Marilyn's Daughter

by John Rechy

  “That would really be something!” Michael approved. “A romance with a modern, new structure. Mark would love that—tradition and experimentation. Goddamn! I mean, to create— . . .”

  Normalyn was caught in his excitement, yearned to express her own. But now that they were waiting for her to say more, she felt awkward—she just didn’t know how to act with a group of people her age!

  “I have to go now.” She stood up, bumping into a waiter. “I’m sorry!” she yelled at him; the despised words echoed. She walked away hurriedly.

  Michael followed her back to the sidewalk. “Will you have lunch with me?”

  “It’s evening,” she reminded him. He didn’t look insecure, and certainly didn’t act it, but she could tell that he was, suddenly, and that calmed her—that he was bold and shy. And, she noticed, he had thick, long eyelashes.

  “I meant dinner.” Michael rushed to encourage:, “Mark mentioned this great restaurant in Hollywood, the only real one left, the oldest. It’s called Musso and Frank’s. It was very popular with writers—Faulkner, Fitzgerald. I prefer Faulkner, do you?”

  “Yes.” She would make sure to read both. She added loyally, “And I like Dickens, Twain, Joyce. And Emily Brontë.” She kept herself from telling him she could not finish the book he had been reading in Palm Springs.

  “I like all those authors, too! Especially Brontë. What time for dinner?”

  “I can’t. I’m expected.” That was the only excuse she could make up.

  He was subdued. “Will you give me your number this time?”

  “Yes,” she said hurriedly so she wouldn’t reconsider.

  He handed her a readied pen, a piece of paper.

  She wrote down the telephone number. She made an ambiguous seven that might be a nine.

  “Is this a nine or a seven?”

  “It’s a seven,” she said.

  “I’ll call you!”

  She walked away, stopped, returned to where he still stood. “I made a mistake,” she told him. “It’s not a seven, it’s a nine.” She took the paper from his hands and retraced the number. Moving away, she waved, just waved, regretting that at the last moment, in fear, she had gone back to give him an incorrect number—regretting that doubly because she realized that, for a few minutes and despite her awkwardness, this contact had pulled her away from the entangled shadows of the past—and the question she had been shaping since leaving David Lange’s office:

  Was there such a person as the one David had described, who knew the truth? Or was this all another avenue of deception, to find out only what she knew—as the others had attempted to find out, too? At a precisely determined time, would the cold stare of publicity he had warned her against spring on her, released by him?

  3

  Troja was sitting on her bed, dressed in a glamorous pale orange dress. Normalyn sat next to her, perceiving a forced calmness. She accepted that her own life, which had earlier made motions, would have to stop now for Troja’s. “You know he loved you a lot,” Normalyn reminded.

  “Yes, I do know that,” Troja said firmly. “But that should have kept him alive!” She voiced the regret. “It would have,” she said with certainty, “if other things hadn’t been killing him. His youth was going, the damn drugs just blurred that for him for a while, killed him in another way. Some people gotta die at the exact time, or they’ll go on dying each day.”

  “But how can you be sure it’s the time to die?” Normalyn asked apprehensively, because she wondered whether Troja was talking about herself.

  “Cause you just feel like dyin’.”

  “But you’re facing things now,” Normalyn reminded.

  “Yeah, takin’ one step after another.” Troja’s shanty tone kept the hurt in control. “I didn’t do good yesterday; I know they won’t call me back. Guess I lost my talent for impersonatin’.”

  Normalyn reacted in surprise. “You said you were working as a backup singer.”

  “Lied,” Troja admitted. “Impersonating—but I don’t know who to impersonate.”

  “You could be you,” Normalyn said.

  Troja touched her hair, arranging it with a sudden flair.

  4

  Night shadows gathered at the window, and a chilly mist penetrated Normalyn’s room. But the cool breeze was scented with the aroma of flowers; so she left the window open. She held her arms close against herself, pressed against her body, huddled. She “saw” herself like that. No, that was— Who? What? She couldn’t trace whom or what the position had evoked. She leaned back, altering it.

  The memory of it—unshaped—lingered as a feeling of desolation through a restless night. She woke inundated by the developments of yesterday in David Lange’s office—and by the awareness that Ted Gonzales would be calling today.

  In her room, the door open, Troja was preparing herself for an interview when Normalyn went into the kitchen. “Myself,” Troja was saying to the mirror. “Gotta be myself. Be myself. Myself.”

  Normalyn’s pleasure ended quickly when she saw Troja hide something in her drawer. When Troja appeared in the kitchen, she seemed listless.

  After Troja drove away in the Mustang—“backup singer” had been restored as a goal—Normalyn went into Troja’s room. She opened the drawer. A needle, a packet of powder. . . . Saddened, Normalyn closed her arms against herself, the way she had the night before. She still could not locate the vague but strong association.

  When the telephone rang, she rushed to it. It would be Ted!

  She let it ring. When she left the house, it was ringing again. At the drugstore, she bought two books, by writers Michael had mentioned. She went to De Longpre Park. Stray bands of the young and the old were already there, some of the young in tattered decorations. It was a strange time, a time of lost identities, of looking for nothing . . . or not even looking anymore.

  Normalyn knew where she would go now!

  Only when she entered the long corridor of heavy trees leading to the Wing of the Angel Home did she wonder what she was going to do there. Ask— What? See— Whom? Normalyn waited, hearing the voices of children in the playground. Boys and girls, some as young as six, others near their teens, squealed, shouted, laughed, protested, cried. From here she could see only a portion of the angel. In bunched shadows, it looked frightened, huddled— . . . That was the position she had assumed yesterday, earlier today.

  With deliberation, she walked along the tended shrubbery to the steps leading to the entrance of the administration building. Quickly, she opened the door.

  A stocky girl—a student helper?—tended to some papers before her. Normalyn coughed to call attention to herself. The girl turned. She was a woman!

  “Normalyn!” Sandra said. “I kept wondering when you’d finally come!”

  5

  Smiling and clasping her hand as if they were close friends reuniting, Sandra led Normalyn outside, into the playground. “I’ve done enough work for today,” she remarked. A bell had rung, and the children were returning to the buildings.

  Sandra sat on a shaded bench in the playground. She motioned Normalyn to sit next to her. Normalyn was glad they would not be facing the desolate angel.

  “Playground hour is over now,” Sandra explained. “It’s rest-time for the children.” She sighed. “It’s peaceful here. That’s why I chose to stay. I’ve been here almost fifty years, Normalyn.”

  Fifty years! Normalyn would have said, I’m sorry, except that Sandra had said that without regret.

  “Of course I’m not a ward any more.” She smiled. “I help run the school for the director now.” She said that with pride. “You know why I was placed here years ago?” she asked abruptly, as if to brush pain away. “Because I’m so homely.”

  “You’re not, you—”

  “Okay, then, I’m plain,” Sandra settled the matter. “I’m happy the way I am, really. Everyone I know who was beautiful was so sad.” She looked away, at memories. “Of course, I’m sure that’s not so for you, Norma
lyn,” she added hastily.

  Although she was hearing it recurrently now, Normalyn still felt discomfort when told she was pretty; she was glad Sandra had gone on:

  “Now that’s all there is about me,” she dismissed. She said to Normalyn, “When I saw you at auditions, I knew right away who you were. Of course, Lady Star had mentioned you’d be there—”

  The stirred suspicion. Would she detect the influence of David Lange even here? Looking at the woman, her pleasant earnestness so apparent, Normalyn doubted it.

  “I’m sorry I was so emotional that night when I ran out. But I knew you’d respond to my message and come looking for me.” That pleased her, to be sought. She cleaned her glasses. “And you did come, and I know why, of course—to hear about Norma Jeane and Enid and the game they used to play until it wasn’t a game any more.”

  “Yes.” Now, that was why Normalyn was here.

  Sandra’s eyes explored the playground for long moments, as if seeking an exact entry into the past.

  “It was so long ago she still called herself Norma Jeane. It was only later that—”

  Forty-Three

  —Norma Jeane became Marilyn Monroe.

  But she arrived as Norma Jeane Mortenson, age nine, at the Norton County Home for Children in May, a misty month in Los Angeles, when the jacaranda trees are most luminescent. She was taken there by her latest guardian, Patricia Bradbury— Mrs. Edgar S. Bradbury. Norma Jeane’s mother, Gladys, was once again in an institution. The Bradburys had had a serious discussion about what was “best” for the moody child: “For her own good,” she would be returned to a home, another one. That did not surprise Norma Jeane. It had happened ten times before. The only question for the child had become how long she would remain with “new parents” before she was given back to the “the county.” A year before she had been returned after less than a week. A favorite boarder in the home of her new “foster parents” had offered to teach her a “game.” When Norma Jeane told her new parents about the molestation, she was slapped by the woman for “talking dirty about one of our best tenants.” Norma Jeane began to stutter after that.

  Norma Jeane had been a typically cute child. She became less pretty as a little girl; her straight blondish hair darkened; she was so skinny that she played a gangly boy in a school production. Quietly despondent, she would lie in bed willing her body to shape like those she saw in the movie-star magazines that Gladys read hungrily to escape her own drab existence.

  Early in her life, Norma Jeane discovered that there must be a terrible wound somewhere inside her body. Only she had it. Sometimes she located it inside her stomach, sometimes in her heart, a deep pit that was “empty” yet still hurt—a cold “painless” aching, she described it in her mind.

  The only real happiness she experienced during that period was when Gladys—“the pretty lady with beautiful red hair”— sane again, would rent a house and bring Norma Jeane to live with her until the cloudy moods, “the blackness, the darkness,” would return. That was the “blackness” that Norma Jeane increasingly remembered having “felt” as Gladys had clasped her hand so tightly when she saw her own mother carried away screaming to an institution.

  That gray day in May, as Norma Jeane faced the new home, she felt cold even though she was perspiring. That was what deepened the “pit”—when she felt like an “orphan,” a stranger among new strangers.

  Waiting to receive Norma Jeane at the Norton County Home were Miss Kline, the director, and her associate, Mrs. Travers. Miss Kline was a tall, imposing woman. She had two deep creases over the bridge of her nose. She seemed stern without wanting to. When she smiled, she looked kind and annoyed. Often, she would attempt to smooth her furrowed brow. Mrs. Travers had an aging prettiness about her, as if she had become older in clothes that merely grew to accommodate her larger form.

  “You won’t be here for more than a month, I promise. We’ll come back for you. This is for your own good. Think of it as a vacation,” Mrs. Bradbury instructed Norma Jeane.

  “Goodbye.”

  Norma Jeane had heard Edgar Bradbury instruct his wife this very morning, “Tell her we’re coming back for her so she’ll have something to look forward to.”

  Norma Jeane shut her eyes, hearing the quick clicking of Mrs. Bradbury’s heels leaving her life. She imagined herself running away, searching block after block until she found Gladys, forced her out of the institution and into a pretty house they would share together. She’d yell at her mother, “Stop being insane, take care of me!”

  “Don’t shut your eyes,” Mrs. Travers said to the new girl. “Look over there at the angel.” She pointed to the statue, left over from a time when the home was a stately private house.

  “It’s hurt, it’s wounded. Look how it’s holding her wings.” Norma Jeane’s tears spilled over.

  “No.” Miss Kline did not see the angel that way. “It’s merely pausing, deciding.”

  At the time, the home housed fifty children, ages six through eleven. Some might have been older, their ages uncertain, perhaps as old as thirteen. Several were wards of the city, many were “semi-orphans,” lacking only one parent, placed there “temporarily,” eventually permanently. When they went to public school in their plain “uniforms,” they were all “just orphans.”

  The first night in the dormitory—there were about twenty-five others girls there tending to their personal tasks—Norma Jeane could hardly breathe with new fear, new sadness. She tried to stop those burrowing feelings by declaring firmly. “I’m here because of a m-m-mistake. My father is a famous movie star who looks ex-ex-exactly like Clark Gable. My mother is a f-f-famous—” The memory of Glady’s pained face stopped the lie. “I was left alone and I w-w-wandered out. Now everyone thinks I’m an orphan. My p-p-parents have hired detectives to find me and they will s-s-soon. A limousine is on i-i-its way.”

  The other girls laughed at her—except for the very young ones, including a homely seven-year-old brown-haired girl with thick glasses, Sandra. She stared at Norma Jeane in admiration of her fabulous story. She herself never talked about her young past: “I’m an orphan, period.”

  There was an indefinitely twelve-year-old boy—he looked older, had beginning muscles, strutted a lot—named Stanley Smith who bragged that his father was “a petty crook.” He had heard him called that and assumed it meant he was important. He aspired to be that, too. “Then I’ll have a son just like me, with no goddamn mother,” he asserted, a proud lineage.

  With the few cents given to the children as weekly allowance for chores performed about the home, Stanley would buy a wrapped candy—mostly sugar—called a “Guess What” because it contained a “surprise gift.” Stanley learned how to feel the wrapping to detect the only one worth having, one that contained a paper with a star on it, which meant he could choose a gift from a box behind the counter. Stan always chose a “necklace”—five marbly beads on a knotted string. He would then sell it for up to five times his investment by swearing he had it on strictest confidence that one of them was “worth a loot.” Grandly he awarded one to Norma Jeane, because she was the girl who by then received the most attention from the boys. He looked around to make sure they were looking at him. He said to Norma Jeane, “You’re the prettiest damn orphan in the fuckin’ home.” He liked to talk that way, and with a crooked smile he would perfect as an adult.

  At the time, Norma Jeane was not exactly “pretty.” She had ordinary features, a nose slightly flat. But her body was giving startling hints of curves—and she “acted” pretty. For that reason, among the girls only Sandra liked her.

  Briefly “sane,” Gladys came to take Norma Jeane out on a Saturday outing. At a beauty shop she guided the woman to Fix the girl’s hair into beautiful waves, make her up “like a movie star.” At home, she touched the girl’s face, lovingly, outlining the redrawn features, asserting the prettiness of this face. “May I have your autograph, movie star?” Gladys asked her daughter. By evening, the frenzied look had taken
over Glady’s face—the traces of her beauty became etched over with scratchy lines when “the darkness” encroached.

  At the home, Norma Jeane wandered into the recreation room. It was “mixer” time, boys and girls together. Norma Jeane’s spirits crashed. She saw a new, pretty, dark-haired girl in the home. Sandra was talking to her. Stanley was lurking with his baby-shark’s teeth. Norma Jeane touched her brown hair—it was already losing its wave. The makeup had faded. She felt terribly plain because the girl looked so confident, so unafraid. Norma Jeane wanted to be like that.

  At night, Norma Jeane was startled to hear sobs coming from the girl’s cot.

  Sandra told Norma Jeane about the new girl: “Her name is Enid Morgan. And you’re so alike I can’t believe it. She told everyone that she doesn’t belong here either. Her parents are rich, like yours. She’s here by mistake, like you, and her famous mother and father have hired detectives to find her. A limousine will be picking her up, too, any day now. I’m sure we’ll all three be close friends!”

  Norma Jeane was skeptical about that—and annoyed, because what Sandra told her meant that the new girl knew she was lying, too.

  When she saw the uncertain look on Norma Jeane’s face, Sandra whispered, “She hurts a lot, too, Norma Jeane, like you do.”

  “I do not hurt. Whatever gave you that idea?” Norma Jeane denied.

  Enid did hurt a lot. She was sure that only she felt sad every single moment of her life, even in her dreams. Her life to now had been a jagged journey from home to home. Because even at that young age she felt it might be possible to “figure life out,” she had started what she called “a journal,” entitled Why? It was really only scraps of paper on which she jotted down her thoughts—in between, inserting pictures of movie stars whom she—and her mother, who glided in and out of her life—admired. She made very few entries in the journal, because there was too much to question.

  In the dormitory, a group of girls were discussing the number of homes they had been in, disguising hurt with bravado. “What about you?” one girl taunted Enid and Norma Jeane. “You’ve been in only one home, the rich one you accidentally wandered from?”