The Magnificent Esme Wells

by Adrienne Sharp

  And in every one of those hotels Mr. Lansky or his associates Stein, Greenbaum, Dalitz, Rosen, Berman, Adler, Roen—even Mickey Cohen back in Los Angeles—had a percentage. All the big boys. Yes, Nate had a stake in every one of these hotels, every one of them but the Stardust, which now, with Tony’s death, would belong to him in some way or another, some front man installed, perhaps, but with the profits flowing to Nate and from him to Meyer Lansky and from Lansky to men like him all across the United States. Nate wanted them all, every hotel, each one a piece of his empire. Without his careful tending and Lansky’s, how long would it take for these hotels to be abandoned, to decay, to stand sand-blown and desiccated? What if Nate and the men like him should be swept out of here by God’s rake since Kefauver’s wasn’t up to the task? And what would these carloads of guests do then, when they saw these wrecks, our pyramids, our desert.

  What else? Turn around and go home.

  44

  Every afternoon at this time, an hour before his shift, my father took a swim in the Flamingo pool, through the 120-degree summer, even through the winter in the 40-degree cold, the temperature dropping as soon as the sun started to go down. And sure enough, when I arrived at the hotel, I found my father, alone, doing his laps in the otherwise empty pool, his dark body seal-like as he swept up and down its length. He didn’t do the crawl, but some stroke of his own invention, an amalgamation of underwater kicks and paddles that occasionally brought him to the surface for air. The stroke of someone who’d never had a swimming lesson in his life. Like me.

  I sat myself down on the cold concrete ledge of the pool, took off my shoes, and stuck my bare feet into the water, which felt warmer the longer I sat there until finally the water felt warmer than the air. I let my feet dangle, studying the distortion that made my shins look as if they’d been broken in two. My bunions, massive creations formed by a decade of dancing in high-heeled shoes, looked exaggerated, too, underwater. The bottom of the pool was a deeper blue than its sides. My father swam on through the cold, through the blue. Around us, the metal umbrella stands rattled, the pink plaster flamingos rocked on their metal stakes.

  Somewhere on the grounds, the Flamingo cats were yowling through the wind. The small litter of kittens Ben had saved for me those six years ago had, in just this short time, grown into a feral pack of thirty tabbies, the mouse- and rat-killers of the hotel grounds, who, for variety, occasionally lapped milk from the bowls set out by the back door of the hotel kitchen. First family of the Flamingo. No. My father and I were the first family of the Flamingo, those cats the second. They sounded off close by, a Greek chorus of panic, turmoil, and need.

  What could they possibly have to complain about?

  Slowly, eventually, my father came to understand that the girl with no hair, wearing a fur coat and sitting awkwardly at the pool’s edge, was actually his daughter, and he swam up beside me and hung from his arms at the deep end.

  “What’s going on, Esme?” Meaning, what have you done to yourself, meaning why have you taken scissors to your hair the way your mother took scissors to my face in that old photograph, meaning are you unraveling just like your mother and where will I put you if you are. There was no Bedlam in Vegas.

  Unraveling? Maybe so.

  I shrugged.

  “When did you do this?” he asked me, gesturing with one wet, dripping hand in the direction of my head.

  “An hour ago.”

  “Don’t you have a show tonight?”

  “My day off.” The casinos and counting rooms, my father’s habitats, were never dark, never shuttered for a night, and soon, with the Stardust, they would never be shuttered at all, not even for an hour.

  “Well, that’s good,” my father said. Meaning, you can straighten out this mess with your hair before tomorrow’s show, send your dresser scouring the costume shop for a wig. He was looking at me, waiting for some kind of explanation as to why I was here, in a fur coat, feet in water, hairless.

  Why was I here?

  Because, really, how could my father possibly make right any wrong done by Nate Stein to me or to anyone else. My father could not fix me with the monster-size diamond ring and a stroll along Broadway, tools he had wielded to fix my mother. My father could only do what he had already done, which was to try to avert this disaster before it arrived by telling me that Nate Stein was much too old for me, that he was rapaciously greedy, that this affair could come to no good end. My father had known that I would be hurt by Nate somehow. He just didn’t know exactly how. Or when.

  I could not bring myself to say anything, so my father made a stab at what had upset me. “You know dirty hands are just part of life out here, Esme. You know that.”

  I nodded.

  “Don’t study anything too closely. Just keep looking ahead, straight ahead.”

  That was what he did, of course, what he had been doing since I was a little girl. Did he ever feel this credo had failed him? He was too smart not to know that it had.

  And then he gave me that grin, the magical grin that showed off his small, white, even child’s teeth, and with the palm of his hand, he smoothed his own dark hair back, as if to reassure himself that he, at least, still had a head of hair, and he pushed himself away from the concrete rim of the pool, away from me, to continue his laps.

  I watched his brown back, black hair move through the water, merman maybe, maybe more like a trapped animal in a small enclosure, forward and back, never out. A trapped animal, perhaps, but even with no way out, my father would never do to me what Nate had done. And though what was good for me over the years might often have played second to what was good for my father, there were still limits to what he would ask of me. I could call Nate “Daddy” from dawn to dusk, but he was not my daddy, and therefore if I could serve one of Nate’s needs, no matter the tenor of it, then I was called to serve.

  Baby E, take this drink over to Tony.

  I’d huddled at the bottom of this pool years ago, hiding from Benny after his blowup with my father. That day my father had peered over the edge of the pool, the distortion of the water making his face loom way too large, trying to explain to me why sometimes a man had to take a hit. Even as a little girl, I knew something was wrong with Benny, something sick in him that his charismatic charm could conceal but not cure. Yet I loved him, with a little girl’s perspective I’m sure I would have lost quickly enough as I grew older. Something was wrong with my father, too, and with Mickey Cohen and Moe Sedway and Gus Greenbaum and Tony Cornero, with all the men I knew out here. Including Nate Stein. And maybe it would have been better for me, much better, if I’d stayed at the bottom of this pool in 1946 and never came up.

  45

  I was sitting outside the bungalow, 3:00 a.m., in my mink coat for warmth and with my short hair standing up in tufts, the shorn head of a sorry French aristocrat about to be made sorrier when her tumbrel stopped at the Place de la Révolution. I’d filled a bowl with milk, and I sat with it in a chair by the front door, calling for the cats with the kissing noises and the soft hisses that usually drew them to me. Eventually, two of them came to drink, one cat a rusty-colored orange and the other black-striped, but they wouldn’t sidle anywhere close to my outstretched fingers, wouldn’t let me handle them. They even stood back from the bowl, as far back as they could manage, heads and necks stretched forward to lap quickly at the white contents, looking at me only briefly before darting away. They didn’t know me, and I didn’t know them. I’d named the seven kittens of that first Flamingo litter—Winter Paws, Pussy Showgirl, Madame Victoria, and other fancies of a fifteen-year-old mind—but after that, there were too many cats to keep track of and each successive generation of them became more feral and less domesticated than the last, until finally they were wild cats and suspicious of us all. Around me and the empty bowl the date palms shook their fronds.

  It was dark, cold.

  At this hour, my father was still in the casino, watching over the blackjack tables—Hit me. Seven. Bust. Go
ddamn. Double down—working his shift. Then, maybe, he’d be home. Sometimes after his shift, he had a quick drink at the Players Club, a shack on a lot by the Desert Inn, the club soon to be demolished, but until then nicknamed the Flamingo Annex because you could find half the Flamingo staff there after hours, whooping it up to Dorita’s congas and maracas. Or maybe he would drop a token in some Flamingo slot machine and the bars would line up BAR BAR BAR 7 7 7 and he would play on his win, play on and on with the extra credits and free games the machine offered until he’d lost everything.

  It didn’t matter. I didn’t mind being alone, a rarity in a Las Vegas so crowded with people. I sat here quietly in my painted metal lawn chair, the back of it shaped like a seashell from some very distant ocean body. The cheap windows of the bungalow rattled in their sashes. No clouds. Only stars, the moon. The same miracles I’d taken in as a child in my grandfather’s house, continued to take in from every godforsaken place I’d ever lived in Los Angeles. And here.

  I was just about to go to bed when I saw Nate walking up the path by the pool, heading my way, sure-footedly, though he had never been here before, had never come to this bungalow. He must have just discovered I was gone, had finished saying goodnight to the bartender and the manager in the Sky Room, had finished his one last tour of the Painted Desert Room to see it was properly cleaned and the kitchen spotless, was done nodding at the front desk with the stiff mail and the metal keys slotted in the cubbyholes, done checking that the lobby ashtrays had been polished, all lint vacuumed from the carpet and chairs, making sure the smudges on the shop windows had been wiped away, the shop doors locked. Nate could never come to bed without one last sweep of the hotel property, to see that the colored Dancing Waters had been shut off, that the dancers by the pool had vanished, the music turned off for the wee hours. Because even Vegas has its wee hours, of sleep, of desperation.

  I gathered my fur coat more tightly around me to watch his approach. He couldn’t see me, but I could see him. He walked purposefully, hair a raised spike in the wind. He was wearing his trench coat, the dark wool one, I saw, when he finally reached me and then stopped abruptly in front of me to take me in, a little surprised to find me sitting outside here in the dark, hunched in a metal chair, instead of, perhaps, tucked into bed with a doll. Or another Miltown. Without a word, he sat down in the flimsy chair beside me, his body so big the chair back all but disappeared behind him, as did the seat beneath him.

  He put out his hand.

  I shied from it.

  Nate used the outstretched hand I wouldn’t take to touch my skull, to finger the short hair standing away from my face, his own face pained.

  I edged my chair sideways along the concrete a few inches until I was out of his reach, and eventually Nate dropped his hand.

  “Come back home with me,” he said.

  I shook my head. “I’m not coming back.”

  I’d already observed that no woman seemed to stay with these Vegas big boys for long, for more than a handful of years, that they all eventually walked away. The wives didn’t like what they could not help but to learn, what they heard, what they saw, even if all of it lay to the periphery, supposedly out of sight, out of earshot. Benny Siegel’s wife stayed behind in New York even after Benny came out here. Dave Berman’s wife left him and Vegas altogether, so sickened by her husband’s life she never recovered, living as an invalid in one Los Angeles apartment or hospital after another until she died. Gus Greenbaum’s wife hadn’t ever come to Vegas with Gus, remained in Phoenix while he ran the Flamingo and now the Riviera. All these women had done the walk away. And now so had I. And the men consoled themselves with second and third wives, and when they walked away, with whores or with mistresses who had once been whores. Nate had already been married four times, and I suppose in me he thought he had found that girl of last resort, a girl at the sight of which my grandfather would draw his lips together.

  Nate was staring at me in the dark. I thought at first he was bemused by my childish defiance, my skirting of his hand. But he wasn’t bemused. I could feel that my lips had assembled themselves into an approximation of my grandfather’s when confronted with a contaminant. And while I was certain this wasn’t the first time Nate had seen that look directed his way, it was the first time he had seen it from me. And he didn’t like it.

  He stood up, a giant who forbade the wind to pull at his black coat. “If you’re going to leave me, Esme, you might as well leave Vegas, too, you and your father. Because there’s not going to be a place left here for either of you.”

  And he walked back down the path toward the Flamingo, head bent. And when my father got home an hour later he told me, “Esme, I’ve just been fired.”

  46

  Los Angeles

  1941

  The fact that working for Mickey Cohen might be a dangerous venture for him personally was something I don’t think had ever occurred to my father before the day Maxie Shaman was murdered, the first of many murders to follow, men dropping dead all around my father through the years, victims of bullets, bombs, icepicks, knives, garrotes. I think my father saw just once an opportunity to escape all he had unthinkingly taken on.

  We were climbing the Hollywood Hills one day in December, which we did sometimes together in reminiscence of our old drives through the narrow lanes of Hollywoodland, still dreaming, I suppose, of Castillo del Lago, of Wells’ Loft or the Silver Lair, my father marveling even after his dozen years in California at how flowers still blossomed and fruit still grew even in what should have been winter, what was winter everywhere else. And as we climbed the slope of Mount Hollywood, my father pointed out to me the television towers that had recently been installed at the top of it, metal trees at the hill’s peak. Some enterprising businessman had bought that property and put in towers and antennae and a pool, from which he was planning to broadcast a show called Bathing Beauties, which would feature young women in bathing suits swimming in the water and sunning themselves on chaises, a sort of Esther Williams free-for-all, sans Buzz’s choreography. “By the time you’re old enough,” my father said, “all the girls will be dancing on television. You won’t even need MGM.”

  And I thought, Forget dancing. I would love to swim in a pool all day, flowers in my hair, cameras filming me as I flicked my limbs prettily through blue water and pointed my toes.

  So I begged him to hike with me to the top of the hill, so we could see up close the agent of this great emancipation from the movie theaters. At this point in time, my father couldn’t deny me anything, we two still shell-shocked survivors on our own without my mother. And so with the passing of another hour, by which time I was panting and silently regretting my request, Who cared about seeing some steel skeletons and an empty concrete bowl?, we made it to the summit.

  The shining silver television towers rose from bases so enormously broad that I never would have guessed from down below that my father and I could walk beneath them without stooping. And what looked like narrow strips of metal and spindly pinnacles at a distance were in fact substantial structures designed to send invisible and inaudible signals through the Los Angeles skies and down into the television sets that would soon sit in the living room of every fake thatched-roof bungalow, every fake two-story Tudor with its black trim, every fake palazzo and maison in the city, and the owners of these homes would watch the tales spun by these new dreamers of the small screen, even if their dreams were as thin and unimaginative as the simple broadcasting of young women swimming around in scanty bathing attire.

  But before we could even approach the fence around this property, two men with rifles and Army uniforms appeared at its perimeter and told us to go away, that the U.S. Army had commandeered this property. There would be no swimming, no pretty girls, no bathing beauties today, just men in army green. We turned and headed back down the hill, my father in a hurry now, saying, “Something’s going on, something’s up,” brambles, grasses, stickers scratching at my bare legs until we reached a roadwa
y, but it wasn’t until we ducked into a diner by the Hollywoodland jitney stop that we found everyone in there huddled around a radio listening to the news: the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor.

  And when my father had heard enough about the torpedoed battleships, cruisers, destroyers, and aircraft, all the American war machinery laid out in that harbor and picked off piece by piece, he took my hand and soberly led me back to our Cadillac, which he had parked, poorly, on Beachwood Drive. Once we were in the car, though, my father seemed strangely ebullient, slapping his palms on the steering wheel as he struggled to get the car off the gravel shoulder and back onto the road. “There’s going to be a war, E! This’ll be my way out! I’m going to join the Navy.” It was a way out of this life and into another, and furthermore, joining up was noble, even mobster-approved. After Pearl Harbor, a lot of them enlisted. And when my father was discharged, he’d be free. He’d just be taking a different path, a new path, after the war, no offense, big boys.

  “And then when the war’s over, you and I will settle in the Valley and I’m gonna run my taxicab company!”

  The taxi company was an idea my father trotted out periodically, an idea at which my mother had always scoffed. During and after the war, Standard Oil, Firestone, and General Motors used shell companies to buy up all the electric trolley lines, and then it was buses and taxis cruising everywhere, built by GM, fueled by Standard, and rolling around on Firestone tires. And then the airport was built and everybody needed a cab to get there with their suitcases, so actually my father was prescient, as prescient as, if somewhat less powerful than, John D. Rockefeller, Harvey Firestone, and William C. Durant. That afternoon, my father even came up with a name for this incarnation of his cab company—Veterans Taxi—and it would be staffed, he said, solely by vets coming home from the war, so a call to Veterans Taxi would be a patriotic choice!