Bride of the Rat God

by Barbara Hambly

  “Hmm,” said Norah. Masses of men and women—dressed with a casualness that she found unnerving—had lined the sidewalk eight and ten deep beneath the garish posters in front of the theater as Christine had docked her enormous yellow Nash roadster at the curb with her usual lack of accuracy, shouting her name, reaching through the police lines to touch her as she walked through them with that slight, seductive sway, her enormous coat of sables half drooping from alabaster shoulders and the lights of the marquee sparking the white opals of her necklace. Norah had followed, feeling invisible as usual, clothed also in black—though far less fashionably—and leading the small string of Pekingese without which, these days, Christine was never seen in public.

  The Pekes—Christine’s latest affectation—currently resided in the theater manager’s office, Chang Ming doubtless sprawled on his back waiting for someone—anyone—to come play with him, Black Jasmine jealously guarding all three of the toys Norah had left to amuse them, and Buttercreme hiding in the darkest corner under the desk, her tongue lying like a little pink welcome mat on the floor before her flat nose.

  Her companion’s voice drew her attention again. “So, listen. I’ll pay for the cab and buy you a cup of coffee at Enyart’s Grille on La Brea if you’re willing to stop. I’m Alec Mindelbaum.” And as if he sensed her proper upbringing withdrawing from the undocumented introduction, added, “I did the camera work on that epic that just—ah—shook us to the soul.”

  “Ah.” Norah remembered him now. He looked very different in a suit. “Of course. And I’m the—I believe you used the phrase ‘butterfingered nitwit’—who let Miss Flamande’s Pekingese get away on the set yesterday with such enlivening results.”

  It was his turn to blush, which he did rather readily behind the close-clipped rufous beard. “I know,” he said a little shyly. “I feel I owe you a cab ride and a cup of coffee just for that.”

  The crowd in the lobby was thinning, changing color and composition as sotto voce invitations to Mr. Brown’s party circulated. The press still surrounded the buffet like sharks feeding on a dying whale, but the flitter of beaded dresses and the black of formal evening clothes were bleeding away, leaving only a muddy suit-brown.

  “Nonsense,” said Norah. “I haven’t been in Los Angeles long, but I saw how long it took Mr. Hraldy to rehearse everyone and set the lights. I don’t wonder you were furious. I think Chang Ming saw a mouse under the queen of Persia’s divan.”

  “That wouldn’t surprise me. That shooting stage must have started life as a mule barn.”

  “And, of course, Black Jasmine would die before he’d let himself be outdone. I suspect he’s still under the impression he’s going to grow up to be a wolf. Your offer of a cab must include them, you know.”

  “I know.” Mindelbaum grinned and held out his arm to her with an old-fashioned courtliness that took her by surprise. No man had treated her with such consideration since she’d left London. “I’ll cherish to my grave the look on the manager’s face when Chris said she’d leave them in his office during the show.”

  “Which was quite unjust of him, since they’re the most fastidious animals you could hope to meet. On the boat from England and later on the train crossing the country, they always waited for their promenades on the deck or down the station platforms, for which I was infinitely thankful, since, of course, I was the one looking after them and Christine wouldn’t have so much as scolded if they’d killed and eaten the conductor.”

  Mindelbaum left her beneath a poster of Christine and Charles Sandringham—like moths to a candle’s DEVOURING FLAME, it said—and went in quest of their coats. Outside the glass the crowd still milled, striving for one last glimpse of cinema godhood. Norah could almost feel them glance at, and dismiss, Mindelbaum’s threadbare tweed and her dowdy black crepe.

  It was a dismissal she’d grown used to long before she’d come here to the ends of the civilized world. The Manchester version of it took in the outdated shirtwaists and mended shoes, the heavy stockings and hands chapped from washing Mrs. Pendergast’s underwear, and said, Oh. Poor relation. The Hollywood version was, in a way, more democratic. Oh. Not a star.

  A younger Chinese, clothed in the baggy black quilting common to Chinese from the Limehouse to the Barbary Coast, had appeared through the same discreet doorway and stood talking to the ushers and the old man. “You must forgive my grandfather,” he said, bowing to the usher. “He has not long been in your country.”

  And the old man gestured, furious, at the poster of Chrysanda Flamande smoldering in the doomed and noble Charles Sandringham’s arms.

  There was a surge of movement from the direction of the buffet. Sandringham, after thirty-five years of ruling the stages of the West End and Broadway, still possessed of exquisite hands and patrician bones, proceeded to the doors in company with his beautiful stuntman. They paused so that Sandringham, clearly in his cups, could light the young man’s cigarette. The Dick’s Hatband Brigade, Jim would have said with a raised eyebrow. Norah was reflecting that her mother would never have credited such a thing of her idol when Alec Mindelbaum’s voice asked in her ear, “That bother you?”

  “So long as he doesn’t light up at a table where I’m eating, no.” She caught the appreciative twinkle in Mr. Mindelbaum’s eye as he helped her with the worn black coat she had bought for Jim’s funeral.

  The manager appeared, bowing and trying to keep two very lively little dogs and one extremely unwilling one from tripping every departing reporter in the room. Norah took pity on Buttercreme and picked her up, carrying her across the lobby to the doors.

  Nothing about Los Angeles had so convinced her that she had come to an alien world—an alien universe—as the weather. All week it had been as warm as an English summer, and even tonight’s flickers of rain had done no more than dampen the streets, yielding a breath of asphalt and a confusion of yellow reflections from the multiglobed streetlights on the Los Angeles version of Broadway.

  An usher summoned a cab, which edged from the porridge-thick traffic while everyone crowded around Mr. Sandringham’s silver Dusenberg. Across the street and up a block, the Pantages and Palace theaters emptied hordes of casually dressed men and smoke-trailing women: Mrs. Pendergast would have retired to bed for a week in a fit of scandalized modesty at the sight. Motorcars wove in front of yellow streetcars and hopelessly impeded their progress. Against the glow of the sky, feather duster tufts of palm trees spread their spiky fans; Norah noticed that a good portion of the people passing before the otherworldly office building opposite were brown-skinned Mexicans and Chinese in their traditional black pajamas and queues, many more than she had seen in Hollywood. She had heard someone mention that Chinatown lay nearby.

  As Mr. Mindelbaum helped her into the cab amid much tangling of leashes and a good deal of “Down, Chang! Sit, Jazz! Off, Chang! No, Chang! Down, Jazz!” something caused Norah to look back at the theater.

  The ancient Chinese gentleman had halted there despite the tugging of his grandson and now gazed worriedly back into the lobby, as if debating the possibility of returning for another bout with the ushers.

  On both sides of the entry, Sandringham and Chrysanda gazed and smoldered; the poster artist had flattered the actor by a good fifteen years and had made Chrysanda’s gown far more revealing than it was in the actual final sequences of the film, though God knew, Norah reflected, it was scanty enough. The old man gestured at the poster again, saying something; then he made a quick and universal sign, slashing his hand across his throat.

  The grandson shook his head as if to say, There is nothing to be done.

  As her cab pulled from the curb, Norah saw the pair of them cross through the lights and crowds around the Pantages before they vanished into the dark of Fergusson Alley.

  TWO

  FIRE OVER LAKE

  The working together of opposites—two

  women dwelling together of opposite temperaments,

  or a man and a woman...

&n
bsp; Regrets disappear—do not chase a lost horse,

  it will return. No danger in seeing an evil person...

  Alone and abandoned, you will meet friends...

  Alone and abandoned, you see pigs wallowing

  in mud and demons riding in carts.

  “I WILL SAY this for her, Christine’s a trooper.” Alec Mindelbaum removed his glasses and polished them with a paper napkin from the cheap tin holder at one end of the much-stained and cigarette-burned pine table. “I must have shot fourteen takes of her running across the golf course that night while Campbell tried to figure out which way he wanted to light the ground fog. If it hadn’t been for the fog, he could have just shot day for night with a red filter and tinted the stock blue, though you have to be careful about shadows.”

  “It was a beautiful sequence,” said Norah, meaning it. “The sense of isolation was stunning.”

  “Considering we had Doc LaRousse and his portable generator just outside the frame line, and Gus Campbell tripping over the cables on the ground, and Mary DeNoux tearing the wardrobe tent apart looking for the spare copies of the dress, and the musicians trying to drown it all out with Mussorgsky,” Alec said, “I was pretty proud of how isolated it did look. But Gus is a genius at setting shots. It’s a shame Chris can’t act.”

  Norah whooped, and he looked stricken.

  “I’m sorry. I forgot—”

  “Don’t be, because of course it’s quite true.”

  He still looked like a flustered teddy bear, and Norah had to smile. He was, she judged, twenty-seven or twenty-eight, the age her husband would have been now if he and a hundred other men had not tried to charge a machine-gun nest in Belgium five years earlier with nothing but rifles in their hands. His dilapidated tweed jacket was on economic par with her too-long frock of black crepe, unfashionable without quite bordering on the antique. Evidently cameramen didn’t earn anything near the salary of a leading lady. Nor, she reflected, did they have the option of sleeping with the head of the studio. Not at Colossus Pictures International, anyway.

  Enyart’s Grille, on La Brea Avenue a few blocks south of Chaplin Studios’ row of toy box bungalows, was a simple wooden building with an open kitchen and an L-shaped counter with a polished brass foot rail that hinted trenchantly at what the place had been before Prohibition. It appeared to be the gathering place of cameramen, of men with paint and plaster daubed on rough work clothes, of scenarists with sheaves of paper under their arms—and it seemed to Norah that an awful lot of those people bypassed the makeshift tables and went straight through to a discreet door in the back. A far cry, she thought, from the papier-mâché palms and stuffed monkeys of the Cocoanut Grove or the Baroque Spanish splendors of the Biltmore.

  “I forgot you were Christine’s... sister?” He regarded her doubtfully, clearly comparing her height and Irish complexion—not to mention her accent—with the raven-haired pocket Venus who had thus far sent a dozen desperate cinematic fools to love-struck graves.

  “Sister-in-law.” Norah looked up as the waiter appeared, a shirtsleeved individual who looked as if he’d been strung together from random lengths of bamboo. “Tea, if you please.” Chang Ming and Black Jasmine emerged from beneath the table to sniff the waiter’s shoes. Buttercreme retreated still farther, as far back as her leash would permit.

  “You have to have tea in the place somewhere, Jack,” pointed out the cameraman. “The usual for me. They make an apple cobbler here that brings tears to strong men’s eyes.”

  “Well, I haven’t had a good cry in—” The words tripped her as she recalled the circumstances of the last time she had shed tears. She went on quickly. “—in at least a year and a half. Cobbler for me, too.”

  Jack winked a bright green eye at her and vanished in the direction of the kitchen.

  A year and a half? Norah had made up the number. She couldn’t remember how long ago she’d stopped crying. There had been a long period—years—of numbness, a feeling of having something broken inside that hurt her beyond bearing every time she moved. She had drawn quiet around her as she would have padded herself in quilts, not moving or wanting to move, waiting stoically to heal. Perhaps that was why it had been so easy to remain in Mrs. Pendergast’s house in spite of the old lady’s tyranny, in spite of Lawrence Pendergast and his boorish friends. She might have had to clean up slop jars and fend off the attentions of men who felt that a woman in service was fair game, but at least she didn’t have to look for a way to live on her own. For a reason to live at all. The pain had eroded her until she wasn’t sure she could be or do anything else.

  That was when she’d found herself thinking about suicide on her birthday. She didn’t know what she would have done if Christine had not flounced through the door trailing a confusion of mink, cigarette ash, and beads.

  She raised her head with a start as the waiter set a white, thick-handled mug in front of her with the air of one disowning all responsibility. The tea was nearly the same color as Mr. Mindelbaum’s coffee. Across the table he was looking at her with concerned eyes.

  “Sorry.” She reached for the milk.

  He pushed it to her. “That bad?”

  “Not really.” She shook her head. “I married Christine’s brother when he was in England on his way to the front. He was killed eight months later. Of course, my family were horrified, but my parents at least didn’t disown me. My grandparents did after my parents and brother died of flu the following year. I nearly died myself. At the time I thought it would have saved me and everyone else a lot of trouble.”

  His thick red brows bent together. “They were that set against you marrying an American?”

  “They were that set against me marrying a Jew,” Norah replied calmly. “Blackstone started out as, I think, Blechstein.” Her jaw tightened as she remembered what Jim’s parents had called her in the letter she’d received when, in desperation, she’d written to them for help. True, she thought, they were still grieving over his death. But it no longer surprised her that Christine had changed her name from Chava and left home at fifteen years of age.

  “Some of my aunts might have helped me—the Anglo-Irish side of the family was all suffragists and socialists and didn’t mind Jim so much—but all but one of them died as well. Our part of London was hit very hard. Mother was desperately overworked—we didn’t have servants by that time—and we simply couldn’t afford a doctor. Father’s money had been invested in Russia, and when their government collapsed, we lost, quite literally, everything. There was no question of my going back to Oxford. I had worked as a VAD, but that was over, too, and I ended up as a companion-cum-maid to a woman in Manchester named Cecily Pendergast: rich, ill, and demanding. I just... shut down.”

  She held her hands over the steaming tea, turning them over for warmth. It was a habit she’d acquired in those years, though the yellow-lit restaurant was warm and friendly compared to the cold of the servants’ kitchen where she’d sat all those nights with nothing but tea for either heat or company.

  “It’s easy to do when you can’t see a way out.” He carefully turned his coffee cup so that the handle lined up with the grain of the table. “The three years I spent working in a paint factory, I don’t think I said more than ‘Hi, how are you?’ to anybody for months at a time. I had to talk myself into not quitting every night, because what the hell were my mother and sister going to do if I tried to make a living taking pictures?”

  The corner of Norah’s lips tugged slightly. “And what did they do?”

  Mindelbaum blushed at how easily she’d read him. “Well, I had a sort of deus ex machina.”

  “As did I. What was yours?”

  He shook his head, hesitated a long time, and then said, “The war.”

  All those fresh-faced boys wandering in uniform around the London streets, staring at the soot-black Georgian shops and twisting alleyways as if they’d never seen anything so old before... A tall young man with curly black hair gazing around an expensive lingerie shop
in the Burlington Arcade as she came through its doors: Could you maybe help me find something for my sister?

  “You enlisted?”

  “I left New York so I wouldn’t be drafted.” He pushed his glasses more firmly onto the bridge of his nose. “Friend of ours who ran a tailoring business married my sister for the same reason and took Mama into his household to make double sure they wouldn’t get him. I felt like a heel, but damned if I was going to die at twenty-two because the Kaiser wanted to see if his army could beat the French.”

  The brown eyes met hers with a kind of calm defiance, as if he expected her to slap him with her gloves or pull a white feather out of her handbag and give it to him. Instead she poured a dollop of cream into her tea and an even larger dollop over the steaming plate of caramelized fruit that had appeared in front of her at some point during her narrative. “What did you do? I mean, did the draft board trace you?”

  Alec shook his head, and his shoulders relaxed. He went back to turning his cup. “I was just one name, and I never stayed in one place very long. I took pictures. Portraits of kids, wedding pictures, church groups, that kind of thing—and, in my spare time, pictures of the things I wanted to take. Old buildings. Dead trees. Empty towns. People’s dogs. I spent months in Louisiana taking pictures of old plantation houses—the ones that got burned out by the Yankees—and what happened to the ones that were left, crumbling back into weeds and ruin. Just seeing what time will do to wood and brick and people’s faces.” He looked up at her again. “What was your deus ex?”

  “Dea, in my case,” Norah said, toying with the cobbler. “This past September Christine was vacationing in the south of France and came to England to buy dogs, of all things.” She leaned her head around to look beneath the table. The dogs returned her gaze with big, round, solemn eyes. Five eyes, to be precise—Black Jasmine, like many Pekes, had suffered eye damage as a puppy and had had one eye removed. Indeed, Christine’s willingness to take in a half-blind dog was one of the first signs of kindness Norah had seen in her sister-in-law. When they saw Norah looking down at them, their ostrich-plume tails curled up a little tighter over their backs and they licked their flat noses in anticipation.