The Magnificent Esme Wells

by Adrienne Sharp

  To my great relief, she did not take the opportunity this evening to strip off her dress and run up Orange Street to Hollywood Boulevard or to fly up into the hills to perch on the O or the L or any other letter of the Hollywoodland sign still standing. She simply wandered over to her own gold-spun bed, where she lay down, as if the bed were somehow still stationed in the privacy of her own bedroom, the fact that she left her shoes on her only concession to our peculiar circumstances. I listened to her cry. It was dark but there was a streetlight. So she could be heard and seen. My father began to pace a circle around all that had once been inside our half of the duplex and now was not, and then he stood on the sidewalk by the car, looking up and down the street as if some answer to all this might yet come rolling his way. The night air was purple with jacaranda.

  Quietly, I got out of the Cadillac.

  I’m not even sure my father felt me, a ghost poking its hands into his pockets to see if he’d gathered any betting tickets from the floor at Hollywood Park. He had. And that was a sure sign that things hadn’t gone well at the track today. As if I needed another one.

  It didn’t look good for a bookie to be scouring the concrete floor for trash. That was usually my job. And as a little girl, I was an expert stooper, slipping easily between the men to dive for tickets, the breeze I made in passing sometimes shaking winning tickets from their careless hands. Those tossed tickets weren’t always losers, you understand. The men down on the concourse have been drinking all day, they can’t see straight to read their tickets, and they let them drop, running off to lay down the next bet. And they dropped more than their tickets. They dropped everything—bottle caps, stubby pencils, handkerchiefs, wads of spittle, shoelaces, bottles, string, coins. At the track with my father, I’d once found a wallet, which he’d stuffed furtively in his coat pocket with a wink. From him, I’d learned to be stealthy.

  I walked over the grass and sat down at our kitchen table with the wad of tickets and my father’s notebook, the pages full of the names of horses I couldn’t quite read: Chance Taken, Up in Arms, Nobody’s Fool, Westward Ho.

  That was what my father had done years before, gone westward ho, seduced by the picture postcards that showed Los Angeles as a fragrant green land of palm trees and orange trees, lemons and oleander, postcards printed with green hills and orange groves, even the paper of those cards were made of smelling sweet. When he had gotten off the train in 1930 at the old River Station, he had looked up at the hot blue sky with the big yellow sun in it and in that moment Baltimore and all its memories burned away to soot and that was why he had so few left to offer me. I can’t even tell you his mother’s name.

  I might not be able to read yet exactly, but I already knew my numbers. Methodically, I began to sort the tickets into piles. Race 1. Race 2. Race 3. When I’d gotten everything sorted, I planned to check the tickets against the information in my father’s notebook. My father was scrupulous about scribbling down the outcome of each race. His notebook held his little history of the track. Usually there were no winning tickets to be found from the first race or so, but as the afternoon wore on and the men grew drunker, they read their tickets with less and less care, and not often, but sometimes, I found a winner. When that happened, my father would bow and kiss my hand, “Thank you very much, Little Miss,” and we’d take the ticket to the betting window and the track paid on it. No scruples darkened our glee. I knew how to please him.

  A siren sounded somewhere north of us, heading toward Gower Street, toward Paramount, not in our direction. The paper tickets stuck to my sweating fingers as I sorted, squinting to see the numbers in the almost dark. I felt as if I were in a horse race myself, a race against what might come next. My mother wasn’t going to lie there crying on that bed forever. So I sorted the gritty slips with some urgency, while my father sat on the edge of the big bed and spoke to my mother in a low, forceful voice. I concentrated hard not to hear them. Eventually, they were quiet and I supposed the quiet meant my mother had acquiesced to something, probably that she would not insist that we all sleep in our beds out here on the lawn of No. 23 Orange Street, Hollywood, California.

  Having placated her, my father came to sit beside me, dropping heavily into the other metal chair, and flipped open his notebook. He understood what I was doing. The tall buildings of nearby Hollywood Boulevard, its street signs and light poles and billboards watched us work. Cross-eyed from looking sideways into the notebook, I found one slip I thought looked good, a possible gem. My father studied it, scanned the notebook, shook my hand, and winked. It was good. It was a gem. I said a quick small prayer to the Gods of the Horses, and then I scampered over to the bed where my mother lay, and I wagged the ticket in the dark air above her.

  She stared up vacantly at me, Who are you?, and then coughed, a drowned person coming to. I tucked the ticket behind my ear like an ornamental flower and wagged my finger at her, strutting and clucking as I’d seen Judy Garland do earlier today. I’d memorized all her routines, and not only from today’s shoot. Already at six, I was a quick study. And, as well, I’d discovered the pleasures of performing for an audience, which offered both escape from—and aggrandizement of—the self. I used my Judy Garland voice to make my mother laugh as I sang,

  He’s sweet just like chocolate candy

  Or like the honey from a bee

  Oh, I’m just wild about Harry

  And he’s just wild about me!

  And behind me, my father, who had calculated the win, sang out, “That’s seven dollars fifty,” victory!, more than enough money for tonight’s hotel room, and my mother smiled at me, her tears dried, and held out her arms. “Well, aren’t you my lucky little pony. Comeer.”

  7

  But because seven dollars fifty only went so far, the next morning my father had to perform his own favorite lounge act, the hocking of my mother’s engagement ring, something he had found himself having to do a few times since we sold my grandfather’s house, and it was never performed without drama. My mother lay in our bed at the Hollyhock Motel, weeping, as he tried to unscrew the diamond ring from her finger, swearing he would soon enough retrieve it, no harm done, and not only that, he would buy her a much bigger ring altogether once we were in the money again. And we would be in the money again, goddammit. And then, with one swift movement, he had sheared the ring from her finger with a cry of triumph, disinterested in my mother’s corresponding cry of pain and insult, holding the ring up to the light as if to take its measure, as if he hadn’t seen it every single day for seven years since the day he first put it on her finger.

  It was not, of course, the first time he’d wronged her. His initial act of perfidy had been to take her to bed the very day he met her in 1932. She had been only sixteen, a teenager walking down Melrose Avenue in her tap shoes, having just finished her own dance class at Daddy Mack’s when my father first beheld her. And she, him. Within the hour she had downed two Tom Collinses at a nearby bar, and by the end of that afternoon, her tap shoes lay, satin bows undone, on the floor by the bed in the rooming house where my father, two years in the city, practically a native, was staying, though not, as it turned out, for very long. After that, my mother was bound to him for life, already pregnant with me while she was filming Gold Diggers. And here it was, 1939, and she was still bound to him, bound to him and all his troubles.

  “So, here’s what we’re going to do,” my father said to me, after he had the ring in hand and we’d hopped into our Cadillac, leaving my mother behind lying in the sagging motel bed with her fistful of tissues and the few valuables she had managed to scoop up before we had left Orange Street behind us last night. “We’re going to find ourselves a nice little pawnshop and we’re going to get ourselves a nice bit of cash and then we’re going to the races on this fine Saturday afternoon, where all we need is one big win and we’re back in business and we’ll head back for the furniture.”

  I said nothing, dubious.

  “Look, little girl. Don’t give me that l
ong face. When you step out into the world, you’ve got to step out with a smile on.”

  I refused to look at the world or at him. I thought he should be made to suffer, even though I usually found my father’s insouciance one of his most appealing characteristics. But my pout didn’t interest him at all. Nor, to be honest, did our furniture. If it weren’t for my mother, I knew he’d leave it all behind without another thought, happy to start over, starting over being his specialty.

  My father drove west on Hollywood Boulevard. In our Cadillac we passed the big movie palaces, once arcade storefronts with penny machines showing one-minute silent shorts, now the El Capitan, Grauman’s Chinese, and the Egyptian, the neon lettering on their marquees a faded red and pink and green in the morning light. And when the mechanical arm on the corner traffic signal swung down the stop placard and up the go, my father turned the car south down Fairfax Avenue.

  We passed Gilmore Field stadium, where the Hollywood All Stars played ball, their motto “The Hollywood Stars owned by the real Hollywood stars,” because their paychecks were cut by movie stars like Gene Autry and the stands packed with movie stars from MGM and Warners. And then there was the plat of oil fields, Gilmore Fields, once a dairy farm, but there were no cows grazing there anymore, no, only pumps and derricks that winched up the money that seemed to be sprouting everywhere in Los Angeles, out of oil fields, out of the new San Pedro Harbor, out of newspapers and movie studios, out of racing tracks and gambling houses, out of the acres of land not only here on the west side of the city but in the Valley farmland above and in the South Bay down below, once Spanish ranchos, money ready to be plucked from the earth by the clever and the game.

  Almost all of my father’s fantasies revolved around the idea of being clever and game, like the big boys of Los Angeles, the big, important Jews who were making money not only by making movies, but also by snapping up land, snapping up all the old ranchos that had once belonged to the Picos and Dominguezes and the Figueroas, after they themselves had stolen it out from under the poor Gabrielino Indians, who didn’t even wear clothes, for Christ’s sake, my father said, just walked around naked, the women in deerskin skirts, weaving baskets at the Missions that enslaved them. And that was only eighty years ago!

  Yes, the big boys had been busy, and not with the primitive pueblos and missions and ranchos that had preoccupied the Spaniards, but with setting up hospitals and racetracks and country clubs and housing developments and law firms—everything the old school Dohenys and Chandlers and Huntingtons had, the newly fancy Jews had for themselves now, too. The movie moguls weren’t admitted to the Dohenys’ country club, so they built their own. Hillcrest. They weren’t welcome at the Santa Anita racetrack, so they built their own. Hollywood Park. They needed a hospital? Cedars of Lebanon. Jews weren’t stuck in the ghetto anymore. They owned this city, or part of it, Los Angeles, population 1,504,277 and still growing, still under construction. And as my father said, Goddammit if there still wasn’t more gold to be mined here by men like him. It was his time, his time to be a big boy!

  We passed the brand-new May Company department store with its great gold cylinder rising up the center of the building’s five floors like a tall stack of coins to which my father always nodded and said, “Ka-ching, ka-ching,” elbowing me, which he did today and at which I refused to smile, and behind the enormous department store rose the stench of the Hancock Park Fossil Pits as if no one cared about the mix of commerce, tar, and bones.

  “All righty,” my father said when we had traveled so far south that we reached Century Boulevard. We cruised past the double-headed streetlamps and the telephone poles and the date palms, past the Cut Rate Drugs and the Inglewood Laundry, and up to the Utility Auto Park that charged a quarter an hour to park. My father pulled in there, telling the man, “We won’t be an hour,” giving him a quarter anyway, along with his best smile. “Put me over by the exit where I won’t bother anyone and keep that quarter for yourself.” At this the man smiled, too, and showed a silver tooth in front.

  I followed my father off the lot and down the street. “You see how crowded it is here?” my father said. “No place to park. The cars are head to toe at every curb.” And it was true. “A man could make a fortune here with a couple of lots.” He tapped his hat. “Something to remember. Always keep lots of ideas up there,” and he tapped his head again. It was so like my father to be hatching a new scheme right in the middle of a crisis brought about by one of his other schemes.

  My father found a shop he liked the look of just around the corner from Inglewood Boulevard and not too far from the racetrack. The painted red word pawnshop was stenciled above the storefront window and beneath that word, two more, cash loans. Clearly, that’s what we were after. Cash. We stood outside the window for a minute, looking through the glass. Above us on a high shelf, a long row of guitars stood propped up and ready to play, black polished guitars in which you could see the buildings opposite reflected and warm yellow ones with the wood softly waxed that reflected nothing. Beneath the guitars hung a row of trumpets, and beneath that, on a shelf, lay the humble xylophone and some maracas. The shop looked like a music store. When I said this, my father told me, “Easy things to pawn. Not something you absolutely need.” Unless you were a musician, of course.

  The instruments were what I was staring at, but my father’s attention was drawn by other things, other things people obviously didn’t absolutely need, like watches and rings. Rows of rings were set out in velvet cases, a dozen long rows of diamond and gold rings, and nestled in the middle of them, jewelry boxes opened like clamshells to show off watches, mostly thick men’s watches, but I could see the slender gold bands of ladies’ watches, too. But mostly there were rings, diamond rings, like my mother’s. “Each one offered up with a tear,” my father said to me. But my father wasn’t crying.

  Inside, we found even more guitars, these guitars still in their open cases as if somebody had loved them very much. They lay like ladies on velvet. Anything on or in velvet accrues the qualities of it—and stimulates the desire to touch. Velvet. Fur. Feathers. Sequins. The tools of my trade, now. That and flesh. There were also bicycles and luggage and clothing, and in every glass case there was more jewelry, as if people had stripped themselves bit by bit of everything they owned, their playthings, their carryalls, their clothing, and then finally, as they were dropping into the grave, their crosses and wedding bands and watches and pearls. I wondered how long it would be before the rest of our possessions ended up at this pawnshop, or some other one like it. At the counter, my father, who had entered the room with a smile, drew with some ceremony my mother’s ring from the pocket of his shirt and proffered it to the pawnshop owner. No handsome velvet clamshell for us.

  I turned away from my father’s genial face and from the pawnshop man who was holding the ring up to the light to assess its value, the light that made its way in from the street to shine on my mother’s diamond and to alight on her tear, which glistened on the stone’s icy surface. When the man pulled out a jeweler’s loupe to better inspect both the gem and my mother’s despair at losing it, I turned away and walked the length of the counter to the back shelf, my head low, where I discovered all the toys—the trains and cars, the puzzles and puppets, the dolls and dollhouses, the toy guns and the many, many bicycles, and I wondered if children had been pried tearfully from these toys or if these were the toys they had simply outgrown and discarded. Which of my toys might soon wend their way here? For all I knew, some of them were here already.

  It seemed with each of our moves, something of ours was lost, or so I had thought. But maybe, just maybe, my missing toys were not lost, but pawned, brought here surreptitiously by my father whenever he needed a few extra dollars. Perhaps this pawnshop had not been selected at random, my father making a big pretense of musing his way along these streets near the track, but through long practice. I know now my father is capable of anything, almost.

  So I decided then that I would look for m
y toys, though I wasn’t exactly sure what I would do if I found them. Force my father to buy them back for me? But because the toys were much less well organized than the jewelry—puzzles and cars all mixed up with alarm clocks and radios—my attention strayed. I was an avid radio listener and the dozens of squat radios, all shapes and sizes, distracted me. The most miraculous of the radios was a radio painted to look like a portable American flag, with a blue body and red-and-white stripes and a red-and-white numbered dial and a blue handle on top you used to carry it. I had never seen anything so fabulous.

  I reached for it, thinking to turn it on, when the pawnshop man called out to me, “That there’s a Patriot Radio,” and to my father, “New. This year.” And when my father didn’t say anything and only tipped his head, the man turned back to the ring. “I can give you fifty dollars for it.”

  In our state, a fortune.

  “How about sixty?” my father said. “It’s worth sixty.” He should know.

  The man shook his head.

  My father grinned. “All right, fifty it is. And,” he said grandly, “we’ll take the radio.”

  Clearly a bribe, but I couldn’t refuse it, as my father very well knew. I had proven myself bribable on many occasions. As had my mother. I hate to say it, but my father was irresistible. So even though I knew I should have resisted him, should have made him drive back to the Hollyhock Motel and hand every cent of that money over to my mother, instead, I carried my Patriot radio to the car, dancing a bit, I regret to say, and I allowed my father to take me, my radio, and the money my mother’s ring brought him straight over to Hollywood Park, which was, I also regret to say, like a second home to me.