The Talisman

She coughed out smoke in three harsh bursts.
    It was another stone against his heart. Two years ago, his mother had given up smoking entirely. Jack had waited for her to backslide with that queer fatalism which is the flip side of childish credulity and innocence. His mother had always smoked; she would soon smoke again. But she had not . . . not until three months ago, in New York. Carltons. Walking around the living room in the apartment on Central Park West, puffing like a choo-choo, or squatting in front of the record cabinet, pawing through her old rock records or her dead husband’s old jazz records.
    ‘You smoking again, Mom?’ he’d asked her.
    ‘Yeah, I’m smoking cabbage leaves,’ she’d said.
    ‘I wish you wouldn’t.’
    ‘Why don’t you turn on the TV?’ she’d responded with uncharacteristic sharpness, turning toward him, her lips pressed tightly together. ‘Maybe you can find Jimmy Swaggart or Reverend Ike. Get down there in the hallelujah corner with the amen sisters.’
    ‘Sorry,’ he’d muttered.
    Well – it was only Carltons. Cabbage leaves. But here were the Herbert Tarrytoons – the blue-and-white old-fashioned pack, the mouthpieces that looked like filters but which weren’t. He could remember, vaguely, his father telling somebody that he smoked Winstons and his wife smoked Black Lungers.
    ‘See anything weird, Jack?’ she asked him now, her overbright eyes fixed on him, the cigarette held in its old, slightly eccentric position between the second and third fingers of the right hand. Daring him to say something. Daring him to say, ‘Mom, I notice you’re smoking Herbert Tarrytoons again – does this mean you figure you don’t have anything left to lose?’
    ‘No,’ he said. That miserable, bewildered homesickness swept him again, and he felt like weeping. ‘Except this place. It’s a little weird.’
    She looked around and grinned. Two other waiters, one fat, one thin, both in red jackets with golden lobsters on the back, stood by the swing doors to the kitchen, talking quietly. A velvet rope hung across the entrance to a huge dining room beyond the alcove where Jack and his mother sat. Chairs were overturned in ziggurat shapes on the tables in this dark cave. At the far end, a huge window-wall looked out on a gothic shorescape that made Jack think of Death’s Darling , a movie his mother had been in. She had played a young woman with a lot of money who married a dark and handsome stranger against her parents’ wishes. The dark and handsome stranger took her to a big house by the ocean and tried to drive her crazy. Death’s Darling had been more or less typical of Lily Cavanaugh’s career – she had starred in a lot of black-and-white films in which handsome but forgettable actors drove around in Ford convertibles with their hats on.
    The sign hanging from the velvet rope barring the entrance to this dark cavern was ludicrously understated: THIS SECTION CLOSED .
    ‘It is a little grim, isn’t it?’ she said.
    ‘It’s like the Twilight Zone,’ he replied, and she barked her harsh, infectious, somehow lovely laugh.
    ‘Yeah, Jacky, Jacky, Jacky,’ she said, and leaned over to ruffle his too-long hair, smiling.
    He pushed her hand away, also smiling (but oh, her fingers felt like bones, didn’t they? She’s almost dead, Jack . . .). ‘Don’t touch-a da moichendise.’
    ‘Off my case.’
    ‘Pretty hip for an old bag.’
    ‘Oh boy, try to get movie money out of me this week.’
    ‘Yeah.’
    They smiled at each other, and Jack could not ever remember a need to cry so badly, or remember loving her so much. There was a kind of desperate toughness about her now . . . going back to the Black Lungers was part of that.
    Their drinks came. She tipped her glass toward his. ‘Us.’
    ‘Okay.’
    They drank. The waiter came with menus.
    ‘Did I pull his string a little hard before, Jacky?’
    ‘Maybe a little,’ he said.
    She thought about it, then shrugged it away. ‘What are you having?’
    ‘Sole, I guess.’
    ‘Make it two.’
    So he ordered for both of them, feeling clumsy and embarrassed but knowing it was what she wanted – and he could see in her eyes when the waiter left that he hadn’t done too bad a job. A lot of that was Uncle Tommy’s doing. After a trip to Hardee’s Uncle Tommy had said: ‘I think there’s hope for you, Jack, if we can just cure this revolting obsession with processed yellow cheese.’
     
    The food came. He wolfed