Chapter 36
Patrick had managed to live in Los Angeles for ten years without ever making it out to Venice Beach. He’d pictured some kind of postcard version of the place: bodybuilders working out on the boardwalk, supermodels on in-line skates, hippies with stands selling crystals and tie-dye. Easy magic. As he followed the GPS directions to the home of Ellie Hoffman, what he found instead was a place that looked like it had been forgotten, left to be taken by the tide and the weeds like a crumbling castle from a fairy tale.
Ellie Hoffman’s residence was no different. Patrick passed through the open front gate onto her short driveway and pulled up outside a Spanish-style bungalow half consumed by climbing vines. Wind chimes and dream catchers dangled from any surface that jutted out far enough, and when Patrick exited the car, an enormous orange cat immediately emerged from one of the bushes next to the porch and padded over to wedge itself clumsily between his ankles.
“Caliban, leave the poor man alone!” came a voice from the front door, the same voice Patrick had heard on his voicemail yesterday. Ellie Hoffman looked more or less exactly how he might have expected her to, given the witch’s cottage where she lived. Henna-red hair floated in a frizzy halo around crab apple cheeks and twinkling eyes. An off-white, sack-like tunic covered most of her sturdy frame in a way that could have made her look like an ascetic nun, had her fingers not glinted with silver and turquoise rings, and Barbie-pink toenails not been poking out from beneath her blue jeans. She could have been anywhere between fifty and seventy.
“Welcome,” Ellie said, smiling brightly and beckoning Patrick inside. “I made lemonade.”
Patrick followed Ellie inside, down a short hallway and into the living room.
“Should I take off my shoes?” he asked.
“I wouldn’t if I were you,” she said. “I dropped an earring somewhere in here yesterday and haven’t found it yet. Wouldn’t want to have to take a movie star to the hospital for a tetanus shot if you stepped on it. Why don’t you take a seat over there”—she gestured to a threadbare sofa draped in an afghan—“and I’ll be right back. Just give Caliban a good shove if he crowds your personal space. I love the beast, but he isn’t for everyone.”
Ellie vanished, leaving him to sit awkwardly perched on the end of the couch, wondering if he had made a huge mistake. Encountering the occasional weirdo was par for the course in his line of work, but he didn’t make a habit of entering their homes. What if Ellie Hoffman came out of that room wielding an axe, claiming to be his number one fan? Would he feel comfortable physically fighting a woman old enough to be his mother?
Caliban did not approach Patrick, but simply watched him intently from under the coffee table while Patrick glanced around the living room at the various Turkish lamps, blue glass evil eyes dangling from door frames, the menorah and Buddha bookending a small stack of dog-eared paperbacks, the trio of silver urns on the mantel, the vase full of bright pink flowers that looked freshly trimmed from the bushes outside, and framed photographs covering almost every inch of the wall. Ellie was present in many of them, surrounded by people who looked like her children.
Some of the older pictures, faded or in black and white, featured a handsome couple. The man had a broad, pleasing smile in many of them, while the woman, pursed lips and arched brow, had the air of somebody about to say something witty or devastating. A smaller number of photos included a pretty, laughing young woman with a snub nose.
“Your parents?” Patrick asked as Ellie returned, carrying two cardboard boxes. He gestured to a picture of the first woman in a modest dress holding a bouquet, the man standing solemnly next to her.
“Yes,” she said, placing the boxes down on the coffee table with great care. “They’re the reason I contacted you, Mr. Lake.” She removed the lid from the first box, revealing a meticulously stacked assortment of papers, some of which were emblazoned, Patrick could see, with the Kismet insignia.
“They were collectors?” he asked.
“Not especially,” said Ellie.
“They certainly seemed to be admirers of Captain Kismet,” said Patrick, reverently picking up what he instantly knew to be an original issue of Wonder Magazine.
“In a way, I suppose,” Ellie said. “They created him.”
Patrick frowned.
“Walter Haywood created Captain Kismet,” he said. “Everybody knows that.”
“All anybody knows is the story that Walter Haywood told them,” said Ellie, her lip curling up as she said the man’s name. Patrick got the impression that in this house, the Haywood name was mud.
“I don’t understand,” he said. “Haywood founded Wonder Magazine and all of its proprietary characters.”
“The magazine was his”—Ellie nodded—“but everything else? All my parents. Haywood liked to say that he came up with the characters himself, and hired writers and artists to help with the work of telling those stories, that they were all his intellectual property.” She pointed to the box. “Go ahead. Take a look. It’s all right here.”
As slowly and fastidiously as possible, Patrick went through the contents of the first box. Early character sketches for Captain Kismet, Axel, Sura, Penny, Omega. Typed pages of Kismet’s adventures, covered in annotations, half the words crossed out and rewritten in the margins. And finally, at the bottom of the box, a series of loose pages punched and tied together in the corner with string:
The Adventures of Captain Kismet, #12.
“The Omega Issue,” Patrick breathed.
“You sit there and read,” said Ellie. “I’ll fetch that lemonade.”
Patrick tried to read with intention and care, but found himself flipping through the pages like a child devouring their first comic book, unable to believe the story unfolding before him: Penny’s hubris, so rarely explored in the fifty years since; Sura’s angelic return; and the operatic romance of Kismet cradling Axel in his arms, kissing him back to life.
“It’s so…gay,” he said moments later, sipping lemonade, the issue safely back in its cardboard tomb.
“Isn’t it just.” Ellie beamed, and Patrick felt a tug in his chest. He’d seen a similar look in Will’s eyes when he opened his drag closet, had heard that verve in April’s voice while they discussed Kismet lore over Margo’s kitchen table.
The fragile joy of showing somebody else the thing you love the most.
“There’s more,” said Ellie, reaching for the second box of her parents’ personal effects and pulling it into her lap. She placed a hand protectively on its lid.
“This is their story,” she said. “Their whole lives, they didn’t want to share it with anybody outside of the family. But I think it’s time. And I have a feeling that you might be just the person to hear it, Mr. Lake. I’ve always considered myself a little bit psychic, actually. I used to read palms down on the boardwalk. I was rarely wrong about people, and now, with you sitting here in front of me…it feels right.”
With an even more loving touch than before, she lifted the cover off the second box and, one by one, handed Patrick fragments of the past.
It began with a letter, written in a fine, elegant hand, on paper so old and thin it was almost translucent between his fingers.
New York City
1949
Dear Axel,
I am sorry that it has been so long between letters (not that I really expect you to have noticed my silence). A great deal has changed since I last wrote you: Charles and I are married now, can you believe it? It was only a small, private affair, just the two of us at City Hall. The couple from next door were witnesses. There were none of the usual blessings, no breaking of the glass, no hora, although we did have a rather excellent lunch at the Bossert afterward. Mother and Father would have positively detested it, which I am more than willing to admit lent a brighter shine to the occasion.
My only regret is that you were not there to meet Charles, to have a drink with him and discuss whatever dull matters men always seem to bring up over hard liquor. Baseball and automobiles, perhaps? I asked for a glass of scotch at the restaurant and toasted my husband, but really, I was toasting you, the only man I’ve ever known who truly understood me. I sipped the scotch and my throat burned and I told myself it was the alcohol making my eyes water.
I tell myself all kinds of marvelous stories these days, Axel. I even write some of them down; fantastical tales of castles in the stars and men who fly. “Wondrous strange!” as your old pal the Bard would put it.
I showed some of my stories to Charles. Even that felt, for just a moment, like a betrayal—I know you kept asking to someday read my scribbles.
He liked them a lot. So much, in fact, that he took one into his studio—a tiny room in our apartment, little more than a closet really—and came out an hour later having sketched the most tremendous illustrations.
“We make quite a team,?” he said, and he kissed my cheek, and I giggled. Me, Axel! Like I was a schoolgirl. Charles sent the story and his pictures to an editor he knew at a magazine. “Incredible Tales,?” I think it’s called, or “Tales of Wonder.” Maybe something will come of it, perhaps nothing will, but if there is one thing I learned, I daresay we all learned, from that terrible, terrible war, it is that if nothing matters, then surely everything matters. It is our duty, I think, to do for ourselves what those who are no longer here cannot do. To grasp opportunity, to say today that which might be too late to say tomorrow.
There are so many things I never told you, Axel. About me, about who and what I really am. I tell myself I didn’t have the words, but that’s another lie.
The truth of the matter is I was afraid. And now it is far too late to tell you anything, which I suppose is why I am sitting here in my nightgown by candlelight like some gothic heroine, writing a letter to a dead man. In the hope that by putting ink to paper, this simple act of creation will somehow carry a part of me to a place where even the tiniest fragment of you might still reside. That is just one more story, I suspect.
But isn’t it a pretty one?
Your sister,
Iris
“Axel,” Patrick breathed.
“My uncle,” Ellie said. “He died long before I was born. I’m not sure my mom ever got over it. I suppose that’s why he’s everywhere in her work. She gave him a second life, a destiny far greater than the one he was saddled with. Her shining prince from the heavens.”
Patrick handed the letter reverently to Ellie and picked up the next artifact from the box: a photograph of the second young woman from the wall, hands perched on top of a baby bump. “Her name was Eleanor,” said Ellie. “They named me for her.”
A story began to form in Patrick’s mind, each new piece of its puzzle falling into place.
Postcards that Ellie’s father, Charles, had received sporadically throughout the years, bearing stamps from all over the world, unsigned, only ever containing one or two lines, from an anonymous correspondent who appeared to have traveled extensively.
You would love Paris.
I find myself once again walking in the city of the seven hills. I sometimes think I never left.
The moon is so bright here in the desert. I never imagined there could be so many stars.
“I think I’m starting to understand,” said Patrick, passing the final postcard back to Ellie. They both held it between them, and Patrick realized he didn’t want to let it go. Eventually, Ellie released it into his hands.
“Charles and Iris,” he said. “They were both…?”
“Yes.” Ellie nodded. “Haywood chased them out of New York when he found out. They both took my mother’s maiden name, Hoffman, when they moved out here. It was a horrible time. Mom told me about it often. How people were being hunted on home soil like they had been in Europe, but all in the name of decency. The hypocrisy!” She laughed and shook her head. “God, I sound just like her. I miss her.”
“And Eleanor was her…”
“Lover?” Ellie blinked nonchalantly. “Of course. She came from New York with them, too. She was my birth mother. She died having me. They both loved her dearly and promised to always take care of me. I think there was some fudging of official records, because it’s their names on my birth certificate, not hers. I imagine that was easier to do in those days. They wanted to make sure nobody could take me away. So they became my real parents.”
She said it with the casual familiarity of somebody who had grown up with the story, but for Patrick it took some processing.
“Wow,” he said.
“Yeah. Wow.” Ellie tucked a stray curl behind her ear.
“And the man from the postcards?”
“What about him?”
“Why didn’t he come to LA with them?” he asked.
Eleanor sighed. “That was one of the great unanswered questions of my father’s life,” she said. “Do you want to know what I think?”
Patrick nodded.
She looked him dead in the eye. “He wasn’t brave enough.”
Patrick’s breath grew short, and he thought back to the fantastical tale he had just read, of Penny’s essence being scattered across time and space, the same life playing out again and again. Wasn’t that the whole business of comics, at the end of the day? A story being told over and over again until someone got it right?
“Does it feel strange?” Patrick asked. “Knowing that your family was built on a lie?”
Eleanor laughed. “A lie? Oh, you’re a funny one. My family may not have looked like everybody else’s, and certain pretenses may have been upheld in public for the benefit of a quiet life, but I assure you, Mr. Lake, we never lied to each other. Or ourselves.”
Patrick continued to look down at the postcard in his hands, turning it over and over as if doing so might reveal an as-yet-hidden message.
“You’re a large man, Mr. Lake,” Eleanor continued. “Does it ever get uncomfortable? A little tight across the shoulders?”
Patrick looked up at her, his brows a question mark.
“The constraints you place on yourself, my dear.”
Patrick’s breathing grew even more rapid, his chest tight, and he only knew he had burst into tears when Ellie enveloped him in an embrace, clutching his head to her shoulder, and he saw his tears dampening the fabric of her tunic. She held him like that for several minutes while he wept, like a mother might a child, or a hero saving a helpless damsel, until finally the tears ran dry and he withdrew, wiping his puffy eyes, a cloud of embarrassment already forming.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know what came over me. I never cry like this.”
“Silly boy,” said Ellie, cupping his cheek with genuine affection. “Maybe you should.”