Manhattan Noir - Lawrence Block [84]
Still, though. Might have been nice to have some American in-laws, even if they’d never come to Manhattan.
Okay, kid, write this down.
Mother cried over Audrey Hepburn movies …
“She’s so elegant,” she sniffed, “and helpless. No wonder men look after her.”
On television, Sabrina was approaching its illogical conclusion. It was Saturday, February 29, 1964, the night of my father’s fifty-ninth birthday. I was fourteen. A-Ba was at a dinner hosted by my three older brothers. We didn’t go because of Audrey, but also because Mother said fifty-nine wasn’t a big deal, and that my brothers and their wives were wasting time sucking up to A-Ba, hoping to get his money.
“I don’t know what you’re crying about,” I said. “It’s just a movie. It isn’t real.”
My mother dried her eyes with a silk handkerchief. “It wouldn’t hurt you to soften up a bit and be a little more elegant.”
Mother was Eurasian, but if you looked at her face front, she passed for Chinese. Exotic perhaps, but Chinese. Her mother was an American missionary’s daughter who married a wealthy Cantonese trader against her parents’ wishes. My father was a Cantonese businessman who made and sold soy sauce—“Yangtze Soy”—when he wasn’t boozing. Whenever his commercial aired, the one where sauce cascades down cleavage to the opening of Grieg’s piano concerto, Mother switched off the television in disgust.
“Here,” she said, handing me her crochet work. “Put this away, please.”
I complied and escaped to my bedroom, grateful to surface above the vale of tears.
Elegance. Facing the mirror in third position, I studied my feet. Six and a half and still growing; already, it was hard finding shoes my size. Mother would die if she knew I danced all the boys’ parts. “Ballet will help you be more graceful,” she insisted when she started me up nine years earlier. “It’s important for young ladies to be graceful because gentlemen like that.” Mother’s graceful. She had jet-black hair, large eyes, high cheekbones, and a figure like Audrey’s. I could imagine her in Humphrey Bogart’s arms, dancing to “Isn’t It Romantic.” Mother loved to dance, but A-Ba couldn’t foxtrot to save his life.
Sabrina is such a silly story. Bogart and Holden are these unlikely brothers of a wealthy Long Island family. Audrey’s the chauffeur’s daughter who has a crush on Holden. She dis-appears off to cooking school in Paris, returns grown up and sophisticated, which is when he finally notices her. But the family doesn’t want her marrying Holden, so Bogart turns on the charm, intending to pay Audrey off. Instead, Bogart falls for her, and they end up getting married. The End.
My hair’s limp and a faded mousy brown. I have Mother’s height and A-Ba’s frazzled eyebrows, beady eyes, and ugly mouth. I look pathetically Eurasian. My brothers inherited the best of my parents; they pass for Chinese and all made it over 5'8", a real asset among Hong Kong men. Leftover blood coursed through me, the accident, seventeen years after the last boy. Good thing I was a girl. That way, Mother fussed over me in her old age and didn’t even mind the way I looked.
In the living room, Bogart and Audrey were sailing off to their Parisian honeymoon in black-and-white. Personally, I couldn’t see what she saw in him. I would have taken Holden any day, philanderer though he was. After all, there was no guarantee what Bogart would be like after Paris.
But kid, I’m getting too old for this.
What? You think Ron happened yesterday? Audrey Hepburn died, that’s what happened yesterday. Papers said cancer. Too bad Ron’s not here. We’d have honored her passing together.
So you want to hear the rest of this story or not?
On her way home from lunch with friends the next afternoon, my mother was killed by a hit-and-run driver.
“She was running across the street again,” my father shouted.
“Always running!”
He had seldom been as angry. A-Ba’s an ugly man who was once better looking. Smashed his face against a cracked toilet bowl when he was drunk one night, and emergency did a lousy job on his jowl. In his fury, his gnarled,