Al and Edie Sampson lived at 12 Whipporwill Way. Lloyd and Katherine Pomerance lived at Number 14. They were incompatible neighbors. Al worked for the telephone company, and Lloyd was an up-and-coming executive with an investment brokerage house. Al was an ex-dogface who found himself armpit deep in the waters off Omaha Beach when the LSI's refused to move in any closer. Lloyd, a college graduate, spent the war at sea aboard the heavy cruiser "Wichita." Al marches in every Memorial Day parade in a uniform that grows in size every year. Lloyd attends the annual "Wichita" officers' dinner in Annapolis in black tie.
The two families moved into the newly formed community of Westlake Village within a day or two of each other. Their tentative hellos quickly faded when they realized they had nothing in common. Lloyd, already distraught at the age of thirty-two, left for work at six-thirty every morning in a suit and a silk tie. He carried a slender attaché case and was never home before dark. Al was picked up by the driver of a telephone utility truck, who blew his horn promptly at 8:30. He wore work clothes and a yellow safety helmet. He was rarely seen without a Budweiser ... breakfast was the only meal at the Sampson house that did not involve beer. Lloyd would mix himself a double Beefeater martini with a twist before dinner ... the drink of Wall Street lions. He often remarked that bottles were meant to be poured from, not drunk from.
Edie and Al had fallen in love at the Feast of St. Gennaro just before the war. It was the first time for both and in a blinding moment of creative ecstasy, their son Willie was conceived. Al would measure every event in his later life by that first union with Edie and the devil's throw of the dice on Omaha Beach. Lloyd and Katherine met at the chamber music summer series of concerts at Tanglewood. Their hands touched and their fingers intertwined during the slow movement of the Brahms Clarinet Trio in A. The insistent rhythms of the final movement contributed in large part to the conception of their daughter Stacey. Unlike the Sampsons, the union was not a watershed moment for either Lloyd or Katherine.
The incomes of the two couples were remarkably the same. Katherine got her beaver coat before Edie got her mink, but the Sampsons got a color television set long before the Pomerances did. Three-piece suits do not often translate into dollars and cents. During the soft summer nights with the windows open to the sound of cricket and cicada, one could stand on the sidewalk outside 12 and 14 Whipporwill Way and feel the pounding boom of punk rock coming from one and, by straining a bit, the plaintive whining voice of Julie Andrews from the other.
Lloyd and Katherine's preschool daughter was Stacey - all golden curls and pink lace panties. If you are familiar with Barbie dolls, you know Barbie was frozen in time at the age of twenty. Picture, if you will, what Barbie may have looked like at the age of three. Without a doubt she would have been the spitting image of Stacey.
Al and Edie's preschool son was Willie. At the age of three Willie was the color of dirt, and he smelled of cat pee. He often played alone, chained to a sandbox his father made for him in the back yard. He shared his box with many of the neighborhood cats, including mine. If you bury your nose in a cat's fur, you will not smell cat. Cats are too fastidious for that. But if you came close to Willie, you could smell cat.
The smell of cat was never objectionable to Edie or Al Sampson. Both of them had come from large Irish families in South Brooklyn and leaving Willie alone to fend for himself seemed natural to them. Keeping him fed and washing him occasionally was about as far as they went.
"Willie cat pee!" Stacey would call from her upstairs bedroom window or while standing on tiptoe with her friends looking over the cyclone fence her father had built to separate the Pomerances from the Sampsons. Other kids walking by the Sampsons' house would pick up the chant. "Willie cat pee! ... Willie cat pee!"
Willie would smile back at them, soaking up the attention as thoroughly as he did the smell of cat. He would have preferred company. He would have shared his shovel and dump truck with Stacey or any of the other kids passing by, but their mothers had warned them, "I want you to stay out of that sandbox ... understand?"
From time to time, Edie would look out the back window to check on Willie in the sandbox. He'd stay out there all day in the summer, even have his lunch out there. If it started to rain she would bring him in. He would call to Stacey to come and play with him, but she would have none of it. It didn't bother Willie. He would rather play in the sand than anything. His fondness for sand ran counter to his father's fear of it. To Al, the sight of sand and the feel of it between his fingers and toes always brought back that horrible morning in June 1944.
When he and Edie took Willie to the beach, Willie would think he'd died and gone to Heaven. He had to be carried, kicking and screaming, back to the car when day was done. But for the thousandth time, Al would fight the battle of D-Day and relate, in the minutest detail to Edie, the story she'd heard a thousand times before.
Stacey rarely went to the beach. With skin so delicate and hair so fair, she was far better off in the shade of a patio umbrella, dressing and undressing her dolls. She had her father's complexion, his blue eyes, and his absolutely colorless hair. She did inherit her mother's beautiful, jet black eyebrows, thick, perfectly formed, and capable of a wide range of expression. Lloyd's eyebrows were white, like the rest of him. Stacey knew she was an exquisite blend of the best her mother and father had to offer and planned, even at the age of four, to expect a lifetime of adulation. She spent a large part of her day before her mother's full-length mirror practicing her smile and a mincing walk that she knew would some day drive men wild.
Very few people are perfect. Most of us are loaded with imperfections. Stacey had only one ... she was stupid, and under the most ideal conditions would never be more than a beautiful bubble-headed blonde. At the age of four, however, stupidity is hard to detect; therefore Lloyd and Katherine were blissfully serene in the expectation that their doll-like daughter would graduate from Princeton at the age of eighteen ... summa cum laude, with a train of tenured professors begging for her hand. They had to settle for Murray Feldman, the bald-headed chief buyer for China City. Although it stretches the imagination, Stacey seemed to grow dumber as she grew older. Murray summed it up well during his courtship of her when she accused him, "All you want is my body!"
He replied, "Sure, why, what else you got?" Even Stacey was forced to agree.
By the age of four, Willie, with sand in his pants, could write his name and address in a squiggly hand with a ballpoint pen. He could dial his own phone number. He could operate the remote control of the television set and turn off the gas to the oven when his mother forgot to. He could show you his birthday on the calendar. He was mentally on a par with his father and, unless something came along to stop him, was well on the road to being a genius. Al and Edie would look at each other in amazement as each new day revealed a newly discovered facet of Willie's development. Using his father's credit card, he ordered the Encyclopedia Britannica over the phone at the age of eight. At ten he broke his way into Nickel Bank's depositor records using the high school computer.
When Stacey once asked him for help with her algebra homework, he could have told her to pound salt. It would have helped to repay the many injustices she had heaped on him as he sat alone in his sandbox. But he didn't ... he simply explained that it wouldn't do any good. "Forget it Stace ... you're a turd-head, get used to it." Though they were the same age, Willie finished undergraduate work at Penn State six months after Stacey got out of Westlake High.
Stacey left our employment at the Westlake Village Guardian to work in china at China City (that's china with a small "c," as in plates and saucers). She left an emptiness at the newspaper that Lucas Crosby and I found difficult to fill. We had no difficulty adding her duties to our own. When the phone rang, Lucas or I would answer it - we hadn't thought of doing that before - and Lucas's wife did the typing at night after supper. Intelligence aside, efficiency aside, wit aside, some people can leave an emptiness. Stacey pulled the plug on beauty at the Guardian when she pulled out, and beauty's every bit as important as brains.
"Jesus, I miss that broad," Lucas sighed.
No one will ever pay a compliment like that to Willie.
(Copyright 1997 by Harry Buschman - No reproduction without express permission from the author)