The Late Child
By Larry McMurtry
Simon & Schuster, 461 pages, $25
When I was a little girl in El Paso, I loved to go to the rodeo. It came to the Coliseum every spring, and my big, raw-boned stepfather was the one who took me. My genteel, Virginia-born mother didn’t care for the noises and smells. “Girls have no business there,” she’d yell, year after year, as we peeled down the driveway.
At the rodeo we perched on the side fence–to this day, I have no idea how we got there or why nobody tried to stop us. My daddy was some kind of rodeo groupie, I guess. In any case, I got some new respect for Daddy about the time a slim-hipped, straw-haired guy poised himself precariously above a huge, red-eyed, dusty bull.
“Think you’re gonna take him tonight, Jim?” my father said to this handsome vision,
“Man,” the cowboy said to Daddy, almost as if he knew him personally, “did you see that mess in Amarillo? Damn near took my left leg off, this evil sumbitch did. Gonna whup ’em tonight or die tryin’.”
Then Jim slammed his Stetson firmly on the back of his head, let go his arms, and rode old Diablo well past the whistle.
“I think,” I said to my father, scraping dung off my shoe on a nearby bleacher, “I’m going to marry a cowboy when I grow up.”
Daddy laughed. “Better to be a cowgirl than try to be a cowboy’s wife,” he said. “Cowboys don’t like women much, and that’s how they got to be cowboys in the first damn place.”
I’m pretty sure that Jim and Diablo went long ago to that big roundup in the sky. I know Daddy did. And since he was such a repository of male wisdom, I hate to second-guess him on this point. But I truly believe some cowboys understand and like women better than most men do. One cowboy in particular, Larry McMurtry.
Now don’t say “Lonesome Dove” to me as a McMurtry tag, even though “Dove” is as rip-snorting a story about the West as ever was written. When I think of McMurtry, I think of “The Last Picture Show” or “Terms of Endearment,” “The Desert Rose” or an overlooked early novel, “Moving On.” And in those books McMurtry writes as insightfully about bright, passionate, confused, frustrated women as anybody has, even other women.
Well now. After heart surgery and a somewhat regrettable dalliance with Pretty Boy Floyd, McMurtry’s back to writing about what he writes about best–women on the road, one way or another.
“The Late Child” is an update on Harmony, the titular “Desert Rose,” a bosomy, good ol’ girl with more heart than sense. Raised by a bunch of wackos in Tarter, Okla., Harmony chose to take her impressive frame to Las Vegas–where they don’t know much about heart but do know talent when they see it.
For more years than she cares to count now, Harmony dazzled big spenders as the star of the chorus line at the old Tropicana. Three years running, she was voted The Most Beautiful Showgirl in Las Vegas. And that’s saying a lot, if you’ve ever seen one of those long-stemmed stunners in the flesh.
The world isn’t kind to aging showgirls. Not the ones like Harmony, who weren’t mercenary enough to capitalize on their assets before their assets went south. When Harmony’s too old for the line, she has no rich sugar daddy to lean on, no Harry Winston baubles in a safe deposit box. Harmony’s on her own because she was too nice for her own good.
Showgirls, like flight attendants and fashion models, have larger-than-life smiles, and Harmony’s smile has made her easy prey for sad, mean, restless men. Given the chance to go to bed with Elvis, Harmony chose Dan Duryea instead. I guess she thought Dan needed her more.
A tireless fixer-upper, the social director on her own Titanic, she scarcely raised her voice when her husband, Ross, took off and left her to raise their daughter, Pepper. And when she found herself impregnated by a guy named Webb at age 42, she didn’t exactly chase his speeding tow truck down the street.
Harmony doesn’t know much about a lot of things, but she can recognize the “going away” look in a man’s eyes: “One after another, they went out for bread or beer or cigarettes and never came back. How women got men to stay with them, month after month and year after year, was a mystery to Harmony.”
Early on in “The Late Child,” McMurtry defines character as “giving up on perfection without giving up on hope.” He surely had Harmony in mind, because when we find her, she’s 47 and raising 5-year-old Eddie on her salary from a recycling plant. (She had $8 in the bank when she heard about the job, so she saw it as a good sign.) Harmony thought she could take anything, until she got the letter from New York telling her her 22-year-old daughter Pepper was dead.
Our stalwart showgirl didn’t cry when she sent her beautiful 17-year-old off to Manhattan to be a Broadway gypsy, but she’s making up for it now. So many tears, so any loose ends and unanswered questions. Who’s this Laurie who wrote the letter, why was Pepper cremated and what in the world did she die of?
AIDS is the operative word, it turns out, though that doesn’t begin to define the kind of regenerative quest McMurtry is after here. When Harmony finally calls her sisters, Neddie and Pat, she’s come to the end of her hopeful rope, and she’s much too sad to tie a knot herself. What begins as a sad sojourn back to her Oklahoma homeplace turns into an antic adventure instead, with a significant side-trip to New York.
There’s not enough space for me to tell you how the borrowed car threw a rod near Grants, N.M., how a puppy was adopted on a Hopi reservation or why little Eddie ended up on Letterman. Maybe McMurtry was pushing the envelope of our credulity when he suggested a visit to the Clintons, or when he assumed that this not-so-merry band would befriend a black hooker from Bayonne, N.J.
Or maybe this cowboy teller of tall tales was saying something much simpler. Maybe if we let go the reins of our life, as Harmony had to do when crippled by grief, our lives could take us places we never expected to go in our wildest dreams.
Listening to Harmony, we find that she’s not nearly as dumb as her life has made her out to be. Having accepted her daughter’s mortality as well as her own, she says wistfully of the rest of her life, “I wish I knew a little more about the details.” And if you think I’m going to tell you about those details, specifically where Eddie and Harmony end up, you’ve got another think coming.
