The Magnificent Esme Wells

by Adrienne Sharp

  And maybe that was for the best, because as my father had said, Nate Stein was a dangerous man.

  I saw that for myself one morning. Walking into the lobby on my usual search for Nate, I spied him at the front desk, but before I could even move toward him, a Negro man came striding purposefully through the glass doors and into the DI lobby, heading directly for Nate. So I paused. We never saw Negroes here.

  In Las Vegas, 1950, we didn’t have Negro waiters or dealers or entertainers in our clubs, unless they were stars like Lena Horne or Pearl Bailey, and even then, there were restrictions. When Lena Horne came to sing at the Flamingo, she refused to stay in the Negro part of town, which didn’t even have a sewage system, so Mr. Siegel put her up in one of the hotel cabanas and had the maids burn her sheets each morning. Burn them! Washing wasn’t even good enough. The Negroes who placed bets or played the numbers did so on their side of town, the games run and money collected by Negroes specially recruited by Gus or Moe or Nate. There were a lot of men, desperate men, in West Vegas, who took on any kind of scrap the casinos or bookies or loan sharks threw at them.

  But we did have Negro boxers at the hotels sometimes as entertainment, dark men pummeling each other in a roped-off square, white referees in place to contain them. And I thought I recognized this man as someone I saw occasionally at the Flamingo, talking to one or another of Greenbaum’s or Sedway’s men, someone who collected debts for the casinos and boxed for hire.

  The man was angry about something, I could read his body well enough even at this distance to see that, and he may have been drunk, too, common enough in Las Vegas where drinking went on any time of day, Bloody Marys and Mimosas giving way to Screwdrivers and hard liquor straight up as the hands of the clock wound onward. He had the arms of a boxer and the legs of a drunk, and he made his way across the lobby toward Nate. What could he be angry about? Had Nate not paid him the percentage due for collecting on a debt or not paid him the money for a private fight or stopped using him as an errand boy or numbers runner?

  When the Negro reached Nate’s side, I saw how quickly Nate’s face changed, darkened. The bad face. Eyebrows together. Mouth down, unsmiling. The man leaned in, aggressively, and said something I couldn’t hear and then forcefully drew back his fist. I flinched, but Nate didn’t. I wasn’t sure what the man said, but I could hear Nate quite well, the steely spike to his voice I’d never heard him use before giving his words force. “If you hit me, nigger, you’d better kill me. Because if you don’t, I’ll make one phone call and you’ll be dead in twenty-four hours.”

  While I watched, the Negro man turned his head and looked at his fist for a moment as if it were a stranger, how did this get there?, and then he looked back at Nate, who stood there still unflinching. And then the man’s body sagged, I could see it, all the fierce energy that had driven him across the lobby floor, the grievance that angered him enough to confront a boss as powerful as Nate, both of those, the energy and the grievance, slid down to his shoes and slithered away from him. And then the man himself turned and bolted, following that snake.

  It was only then that Nate saw me, the bad face rearranging itself into an uncertain grin, and it was uncertain because Nate didn’t know exactly how much I’d seen of this encounter or exactly what I would do if I had seen too much. And then I saw him apprehend that I had seen it all.

  “It’s just talk, E,” he said.

  Was it? Was it just talk when he’d made a call, sending two men to the casino manager at the Last Frontier to tell him to stop calling Jews “kikes” or they’d come back to break his arms and legs and the man understood that was not what they meant, not at all, and the man left Vegas never to return? I’d heard about that.

  Nate felt for his cigarettes and lighter, watching me while he did so. Would I, like the Negro, bolt from him?

  No. No, I would not.

  Because Nate and I might have sex and sorrow in common, but we had something else in common much less lovely.

  Ambition.

  28

  Los Angeles

  1939

  When Mr. Mayer dismissed my mother’s screen test with that “eh,” she took to her bed in a numb, mindless fugue, her body simply folded up, squeezed together, like a director’s chair collected at the end of a long day’s shoot. She slept alone, and too much, day and night. Without my father even asking me to, at my own bedtime, I went to sleep in her bed, to keep a watch on her. If she went to the window to throw herself out into the dark, I would know. But she hardly stirred. From noon to dawn, she remained unmoving.

  I began to like it in her room, with her there, quiet and malleable, not the usual scrap of trouble my father followed around with a broom and dustpan. Being around her now was easy. I could open her dresser drawers, put on her necklaces and shoes, wear whatever I wanted of hers. Slowly I moved some of my own clothing into her room, folded the pieces carefully and laid them in her dresser drawers. My own bedroom had never been organized into anything resembling coherence, my dresser and bed at stark angles in the center of the floor, dropped there by the Boyle Moving Co. and never touched again, my toys still in boxes in a ragged cardboard wall to one side, a wall I’d barely disturbed. My room’s lack of design seemed to speak to my parents’ general disarray and disorientation since our eviction from Orange Street, a disarray and disorientation that seemed even more exaggerated now with my mother’s perpetual slumber. We were in a lull, but a lull with a certain tension in it, an ebb before the flow that waxed everywhere.

  My mother refused, for the first time in six years, to go to the studio—what’s the point?—and hadn’t shown up to any rehearsals for Strike Up the Band. She shrugged, ignored me when I stamped my feet. “Go away, Esme,” she told me, in a heavy throaty voice which only proved she hadn’t even really woken up. I tugged at her arms and wailed at her, but she rolled over in the bed, unimpressed, and showed me her back.

  I think my mother felt if her fate was to continue to appear on the screen with hundreds of others into perpetuity, well, she didn’t want that kind of perpetuity. No thank you. In fact, my father and I worried that she might not want any kind of perpetuity at all.

  Neither of us wanted to see her returned to Camarillo, the hospital wedged between the blue Santa Monica Mountains and the verdant fields and orchards that made a valley to the Pacific, the ocean you could smell and feel from the grounds but couldn’t quite see. We didn’t want her returned to the courtyards and the whitewashed walls and the red-tiled roofs, all of it promising a sanctuary it did not deliver. It only promised this, as did the Spanish missions after which the complex was modeled, with its chapels, orchards, farmlands, stables, and laundries, and at which by day the patients labored as the Indians once had for their padres two centuries earlier. All the women hospitalized there had been trouble for someone and needed to be remade, like the baptized Chumash and the Gabrielino, to please their masters.

  When my father took me that one time to visit my mother, after which I refused to go, she had grabbed at my hand to tell me about the babies who were waiting for rescue, swaddled and balanced on the open palm leaves that tottered at the pinnacles of those tall thin trees on the grounds. The babies slept at the tops of those trees, she told me, their hands fists, their mouths slack, nestled in the long fringed palm leaves or captured in baskets of orange tree branches, almost invisible behind their waxy green leaves, or rocked by the waving branches of the eucalyptus. Cradles. Not one of them cried. The babies were good. Waiting, waiting to be collected. That’s why she needed to climb the bell tower and fly, to reach them.

  Her rambling had terrified me, and I wasn’t entirely sure what she said wasn’t true, as everything about the place, with its locking doors and restrained women and overcrowded dormitories and solitary confinement cells and hydrotherapy rooms with their enormous, terrifying bathtubs, was the inverse of normal. It seemed to me, at age five, that babies might very well be placed in cradles in the treetops, out of reach of their disturbed moth
ers. It didn’t occur to me then to wonder why my mother was worrying about lost babies, and, of course, I didn’t understand she was worrying about me.

  29

  When my father got home from work at six o’clcok, he went directly into the garage, still wearing his splattered painter’s coveralls and his splattered painter’s cap. I hated to see my father in those coveralls, my father’s pant legs, his undershirt, even his painter’s hat and his face streaked all over with paint that had dripped sloppily from his brush, as if my father cared so little for what he was doing that he took no caution with the paint at all, could have poured a bucket of it over his head for all it mattered to him. Now that my mother never rose from bed, my father brought supper home for us each night, and I’d run out to the garage to eat with him there because I was hungry, even though I dreaded seeing my father’s face. His expression, normally so animated, so taut with hope, seemed like a shriveled balloon.

  Sometimes I’d interrupt him secretly studying the racing sheets my mother had forbidden him to study ever again, making important notes in his red notebook, which she had also forbidden him. But those notes in that notebook might get us out of here, I hoped, or at least might get my father out of this space in the garage, where he had repurposed the couch as a bed, a kitchen chair for a nightstand, and a tabletop for a wardrobe, his pants and shirts folded on the surface of it, his shoes lined up below. My father would look up blearily at my entrance and mutely offer me a carton, usually of Chinese food, from a restaurant just west of Jewtown. My father never had a good story anymore for me and my father used to always have a good story. In fact, he had started to look like one of the men I would spot on the street a few years ago, men sitting on their haunches and holding up signs, Need Money For Food, men to whom my mother would always give a nickel or dime, putting the coins in their hands and saying, “Here you go, baby,” to which the men would always say, “God bless.” Well, no such charity flowed from my mother now.

  And so on those summer evenings without her, after my father and I had eaten, I shuffled our worn deck of cards, expertly, with my two small hands, the shuffle, bridge, fan, cut, and shuffle, just as my father had taught me, and on one of those nights I accidentally discovered the secrets he kept beneath his painter’s cap, grand schemes that ran parallel to my mother’s delusions.

  On that night he was absentminded though I dealt out our hands noisily, slapping the cards down on the little table, trying to get his attention. The ploy didn’t work. My father still stood at the garage door window, looking out at the street, cracking his knuckles, distracted. He had exchanged his coveralls for a collared shirt and suit pants. He’d recently started going out in the evenings to Louie Schwartzman’s Ebony Room, where he kept company with the Boyle Heights bums my grandfather despised—Big Greenie Greenberg, Izzie and Maxie Shaman, Hooky Rothman, Mickey Cohen—and where he played the numbers since my mother had forbidden him the track and horses. Because my father had to gamble. That was understood. Only the breadth of it could be curtailed.

  “Come on, Dad,” I called out, finally. “Let’s play.”

  “What are we playing?” He turned from the window.

  “Acey-Deucey,” I said, naming one of the poker games my father had been teaching me. Follow the Lady. Little Chicago. Acey-Deucey. Texas Hold-Em.

  My father came to the table and looked down at his cards. “Five and a Jack,” he said. “Not so shabby.”

  “Seven and ten,” I said of my own cards.

  “Bet low,” my father advised.

  But since all the bets were imaginary, written in pencil on a piece of scrap paper, which was one reason why my father found our game so dull, the fact that I was the only other participant being the other, I wrote down a big number. Ten dollars.

  My father grinned at the audacity. He found that much engaging. “All right, big shot. Hit me.”

  I flipped my father a card. Ace. He grimaced theatrically. I dealt my own, a three, but before my father could commiserate with me, somebody in our driveway called out his name. “Ike!” And my father didn’t seem surprised to hear his name called.

  “Who’s that?” I asked. Nobody ever came to our house.

  But he got up from the table without answering me.

  I got up, too, and followed my father to the garage door window. A man in a white summer suit like my father’s stood at the end of the drive, by the curb, where a car sat, also white, a Chevrolet, its motor running. Inside the car was another man, hat low over his forehead.

  My father nodded to the first man. The man nodded back, got into the Chevy, and drove away. My father’s expression changed, no longer distracted now, but tense.

  I tugged at his hand to flush that face away. But it stayed there.

  My father said, “I’ve got an errand to run.”

  “Can I come?” I asked him.

  “No.” He turned to the clothesline, strung from the standing floor lamp to a nail in the wall opposite, and took down one of the suit jackets hanging on a scraggly wire hanger. He put on a tie, used a towel to shine his shoes, and then took something that looked like four metal rings welded together from the tool box that apparently now served as his accessories drawer. He slipped it over his fingers, made a fist, then slipped the contraption off and secreted it in his left pocket.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Nothing.”

  So it was nothing. So interesting that it had to be made into nothing. I knew it! I knew my father was not just a common house painter, had not become something so ordinary. He was simply keeping his fabulous new identity to himself, like his racing sheets. And his red notebook.

  “I’ll be back in an hour or two,” my father said, fumbling for his car keys.

  He slid open the garage door. “Go to bed now.”

  But then he paused. He’d forgotten something.

  That’s when I called out theatrically, “Good night, so long, see you later,” and slipped quietly out the open door. But instead of going into the house, I ran around the side of the garage to the back alley where my father kept our Cadillac, which he’d displaced, car doors unlocked. It took me only a few seconds to crawl onto the floor in the rear and pull down the blanket we used for impromptu picnics, or did, anyway, in better days. I made my skinny self as flat as I could beneath the wool.

  A few seconds later, my father slid into the front seat and started the car with a roar he quickly choked back, so I knew he was nervous. My father never started the car like that. He was a column of mysterious figures in his red notebook that I was about to add up. Magic Ike!

  30

  It wasn’t long before we were out of Boyle Heights. From under the blanket, I heard the rumble of our tires over the Sixth Street Bridge and then the traffic of Grand, Hope, Flower, Figueroa, all the big north-south downtown avenues, east of the long avenues we used to survey from our perch on Mulholland Drive. Horns. The bump of a pothole. Squeaky brakes. My own breathing. I could smell that my father had lit a Chesterfield. I wondered at what point, if any, my mother would miss me, come out to the garage in her negligee to call me to bed, see us both gone, and telephone over to the Ebony Room, scream at the bartender, “Tell Ike Silver to come home. And to bring his daughter with him.” And, haha!, we wouldn’t be there. But, more likely, she’d never notice my absence at all.

  My father turned the car abruptly south. We drove blocks and blocks, hitting too many traffic lights, my father cursing impatiently under his breath at each one, “God fucking dammit,” words he never would have uttered in my presence, of course, but how could he know I was here? Finally, with one quick sharp maneuver, he parked and jumped from the car. I waited, then carefully sat up.

  We were on a side street. Ahead of me, on the sidewalk, I could see a small group of men gathering, and my father striding toward them with the gait I recognized as his gait of false confidence, the jaunty one he used when he lost big at the track. What was he up to? I climbed carefully out of the car and stood
by it, half-hidden. I watched my father stop in front of number 634, and I slowly approached the address myself, uncertainly, careful to halt a few yards back from it.

  Six-three-four looked like a two-story stucco house, nestled between two other innocuous stucco houses, but this one had a sign mounted over the front doors. Two words I had never seen before. I wasn’t even sure the words were in English. Deutsches Haus. The words had been painted in fancy lettering that made them look like the Hebrew in my grandfather’s prayer books. For all I knew, Deutsches Haus was Hebrew and this house some kind of modest synagogue. Maybe my father was turning to God for help to get my mother out of bed.

  Tables had been set out on the small porch and on the grass lawn, and those rickety tables were piled high with paper. More men in suits and hats or workers’ caps were milling around on the sidewalk or entering the doors. There were women, too, in dresses and hats. I could see when the doors opened that beyond the vestibule there was some kind of big hall, so though the building looked like a house, it was not a house. A house wouldn’t have an auditorium filled with chairs ready to put on a show. So my next guess was that this must be a theater and those papers must be the programs. Perhaps my father had been secretly studying acting in order to join my mother at MGM? He was certainly handsome enough.