The Girl in the Green Raincoat_ A Novel - Laura Lippman [22]
“We worked on the primary campaign of Carlton Sickles, yes. But that’s not where we met. We met at the Westview Drive-in the year before. I’m not good on dates, but it was coolish. She wore a lemon-yellow cardigan, only it was pinned to her shoulders with this little chain, with butterflies on either end.”
He fluttered his hands along his collarbone, trying to evoke the singular magic of it all. A sweater, moored by butterflies! He made it sound as if Judith Weinstein, as she would have been known then, had been dressed by a coterie of talking woodland creatures, like some princess in a Disney film.
“Are you saying you fell in love at first sight?” This did not fit with what Tess thought she knew of her pragmatic, down-to-earth parents. Love at first sight was for passionate kids. But then—her parents were kids at the time.
“I bird-dogged her,” her father said proudly. “Snaked her away from her date. Not that night, but later. She was really interested in politics—your uncle Donald had worked on the Kennedy campaign in ’sixty, was recruiting volunteers for the city council races, so, yeah, it must have been spring ’sixty-five—so I pretended to care, too.”
“Pretended to care?” Tess was scandalized. Her father’s political life had defined him, as far as she knew.
“Oh, eventually I did get caught up with it, but that was more Donald’s influence. That night I met your mother, I just wanted to find a way to keep her talking to me. So I told her, yeah, I’d love to volunteer, stuff envelopes, knock on doors, do whatever I could. I figured that would get me more time with her.” His fair skin flushed with the memory. “What a way to go.”
“Politics?”
“The movie that night. It was What a Way to Go! With Shirley MacLaine. I always liked her. We almost named you Shirley.”
What’s in a name? Only everything. Tess tried to imagine the life and times of Shirley Monaghan. Who were the famous Shirleys? Shirley MacLaine, Shirley Jones, and—oh God, Shirley Booth. Shirley was Noel Airman’s code, in Marjorie Morningstar, for the first generation of Jewish American Princesses. All things considered, she was happy to be Theresa Esther, mouthful though that was.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen it.”
“Oh, it’s great,” her father said. “Actually, I watched it on television a couple of years ago, and it didn’t hold up so good. But I still love it. Shirley MacLaine is this woman who wants to marry for love, see? And her mother is pushing her to marry the local rich guy, played by Dean Martin. Remember Dean Martin?”
“Yes, there’s a channel on cable that appears to be devoted to selling his show on DVD.” These were the kinds of things one learned on bed rest.
“Anyway, she marries Dick Van Dyke. But he becomes obsessed with getting rich, showing Dean Martin that he has a real work ethic, and he drops dead of a heart attack, leaving her a wealthy widow. Then she marries Paul Newman, a starving artist who ends up getting rich and being strangled by his own painting machines—”
“Painting machines?”
“Yeah, they paint in time to music. Also there was a monkey.”
Also, there was a monkey. This struck Tess as the most trenchant bit of film criticism that she had ever heard from her father, something that could equal Andrew Sarris’s auteur theory. She would run this past Lloyd, the film student, the Tess Monaghan theory of awfulness in movies, summed up by one line: Also, there was a monkey.
“Then she tries to change her luck by marrying a rich guy, Robert Mitchum—did you know he hit on your aunt Kitty, when she was all of fourteen, one summer at Ocean City?”
Wake up, Tess said in her head, experimentally. It was something she did when her dreams were disturbing, or simply too weird. Wake up! Apparently she was conscious.
“But he gets kicked in the head by a bull, when he tries to milk him—he’s drunk, you see—so she marries Gene Kelly and he gets, I think, literally torn apart by his fans, so that’s where she is when she goes to the psychiatrist and he