And as we drove, my father told my mother what she wanted to hear. “This is where we’re going to live one day, baby.” And, I suppose, that was the purpose of these visits up to the hills, so my parents could remind themselves this was where they were headed, this was where they belonged. Every place we’d lived in since my grandfather’s death two years ago—and we’d lived in a lot of places—was just temporary. Our real house, our dream house, was ahead of us, in the big wide future. Those dreamers called dibs on every house we passed that evening, singing out, “This one. No, that one,” each new house appealing to them more than the last. And when they couldn’t decide at all, laughing, they turned to me and had me pick.
That night I pointed to the biggest, gaudiest house in all of Hollywoodland, up high on Durand Drive, a three-story castle with a watchtower owned by the gangster Bugsy Siegel, who once ran a speakeasy there. Who knew then we’d ever meet him, let alone that my father would work for him?
My father took hold of my hand with the pointing finger and said, “Castillo del Lago, why not?”
Yes, why not? Why couldn’t we live in the biggest, gaudiest confection teetering atop the highest hill?
After all, as we all knew, any minute now my mother was going to have the screen test that would make her a star and my father was going to make a fortune at the track and become a member of the Turf Club at Hollywood Park, where he’d rub elbows with Mr. Louis B. Mayer himself, and we three would move up here to a manor house we would call Wells’ Loft for my mother or maybe the Silver Lair for my father. Or Esme’s Burrow for me.
My mother hugged me, and my father called me Miss Gold Digger of 1939, but I knew I hadn’t displeased him. Far from it. I used to love to listen while my parents talked like that, back and forth, their dreams great puffs of smoke that made a lullaby for me. Soon, soon, soon.
5
At the top of Mulholland Drive, my father pulled over onto an outlook to park and the three of us looked down at the city below, the many blinking lights of downtown, the three busiest streets of Western, Vine, and La Brea spread in a wide, ever expanding triangle before us. Looking west there were fewer lights until finally it was just a swath of darkness pushing its inky way to the ocean.
When my parents got out of the car to sit on its hood and share a cigarette and look out over the city lights before them, I swiveled around in my seat to look back at the remaining tall white letters of the Hollywoodland sign fast fading in the twilight. A young actress had jumped off the now fallen H to her death the year before I was born.
That had been one of my mother’s bedtime stories, however oddly inappropriate for me, and embedded in this particular story was the uneasy conflation of my birth and the lady’s death, my arrival and her flight.
Did my mother think my arrival meant she too had to say goodbye? Goodbye, goodbye, to Western, La Brea, and Vine? Yes. She was only sixteen when she had me, my father eighteen. I imagined the actress, Peg Entwistle, who looked, in my imagination then, distressingly similar to my mother, though she was blond and my mother brunette, perched on the H, her dress flapping in the wind, as she called out to the world that if she couldn’t be a star she would rather be a ghost, a beautiful ghost.
My mother had once told me dead people liked to haunt the places where they died, that she’d seen my grandfather’s ghost sitting in the dining room at our old house reading his newspapers the night after his funeral, and that people had seen Entwistle haunting this hill, a sad-looking blonde in old-fashioned clothes who gave off the pungent scent of her favorite gardenia perfume. That, and the scent of regret. Or maybe it was rage. Maybe it was her ghost that pulled down the letter H of the Hollywood that betrayed her. Maybe tonight would be the night her ghost climbed down the big hill and across Mulholland Drive to our car, her face white and her hands outstretched to strangle anyone whose face loomed larger than hers once did on the screen.
From the foot of the sign where she had fallen, you could see the big reservoir created by the Hollywood Dam. So the water up here wasn’t really a lake, it was a reservoir, but it was called Lake Hollywood, anyway. After all, this was Los Angeles, land of pretend, where houses were castles and peddlers were moguls and reservoirs were lakes. So fine. It was a lake. Make it a lake. Maybe Entwistle had been jumping for that, for a dark, watery oblivion.
I turned back and pulled the car blanket over my body, ready to make myself fully invisible should her anguished ghost float by. Meanwhile, I found the sight of my parents through the windscreen reassuring, the two of them sitting side by side on the hood, my father’s arm about my mother’s shoulders, keeping her there and nowhere else, their bodies silhouetted against the yellow city lights that winked before them and the white stars that had begun to offer their light from above.
While I watched, my father opened up his free arm in a sweeping gesture, as if to offer all of that light, both heaven and manmade, to my mother. Because those were the terms of their marriage from the start, his promise to provide her the big life she craved. As long as they were both engaged in the pursuit of that goal, all was fine. When I knocked on the windscreen to get their attention, to be part of that embrace, they turned, laughing, and knocked back, and my mother pressed her lips to the glass in a kiss. When she sat up, I could see the perfect red imprint of her lips left behind just for me.
The color? St. Petersburgundy.
6
By the time we had finished gazing at the city from our perch on Mulholland Drive and headed down to the Hollywood Flats, to Orange Street, as the fruit trees grew everywhere on our block, the susurrus of the car’s motor and my parents’ voices had acted on me like a great sleeping draught, my head rocking in my mother’s lap. But I roused quickly enough when the car stopped too abruptly and my mother let out an odd cry. My father pulled the brake.
I sat up and peeked over the dashboard. On the front lawn before our flat-roofed duplex, No. 23, stood our furniture as if arranged for a nighttime garage sale—our sofa and tables, our chairs with clothing on hangers hooked to the backs of them, large mounds of towels and linen, stacks of pots and dishes. And set out as if the lawn were a green carpet and the square of lawn a bedroom were my parents’ bed and all the pieces of the curvilinear Art Moderne champagne-colored bedroom suite my mother had been so proud of that she had invited in the next-door neighbors whose names she didn’t even know to see it the day it was delivered. Now they could see it all just by looking out their windows.
I sat up straighter, looking from my father, who, I could tell from years of carefully reading his face, was not entirely surprised by this course of events, to my mother, for whom all this represented an odd, jumbled, and surprising dreamscape. She shut the windscreen against all that lay before us as if the action might erase the entirety of it. Which, of course, it did not.
She sat silently holding her cigarette for three seconds, five seconds, ten seconds before flicking it out the window and turning on my father, flailing her little fists at him over me, pummeling him, crying, “Ike, what did you do? What did you do?”
I shrank down in the seat between them while he, cigarette between his teeth, held up his own hands to ward off her assault, the slap, slap of flesh meeting flesh continuing on above me. This had to somehow be his fault.
And, of course, as it turned out, it was. As usual.
My father’s life at that time revolved around the great magic triumvirate of the Santa Anita, Del Mar, and Hollywood Park racetracks. Every morning when the horses were running, he made the circuit at MGM, taking bets from the bit actors and the barbers and the electricians and the kitchen help on the lot, and he put the money in his own pocket. If a horse won, he paid on the bet. If the horses lost, as they almost always did, my father kept the money, saying, Why should the track get the dough? The track was like a bank and banks go broke. Safer this way for everybody. Except when the long shots came in and my father had to scramble to pay. But he always paid. Always. People trusted Ike.
&n
bsp; So what had my father done? It was more what he had not done. He had not paid the rent, had not paid the rent for the past three months, had been planning to pay it all to the landlord tonight after his big win at the track. But in, as he explained, a minor hiccup, he had lost the money he’d collected this morning at the MGM barber shop, at the Mill Buildings, at the kitchen door of the Commissary, when Starlight had come in at 4 to 1 in the fifth at Hollywood Park. And the sixth hadn’t gone much better. Or the seventh. In fact, he hadn’t done well in any of the races. The horses had come in. And he’d had to pay on those bets. What else could he do? He had to pay the win. From the rent money.
“So what?” my father said. “A temporary setback.”
To which my mother replied, “It always is.”
She was screaming now, saying she wished they’d never sold her daddy’s house. If they hadn’t they could be there right now. Inside. In bed. At some point during my mother’s speech, I began to wish my father hadn’t parked right in front of our house. Not that the neighbors hadn’t heard this or something like it plenty of times before.
But my father, who usually tried to mollify my mother as quickly as possible, wasn’t backing down tonight, was getting out of the car and coming around to her side to pull her out, too, one of her hands grasping blindly for me as if a fistful of my dress could hold her tight. Like a traitor, I shied away from her, and then she was out of the car where my father could shout right into her hysterical rant that there was gold floating in the dust around the great ring of racetracks and there wasn’t anything else here for him in this goddamn parched place. All those big boys—Zanuck, Warner, and Cohn—wouldn’t be at the track so much if it weren’t a place to make money. Even Louis B. Mayer played the ponies. Played the ponies, hell, he owned twenty-five of them! He spent so much time at Santa Anita his staff at MGM nicknamed his box there Stage 14. So my father was going to make his losses back and then some. Like he always did.
My second wish of the night was that my father hadn’t pulled my mother from the car to deliver this speech because now she was trying to squirm away from him, an elbow at his chest, and who knew what she would do if she got loose. I peered at her in the semi-darkness. Her face looked nothing like a doll’s anymore, long streaks of wet unmasking her sallow skin beneath the golden powder and her eyes blinking out of a blurred black mask while my father reasoned with her, his voice a comet at the end of its course, all sparks and emptiness. She wasn’t having any of it.
“Where’s all my daddy’s money?” she demanded. “All that money. Where is it?”
Without looking away from her, my father waved his arm vaguely at our furniture, our clothing, even the Cadillac with me in it. “It’s all here, baby. Every penny of it.”
“It can’t all be here,” my mother said. She put one hand on her hip and jutted that hip out aggressively at him.
“Gone,” my father said.
“But there was so much of it,” she said. There was some bewilderment in her voice now, maybe some protest, but more than anything, resignation. “What did you do with it?”
Well. We’d moved a lot. Bought a lot.
He took her hand in his. “Dina, baby, it doesn’t matter. Change is blowing down the boulevard. Can’t you feel it?” And he gestured, a big sweeping gesture that took in the hills, with the Hollywoodland sign glowing white, minus its H, even beyond the hills, as if change were a tumbleweed come all the way here from the desert where we’d end up. “Baby, can you feel it?”
Well, I guess she couldn’t because she wrenched her hand from his and pushed herself away from him. My father and I watched her take a few unsteady sashaying steps in those high heels of hers, her cotton dress as damp and weepy as she was. She moved over the grass toward the ragged aisles of our furniture where she paused, as if freshly startled, and then marched onward into the mess of it, running her palm along the tabletops as she passed them, a customer considering a purchase, picking up a glass or utensil to study as if it were some curiosity whose use she could not fathom, patting at her black hair while looking into the big framed mirror. Vanity even in extremis. After one fight, my mother had taken scissors to her own wedding portrait—a portrait they’d sat for at some department store following their elopement—cutting my father’s face right out of the paper, leaving a hole below his hat and beneath that hole, my father’s suited body. But her own beautiful face remained there by him, intact, of course.
My father, who seemed relieved that the worst was over, leaned against the car to light and smoke a Chesterfield. I watched him watch her the whole time and then he finished his cigarette, ground it out on the street curb, and sighed. “Stay here,” he said to me. As if I had any intention of getting out of the car.
I watched him walk to where she now stood, slowly emptying my bed of the pots and pans the frustrated landlord had piled in there, helter-skelter, eager to scrape his rental clean of troublesome us. Without looking back at my father, she put up a hand to keep him away. And when the bed was cleared of its tower of kitchenware, she smoothed my bedspread, printed with its pumpkin carriages, glass slippers, and helpful mice wielding scissors and thread. My mouth opened. Making my bed was not something she did very much. Not when it was in the house.
I couldn’t hear what my father said to her then, but I could hear her tell him in a too-loud voice, “This neighborhood is full of thieves.”
This neighborhood hadn’t been our neighborhood for very long. We used to live in a big house in Boyle Heights with my grandfather until my grandfather died two years ago and my mother had to be committed to Camarillo State Mental Hospital. After the funeral, my mother had stayed up all night talking and talking and talking, and then all of a sudden like a chattering doll run out of news, she lay there stupidly mute on the living-room sofa, unable to get up. One morning when I woke, my mother wasn’t there, no goodbye, no goodbye kiss, her dresser drawers emptied. My father told me she was taking a rest for a few weeks in Camarillo, at a special hospital. A doll hospital, where the chattering part, its springs and pulleys, would be fixed so it would run neither too fast nor too slow. She was gone for a month, and the whole time she was gone, I slept with one of her chiffon nightgowns as if it were her shadow I had been charged to keep.
When she recovered, we sold my grandfather’s house and blew out of there in his 1936 black Plymouth, throwing my mother’s inheritance out the car window, one hundred-dollar bill at a time, two bills, three bills, there was plenty more where that came from, of that my parents were sure. We had lived first in a big Spanish-style house in Echo Park, where my father had taken me on boat rides around a lake from the center of which erupted a fountain, the circumference of the lake sprouting date palms with their thick middles and hairy fronds. After that, we had lived, for a few months, in the aforementioned Redondo Beach, at the end of a long railway line, in a shotgun clapboard shack, perpetually damp, and then we had moved again to a wooden bungalow in the hills and after that to this one-story duplex apartment on Orange Street in the flats of Hollywood, where the yard was overgrown with jasmine and sticker bushes and at the back the wood fence sagged inward like an embrace.
And this was where we had last lived.
Used to live.
It didn’t occur to me then that our change of housing reflected the slow decline in our fortunes. I see that now, of course. But back then I thought we’d moved to the flats for good luck, because this was where the early Hollywood studios had once cranked out the silent pictures, the kind of pictures my mother loved. Our move there was in tribute, I thought. Homage.
I saw the curtains move in the front window of the duplex next to ours. I held my breath, not only because we were being watched, but because I wasn’t quite sure what my mother might do or say next. Not long ago my father had read me a story from the Daily News about a woman who had run naked and screaming along Hollywood Boulevard, the police chasing after her for two blocks waving their hands. He had laughed, but I had not. I could far to
o easily picture my mother running the white-hot pavement in her bare feet, her bare body luminescent and all too fluid in that steaming urban light.
On my one visit to see her in Camarillo she had whispered to me that the night before she had flown over the unit wall to the main building, the one with the bell tower, and sailed around its courtyard fountain to a big wooden door with iron mountings. Locked, but opened by a wish. Down the embossed floor of the hallway, tiles underfoot made for a saint, through the next door, and up the tightly winding stairway that looped back and forth on itself like a troubled mind and led, eventually, to the freedom of the bell tower, which soared three stories high, the tallest perch on the grounds, save the tops of the eucalyptus and palm trees. The tower archway opened to the black air, the ledge just deep enough for a woman’s feet. And there she stood, the hem of her gown flapping, the gown threatening to divide itself altogether from her body, a plastic leash with her name on it wrapped around one wrist. I was four, and I wasn’t entirely certain what she told me hadn’t actually happened. Was it summer? Winter? Autumn? Flower petals? Red leaves? Snowflakes? Drizzle? Different. Different every time I imagined it.
Was my father watching her also, wary even as he pretended disaffection? Did he worry as I did that she might climb up onto the roof of our house and raise her arms to the moon, pull herself onto it, and walk its surface? And if that happened, how did he plan to retrieve her? As he had retrieved her from Camarillo, slowly drawing her down from that bell tower, away from the great black lip of the Camarillo mission bell, the clapper invisible within the dark mouth itself, a secret, my father pulling my mother down from the sky just as she rose to meet it, her gown a pale bone sail puffed full of air? Once I had been in the Sisters Orphan Home, I came to better understand my mother and the lure of a bell tower, from which it seemed possible to launch an escape from everything intolerable. And after she came back to us, I was careful to watch her, to know where she was, to anticipate what she might do next, so I might catch her before she fell or flew away.
The Magnificent Esme Wells Page 2