The Gilded Life of Matilda Duplaine

by Alex Brunkhorst

  As a reporter, I was always looking at the clock, trying to make a deadline. It was ironic, because since we’d arrived in Hawaii, time had always been running too fast. But in the hours since Matilda had left, it felt as if it were standing still.

  * * *

  During my run the next day, I kept my thoughts close to me. I didn’t turn on my music; instead, I listened to my breath, my feet, the chirps of birds, the slow breeze rolling through the palms. Only a few cars passed, and when they did I focused on the sounds of their motors, the tires that treaded on pavement, squeaky brakes that seemed louder than they were in the quiet Hawaiian air.

  I recalled what David had told Matilda about her mother: if someone doesn’t want you, you shouldn’t want them. It was simple advice really, but advice I hadn’t taken. I had loved Willa long after she had reciprocated that love, and I wouldn’t allow myself to do the same with Matilda.

  Professor Grandy’s Journalism Rule Number Six: Never fall in love with your subject.

  That had been my first mistake, and the one that had led me to the wrong shore. Here I was, a man who had chosen a different path than my friends at Harvard. I had excelled in school, and I could have had virtually any job I had wanted. But instead I had prided myself on being the only one who didn’t sell himself for money while all of my friends had been bought by investment banks, hedge funds and corporate law jobs.

  I thought I had chosen the honest path, the path of a reporter. I almost laughed out loud at the thought. A story of the Hollywood century lay in front of me, and I had chosen not to break it.

  By mile number four, my shirt was damp with sweat and I could have shaken the water out of my hair it was so wet. I thought about the future—immediate and far. Sure, there were the next few days to consider: how to muddle through the time without Matilda more gracefully than I had after Willa. There would be no counting down of minutes this time, no thinking of how to make myself more worthy of her love. If she was gone for good—a frighteningly distinct possibility—I would begin the rest of my life anew. I would not lie in bed awake for years, sleeplessly reaching for a season that had already shed its leaves.

  And if this was to be the outcome, there was the story to consider. I would betray Lily in writing it, and the same for David and Matilda. But of all of the characters in my life, it was Rubenstein to whom I owed the most. And, if I was being honest, myself. If someone had asked me to list my greatest character traits, I would have pegged loyalty at the top, but the older I got the more I realized just how rare a thing loyalty is.

  I returned to Joel Goldman’s house and took a quick shower. Thoughts of Matilda weighed heavily on me—questions about her past, the dismal reality of the present—and I found myself starting to corrode, like this old house.

  I decided I needed to give myself a purpose, and the purpose for me, for as long as I could remember, had always been putting pen to paper to tell a story—to tell the truth. I thought again of the story of Matilda’s lineage and decided to start writing it—even if it was for my consumption only.

  But I couldn’t stay here, in this crumbling estate. I needed to go somewhere else to work. Anywhere. Matilda had been right about that. I had been stuck at home for too long. I decided that the library was as good a place as any.

  I drove to the library, feeling more productive and, oddly, hopeful, than I had in the past two weeks. It was a palatial building situated behind an impressive garden. As I walked through the tall doors into an entry that smelled of paper and cardboard, I was reminded of boyhood—of sitting cross-legged on the floor with a Hardy Boys book, of cramming my way through Harvard.

  I chose a table in a secluded corner. I turned off my cell phone so I couldn’t be tempted to see if Matilda had called, and I spread out three months of research in front of me like a fan.

  I had two notebooks of transcriptions, but no story. After all, I was dealing in the world of David Duplaine. He didn’t accidentally drop clues; he was too clever for that.

  I spent hours sifting through the pieces, and by midafternoon, my head was spinning with facts. I thought of the key that seemed to open nothing, the piece of art that still hung in Lily’s bedroom. And who was the mysterious brunette the man from the bar had longingly recalled? Something told me that Joel Goldman had to have known about Matilda. But what did he know? And then there was Lily’s fiancé, Carole’s brother—that may have been the strangest piece that didn’t quite fit. There was no mention of him in the press, and his engagement with Lily had been derailed for no apparent reason. I wondered if his disappearance might have been more significant than I had thought.

  I needed to delve further, and so I called the office and asked one of the young researchers to pull extensive background checks on Joel Goldman and Carole Partridge’s brother.

  It wasn’t until the library was about to close that I packed up my bag and left. Once in the courtyard, I lit a cigarette and glanced at my phone. Matilda hadn’t called. It was as if we were two boxers bobbing on either side of the ring, waiting for the other to move to the middle first.

  My head was spinning with facts, but there was something nagging me. I kept feeling as if the critical pieces of the story were those I hadn’t yet touched. There was still something I was missing, but I couldn’t isolate it.

  Professor Grandy’s Journalism Rule Number Seven: Sometimes what isn’t there is more important than what is.

  Twenty-Six

  I woke up the next morning to a text from Matilda. It had come in at one in the morning.

  Got here ok, it said. How r u?

  A simple text, but it felt significant. Matilda had shuffled into the center of the ring first. I debated about how to respond and then put my phone down without texting back. I was a journalist, too careful with putting pen to paper, or thumbs to keyboard as the case may be.

  Still sore from my long run the morning before, I put on my running gear, determined to reprise yesterday’s productivity. The sky was covered in wisps of clouds, ethereal and bright white.

  The first mile was the hardest, and then it got easier. My legs and hips seemed to remember what to do; they just had to keep going until the adrenaline kicked in, which it did, around mile three. When I returned home after six miles through the green hills, I was invigorated. I picked up my cell phone and texted Matilda.

  I’m good. Have fun and enjoy the surf.

  I took a cold shower before heading to the library.

  Honolulu was three hours behind Los Angeles, so by the time I sat down at the table in the library, I had two emails from the researcher at the Times.

  I combed the background material on Carole’s brother first. As expected, little was known about Michael Partridge. Michael had been employed as a stable hand of Joel Goldman’s for over a decade. At twenty-seven he had moved to Honolulu, but if social security records were any indication, at the time he was still under Joel’s employ. Soon after his move to Honolulu, he left his job with the Goldman family, and he appeared to have odd jobs at various ranches. He had been fired on multiple occasions and seemed to have no real consistent employment. This career end coincided with Carole’s first movie roles, so my guess was he was being supported by her.

  I knew very little about him, but even in the rare photo Michael Partridge didn’t seem like the type to live off his sister, so I wondered if something had happened. I thought back to my conversation with Rubenstein months earlier about Lily’s failed engagement.

  They were supposed to get married, but it didn’t happen. He ran off to someplace far away—Hawaii, I think it was—and never came back.

  I had learned in journalism that coincidences were few and far between. It seemed too great a coincidence that Michael would have ended up in Honolulu, so close to the estate that belonged to Joel Goldman. But even more of a coincidence—or, I suspected, not a coincidence—wa
s his date of relocation. He moved in the summer of 1988—two months after Matilda had been born.

  The email listed a current place of residence. I searched for it on a map and found it to be well inland, far from the coast and civilization. There was a phone number as well, and I started to dial but then stopped. I didn’t know if Michael was somehow integral to the plot, but if he was I thought it better to visit instead of call.

  I put his information to the side and then opened the second email.

  The information on Joel Goldman was vast. After all, he had been one of the most public figures in the history of Hollywood. Much of it I had found before, through my research for his obituary. I searched through photo after photo, news article after news article. Eventually, I decided to look into the Honolulu house, since that was the house that seemed to have a connection, however flimsy, to Michael Partridge.

  I flipped through the title reports for information on the house and found it. It had been purchased in 1959. Joel’s other real estate holdings included the home in the South of France, a pied-à-terre on the Upper East Side in New York, the equestrian estate in Hidden Hills, and two houses in Bel-Air—one that had been sold and one purchased in the same year, suggesting he moved from one Bel-Air house to another. Nothing out of the ordinary there. It was a typical real estate portfolio for an überwealthy gentleman in Los Angeles.

  I was about to minimize the title research on my screen when suddenly two details caught my eye. One was the date of the transfer of the Bel-Air properties: April 1988, the month and year Matilda was born. The second was the address of the property: the current home of David Duplaine.

  For a moment everything around me blurred, and then it became sharply clear, as letters in an eye test at the click of a lens.

  Joel Goldman had lived in the same house in Bel-Air for twenty-eight years, and then in April 1988, the month Matilda was born, he transferred ownership of his six-acre estate to David.

  David’s Palladian mansion had once been Joel Goldman’s house. Lily said Hector had worked for the family for over forty years. I had thought it was an exaggeration, but perhaps Hector had first worked for Joel and then David—both on the estate.

  I thought about my biggest assumption in this mystery, and I jettisoned it. For the first time since I had stumbled upon Matilda on the tennis court, I abandoned the assumption that David Duplaine was her biological father and considered Joel Goldman instead.

  Joel Goldman would have been sixty-one when Matilda was born. He was married, but his wife was long past childbearing age, so there was no way the child could have been theirs. So if, indeed, Matilda was Joel’s daughter, he would have had to father her with someone other than his wife.

  But why hide her? Why hold her captive?

  Had Joel merely had an affair, there wouldn’t have been reason for such a dramatic measure. Los Angeles was a city of loose morals, so it had to have been something truly scandalous.

  I put down my story. The more I learned, the more holes needed to be filled. It was a leap of faith to consider the possibility of Joel Goldman as Matilda’s father. And if I did, it still left the burning question:

  Who was Matilda’s mother?

  * * *

  I worked at the library until closing. I stopped at a little convenience store on the way home for a bottle of scotch.

  Once home I set up a makeshift office on the veranda overlooking the ocean. I sat in front of my computer, research strewn about me, seashells serving as paperweights. The laptop light glowed, and it reminded me of those late nights at the Wall Street Journal, writing into that glorious part of the night when everyone else slept. It felt good to be back there, to that place when my life had meant something.

  My phone buzzed. It was a text from Matilda.

  Surf’s good. Miss u.

  I walked over to the bar, poured myself another drink and wondered if I missed her, too. Missing her came over me in waves, like the sadness after my mother died. It ebbed and flowed, was unbearable then not. But I also realized how suffocating my love for Matilda had been. It wasn’t her fault; it was mine. I had lost myself in her. Ironically, I had needed her to leave in order to find the parts of myself hidden in her, so I could put them back in me where they belonged. Maybe Matilda and I had been brought together to teach each other freedom.

  I sipped my scotch, allowing it to take the edge off but not take away my clarity. I needed that. I stepped away from the bar, inventorying its contents.

  And then it hit me.

  Would you like to have a glass of wine? Matilda had asked me. I found a fantastic bottle.

  That was it: Matilda had indicated she had “found” a fantastic bottle of wine, but there had never been a bottle of wine on the bar or in the kitchen. So where had she found it?

  The logical place for wine in a vast estate like this would have been a cellar, but houses in Hawaii didn’t have basements, because it was too expensive to cut into the volcanic rock. And besides, I had pored over every inch of the house—or so I had thought. If there were a wine cellar, I would have seen a door to it.

  On our first day of class, freshman year, Professor Grandy recounted a story that had been branded in me since. It was the true tale of a man who made the arduous journey to the West Coast to find gold. He spent years looking for the stuff and eventually gave up, only to later discover that he had stopped three feet from a vast gold mine.

  The lesson: Professor Grandy’s Journalism Rule Number Eight: Don’t be the poor fool who stops three feet from gold.

  Suddenly I began to think I was merely three feet from gold—I was so close I could smell it. I started my search with the living room. It was unlikely Matilda would have moved heavy furniture to find a cellar, but I did just that. If I was onto something, I had been sloppy and haphazard in my search before. So, I pushed chairs, the sofa, lamps and rugs around, as if they were pawns on a chessboard, finding nothing. I then did the same in Joel’s office, struggling to move his heavy desk and rolling his desk chair across the room.

  Again, nothing.

  I took a breath, deciding to be strategic about the search. Where, I wondered, would Matilda have spent more time than I? The answer was obvious. I walked to Joel’s suite and went directly into the closet.

  Matilda had taken her new clothing with her, leaving her old clothes behind. I rubbed the nylon of her one-piece bathing suit, the demure dress she had worn the day we had come to Hawaii. Her plump diamond earrings were haphazardly thrown on top of a dresser, a symbol of a life she wanted nothing to do with anymore.

  I looked below me, on the floor, at first seeing nothing. I moved aside everything in the closet, finally shifting a laundry basket a couple feet to its left. It was then that I found what I was looking for: a large brass latch on a heavy wooden door.

  The latch wasn’t easy to open, and it took a couple tries before I successfully swung it toward me. It revealed a narrow ladder. I took each step carefully and eagerly, feeling that I was close to a great discovery.

  The ladder led to a small room that at first blush appeared to be a wine cellar. But I knew better. There was no way a wine cellar would have been put inside a closet, and the cost of drilling into volcanic rock wouldn’t have justified such measures—even for someone as wealthy as Joel Goldman. It had to be a safe of some sort.

  The cellar did contain several decades-old bottles of wine, but the rest of the valuables in the long-forgotten room had been cleared out. I was ready to believe I’d hit another dead end when I spotted it in a corner: a small metal safe built into the wall. It was a key-lock safe, not a combination, and it immediately clicked in my mind. I ran upstairs and retrieved the key I had found taped under Lily’s dresser.

  My anticipation was palpable as I put the key into the safe and I felt the lock gently give way. I slowly pulled the door open.

 
The safe was empty, except for a single object: a square-shaped item wrapped in a deep-purple-colored cloth. From the shape I guessed it was a book of some sort. I peeled away the layers of cloth, my heartbeat increasing with each fold.

  It was an old white photo album that had gone yellow, the kind with a slightly cushy cover and nylon sleeves. In the age of digital storage, it was a relic from the past. I opened it up tentatively, still feeling Joel Goldman’s breath on me. He was buried an ocean away, on the hills of Forest Lawn Cemetery near the back lot of the movie studio that he had built, but I felt him watching me from the grave, warning me to turn around.

  I flipped through the pages of the album and examined the pictures closely. It took me only a moment to realize that Carole Partridge was in nearly every one. The first photos were of her as an infant. She had wisps of brown hair, cheeks so full they could have been hiding chestnuts and a wide smile. There were photos of her playing hopscotch and tennis, and one of her beaming behind a birthday cake, just before blowing out the candles. In another picture, she stood at the top of a high diving board, child’s legs—lanky even then—crossed nervously.

  At around age ten, pictures of backyard birthday parties were replaced by pictures of her with Thoroughbred horses at the Goldmans’ equestrian estate. By the time she was fourteen, her body had changed. She didn’t look like a teenager at all, but a woman. Her sole companions appeared to be her older brother, Michael, and Lily—who at the time was a striking blonde in her thirties. Like so many staff of the rich, Carole and her brother seemed to be absorbed into the family Michael worked for. In the early photos there had been a woman who must have been Carole’s mother, but there was never a father pictured. And in later pictures, the woman seemed to vanish like a ghost. The only family Carole seemed to have were her brother and the Goldmans.