Stars Over Sunset Boulevard

by Susan Meissner

  Glen had proposed on Valentine’s Day, after presenting Audrey with a four-carat diamond. She hadn’t been completely surprised, and yet she had still trembled at the thought of making such a huge shift. Marrying Glen would surely change how often she could see Lainey. She would not be able to drop everything and hop in a car to go see the child whenever she wanted if she was married. Glen was sympathetic to a point when it came to Lainey. He’d told Audrey he thought she’d done the right thing by hiding her pregnancy and secretly giving up the baby. Her image in Hollywood was being reinvented, and a child out of wedlock would not have been received well by the public. Glen would say she needed to be careful about how much time and attention she lavished on her best friend’s little girl, lest anyone begin to have doubts about whose child Lainey really was.

  More than anything else, it was this gnawing thought that had kept her from saying yes to Glen. He didn’t love Lainey; he had no familial bond with her. He was a widower with two grown children of his own and a new grandson. Audrey could not imagine her life apart from Lainey now, even if it meant turning Glen down. When she had been unable to answer him, he had told her to take all the time she needed, as though he was confident she would ultimately say yes. He offered a life of ease and riches and devotion. He loved her—of that she was certain. And yet she still hadn’t been able to tell Glen that she would marry him. Not with Lainey seemingly hanging in the balance.

  A few minutes later she was pulling up to Bert and Violet’s house, and her heart was pounding with anticipation. Though she had sent little gifts and toys in the mail to Lainey over the past couple months, Audrey hadn’t actually seen her since late January, when she’d come up on a Sunday afternoon for an impromptu visit.

  She grabbed the gifts off the seat next to her and walked briskly up the path to the front door. Three months was a long time in an infant’s first year; Lainey had probably changed so much. Audrey knocked lightly on the door, mindful that the baby could be asleep, and then opened it.

  “Yoo-hoo!” she said softly as she poked her head inside. “It’s me, Audrey.” She stepped inside.

  The living room was different. At first Audrey wasn’t quite sure in what way. There was less of everything somehow. Fewer photographs in frames, fewer pictures on the wall. The afghan over the couch was gone. Delores’s favorite chair was also missing.

  A wave of shock roiled across her as she instantly assumed the worst: Delores had died.

  She set her packages down with a sense of sadness. And then she heard a door closing and quiet footsteps approaching from down the hall. Violet walked into the room and laid a finger to her lips. She looked serene.

  “Lainey just went down for her nap,” Violet murmured.

  “What’s happened? Is Delores is all right?”

  “Delores is fine. She is with Charlene and Howard. In San Francisco.” Violet closed the distance and put her arms around Audrey, but her embrace seemed loose. Violet was not quite herself. Something was amiss.

  “Oh,” Audrey said as they separated. She nodded toward the empty space where the armchair had been. “She took her chair?”

  “She took everything that was important to her,” Violet said, her tone odd. “She is living with them now. Charlene is a nurse. She is better able to help Delores with her medical needs.”

  “Oh, I see. My goodness. So it’s just you and Lainey here, then?”

  Violet smiled a half grin. “Yes.”

  “Are you all right with that? Does Bert know?”

  Violet cocked her head. “Does Bert know what? That his mother wanted to be closer to her new grandson? Of course. He thinks it’s a great idea, especially with Charlene being a nurse and all. Want some coffee?”

  Everything was off. Violet was off. The mood inside the house was off. Something still wasn’t right.

  “Sure. Can I just peek at Lainey first? I’ve missed her so much.” Audrey took a step toward the hallway and Violet reached out to stop her.

  “It will be better for her if you let her sleep. She wakes up so easily now and she needs her nap. It’s too hard on her when she misses it. Let’s have some coffee first. There’s . . . there’s something I need to tell you.”

  Audrey sensed a different kind of quaking in her heart and soul. Something was about to change. Tendrils of fear curled about her as she followed Violet into the kitchen. Violet took out two cups and their saucers and poured coffee that she had obviously already made for this purpose. Audrey pulled out a chair and sat down. The china cups made little rattling noises as Violet brought them to the table.

  “Want any cream?” Violet asked.

  What I want is for you to tell me what’s going on. Audrey shook her head. “No, thanks.”

  Violet sat down, too. She put her hands around her cup, as if using its heat to power her words. Her gaze was on the steam rising from it. “Lainey and I are going home to Alabama.”

  The tendrils of fear thickened. “For a visit?”

  “Until the war is over. Maybe longer. We’re going to be renting out this house.”

  “Are you telling me Bert wants to live in Alabama after the war, with his mother so ill?” Audrey’s voice sounded childlike in her ears.

  “Delores may not live to see the end of the war. And Bert has dreams for his life that my parents can help him with. He wants to travel the world and photograph birds. Maybe you didn’t know that about him.”

  Hot tears instantly pooled in Audrey’s eyes. An ache she hadn’t felt since leaving the hospital after having Lainey swelled up within her. She blinked away the tears and tamped down the dread. “You don’t want to be alone here with Bert gone. I get that. Come back with me to Hollywood, Violet. The bungalow’s plenty big for two women and a baby. It would be just like old times, only better. We can—”

  Violet looked up at her “Audrey.”

  “What?”

  “I want to go home. I want my mother. I want my family. I’m tired of having to do everything by myself.”

  The tears trickled down Audrey’s cheeks, warm and rapid. She had to think of a way to keep Violet and Lainey in California. Had to.

  Glen. She could marry Glen.

  Glen had a mansion in Beverly Hills with eight bedrooms and a guest suite. Surely he would do his part for the war effort by letting an Army wife and infant daughter come live with them. He’d get to know Lainey that way. He might even begin to love her a little.

  “Wait, Violet. Listen. Glen has asked me to marry him. He has this amazing house that is as big as a castle. You would want for nothing there. You and Lainey could have one whole wing all to yourselves. You’d feel like a princess, and he’d give Lainey everything she needed. You could—”

  “Audrey, you’re not listening to me. I want to be with my family.”

  “But that’s just it. You would be with family. You are like a sister to me. And Lainey? I’m her auntie Audrey.” She had to make Violet understand. “You’re like family to me, Vi!” she exclaimed.

  “But I’m not your family, Audrey!” Violet shouted. “I’m not your sister. And Lainey is not your niece!”

  “But you and Bert and Lainey are all I have!” Audrey reached across the table for Violet, bumping her cup and sending coffee sloshing out of it.

  Violet backed away from her. “We are not all you have! You have a family! You have one and you walked away from it!”

  Audrey sat back now, too. Stunned. “How can you say that?”

  Violet’s exasperation seemed to melt into a lesser form of anger. “Because it’s true! You have a father and two half brothers and a stepmother and an uncle and aunt, and cousins, too, probably. You have a family. You have one, Audrey. You walked away from it. That’s no one’s fault but yours.”

  A cry erupted from the nursery. Their shouting had awakened Lainey.

  Violet stood and left the kitchen. Audrey s
at numb and stricken in the chair. When Violet returned, Lainey was cuddled against Violet, her angelic face buried in the crook of Violet’s neck, fully comforted in the arms of her mother. The image seared itself into Audrey’s heart.

  “Look, I didn’t mean to hurt you. I just—,” Violet said as she retook her seat.

  “No. You’re right. Bert is yours. Lainey is yours. They are your family. Not mine.”

  Seconds of silence hovered between them. It was inevitable, this tearing. Audrey knew that now. She had pulled herself away from Lainey before and then had made the mistake of sewing the rip back together.

  “I’m sorry I woke her,” Audrey murmured, fresh tears spilling from her eyes.

  Violet gently patted Lainey’s back. “She’ll be all right.”

  The two friends sat in silence as the baby in Violet’s arms fell back asleep.

  “When do you leave?” Audrey asked, steeling her heart for the answer.

  “On Friday.”

  Audrey let the knowledge settle over her. “May I write to you?”

  “Of course. And I will write to you.”

  “And may I . . . may I send her things? Just from time to time?”

  Violet hesitated a second. “From time to time.”

  Audrey wiped her eyes with a napkin.

  “You’ve spilled your coffee,” Violet said.

  Audrey looked down at the splash of coffee on the table. “I did.”

  “Here.” Violet stood and offered the sleeping child to her. “You hold Lainey while I make a fresh pot. And I’ll cut some cake for us. It’s the one I used to make at the bungalow that you liked so much. With the sugared pecans.”

  Audrey set down the tearstained napkin and took the baby carefully, so that her engagement ring would not scrape the child’s delicate skin.

  • • •

  Audrey stayed only one night in Santa Barbara, not two.

  Sleep eluded her hour after hour as she lay in Delores’s old bed, and Audrey decided what she would do after Violet and Lainey left.

  After saying a tearful good-bye the next day, she got into Glen’s Cadillac and headed north, not south.

  She arrived at her father’s farm a bit before three. Leon Kluge was bent over a tractor in the nearest shed when her car came up the gravel road. He looked up, shielded his eyes against the sun, and stared at the vehicle that he did not recognize. Audrey parked in front of the house, got out, and walked slowly toward him, her soul feeling as raw and exposed as a newborn child.

  Her father wiped his hands on his dungarees as he stepped away from the tractor, an anxious look on his face. He stopped just at the opening of the shed and waited for her to come to him.

  When she was a few feet away, she stopped, too.

  “Hi, Dad.”

  He stared at her for a moment. “Audrey. You . . . you drove all the way up from Los Angeles?”

  She nodded.

  “Everything all right?”

  “Maybe,” she said, blinking back tears that she could not name.

  He continued to stare, so unsure of what to do or say. She saw in his eyes the fear that she knew all too well. His fear had masqueraded as bitterness, indignation, anguish, and resentment. But it was fear, plain and simple. He was just like her. He was afraid of not being wanted just like she was. Her mother hadn’t been happy here and had made herself ill because of it. Her mother hadn’t been happy with the life he’d made for her.

  She had stopped wanting him.

  “Why are you are here?” he finally asked.

  “I’m getting married, Dad.”

  He waited.

  “I’d really like you to walk me down the aisle and give me away.”

  He looked away, first at his shoes and then at the horizon of budding fruit trees that stretched endlessly in every direction. When he returned his gaze to her, his eyes were shimmering. “If that’s really what you want.”

  “I think it’s what I’ve always wanted. I just didn’t know it.”

  He averted his eyes again and she knew it would be slow, this reconnecting of unraveled threads between them. Slow was good. Everything else that had happened that weekend had happened too fast. Much too fast.

  “If it’s not during harvest,” he said, his gaze on the trees, not on her.

  “Of course.”

  “That his car?”

  Audrey looked back at Glen’s gleaming Cadillac and then turned back around. “Yes.”

  Leon Kluge stared at the car for a moment and then at her. “Is he a good man?”

  She nodded and a knot of emotion swelled in her throat at all that lay beneath that question. “He is.”

  Her father hesitated for only a moment. “Guess we can look at the calendar, then.”

  They turned for the house. The dogs, who had been off in the groves when she had arrived, bounded toward her now, tails wagging, tongues lolling, welcoming her home.

  TWENTY-NINE

  November 1943

  Violet tied a pink balloon to the grosgrain ribbon she held in her hand and ascended a stepladder to attach it to a chandelier. She heard a voice behind her as she pulled the bow tight.

  “Bessie can do that for you, Violet.”

  Violet turned to see her mother, dressed in a peach-toned linen dress accented by a strand of pearls, standing at the entrance to the formal dining room. At fifty-eight, Mama was still trim, elegant, and very active in Montgomery’s social and charitable circles. For Violet, the sweetest aspect of coming home had been finding she was at last seeing shimmers of her own reflection when she looked at Mama, who was a paragon of social graces.

  “I don’t mind doing it.” Violet leaned back a bit to gauge the need to add another balloon to the cluster already dangling from the light fixture. “I’ve got to keep busy, or I’ll go crazy watching the clock.”

  “Well, don’t go falling off that ladder, now. It’s a big day and you don’t want to spend it with an ice pack on your ankle.”

  Violet laughed. “I promise I’m being careful.” The cluster of pink and yellow balloons looked festive and cheerful. Violet climbed down the ladder. “Do the balloons look all right?”

  Her mother nodded. “Very nice. It’s going to be a lovely birthday party.”

  “I guess I can finally start getting ready to go to the train station, then.”

  Bessie, her parents’ housekeeper for the past twenty-five years, appeared at the doorway to the kitchen.

  “Let me take that ladder back out to the utility room, Violet.” The housekeeper reached for the stepladder and folded it closed. “I’m so glad your Mr. Redmond gets to be here for Miss Lainey’s first birthday party.”

  “Thanks, Bessie. I probably don’t have to tell you that I am, too.”

  Bessie laughed. Her voice was low and resonant, like Audrey’s. An ache from a deep place swelled inside. Violet missed Audrey more than she’d ever thought she would. There had been letters and cards over the past seven months, and Audrey had sent a photograph of her May wedding to Glen Wainwright, but those letters and the picture had seemed only to intensify Violet’s feelings of sadness at their parting. And yet she did not for a minute want to go back to California right now. Violet shook her head slightly to coax that sad sensation away.

  “I so wish he could stay through Thanksgiving and Christmas, though,” her mother said. “Seems a shame he’s coming right before the holidays and then must head back to New Jersey just as everything else is about to begin.”

  Violet shrugged. “I guess I’d rather he were here for Lainey’s first birthday, which will only happen once, while Christmas will be back around again before we know it.”

  “I suppose that’s true.”

  The housekeeper started to walk away with the ladder under her arm. Violet heard the faint sounds of Lainey chattering in her cr
ib upstairs. She had awakened early from her nap. All three women looked toward the stairs beyond the dining room.

  “Don’t you gals worry none about Little Miss,” Bessie said. “I’ll get her cleaned up and fed while you ready yourself for the train station, Violet. And I knows you’ve got to go get the cake and flowers, Mrs. Mayfield.”

  “Thanks, Bessie. I’ll get back as soon as I can,” Violet’s mother said. “I’m sure you’ve got all the food yet to prepare for the party.”

  “No worries, no worries. There’s a lot I can take care of in the kitchen while Lainey has her lunch in the high chair. No worries at all.”

  Violet turned from the decorated room to head upstairs to change and fix her hair. A happy knot was already forming in her stomach at the thought of seeing Bert again after six months.

  She ascended the staircase to what had been her oldest brother’s bedroom, which she and Mama had redecorated when she’d arrived home. She bypassed the closed door to her old room, which was now Lainey’s. Behind the door, her daughter was happily babbling nonsense, but that cheerful chatter wouldn’t last. In a moment or two, if no one came for her, Lainey would start to howl for attention.

  Sweet girl.

  Violet stepped into the bedroom that was hers now and closed the door. She stripped off her party-decorating clothes and picked up a powder puff laden with scented talcum to chase away any unpleasant scents.

  The party for Lainey later that day wouldn’t be a huge affair; everyone seemed to be doing less entertaining with a war on and rationing to go with it. But her grandparents would be there. Her brothers and their wives and their children. A few of the cousins who still lived in town. Some high school friends and their young ones.

  Violet frowned as she pulled on a clean slip. Her friends from her younger years just weren’t the same as when they had all been childhood chums. Or maybe since Violet was the one who had lived in California for the past four years, she was the one who had changed while everyone in Montgomery had stayed exactly the same. She could tell just how much they had drifted apart when she’d moved back home seven months ago. Their easy camaraderie had thinned; their affection for one another now was one of Southern politeness. Her high school friends had forged new friendships with other young mothers at her church and at the different charitable organizations for whom they now volunteered. Violet still had some work to do to get back into that little universe, even with her mother’s help reintroducing her into local society.