But he saw something on my face, and he misunderstood that, too.
He put up a hand, ready for an argument I wasn’t planning to make.
“I didn’t mean to leave you alone afterwards for so long, baby girl,” he said. “I just didn’t know it would take me that many months to persuade myself to go on.”
50
Los Angeles
1939
On the evenings my mother wasn’t dancing at the Clover, my parents went out, often to Benny Siegel’s Holmby Hills home, for which Benny had forsaken his Castillo del Lago and where Benny had gone on a decorating frenzy in imitation of the Countess di Frasso’s own mansion. Cary Grant and Clark Gable and Marion Davies and Loretta Young gathered in the evenings to enjoy some mobster company, whatever of that company was presentable enough, and there were some members presentable enough, like Al Smiley or Ike Silver. Mickey Cohen, at that time not yet sufficiently polished up, was invited there as entertainment—to box in a hastily erected exhibition ring—and my parents would gather shoulder to shoulder with movie royalty to applaud the show, after which there was drinking and dancing and gambling. My grandfather the Austrian had left the old country around the same time as Goldwyn, Mayer, Lasky, and Cohn, but it was his daughter who grasped and reached and twisted and connived like the moguls, and now she was partaking of the sweets.
For these occasions and others, my mother had a new dress or costume made for herself every two weeks, all of them tailored especially for her by the woman next door to us on Soto Street, Mrs. T., I never learned her last name, an extraordinarily inventive seamstress from Paramount who created these marvels on the side, fabulous concoctions of feathers, spangles, and satin. The garment bags my mother stored them all in could barely contain them, so stuffed were they with the combustible energy of those fabrics and ornaments. Mrs. T. herself looked like a mouse to me, small, stooped, with hair that was neither brown nor blond, pink-rimmed eyes, their vision assisted by a pair of reading glasses poised halfway between her nostrils and the bridge of her nose. A mouthful of straight pins. Not a movie star. Definitely not a movie star. Yet from this nondescript person erupted a flamboyance worthy of my mother, who for all I knew might have represented Mrs. T.’s secret vision of her secret self in which she was no longer a mouse but a lion.
Standing on the small platform before the triple mirror in the living room cum fitting room of the bungalow next door, my mother modeled Mrs. T.’s confections and ignored the two of us, we small figures in the background of her own reflection, two mice, I a tinier version of Mrs. T. and equally unworthy of attention. Mrs. T. never swallowed a pin, though I waited patiently for this to one day happen. What did happen was that Mrs. T., taking pity on me, made me a skirt and two cuffs of stiff black tulle from the leftover fabric she’d used to make the tail for my mother’s peacock costume—I was noticed by someone!—and I wore the stuff always, a constant accessory, as if I, too, were nightclub entertainment and this were the sliver of some larger magnificent me I was yet to become. I was six, but it seemed I’d already heard the call.
And when Mr. Cohen saw the bedraggled black tulle I wore so religiously, he started giving my father weekly wrist corsages to take home to me from his latest business venture, Michael’s Greenhouses, the corsages made up sometimes of roses, little miniature baby roses, other times peonies, flowers of every color, red, yellow, once baby blue, sometimes the palest pink to an almost, almost white. I saved the wilted browned corsages in a box in my room as if they were coins in a piggy bank, but unlike pennies, those old corsages infused my room with a reeking flower smell I thought divine.
I longed to grow up and join my parents at Benny Siegel’s place, but until then, I would be left behind. So on their evenings out, I lay on my bed, as usual, latest corsages on each wrist, smelling them alternately, listening to Mrs. T. who enjoyed no nightlife whatsoever of her own and who was therefore paid to keep an ear out for me from across the narrow walkway between our two houses: my bedroom window opened onto hers and I could hear her working on her sewing machine, the whirr and the stop of it. I think she took in mending, too. I’d listen to her and gaze at the ridiculous colors of my ceiling and walls that I had selected from the Kon-Kre-Kota and that my father had purchased and, using the skills acquired during his brief stint at my grandfather’s company, had rolled up over every surface. It was like sleeping in a circus tent. As a joke, my father would put a hand up to shield his eyes every time he walked into my room. But I loved it. It was a preview, I suppose, of the neon-gilded Las Vegas I would also come to love.
That night, I lay in bed and listened to my pawnshop Patriot radio, waiting for my favorite show, Gangbusters, to start. I sniffed both my corsages at once and scratched at my arms, which had lately begun sporting a horribly bumpy red rash, which my father had diagnosed as an allergy from Mickey Cohen’s goddamn gardenias and roses, but which would take the nuns at the Sisters Home to diagnose as impetigo from my not having been bathed enough. For weeks to come, my arms would have to be washed twice a day and painted with gentian violet so that I looked like a space alien—as if those weeks to come would not be traumatic enough. For now, I scratched and waited for my program.
Gangbusters always began, as it should, with the sounds of sirens and machine-gun fire and a man’s portentous voice. “Calling all police. Calling all G-men. Calling all Americans to war on the underworld!” More sirens. “Gangbusters! Brought to you, the men and women of America, by the makers of Sloan’s Liniment, with the cooperation of leading law enforcement officials of the United States, Gangbusters presents the facts of the relentless war of the police on the underworld.” And the program always ended the same way, too, with the announcer booming, “Crime does not pay!”
Though that had not yet been my experience.
I hadn’t even gotten very far in the program when my parents pulled their Cadillac around the back of the house. They were home early and they were arguing as they got out of the car, and their voices woke me up or mixed in with the radio I’d left on under the covers, a blur of sounds that were no longer dreamy or smooth. The sewing machine was silent, which meant either my next-door neighbor had already called out across the driveway, “Good night, Esme,” and gone to sleep or was quietly listening to my parents alongside me. I sat up in my bed.
My mother was speaking outside, loudly, indiscriminately, of course, in that way she had, her words ricocheting between the garage and the back of the house. I got out of bed and went to the window just as she walked around the car to where my father still sat in the driver’s seat, door closed against her in a futile effort at self-protection. She had her shoes in one hand, the spiky heels a black corsage. A dog barked from somewhere down the block. A car drove by, its radio leaving a trail of notes in the Soto Street hemisphere. The moon and the streetlamps faced off in the night sky. Camellias and hibiscus unfurled their blossoms. The Cadillac gave off a mechanical hiss.
“You’ll just take a year off,” my father was saying from behind the wheel.
“I’ll be a year older.”
“It’s just a year.”
“And who’s to say what I’ll look like when the year’s over. Or if I’ll ever get the stage back?” my mother said, and she set her shoes down on the hood of the car, as if those shoes were the problem. They faced two different directions, north and south.
My father got out of the car now, the better to reason with her. “If not that stage, another one, all right? The boys are opening clubs all up and down Sunset.” And he waved his arm as if Sunset were right up at the end of Soto Street here in Boyle Heights.
That just made her hiss at him, “You want to tuck me away like Ben’s wife, Esta.”
My mother, tucked away? I wasn’t sure that was even possible. My mother once said that if it weren’t for me she’d rather just live in a hotel, not be bothered with laundry and pots and pans. Not that she bothered much with them anyway. And I doubted my father wanted her to be a housewife, a Bet
ty Crocker. He took pride in her beauty and her talent, loved to stop by the Clover to see her numbers, though he told me later she wasn’t a headliner as I had thought, but just an entr’acte, her dances wedged between a singer and a jazz band.
“Dina, you know that’s not true.”
And I knew that it wasn’t, that my mother was being unreasonable. For a change. Not that this stopped her.
“And who’s going to watch the baby?” she said.
“We’ll find someone.”
“Really? The way we found someone to watch Esme? Because I feel like I’ve dragged her behind me for a thousand miles. A hundred thousand.” My mother’s face was stretched tight, the face of someone starving. “I’m not letting you push me into having another child. One’s enough!” and she pointed at my bedroom window, which made my father turn to look, and that’s when he saw my face framed there, looking out at them.
He put up his hand to my mother, who turned her head. She didn’t seem pleased to see me.
“Esme.” She waved her pointing hand with the bangled bracelets. “What are you doing up?”
“Go back to bed, E,” my father said, and he took my mother by the arm, picked her shoes up off the car hood with his free hand. When he saw I was still at the window, he jerked his chin at me to make me do what he wanted, and I retreated.
I took my corsages off my wrists and dropped them into the box with the others, fresh little roses crowning a pile of brown-petaled bracelets, which made me think of my father’s saying, “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,” each time Michael’s Greenhouses delivered me another corsage. I looked around. For the first time, I saw how garish the colors were I’d chosen for my walls. I would tell my father tomorrow I wanted to paint them over. White. And I wanted to throw out my flowers. They stank. I wanted to throw out everything. I wanted to run to Union Station, that station at which my father had long ago arrived, and buy myself a ticket to somewhere else. Maybe Baltimore, where my father had come from and where his family still lived, all the way east, next to that other ocean. But I wasn’t sure any of them even knew I existed. And I was in my pajamas. So instead, I crawled under my bed, an action I promptly regretted—under there dust had formed its own layer of crusty earth—but refused to reverse.
When my father brought my mother and her bare feet inside, their fight raged on. Even from my impromptu burrow, Esme’s Burrow, I heard them through my bedroom wall. I wished my parents were dead so they’d stop talking or better yet, that I were dead so I didn’t have to hear them anymore. Better than that, that I had never been born, all the miles my mother had so resentfully dragged me rescinded. And, eventually, somehow, I fell asleep.
But I wouldn’t have slept at all if I’d known everything was going to be over so quickly.
51
The next morning was Saturday, the day my father always went off to one of Cohen’s bookie joints to monitor the racing results and the betting, but my mother was gone, too, I discovered, when I woke, a little dust-covered, and crawled out from under the bed, and that was odd. She always slept in on Saturday mornings. I wandered the house, a little bewildered by the wreck of it, the bottles, the glasses, the cigarettes, as if there had been a big party here, but I knew there hadn’t been. It had just been a party of two, a long, drawn-out bedraggled party with two reluctant guests, both of whom were now long gone. So I sat amidst the disarray and waited.
At noon, my mother drove up in the Cadillac, and without emerging, honked, called my name, and told me to get dressed. We were going to the movies. She sat in the car waiting for me, smoking a cigarette, a yellow seated statue in the expansive front seat of our car parked behind the house. I kept checking on her as I dressed and I could see she barely moved, that arm with the cigarette dangling out the driver’s window, and I thought, I need to hurry. I’m pretty sure she picked a day at the theater to keep me quiet so she could rest without being bothered by me, and what better way to amuse me than with a newsreel, cartoons, and two movies. Outside it smelled burnt, the sky brown, and on the ridge of one of the hills to the north a wildfire showed itself, a slight orange glimmer. Little bits of soot and ash fell from the sky as I ran to join her in the car.
We could spend all day in the cool of the National Theatre on Brooklyn Avenue, which everybody in Boyle Heights called the Pollyseed House, because its patrons brought sunflower seeds with them to snack on during the shows, even though everybody ate popcorn at the theaters downtown or up in Hollywood. But this was Jewtown. The theater had a storefront marquee crammed in between miscellaneous signage—New York Café, Malted Milk 10 cents, Boyle Heights Cleaners, and, simply, Tailor. Ducking beneath it all and paying your quarter, you could stay there all afternoon in the dark under the big ceiling fans, watching the pictures flick by on the screen, and when we came out, my mother said, the sunlight would have grown thin and a lot less warm, the sky a yellow-brown rather than hot blue because even though it was mid-September, autumn everywhere else in the country, my mother said, this was southern California and September was our hottest month, fire season.
And all around us, of course, sat the neighbors my mother had known since she was a little girl—my mother couldn’t walk anywhere without somebody saying hello to her, asking her if she was a big star yet, as if ambition were something to jibe about. At the National, we always sat to the side and toward the back in what we had come to call our seats, I don’t know why my father didn’t know this, bristling if we found the seats taken by others. But today, no bristling. My mother hurried me as I tried to linger looking at the lobby cards for the soon to be released Gone with the Wind, six scenes of Clark Gable in a frock coat and Vivien Leigh in a hooped ball dress and gray-coated Confederate soldiers lying dead on Civil War battlegrounds or in happier days smoking cigars on the porches of old southern plantations, but even so, no one had taken our seats.
She sat down with a sigh and said, “Stop scratching, Esme.”
I stopped. It was hard, but I stopped.
The National showed older movies; in fact, that day it was showing Gold Diggers of Paris, the picture my mother shot last year with Buzz when he was working at Warner Brothers. In the picture, a man named Maurice comes to New York from France to gather some ballet dancers for a Parisian dance competition, but somehow he ends up not at the ballet company’s rehearsal hall but at a nightclub. And because the nightclub is about to go out of business, the wily owners pretend they run a ballet company. On the ship crossing the Atlantic they have to teach all their strutting showgirls how to do ballet, and my mother was one of those showgirls.
The theater grew dark and my mother put her arm around me and squeezed, telling me she loved me, something she didn’t say often, and after last night, I wasn’t sure I could believe. We settled in for the newsreel, which was always first.
Universal Newsreel
Special Release
Europe at War!
Nazis Attack Poland And
Bomb Cities in Lightning
Coup—France & England
Prepare to Strike
A man’s voice intoned urgently, “On September the first 1939 the German army smashed into Poland,” and the picture accompanying it featured cartoon drawings of a big boot crushing the grass beneath it. The soundtrack was full of cymbal crashes and ominous music, followed by shots of a rally, an enormous version of what I had seen at the Deutsches Haus, the arena hung with swastikas and an eagle and flags and bunting, with hands shooting into the frame as the crowd saluted. Heil, Hitler. Then a new scene. Rows of men in uniform were marching down a wide dirt boulevard, rows of goose-stepping men, and then in a quick change, a group of planes flying in formation, making three vees, like a flock of birds.
Then it was back to a cityscape. The theater echoed with the sound of air-raid sirens. I shrank down in my seat. Men and women in hats and coats were running to air-raid shelters. Then the camera showed what happened while they were inside. Bombs dropped and the streets and buildings of that city expl
oded in smoke and flames. Afterwards a woman in a kerchief and cloak, an old country woman, sat on a step with her head in her hand. A baby cried while having its head bandaged. People stood on ladders to pile sandbags up against buildings, even though some of those houses already had holes in what used to be their ceilings and rooms with piles of broken wood in them that once was furniture.
I looked at my mother, but she had closed her eyes. Off duty.
I turned back to the screen as the camera showed bodies of people lined up on a sidewalk right where people had just been walking, the dead people lying there in rows still wearing their pants and dresses, some of them with their shoes blown off, their bodies not even covered by sheets. Water. Boats with cannons. Explosions. Fields. Men on horseback. Horses pulling carts. The men stopped and loaded the cannons right there on the field. Men saying goodbye to their families through a wooden fence. Horses having shoes put on their feet, the hot iron, a puff of smoke. Men piling up bombs, smoothly metallic.
The narrator’s voice intoned, “World War II has begun.” Someplace else now. Thatched roofs a muddle, holes made by something bigger than bullets in the plaster façade of a building. Women in dark coats and kerchiefs read a Proclamation posted on a wall. My grandfather had told me that in Germany the Jews were no longer allowed to visit parks, cinemas, or restaurants, that Jewish children could not go to school, and that stores and synagogues had been vandalized or burned to the ground. But here, on Breed Street, rose the intact structure of Congregation Talmud Torah, its brown edifice curved at the apex. A big stained-glass window above the double doors bore a Jewish star, and above that, embedded into the brick were the two tablets of the Ten Commandments. There, tanks moved through city streets, shooting, and then those streets turned to flame. The Führer jumped out of a car that had barely stopped moving and above him all along the street the second-story windows projected flags with swastikas. The newsreel drew to its scratchy close.
The Magnificent Esme Wells Page 25