The moment of Miss Kathie’s exit in search of said spoon, my fingers pry open a box of bath salts and pinch up the coarse grains. These I sprinkle between the roses, swirling the vase to dissolve the salts into the water. My fingers pluck the card from the bouquet of roses and lilies. Folding the parchment, I tear it once, twice. Folding and tearing until the sentences become only words. The words become only letters of the alphabet, which I sprinkle into the toilet bowl. As I flush the lever, the water rises in the bowl, the torn parchment spinning as the water deepens. From deep within itself, the commode regurgitates a hidden mess of paper trapped down within the toilet’s throat. Bobbing to the surface, bits of waterlogged paper, greeting cards, the tissue paper of telegrams. It all backs up within the clogged bowl.
Within the rim of the toilet swirls a tide of affection and concern, signed by Edna Ferber, Artie Shaw, Bess Truman. The handwritten notes and cards, the telegrams reading, If there’s anything I can do… and, Please don’t hesitate to call. The torn scraps of these sentiments spin higher and higher toward the brim of disaster, preparing to overflow, to run over the lip of the white bowl and flood the pink marble floor. These affectionate words… I’ve torn them into bits, and then torn those into smaller bits, scraps. All of my covert work is about to be exposed. These, all of the condolences I’ve destroyed during the past few days.
From the downstairs powder room, echoing up through the silence of the town house, the sounds of Miss Kathie’s gorge rises with beef Stroganoff and Queen Charlotte pears and veal Prince Orloff, heaving up from the depths of Miss Kathie, triggered by the tip of a silver spoon touching the back of her tongue, her gag reflex rejecting it all.
“Fuck ’em,” Miss Kathie says between splashes, her movie-star voice hoarse with bile and stomach acid. “They don’t care,” she says, purging herself in great thunderous blasts.
The infamous advice Busby Berkeley gave to Judy Garland, “If you’re still having bowel movements, you’re eating too much.”
Upstairs, the shredded affections rise, about to spill out onto the bathroom floor. Spiraling upward toward disaster. At the last possible moment I drop to my knees on the pink marble tile. I plunge my hand into the churning mess, the cold water lapping around my elbow, then swirling about my shoulder as I burrow my hand deep into the toilet’s throat, clearing aside wet paper. Clawing, scratching a tunnel through the sodden, matted layer of endearments. The soft mass of sentiments I can’t see.
Downstairs, Miss Kathie heaves out great mouthfuls of gâteau Pierre Rothschild. Bombe de Louise Grimaldi. Aunt Jemima syrup. Lady Baltimore cake. The wet, bubbling shouts of undigested Jimmy Dean sausage.
The plumbing of this old town house shudders, the pipes banging and thudding to contain and channel this new burden of macerated secrets and gourmet vomit.
A “Hollywood lifetime” later, the water in the toilet bowl begins to recede.
The shredded scraps of love and caring, the kind regards sink from sight. Freshwater chases the final words of comfort into the sewers. Those lacy, embossed, engraved and perfumed fragments, the toilet gulps them down. The water swallows every last word of sympathy from Jeanne Crain, the florid handwriting of Her Royal Highness Princess Margaret, from John Gilbert, Linus Pauling and Christiaan Barnard. In her bathroom, the purge of names and devotion signed, Brooks Atkinson, George Arliss and Jill Esmond, the spinning flood disappearing, disappearing, the water level drops until all the names and notes are sucked down. Drowned.
Echoing from the downstairs powder room comes the hawk and spit sound of my Miss Kathie clearing the bile taste from her mouth. Her cough and belch. A final flush of the downstairs commode, followed by the rushing spray noise of aerosol room deodorant.
A “New York second” goes by, and I stand. One step to the sink, and I calmly begin to scrub my dripping hands, careful to pick and scrape the words sorrow and tragedy from where they’re lodged beneath each fingernail. Already, the lovely bouquet of pink roses and yellow lilies poisoned with salt water, the petals begin to wither and brown.
ACT I, SCENE SIX
The next sequence depicts a montage of flowers arriving at the town house. Deliverymen wearing jaunty, brimmed caps and polished shoes arrive to ring the front doorbell. Each man carries a long box of roses tied with a floppy velvet ribbon, tucked under one arm. Or a cellophane spill brimming full of roses cradled the way one would carry an infant. Each deliveryman’s opposite hand extends, ready to offer a clipboard and a pen, a receipt needing a signature. Billowing masses of white lilac. Delivery after delivery arrives. The doorbell ringing to announce yellow gladiolas and scarlet birds-of-paradise. Trembling pink branches of dogwood in full bloom. The chilled flesh of hothouse orchids. Camellias. Each new florist always stretches his neck to see past me, craning his head to see into the foyer for a glimpse of the famous Katherine Kenton.
One frame too late, Miss Kathie’s voice calls from offscreen, “Who is it?” The moment after the deliveryman is gone.
Me, always shouting in response, It’s the Fuller Brush man. A Jehovah’s Witness. A Girl Scout, selling cookies. The same ding-dong of the doorbell cueing the cut to another bouquet of honeysuckle or towering pink spears of flowering ginger.
Me, shouting up the stairs to Miss Kathie, asking if she expects a gentleman caller.
In response, Miss Kathie shouting, “No.” Shouting, less loudly, “No one in particular.”
In the foyer and dining room and kitchen, the air swims with the scent of phantom flowers, shimmering with sweet, heavy mock orange. An invisible garden. The creamy perfume of absent gardenias. Hanging in the air is the tang of eucalyptus I carry directly to the back door. The trash cans in the alley overflow with crimson bougainvillea and sprays of sweet-smelling daphne.
Every card signed, Webster Carlton Westward III.
From an insert shot of one gift card, we cut to a close-up of another card, and another. A series of card after gift card. Then a close-up of yet another paper envelope with To Miss Katherine handwritten on one side. The shot pulls back to reveal me holding this last sealed envelope in the steam jetting from a kettle boiling atop the stove. The kitchen setting appears much the same as it did a dog’s lifetime ago, when my Miss Kathie scratched her heart into the window. One new detail, a portable television, sits atop the icebox, flashing the room with scenes from a hospital, the operating room in a surgical suite where an actor’s rubber-gloved hand grasps a surgical mask and pulls it from his own face, revealing the previous “was-band,” Paco Esposito. The seventh and most recent Mr. Katherine Kenton. His hair now grows gray at his temples. His upper lip fringed with a pepper-and-salt mustache.
The teakettle hisses on the stove, centered above the blue spider of a gas flame. Steam rises from the spout, curling the corners of the white envelope I hold. The paper darkens with damp until the glued flap peels along one edge. Picking with a thumbnail, I lift the flap. Pinching with two fingers, I slide out the letter.
On television, Paco leans over the operating table, dragging a scalpel through the inert body of a patient played by Stephen Boyd. Hope Lange plays the assisting physician. Suzy Parker the anesthesiologist. Fixing his gaze on the attending nurse, Natalie Wood, Paco says, “I’ve never seen anything this bad. This brain has got to come out!”
The next channel over, a battalion of dancers dash around a soundstage, fighting the Battle of Antietam in some Frank Powell production directed by D. W. Griffith of a musical version of the Civil War. The lead for the Confederate Army, leaping and pirouetting, is featured dancer Terrence Terry. A heartbreakingly young Joan Leslie plays Tallulah Bankhead. H. B. Warner plays Jefferson Davis. Music scored by Max Steiner.