As he holed up in his room, lying on his bed, looking up at the King Kong poster he'd thumbtacked up there, thinking about finishing that Aurora model of a witch he was working on (he loved painting every little curve and crevice, the bubbles and snakes in the cauldron, the dead bats hung up like Chinese ducks), downstairs his mother turned on the radio while finishing up the biscuits and moving on to a chicken. It was news radio, and the announcer seemed to have been handed a bulletin because he hurried through some comments about a tie-up on Roosevelt Blvd. and read,
"Boris Karloff, 'The King of the Monsters,' has passed away of pneumonia in England after a long and celebrated career. By the time he starred as the monster in Frankenstein, Karloff had already appeared in dozens of pictures. But it was with Dr. Frankenstein's monster that Karloff made his mark on film history. He went on to portray Frankenstein's monster twice more in a career that spanned 50 years and numerous movie and television appearances. While his rivalry with Bela Lugosi may have been a studio invention, his legacy certainly rests upon his willingness in 1931 to don the heavy makeup and 13-pound shoes that enabled him to stride through numerous roles, mostly in Gothic films but also in comedies and dramas. He reached a new generation of fans as the narrator and star of the 1966 CBS special, The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, earning him new accolades as a versatile and unique performer. Many have attempted to reproduce his successes, but no one can replace him. Boris Karloff was 81."
She stopped to listen, one hand resting on the raw chicken, the other holding a small shaker of Accent. And as high-voltage and jumbled as her life was in that house of madmen, she knew them all, at least as a collection of wildly differing likes and dislikes; and she knew that her middle child was crazy for Karloff, that he watched monster movies the way some people went to church—planted in his seat, upright and waiting for a miracle, as awful as it might be. She finished getting the chicken ready, slid it into the oven, and went upstairs.
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