I reached my mother’s room. She lay in bed, surfing channels, her eyes alert, a lunch tray empty on her bedside table. I knocked, lightly, on her open door.
“Mom?”
She turned to see me. Then her face lit up. With mute excitement, she waved me over. I came forward, but only so far, stopping at the foot of her bed.
“I think I know what this is all about,” I said.
Seeing the look in my eyes, my mother immediately recoiled. Then, slowly, she began to cry, in silence. The tears seemed as much from relief as unhappiness.
Ted Savitch had met her that day at the double feature in Times Square. It was one of her secret movie outings in the city. His e-mail address had been Ted6569, the day and year I was secretly conceived. No wonder Dena and I had always been drawn to, then repelled by, each other.
“Ted Savitch was my father, right?” I said.
He was another replaced actor.
My mother didn’t respond. She just kept crying, making no noise.
“Let me guess,” I said. “He recently got in touch with you. He was in bad health, his heart was failing. He wanted to connect with you before he died. To make dying easy. I don’t know the details. But you know what I’m saying.”
The specifics didn’t matter. They had been lost in his missing diary pages. What mattered was that she’d probably felt closer to Ted in one day than she ever did to the man she married. There was a life she had never pursued, a life that linked all three of us: Mom, my real Dad, and me.
“See,” I said, “he got in touch with me, too.”
I was quiet then. I’d done all the talking, the explaining she couldn’t do in the weeks that she’d been mute.
Slowly, then, small moans began to come from her. They grew louder, breaking the embargo on discourse that had lasted until now.
She nodded. Then, at long last, she spoke. She said what she always did to me. This time, it wasn’t a way to goad or upbraid me about my life. It was a question about herself, one my mother wished desperately to have answered.
“What do you do,” she said, “with a thing like that?”
EPILOGUE
GRATEY MCBRIDE WAS LIFTING HER OSCAR AGAIN.
This time, though, it was in triumph. Now in rehab, she was being interviewed on LCM by Taylor Weinrod, before a showing of Macaroon Heart. Looking pretty and dressed presentably, she had brought her award along and held it proudly, not aggressively.
I was cruising channels, preparing the new issue of Trivial Man, which was late by weeks now. There would be no mention of The Day the Clown Cried; I couldn’t afford to blow the bargain I had made with Florent. Still, I sensed, in the admiring and resentful eyes of my little community, that word of my latest gain and loss was leaking out. It was bound to make me even more of a hero and a pariah than I already was.
How did I feel about that? I was part of a real family now, not just one made up by the trivial brotherhood. The former was profound and forever; the latter was sillier, safer, and asked much less of me. Which one did I prefer? I didn’t yet know.
It had already had a positive effect on Dena. The information seemed to free her; my half-sister had filed applications to go back to law school.
(Her houseguest, Katie, had mailed them for her. Then, on a rented bike, she had ridden away and never come back.)
I switched channels now. I stopped for a second at paid programming, which was Marthe’s successful new infomercial. Then I hit the all-news channel, which had a brief mention of Troy Kevlin’s latest indictment on drug charges. Finally, I lingered on the entertainment network, which featured news of the cancellation of Howie Romaine’s new sitcom, Romaine Land, after just three episodes. Only I knew why these changes, good and bad, had taken place.
My last stop was the local news. There was coverage of a robbery at the Queens home of a police detective, Emile Florent. The lawman himself, looking flustered and bedraggled, was giving a reluctant interview.
“Only things of personal value were taken,” he said, then turned away.
If I had been paying more attention, maybe I would have seen a crummy white Honda on the street where he and I had made our deal.
Bound to sell Clown, Stanley was on the loose again. Who knew what other treasures he would pursue? He wouldn’t be contacting Abner again, that was for sure. My old pal had curtailed his ambitions to just running his Web site, back in his parents’ house.
Then the phone rang. It was Jody. She wanted to know who played the peddler in Macaroon Heart, now unspooling on LCM. But, mostly, a little worried, she wanted to know where I’d been hiding myself.
“What have you been up to, Roy?”
I warned her that it was a long story. It was okay with her. Then, as I started to explain, my call waiting kicked in.
“Hold on,” I said, and pressed the little lever.
“Will you hold for Jerry Lewis?” a voice said.
I had a terrible sense of anticipation. My heart began to pound. Was something beginning or had it reached a conclusion?
Still, there was so much to tell Jody.
I thought of Stanley Lager, who was a trivial man in the worst sense: someone who didn’t know what was important.
Then I took a deep breath.
“Tell him,” I said, “that I’ll call him back.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
LAURENCE KLAVAN won the Edgar Award for Best Original Paperback for Mrs. White, written under a pseudonym. He is also the author of The Cutting Room, another novel featuring Roy Milano. His work for the theater includes the librettos for Bed and Sofa, for which he received a Drama Desk nomination, and the acclaimed Embarrassments. He lives in New York City.
