Emerald

by Whitney, Phyllis A. ;

  Linda stared. “You look like her, you know! Oh, not your features, exactly, but the way you lift your head. And the way you stroked your cheek just now—that’s a Monica Arlen gesture!”

  “From watching her pictures, I suppose. Dreaming about her, and copying her, when I was very young,” I said ruefully.

  “You’d better be careful,” Linda warned. “She won’t like mimicking.”

  “I have to be myself. If I resemble her, I have a right to, you know.”

  “Of course. I didn’t mean …” She broke off unhappily.

  Keith had grown bored with our talk and he went to stand on the balcony overlooking the swimming pool.

  Linda lowered her voice. “That’s a dreadful bruise on your son’s cheek. How are you handling this?”

  “I’m trying to call it an adventure, make it a game.”

  “He’ll be safe up the mountain. You both will. You can’t imagine how careful she is. You get that way after the Hollywood fishbowl.”

  “She doesn’t miss all that?”

  “It was a long time ago. Though she’s a very deep lady, and I don’t always know what she’s thinking. Look—I need to get back before I’m missed. Even though she’s shut herself in, she can want me at any time, and she doesn’t like me to disappear without letting her know. We’ll meet in the morning, Carol, when you come up to the house.”

  “All right,” I said hesitantly, and went with her to the door. What other choice did I have?

  Out on the gallery that ran past the rooms, Linda paused. “You’ll want dinner and there’s a good restaurant connected with the hotel. It’s down there to your right. If you go early you won’t need a reservation.”

  For a moment she looked off at the massive rise of the mountain, as though she might say something more, then shrugged and went toward the outside stairs, moving with less bounce than when she’d come up.

  Linda Trevor, I thought, might be a very deep lady too, and she quite clearly had concerns on her mind. But I could take this only one step at a time.

  I tried to tell myself there was no danger in our staying overnight at this hotel, but I’d known Owen Barclay long enough to be aware of the means he could summon to his service when the need arose. Power and money could accomplish almost anything. My only hope for the time being was to get beyond the guarded gate of Smoke Tree House, and under Monica Arlen’s protection. For now I would simply have to wait until the hours passed and tomorrow morning came. Only then could I breathe a little easier. For a time at least.

  Keith had come to the rail beside me and was watching Linda get into her car. “She hops around a lot, doesn’t she?” he commented.

  I could only agree. Linda Trevor had always seemed much calmer in her letters.

  We went inside and changed for dinner. I shook out a dress of saffron tie silk, put it on, and brushed my hair. It was nearly six o’clock and the restaurant should be open. Out of his jeans, Keith looked handsome in gray pants and blue blazer, and he’d combed his own hair.

  Outside, we followed the lower level past tropical plantings, where steps led to great double doors of carved wood, brass-studded. For just a second I hesitated uncomfortably—and recognized the cause. For the last six years I’d never stepped into a good restaurant without Owen’s commanding presence at my side. A conditioning I’d be happy to overcome.

  Then, as I paused, I noticed the name of the restaurant arching above the doors and I forgot everything else. In bold black letters the sign read: SAXON’S.

  Was this why Linda had hesitated, and then decided to let me find out for myself? A little of my depression lifted as I took Keith’s hand and we went through the doors together. If there was a “Saxon’s,” then the owner of that name must still be alive, perhaps even living here in Palm Springs. So very close to Monica Arlen—when they’d broken off in hot anger all those years before?

  An excitement came alive in me. There might even be a story here. And I must think of articles and writing them as soon as possible. How fascinating if I could actually meet and talk to Saxon Scott!

  We entered a large, pleasant room with sand-colored walls. Tables were still empty at this hour, and I stood looking around. Tall screens of Spanish leather stood in each corner, and high ceiling beams had been painted a light beige like the ceiling between, making the room seem bright and airy. Tablecloths were avocado green, with yellow napkins perked at every setting, and ladder-backed chairs with leather seats carried out the Spanish-Mexican effect.

  The headwaiter came toward us courteously, but with no great enthusiasm for two such early and modest-looking diners.

  “I haven’t a reservation,” I told him.

  He considered the tables as though every one was occupied, and decided to put us out of sight. “May I suggest the Mirage Room?” he said. “It won’t fill up until later.”

  We followed as he led the way. The Mirage Room! I urged Keith ahead of me, and in the doorway I stopped to stare. I had been here so many times before. I knew this intimate room in its every detail. I recognized the red-checked tablecloths, the stubby candles in glasses, the single anemone in a bud vase on each table. Even the bentwood chairs were familiar. The entire room had been re-created from that immortal scene in Monica’s and Saxon’s most famous movie.

  The headwaiter had pulled out a chair at a corner table and was waiting expectantly. Keith ran across the room and I followed more slowly, still looking. On the walls hung framed and autographed photographs of Monica Arlen and Saxon Scott, both smiling in the stunning beauty of their youth. On either side of the central portraits were framed stills from Mirage, one of them a restaurant scene—a duplicate of the room in which I stood. The movie had been made just after the war, and was more bittersweet, less saccharine, than the earlier ones.

  “I’ve seen the movie,” I told the waiter as we sat down. “Does Mr. Scott own this place?”

  He looked slightly bored as he pointed to the legend on the back of the menu, which would tell me about the restaurant and this room. It was all there—it was true.

  When I’d ordered for us, and the waiter had gone, Keith glowered at me. “I look funny, don’t I? Everybody stares.”

  “They just feel sorry that you got hurt,” I told him gently. “Let’s go look at the pictures.”

  It was something to do. In the past Keith had never been one to keep still for five minutes. His bright mind had examined everything, and his chatter had lightened my life. But in the last months he’d become disturbingly quiet, and his very silences pained me.

  I tried to talk about the pictures as we followed them down the room in scenes I remembered very well. I told him about the one when Saxon, a very clever thief in the film, had entered by the balcony of Monica’s bedroom, to find her in the act of taking too many sleeping pills. He’d sat beside her bed and talked to her about the joy of being alive, no matter what. One of his best scenes ever. Her response had been touching, moving—that of a lost lady who needed to be given the will to live. Mirage had taken a more serious turn than earlier pictures, and had seemed to promise even more for the future. Arlen and Scott had received nominations for Oscars for their roles in the film, though neither had won, and a great to-do had been made by the press when neither showed up at the Oscar ceremony.

  As we moved from photo to photo, I found myself lost in the past. Even though Monica Arlen’s marvelous old Warner Brothers pictures—witty and a little wry, always entertaining—had been made before I was born, they were a part of my growing up. I could remember times when I’d sneaked downstairs late at night, wherever I was living, to watch Monica Arlen and Saxon Scott as they’d shone again so brilliantly on the late shows across the television screens of America—miraculously restored to the great days of their youth. When I was older, I’d saved my allowance (when I had one) so I could visit any theater that might be playing one of their old films. I could always watch them over and over, and I still knew some of their lines by heart. Indeed, I’d played a f
ew of Monica’s roles in front of my own mirror, even while I laughed at myself.

  In the late thirties and early forties, those two had been called, “golden,” “stunning,” and of course, “forever romantic.” Monica’s faintly tilted eyes and breathless, parted lips had become almost a cliché from long imitation. Imitation too often became caricature, but no one had ever done Monica Arlen as well as Arlen herself. She had symbolized so much of glamour and romance in those days of screen heroines and heroes—of STARS.

  On a few occasions that made me practically ecstatic, someone who knew of my relationship to Monica (I hardly kept it secret!) would say there was a resemblance between us—just as Linda had done. But though I searched, I could never find it in my own face. My eyes had no exotic tilt, and my nose was just a nose.

  One of the things I’d always watched for and loved in Monica’s pictures was her own special signature. On screen and off, she was given to carrying a silken iris done in beautiful shades of blue. There had been scenes in her pictures when she’d gestured with it to graceful effect. Of course she repeatedly denied any imitation of Gloria Swanson’s famous red carnation, though one wondered. The iris (she had them especially made by hand) became her symbol, in real life even more than on a screen. Once I’d stood for half an hour before a mirror with an iris stalk in my hands, trying—not very successfully—to achieve her gestures.

  I had been fortunate in a way. The families I’d lived with were kind enough, though they thought me a strange child, and probably found me hard to love—except for Mrs. Johnson, who told me desert stories. I’d loved her, and I think she loved me. But foster parents often moved away, or changed for other reasons. She’d written to me for a little while, but it had hurt too much to write back. I just couldn’t. Mostly the people I lived with weren’t especially imaginative—which wasn’t their fault. So how could they cope with a girl who lived too much inside her own head?

  As for Saxon Scott on those screens—how could I ever forget that slightly satyr-like expression he so often wore when he looked at a woman? Or the startling emphasis of white plumes set prematurely in dark hair at either temple, or the dashing mustache he’d borrowed from Ronald Colman, before either Gable or Flynn had made such mustaches famous? Since Monica had so obviously loved him, I must love him too.

  What a pair they’d been! Legendary. Blessed by the gods of the cinema. Once I’d found a stack of old fan magazines in a secondhand bookstore, and I’d bought them all, to pore endlessly over their sepia pages. They’d been filled with stories of that great and boundless love, that exciting romance between Arlen and Scott—chattily depicted in the vernacular of the day. A love that must have been as passionate off-screen as on, so that when their lips met in the carefully timed kisses the Hays Office allowed, the screen fairly sizzled and audiences knew they were seeing the real thing.

  How convincingly they’d wept and laughed and fenced with each other through all those comedy-dramas, where actors spoke dialogue ordinary people only wished they could emulate. And writers must have knocked themselves out to achieve. How they’d fought as well, and as passionately, sometimes in public, so that restaurant bric-a-brac flew and they’d ended up laughing in each other’s arms—all of which was duly reported in the gossip columns and on the radio, to the delight of millions of fans.

  Until that last picture, Mirage. The picture this little dining room belonged to. Their unforgettable best, all the critics had said. A four-handkerchief job, if there ever was one, but something that had touched millions of hearts, and still reached lonely watchers at night and brought tears to the eyes. All the more moving because of the legend itself. The dissolution of a screen love that had seemed to promise so much more than it could ever fulfill, had made an entire country sad. In the end, it prophesied that nothing could last. Not beauty, not youth, not any “forever” love.

  Sometimes, as I’d read about all this, I’d ached a little for the suffering of that fabulous woman—of my own blood!—whom I’d never been able to meet.

  The breakup between Arlen and Scott had come about when Monica walked out at the end of the picture and said flatly that she would never act again. One of the things aficionados still watched for in Mirage was the lack of any luster in her performance during those scenes that had been retakes. As though her heart had already died, and when she was called back to redo those scenes, she could summon no more make-believe to get her through. Seeing that picture again and again, as I had, I’d thought there had seemed a hint of fear in those shadowed scenes; something almost terrified that had haunted her famous slanted eyes when she looked at Saxon. There was no denying that his own performance grew stony in just those few retakes. As though something had gone out of him as well, and could never be rekindled. Nevertheless, I’d wondered if this would really have been noticeable except for hindsight.

  When Monica Arlen walked out for the last time, she had closed her magnificent home, Cadenza, in Beverly Hills, and had retreated to her fortress of a house above Palm Springs. There she had been safe from the intrusion of public and press—or anything else she might have feared. Mirage marked the end of her acting life. All this had happened some thirty-six years ago, and I’d read that she and Saxon had never met again after that.

  Saxon had gone on in pictures without her for a time, but in the end he’d had to accept the fact that they’d made such a splendid combination that the public wanted to see them together, and only together. Each had been trapped by the legend. Playing with another woman, he’d never seemed himself—not the old Saxon Scott. In those last pictures he’d made without Monica, it hadn’t been the same. No electricity had been generated. The legend had been too powerful to overcome. So Saxon too had faded from the public eye, and I hadn’t even known whether he was alive, let alone here in Palm Springs.

  In my letters to Linda, I’d asked about Saxon once, but she’d never replied, and I could only suppose that there were certain subjects she’d been told not to discuss with me.

  The years of the Second World War had brought all the beautiful film fantasies to an end, and the screen had turned to a harsher, more realistic world, and gradually to a different sort of fantasy. Only night audiences still watched the dreams become real again on that smaller screen in the privacy of their own homes. Arlen and Scott were not forgotten, but the legend was different now—more nostalgic, and for the young, sometimes funny.

  There had, of course, been endless speculation at the time of Monica’s retirement. I’d heard about that. But much of it was gossip and so embroidered that it was hard to know what was imaginary, or what had actually happened. One thing was strongly rumored—that Saxon himself had broken with Monica before the end of the picture, and that she had been devastated, so distraught that she could never continue her career without him.

  At about the same time, Monica had lost her secretary and companion—Peggy Smith, who had died a suicide. After that tragedy, Monica’s affairs had fallen into disarray for a time, and gossip said her grief for two terrible losses, her lover and her friend, had made her inconsolable.

  When her co-star had married a year or so after the breakup with Monica, the story had hit the headlines, as had Saxon’s divorce a few years later. After that there had been only silence.

  Now in the Mirage Room, I moved on to a photograph that showed Monica’s graceful hands, my attention caught by the famous ring she was wearing. There had been so many accounts of this gift Saxon had made to Monica when they started work on Mirage that I was familiar with it. Monica had hated diamonds, and this was a large square emerald—the color of an oasis in the desert, she’d said. I recalled that the ring was the work of a woman whose hobby had been creating imaginative jewelry from precious gems. When Saxon had asked her to create something unique for Monica, she had etched an intaglio design into the fine stones—a delicate iris, Monica Arlen’s symbol. Traced forever in the deep green of the great emerald, it would also become legendary.

  From the time wh
en Saxon put the ring on Monica’s finger and they’d embraced each other, as they always did at the start of work on a picture, she’d never taken it off … or so the story went. Fan magazines and gossip columnists had chattered on avidly. I wondered if Monica still had the emerald, or if she wore it anymore. She must remember those old days constantly, but how much of the past did she regret? If she’d married him, he would have been her third husband, and with two failures behind her, perhaps she’d hesitated too long.

  For a while, studying the photographs, I’d been carried into another world, escaping briefly into the make-believe that had always entranced me. Keith, however, grew tired of my dreaming, and when he saw that the waiter had brought salads to our table, he nudged me. As I turned to follow him, I glanced into the outer dining room and again stopped to stare.

  A man had paused to speak to a couple just seated at one of the tables, and I’d have recognized him anywhere. His thick hair was completely white now—no more contrasting plumes at the temples. Indeed, so white that it was almost blond, and the mustache was gone. He seemed heavier than I remembered, though still athletic-looking and trim. He wore a white dinner jacket that emphasized a great tan, and though he was well into his seventh decade, Saxon Scott looked amazingly fit and handsome, and a good deal younger than his years. I wondered if Monica had managed as well.

  I suppressed a ridiculous urge to introduce myself as Monica Arlen’s great-niece. I wasn’t a teenage fan any longer, however, and that would be a highly inappropriate intrusion. Just the same, as I took my place at the table with Keith, I wondered again about a possible interview with Saxon Scott. Next to interviewing Monica herself—which she would probably never permit—an article about Saxon would be my next choice. Perhaps I could find a way, once I settled down to working again. I didn’t want to exploit Monica or Saxon in any way, yet I had to earn a living now, somehow.