The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [98]
“Good reflexes,” he told her.
She asked him if he knew where she could go rollerblading.
He gestured up the boardwalk, adding in an expansive outburst, “You’re getting a burn. Sun’s a bitch.” He pointed at her legs.
***
On rented red rollerblades, gleaming with sunscreen, running shoes tied around her neck, Annie skimmed along the boardwalk of Ocean Drive, eating slices of an orange, dodging in and out of batches of beach-walkers. She felt her breathing slow as she sped along.
The therapist she’d seen only once had accused her of an addiction to exercise. Perhaps it had seemed that way to a man who could sit in a chair all day, ingesting chocolate-coated coffee beans. But Annie had been raised by a tennis player, her aunt Sam, and by—in his youth—a long-distance runner, her uncle Clark, and from the age of seven on, from sleepy dawns in lap pools to cold nights on track fields, her days had been busy with sports. In sports, as in the Navy, there were rules, and there were prizes; both the restrictions and rewards were ways of keeping life in order. She liked it that in a track event, there were no limits except those of her body’s willingness to refuse defeat. Although smaller than her teammates, Annie had graduated from Emerald High School with four varsity letters. “There’s nothing a woman can’t do,” her aunt had promised her, and Annie had believed it and had proved it on track fields and diving boards, in the muddy sleet at Annapolis, in the sky.
All right, she told herself as she skated along Miami streets, so what if the peculiar Rafael Rook hadn’t shown up and neither had this equally bizarre detective, Daniel Hart? So what if her father remained the receding mirage he had always been? So what if she had no name for her mother but the one on a birth certificate that was obviously a joke, since it was impossible that her mother was Claudette Colbert, who’d been in her seventies when Annie was born? Hadn’t Claudette Colbert done all right as a role model?
When a child, of course, Annie hadn’t recognized the famous name of the dead movie star and so had believed when she’d first seen her birth certificate that Claudette Colbert really was her mother’s name. Aunt Sam, the film lover, had tried to break the news to her gently and had eventually introduced her to the actress by playing her a tape of It Happened One Night.
From the moment Annie watched Claudette Colbert dive off her father’s yacht in the beginning of that film, then hop on a night bus in Miami and wisecrack her way north with Clark Gable—the man for whom Clark Goode had been named—she had liked the small unflappable woman with her chic French bangs, throaty voice, and civilized laughter, with her new moon of an eyebrow raised at the folly of men.
She had asked Aunt Sam for more Claudette Colbert movies and had watched them all, loving the way there were so many airplane pilots in the films; how nothing ever fazed the woman, not Mohawks, not Japanese prison camps, not Nero, not running an egg farm with Fred MacMurray or racing around Paris with Don Ameche in his taxi, not even a whole trainload of drunken quail hunters on their bacchanalian way to Palm Beach.
Annie had replayed Claudette Colbert’s movies until she’d memorized them, pausing the tapes to study the actress’s gestures. The star gave the child something with which to fill in the otherwise empty concept called “my mother.”
Not that she looked for someone to do the day-to-day job. Sam did fine. But she was naturally curious about the original and as there were no other candidates but the star’s name on the certificate, it was to the star that she turned. Jack had told her so many contradictory stories that it was clear he couldn’t remember what absurdity he’d previously made up about the woman who’d borne Annie. So why not take Claudette Colbert as a maternal ideal?
By her teen years, Annie’s enthusiasm for Claudette Colbert faded. The star became just a French joke she shared with Georgette. “Comme ma mère, Claudette, toujours dit,” she would say to her friend. She hadn’t thought much