by Donis Casey
“Oh, as I said, he died.” Mrs. Gilbert’s tone was matter-of-fact. “He was found dead not long after I left him. The police never did find out what happened. Not that they tried very hard.”
Blanche’s eyes widened. “He was murdered?”
“It was no more than he deserved.” Mrs. Gilbert shot her a sidelong glance and returned to the matter at hand. “Miss Bolding loves to help people, Blanche, and you are her latest project. Alma looks like she’s in clover and everybody just does whatever she wants, but she’s had a hard life and money and fame don’t erase that. Her immoderate ways are not good for her health. She’s in debt and scared of getting too old to make a living in the movies. One of her ex-husbands drained her bank account and another one liked to use her for a punching bag, too. I hope you’ll stay, honey, and let her help you, because it’ll help her, too, to have somebody else to think of. And don’t worry about earning your keep. There will be plenty you can do to help out around here…”
She was interrupted by Alma’s voice ringing out from the other end of the hall. “Delphinia, let’s throw a party!”
Mrs. Gilbert laughed. “…starting now.”
~Bad habits
are my specialty.~
Alma Bolding’s parties often went on for days. Everyone in Hollywood wanted to be invited. It was a great social coup to even be in possession of one of her gilt-edged invitations. The parties always had a theme, perhaps a scavenger hunt, or a pool party where guests were instructed to come in their bathing suits. And they did. Bathing suits and bow ties with fedoras, or boas and feathered hats. Alma made a grand entrance, sometimes two or three, if the party went on for more than twenty-four hours. She loved to dance, and would drift in and out, usually with a pink lady or gin rickey in hand, always half in the bag and ready to partake in the usual shenanigans with all the bright young things.
Alma had the filthiest mouth Blanche had ever heard on a woman, and maybe just the filthiest mouth she had ever heard, period. It didn’t take Blanche long to realize that Alma’s drunken binges in Arizona were no fluke. Alma liked to drink. She also took pills to go to sleep at night and pills to wake up in the morning. Alma was only in her mid-thirties, but without the magical skills of her makeup artist and hairdresser, she looked a decade older. She was far too loud, far too frivolous, and something of a slut. There was an endless parade of young snugglepups who came to dinner and often spent the night, none of whom really cared much about Alma, Blanche thought, beyond what she could buy for them.
But Mrs. Gilbert was right about her good heart. Alma was sadly self-aware. Mrs. Gilbert, and as far as Blanche could see, the rest of Alma’s staff were all quite protective of her. At first Blanche figured it was because they didn’t want to lose their meal ticket, but the more Blanche got to know the maids and the gardeners and the handymen and the chauffeurs, the more she came to realize that they genuinely loved her. Alma had saved many of them in one way or another, just as she had saved Blanche.
Alma decided that Blanche had a future in the motion picture business, so she took the girl shopping for a new wardrobe in Los Angeles, hired a tutor for her, an acting coach, and an elocution coach. She told Blanche she was not going to have an ignoramus living in her house. “Besides, honey, beauty fades but brains never go out of style.” Blanche only protested about the elocution lessons. What was the point of suffering to get rid of her Oklahoma twang when the movie audiences couldn’t hear her anyway?
“It’s not always going to be like that, little biscuit. Someday in the not-too-distant future somebody is going to figure out how to record voices as well as pictures, and then you’d better not sound like you just fell off the turnip truck. But that’s not the main reason I want you to learn to talk like a lady. Now, if you want to last in this business, you’d better learn to take care of your own business. Learn to be an actress and not just a star. And if you’re going to be an actress, nothing will teach you the craft like starting out with stage work. Now, my friend Damian Kirk is going to be directing his own adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Morosco Theatre this winter, and I hear he has a small part that would be perfect for you, one of the fairy attendants to Titania. The part has one line and I’m betting that you can get the hay picked out of your teeth enough to deliver it by then.”
Blanche was vaguely insulted at Alma’s continual denigration of her Ozark Mountain roots, but tamped down her irritation enough to appreciate the opportunity she was being given.
Between shopping for carrots, dusting, and serving canapés to the glitterati at Alma’s many parties, Blanche studied literature, economics, and elocution, swam in Alma’s blue-tiled pool, exercised, and practiced her one line over and over until late at night, rounding her vowels and making sure the one-syllable words only contained one syllable. “Come now, sisters, let us dance,” instead of “let us day-unce.”
One morning out of the blue Alma said, “Let’s go down to the hen coop and get you a bob.” She didn’t give Blanche time to think about it or ask her opinion. Blanche held on for dear life as Alma roared into town in the Bugatti and hustled her into a beauty parlor so exclusive that it didn’t even have a name. Alma’s hairdresser sat Blanche down in front of the mirror and ran her fingers through the waves of sable that cascaded down Blanche’s back. “You have gorgeous hair, sweetie. Why, we could do almost anything with it, and what we want to do is make you look as timely as tomorrow’s news. You are a modern girl, sweetie, so let’s get modern!”
“I don’t know about this, Miss Maloney. I like my hair. My mother always said it was one of my best features.”
“Believe me, sweetie, you’ll love what I’m going to do to it.”
Miss Maloney threw what looked like a sheet over Blanche’s shoulders and clipped away like a madwoman while Blanche gritted her teeth and held her breath. But when the snipping stopped, she barely recognized the girl in the mirror with the short, fluffy bob, just like Mabel Normand. She was a new woman, and she loved it.
Miss Maloney looked triumphant. “You are just the cat’s meow, honey! And look at this. There must be five pounds of hair on the floor! Don’t let that beautiful stuff go to waste. I’ll pay you two dollars for it.”
Alma wasn’t having it. “You’ll pay her five dollars, you pill. That hair will make a hell of a wig for a rich balding socialite.”
On the day of the audition, Alma gave Blanche a thorough once-over. Hair, clothes, makeup. “You’ll do, honey. Will you ever do. That face is going to open doors for you.”
Blanche didn’t know what to think about that comment. Beauty is fleeting, that’s what her mother had always said. Still…her looks had gotten her out of at least as many messes as they had gotten her into. In fact, it would be downright sacrilegious not to use the gifts God had given her while she still had the use of them. Wouldn’t it?
“But I’ll tell you what,” Alma was saying, “you don’t look like a Blanche Tucker anymore. No, indeed. If I had to guess, I’d say you were born in Algiers. No, maybe southern France. Nice, or Monaco. Yes, I like that. You need a French name. Blanche is French for ‘white,’ which is good, but I don’t like the sound. It’s flat. Not mellifluous enough. Maybe something Italian, but Spanish is lovely, too. Be mysterious. Keep ’em guessing, that’s what I say.”
“Oh, Miss Bolding, I love the idea.” Blanche especially loved the idea of becoming an entirely new person.
“Now, for a stage name, we want something that says, ‘I am a high-class beauty so don’t mess with me.’ I’ll have to think about that.” Alma whirled around. “Delphinia, call my publicist! I’m going to make a star!”
But she didn’t get the chance, not on that day. At the audition, Damian Kirk took one look at Blanche, standing on the stage with her hat in her hand, and said he had no use for a chubby little girl trying to act like a fairy.
Alma was incensed. “Chubby! Why this girl looks like a string with feet
. She looks like a piece of spaghetti that swallowed a peanut. She looks like a…” Alma’s voice trailed off. “Where did that peanut come from, honey?”
~The Jig is Up.~
Blanche burst into wet, sloppy sobs. Alma leapt up from her seat in the first row of the theatre and took the steps up to the stage two at a time. She steered the weeping girl off into the wings, sat her down on a stool and handed her a handkerchief.
“Dry your eyes, little puppy. Your nose will swell all up and your face’ll get so puffy you’ll look like a marshmallow with a hat on. Tell me, honey, and don’t worry, Aunt Alma will take care of everything.”
By the time Blanche finished her tale, Alma’s face resembled a thundercloud. “That piece of shit. I figured you were free of him for good. I have half a mind to send Fee to pay him a little visit. At the very least I’m going to call my lawyer and sue the son of a bitch for child support.”
“Oh, no, Miss Bolding, I don’t want anything from him. I sure don’t want him anywhere around my baby.”
“I can understand that, honey. I’d just as soon never see any of my exes again, either. But he shouldn’t be allowed to get away scot-free. He needs to pay for what he did.”
“Oh, don’t worry, Miss Bolding. I intend to make him pay. But right now I suppose I have to think about what I’m going to do.”
“Don’t worry about anything, honey. I know a great doctor who can take care of you and nobody will be the wiser. He’s taken care of me a couple of times. I’ll pay for everything and you’ll be back on your feet in two weeks.”
“Do you mean…? Oh, no, Miss, I couldn’t do that.”
Alma was taken aback by Blanche’s reaction. It hadn’t occurred to her that there might be another option besides abortion. This was Hollywood, and an abortion or two was the price of doing business for an actress in Hollywood.
“You mean you want to have the baby?”
“I have to, don’t I?”
“No. Do you want to be saddled with a kid at your age, before you even get started in the world? Or would you rather end up married at fifteen to the first schmuck who’ll have you, and then spend your days cranking out brats while your husband drinks away the rent money?”
Blanche was startled. A vision of her mother rose—a farm wife with a doting husband and a happy brood of ten living children. She didn’t know which scenario horrified her more.
“Miss Bolding, I wouldn’t blame you a bit if you threw me right out on the street. You’ve been so good to me, way more than I could ever have imagined and way more than I deserve. I know you’ve invested a lot of time and money trying to turn me into a mysterious European princess, but I can’t do it now. I’ll figure out a way to pay you back. I’ll find a job and work till I can’t any more, then when the baby comes I’ll give it up for adoption.”
Alma’s eyebrows had practically disappeared under her hat brim. “What a concept! Well, honey, I’m not going to throw you out. Where’d you get such an idea? You’re right, I’ve spent too damn much time and money to give up on you now. Didn’t you ever read Shaw’s play about Pygmalion? You’re my creation and I love you, you pinhead. I was just surprised, that’s all. I never knew anybody who didn’t either get rid of the little intruder or find somebody to marry so she could keep the tot. If you were older, you could pretend to find the kid in an orphanage after you have him and adopt him yourself, but baby, you’re just a baby yourself. You can stay on with me and keep studying, and when the kid is born, we’ll find a good place for it. Then we can pick up with your career where we left off.” She took a small silver flask out of her pocketbook and slugged down a stiff drink before emitting a huge sigh. “Well, I guess you won’t be jumping into any crevasses for me for a while.”
More tears started to Blanche’s eyes. She had never known anyone like Alma Bolding—crude, rude, and immoral, but kinder and more generous than anyone had a right to be, and she never asked anything in return for her generosity. Blanche found herself reconsidering her entire worldview. It seemed that it was possible to be bad and good at the same time. There was something incredibly comforting in that thought.
~Thus followed long, languid days
of paradise, and of reinvention, as
Blanche learns to be someone else.~
Time slipped past with one day hardly differing from another. Winter was no winter at all, just quiet, muzzy, soft days, each beginning with heavy gray clouds that burned away into misty sunshine. Between lessons, Alma encouraged Blanche to swim in the blue-tiled pool at the back of the property, tend the flower beds, and tried amidst much laughter to teach her to drive the sporty little Bugatti that she kept for tooling around Los Angeles. Christmas came and Mrs. Gilbert hung greenery and red bows over the antique fireplace and brought in pots full of beautiful scarlet flowers from Mexico that she called “poinsettias.” The shops on Hollywood Boulevard and Sunset were decorated as well, doing their best to bring the holiday spirit to a distinctly un-Christmassy place. At least the orange and lemon trees put on their own decorations for the season. Blanche did not allow herself to dwell on how much she had loved her giant family’s Christmases and how much she missed them. Instead she remained firmly in the moment, only occasionally wondering if they were still looking for her. She knew they were. She knew that her mother would be looking for her until the end of her days.
A few days before the New Year, Alma called Blanche onto the patio. She was sitting in a wicker chair, smoking a cigarette. Standing beside her was the small Asian man whom Blanche had seen only from a distance, working on the landscaping.
Alma gestured at the man with her cigarette holder. “Darling, this is Mr. Hashiyara. I’ve asked him if he would consider teaching you an exercise program that I think will serve you well in your future film career.”
Blanche blinked at the man, who was scrutinizing her as though she were a piece of furniture he might consider buying. Blanche had only known one Asian person in her entire life—her aunt’s Chinese housekeeper, Lu, last name unknown, a dumpling of a woman who ran every practical aspect of her aunt’s household in Enid, Oklahoma. She doubted if she had spoken two words to Lu in her entire life. She parted her lips to say, “I already know how to garden,” but Mr. Hashiyara spoke first.
“Come here, child.”
Startled, Blanche looked at Alma, who nodded her encouragement. She took a couple of steps forward. Mr. Hashiyara didn’t touch her, simply looked her up and down with his hands folded quietly over his stomach. Finally he said, “Miss Bolding says you have much athletic ability.” His English was formal and stilted, but only lightly accented.
Another glance at Alma. Was that amusement that Blanche saw in her eyes? “Miss Bolding is kind.”
“You ride horses, yes?”
“Yes. I grew up on a horse farm. I’ve ridden since I was a little thing.”
“You like school? Do you like your teachers?”
Blanche’s forehead wrinkled. “I liked my teachers. I like to learn new things, to do new things. I like the tutors Miss Bolding hired for me. But I didn’t like going to school.”
“Why not?”
“It was boring. What’s this all about, Miss Bolding?”
“Darling, Mr. Hashiyara is the possessor of a great and hidden knowledge that has nothing to do with trimming hedges. He has taught me many ways to move my body, knowledge that I have used to keep from breaking something important, like my leg, while leaping over ice floes and falling off of mountains during filming. And I am as athletic as a sofa pillow, so just imagine what he could do for you…” Her gaze switched from Blanche to the gardener. “If he agrees to take you on, that is.”
Hashiyara took a deep breath and let it out in a sigh. “Would you like to learn?”
Blanche was still in the dark about what Alma intended to have this strange man teach her, but she felt that tingle of fear mixed with excit
ement that she had become so familiar with since she ran away from home. “I would like to learn,” she said.
Hashiyara stepped back, clearing her path. “Then run.”
It was all so bizarre that she didn’t think twice. She took off down the garden path and ran flat out around the meandering back garden, around the fountain, up the steep berm and down. The terrace was hardly big enough for her to break a sweat, and when she skidded to a stop on the patio, her breathing had not quickened.
Hashiyara turned to Alma. “I will be here tomorrow afternoon. We will try for one week.” Without another word to Blanche, he picked up the hoe he had leaned against the pillar and left.
“Miss Bolding…”
“Mr. Hashiyara is a master practitioner of judo, mysterious physical and mental arts from the Orient, darling. By the time he’s finished with you, you’ll be able to roll out of a speeding motorcar over a cliff and into a raging flood and not get hurt.”
“But what about the baby?” Blanche didn’t like to remind Alma of her condition, for fear the offer of judo lessons would be rescinded, but better lose them now before she found out whether she loved them or not.
“Oh, he knows. He won’t have you do anything that will harm you or your little bundle. In fact, this may make things easier for you when the time comes.” She stood up. “It’s time for my rest, now, so run and see if Mrs. Gilbert needs you for anything. Remember that Madame Adele will be here in a couple of hours for your French lessons. Oh, and find something loose and comfortable to wear when Mr. Hashiyara comes tomorrow. Ask Mrs. Gilbert to find you some trousers.”
* * *
Blanche loved her trousers. They were feminine and flowing, and nothing like the hand-me-down overalls and outgrown work pants of her brothers’ that she had occasionally worn. Her eyes filled with tears of joy at the freedom she felt when she first put them on. She felt like a powerful female and not just a make-believe male. She loved her martial arts lessons, too, and Mr. Hashiyara for teaching her. He was mindful of her condition but he didn’t treat her like tissue paper. The deceptively easy movements he had her do over and over made her muscles quiver and ache, but she persevered. She became strong. Her limbs seemed to lengthen as she added muscle and lost her baby fat. Her cheeks hollowed as her belly grew. When she finally became too big to do the intricate shadow kicks, twirls, and punches, Mr. Hashiyara taught her long, slow, gently flowing moves like a dance, and then had her sit quietly for long periods of time and concentrate on controlling her breathing.