Whale Music Read Free

Claire
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    Mind you, song-writing wasn’t the father’s only job. He was also a sales representative for a company called Universal Party Favors. They carried such standard items as plastic icecubes with flies inside and whoopee cushions. They also had some rather inventive stock, for example an automatic card shuffler. I still have three or four of these devices, and it really is amazing how well they shuffle the deck, although about every five or six times they chew it up and spit out little pieces of cardboard. Henry Howell had a reputation as a hard seller, not that it did him much good. When the big item is rubberized doggy-do, the last thing you want to be is an obnoxious, pushy salesman, but this was the father’s style. “You think this won’t go?” he’d scream. “You think this won’t be the single most
numero-uno
party joke throughout the nation? You, my friend, are sadly mistaken, you are living in a fantasy world!”
    The father Henry Howell was a large man, stocky in his twenties and flat-out fat from then on. He had bland features that, given the right lighting, could pass as a kind of handsomeness. This I inherited from him. Danny got my mother’s looks, hard and chiselled, dark and deep-set eyes, lips a bit oversized. My mother is, and my brother was, beautiful in an odd and unsettling way.
    My mother’s beauty was such that when Claire Graham was seventeen she found employment as a Kirby Sweater Gal. What she did was, she’d go to various department stores and model Kirby sweaters. My mother would stand among the mannequins. She’d push her small perfect breasts forward, a miler trying to break the ribbon. She’d lift her hands awkwardly, her fingers splayed in what she hoped was an elegant manner. And then my mother would freeze. Four hours on, half an hour for lunch, back to the stand until four-thirty in the afternoon.
    One day the much older (thirty-four years to her seventeen) Hank Howell came blustering through the doorway of the department store she was working. The father no doubt had some hot item he wanted to pitch, for example gum that turned your mouth black. The father thought that mouth-blackening gum was the greatest thing since sliced bread—and it is a good indication of the limits to his intelligence that he never thought to invent mouth-blackening bread, which has just occurred to me now. At any rate, the father went into the department store, took his place in the centre of the floor and cast his little eyes about for the mouth-blackening-gum purchaser. As the father did this, some portion of his mind noted the mannequin he was planted next to, and he reached out with his thick, horny hand and patted its bottom.
    My mother loved to tell this story, she’d hoot or gurgle. (The hoot was her natural laugh, the gurgle a sophisticated little chuckle she’s worked on over the years.) The father would come close to blushing and deny it. “I was just,” he’d explain, “tapping the ashes of my cigarette.” He never came up with the same lame story twice. “I was just,” he might say, “feeling the material in that skirt.”
    Danny was always bewildered by the story of how our parents met. “I don’t see why you’d pat the fanny of a dummy,” he’d say to the father.
    “Aw, I wasn’t patting her fanny, Dan-Dan. My hand had gone numb and I was trying to beat the blood back into my fingertips.”
    The father got the blood beat back into his face, that’s for sure, because the young Claire Graham produced an uppercut from somewhere near the floor and collapsed Hank Howell’s nose. Blood spilled forth in biblical quantities. (I inherited the Howell beak, a snivelling little creature it is, any sign of danger and it starts bleeding profusely.) Claire Graham was instantly remorseful. She leapt off her pedestal and took the father’s chubby face in her hands. “Tilt your head back,” she told him, “and lie down.” The father was too shaken to do anything but obey.