The Johnny Moss Room by Ellen Kesend

Author:Ellen Kesend
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: forgiveness, best friends, yankees, fathers and daughters, lol, death of parent, father hunger, jewish americans, sixties setting, dysfunctional family dramedy
Publisher: Ellen Kesend

Chapter Sixteen

A Maker of Films

On Saturday morning my mother stood in the foyer in her housedress and watched me button up my cape and pick up my valise. Her hair stuck out in clumps the texture of straw and her frown stayed where I kissed it when I walked out the door.

All down the long hill my boots crunched through piles of brown leaves. I turned left before the lake, passed my old elementary school and made the steep climb up to Juliet’s. At the top of her hill a small signpost marked the entrance to the Wolfes’ private road. I trudged up it through a stand of birch trees and crossed the narrow bridge over the brook. There beneath branches that looked like witches’ fingers scratching at the sky stood the Wolfes’ house, one sprawling glass and wood and fieldstone story, the only ultra-modern house I’d ever been in. Through the transparent wall I saw the family gathered on cane and curved chrome chairs around the glass breakfast table. Doreen, their maid, was serving them pancakes in the woods.

The house was Barbara Wolfe’s passion. She worked closely with the architect, Marcel Breuer, who came down regularly from Boston while it was being built. Juliet said the two of them discussed every door handle and cabinet pull ad nauseam. I could see in the living room the low-slung Barcelona chairs which Mrs. Wolfe said exemplified purity of design, though they looked plain to me. Huge abstract expressionist canvasses covered the few walls, a color-splattered Jackson Pollack, and a powerful black and white Motherwell Mrs. Wolfe told me was an ode to the Spanish Republic before Franco became dictator. The slabs of savage color smeared across big rectangular canvasses were Mrs. Wolfe’s paintings. They were as strong as anything on those walls. Mrs. Wolfe never tried to sell her paintings or find a gallery to represent her. Juliet told me her mother thought one artist in the family was enough.

Derek must’ve heard the leaves crackling under my feet because he looked up from pouring his syrup and waved at me. He spoke to Doreen, who set another place. I walked through a glass door into the kitchen. It might have looked outdoors, but the magic was that it was shelter, and the warmth and kitchen smells that stayed inside wrapped around me.

“Brava,” Derek said. He pulled out a chair for me and bowed.

I bowed back. I told them I wished I could stay, but I had a train to catch. Today was the day I was meeting my moviola.

Derek laughed and opened his arms for a hug. He was still in his silk pajamas, which held close his thick male smells.

Next I kissed Mrs. Wolfe, who was wearing a brilliant kimono that exposed the top of her breasts. She drew me to her soft body, to the scent that was a mixture of her French perfume and her skin’s exhalations. “How’s Dad?” she asked. “When will they let him come home?”

“Sometime next week,” I said.

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