“How?”
Dan shrugged. “Probably gave her some line he needed the cash to save his life. She’s a health nut.”
“That’s pretty low.”
Red exploded on Dan’s cheeks. “Listen, I should ask what he told her? I should interfere? The fat little turd wants her to sell. And I’m the only buyer she’ll deal with.”
After a minute, Gene-the-treasurer asked, “Did you get it at a good price?”
“Half what it’s worth!” Dan replied pugnaciously, then he melted. “Gene, get your ass out of that sling. Take a look.” He was unrolling plans, using heavy ashtrays and paperweights to keep blue drawings flat. The two men stood over the desk, Dan’s forefinger moving a vigorous guided tour. “This is tentative. One thing’s for sure, though. Everything under one roof. Like the idea?”
“You’ve hooked me. When can I put in?”
“No investors.”
“Dan, don’t play me. I’m sold.”
“I’m not giving you a line.”
“But this is big. Can you handle it?”
“Who could?” Dan rolled up plans, snapping elastic around them. “I’m going into hock. Way over my head.” He handed Gene the Orange County agreement in triplicate. “Here,” he said.
Gene sat down, pushing up his glasses, reading.
“It’s kosher.”
“I always read before I sign.”
“You’re a cautious man, Gene.”
And Dan took a cigar from his humidor, prowling the grass-papered office as he lit up. Gene finished reading. With each signature, Dan impatiently removed the stapled form.
“That wraps it up. My last investor in my last syndication.”
“What?”
“After this mall, I’m retiring.”
Gene couldn’t prevent a smile. “To play golf?”
“The way I do business, you need to entertain. And let’s face it, entertaining’s not Beverly’s forte. You might say she stinks.”
Gene considered Beverly’s fragile bone structure elegant. Her eyes, to him, held a deep, mysterious sadness which he connected with artistic sensitivity. Mostly, though, he respected her. While he didn’t think much of her overpink pastels or those watered-down Chagall oils, he did admire her for scrimping out a year of West Los Angeles livelihood from them. She had borne aloft the banner of art that years ago he’d found too heavy to lift.
“You really can be a prick, Dan.”
Dan, scrawling his name under Gene’s, glanced up. “What?”
“She’s a painter, not a housewife.”
“That’s news? Gene, why do you think this mall is such a big deal? You know we fouled up once. I’m not going to let it happen again.”
“You’re going to alter your entire business?”
“Tell me what else I can do? Yeah, I’m getting out.”
“But—”
“The mall’ll bring in plenty. Okay, so maybe I put together an occasional deal, but it’ll be gravy, not a living. She won’t have to do a thing.” He scribbled his final signature. “The damn thing should be up already! I hate like hell having her push herself when she should be taking it easy.” He stopped, actually blushing. “Oh hell. Gene, don’t tell anyone. And that means your wife. It’s not due until the middle of February. We just found out.”
A baby? To Gene’s surprise, his vision blurred and Dan was one huge, shimmering grin. A baby? When Cricket, his daughter, his beloved only child, was four, Caroline had had a pelvic inflammation that made it impossible for her to conceive again. Gene, experiencing a jab of envy, resisted a crazy impulse to embrace his friend, instead making a fist and lightly punching the smooth Italian silk over Dan’s biceps.
“Hey, congratulations.”
Dan was still beaming. “Gene, come to the house for lunch. That is, if you don’t object to burned cheese sandwiches and instant coffee.”
“Isn’t Beverly working?”
“Why do you think I go home? She forgets to eat. Come on.”
Gene hesitated. “I’ll be intruding.”
“Charge it to business. We’ll talk about the Van Vliet’s lease.”
“Locations aren’t my department.”
“For a technicality you’re going to pass this up?”
Gene had to laugh. “You’re one domineering man,” he said.
“Somebody has to goose the world,” Dan said, propelling Gene through the door.
Dan could get 80% financing. He sold off four parcels. If he’d waited he could’ve gotten more, but the profit was there and no investor squawked. He borrowed on his life insurance, he borrowed on the boys’ trusts, he even borrowed on his S&G stock, he borrowed and borrowed. “You realize you’re taking an insane gamble?” inquired his accountant. “Once I pull it off, you’ll call it vision.” “Okay, Dan, you’re in over your head. But a quarter of a million on a house? Now?” Dan, not a man to live in his predecessor’s home, was building north of Sunset in Beverly Hills. “Fuck off my business. And you say one word to Beverly, I’ll kill you.”
So Beverly disliked the house plans for the eight bathrooms, the sunken master tub with Jacuzzi, the two ornamental pools in the enclosed entry, rather than the strain the bills were putting on Dan’s blood pressure. She knew Dan was working too hard, but Dan in motion was an irresistible force. Right now he was wooing prospective tenants with the same restaurant chumminess he’d pursued investors.
As often as possible they ate at home. Alix and Jamie would go to their rooms, she would turn on the Gas Company’s Evening Concert—low, Dan wasn’t wild for classical—and lie on the couch, her bare feet on his lap, while he went over the mall figures. Occasionally he would smile at her.
“D’you think it’ll be a boy?” she’d asked.
“Or a girl,” he would agree.
“I can’t see you with a girl.”
“Why not?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Too masculine, I guess.”
“Buzz, I’ll be the strictest old man in town.”
They would smile at one another. Camellia branches would rustle at leaded glass windows, and although there is no working definition of happiness, Beverly knew she was as close to it as any human can get.
She miscarried.
One rainy night in September Dan sped her eastward to Cedars of Lebanon. Her hands clenched. Punishment, she thought. A sudden cloudburst slashed on the windshield, and Dan was forced to take his arm from around her. The moans, ahh, ahh, ahh, weren’t part of her. Punishment, she thought.
A painful miscarriage. She recovered slowly.
6
In the March 17, 1963, Sunday real-estate section of the Los Angeles Times:
MALL TO RISE IN SAN FERNANDO VALLEY
Final plans have been announced for construction of a 550,000-square-foot, $15-million shopping center fronting on Ventura between Cornice and Avianca roads. The 20.5 acres, adjacent to the Ventura Freeway, is said to be worth in excess of $3 million. The shopping center will be completely enclosed. It is a project of Victory Enterprises and its financial partner, Encino Mutual Savings and Loan.
Dan R. Grossblatt, president of Victory Enterprises, says it is the first such facility on the West Coast. The complex will include a climate monitor—a central computer which collects information on air conditioning, ventilation, and heating—an indoor skating rink, a motion picture theater, a children’s amusement park, a Van Vliet’s market, and a Best Western motel facility.
“Bullock’s, Broadway, and Montgomery Ward already have signed leases. We have parking for 1,400 cars,” Grossblatt said.
“This self-contained environment will offer a unique experience to Southland shoppers. We have plans for a health spa and a sidewalk café, a Japanese garden with teahouse, as well as five other restaurants.”
Completion is scheduled for January, 1964.
This Sunday the phones in the new house never stopped ringing. Everyone, it seemed, had read the article and wished to offer congratulations and good wi
shes. Quite a few offered, “I’ve got some spare cash, Danny boy.”
7
The following Monday Jamie had a cold.
He stayed home. Happily. The move to Beverly Hills had caused Alix no pain. Jamie, though, lacked her social ease. He was New Kid in a different school system. Not that he was picked on. No. He was ignored. He walked invisible through locker-clanging corridors and noisy playgrounds. In gym, when teams were picked, he was overlooked. No teacher called on him, yet he feared the eventuality. What if his voice made no sound? He began to be obsessed with the idea that he didn’t exist during school hours—but if he didn’t, where was he?
Naturally he never told any of this to Beverly. Naturally, she understood.
He lounged in the sunny, overequipped kitchen, quartering oranges (good for a cold), reading the sports, scratching Boris’s velvet ear, fixing tacos. His full, juicy sneezes gave him satisfaction. Around ten that morning he visited Beverly.
Her studio was reached by steps from the kitchen: the architect had incorporated in it all his splendors. Plastic bubble skylights, elaborate storage, a dais for her easel, a marble counter to set up still lifes. Currently on deck, one aphid-infested rose in an Adohr milk bottle. She frowned, using her brush to get to the heart of a rose. Jamie found pastels in one drawer, some rice paper in another. Boris began circling restlessly, giving small yips. Jamie let him out the back door. The beagle disappeared, Magellan in the many garbage-canned alleys of Beverly Hills.
Jamie returned, snuffling into his handkerchief.
“Do you believe in God?” he asked.
His mother looked away from the rose. They’d gone into the matter often. “Yes. Or Something. I’m not sure what, there’s too many definitions. But how could a rose grow?”
“Nature?”
“That’s just another definition. People worship nature.”
“I guess most people have Something.”
“Want to go to Sunday school with Michael and Vic?” (Each Sunday morning at eight thirty, Dan picked up his sons, driving them to temple.)
“That’s not what I meant,” he said hastily. He was worried about what would happen when he turned thirteen. Dan was very big on him having a bar mitzvah. His own father was half-Jewish and answered in a funny, stiff voice if you even mentioned religion. After a minute Jamie said, “I wish I were a bird.”
Beverly wiped her brush. “Any particular sort?”
“No.”
“Why a bird?”
“I’d fly in the cool air just below the clouds and see everything.”
“I wonder what their eyes do see.”
“Everything,” he said. “Did you know the diving petrel can fly underwater?”
“Really?”
“I read,” he said. Picking a dark-green chalk, he knelt over rice paper.
After about fifteen minutes, he sat up, mopping his nose. “Doesn’t it get boring?”
“Not for me.”
His eyes questioned her.
“I must have a high boredom threshold,” she said.
“You’re good.”
She shook her head. “No. Maybe that’s why I’m not bored. I’m trying to get decent.”
“People buy your stuff.”
“The pastels.”
“Sometimes the other,” he said.
They often talked like this, desultory remarks, maybe picked up later, maybe dropped. It was easy, nothing. But rare.
Jamie turned on his transistor. “Listen,” he said. “It’s an oldie.”
A nasal voice inquired of a dead teenager, possibly in heaven, if the singer were still beloved.
“Like it?” Jamie asked.
“It’s not Cole Porter.”
“Who?”
“Before your time.”
After a while, he wandered away.
After a longer while, someone rang the front doorbell.
Beverly didn’t hear. She was deaf to everything. The rose was stubborn about yielding up its aphid-infected heart.
She unscrewed the canvas, turning it upside down to criticize color and balance. Rotating her shoulders, she squinted. The thalo violet patch in the lower right corner, she decided, should be knocked down. A faraway lawn mower roared. On the marble counter Jamie had left her a sandwich. She ate whole-wheat bread and canned salmon full of mayonnaise, running her tongue over her teeth. A fish taste lingered. I’ll clean my brushes later, she thought, and went for milk. Piled on the big kitchen table were yesterday’s real-estate sections, six of them, topped by Jamie’s transistor grunting out music. A waste of batteries. The sixty-five cents for new ones came from the dollar allowance that Philip gave him each Sunday. With her thumb she twisted the serrated edge of the dial, cutting off a long-drawn-out “Ugggh.”
“Jamie,” she called.
“Jamie!” she tried again.
Taking the radio, she clattered across terrazzo. Her thongs on the hard surface sounded tropical and slatternly, making her think of magnificent golden trollops wearing only mules, then of the naked freedom of Olympia, then the free clarity of Winslow Homer’s—
Her feet stopped moving.
Jamie’s radio fell. Inside the leatherette case, plastic shattered.
She heard a loud gagging.
All warmth receded. She was ice. The dead dwarf suns of a frozen galaxy were warm compared to her. Ice petrified her blood. Each time she remembered this moment, she would experience this barren, awesome chill. Through the open front door coiled a strand of birdsong. Sunlight jounced from the mezuzah that Dan, two months ago, had nailed to the oversize doorjamb, pronouncing: “Blessed art Thou … accept in mercy and favor the prayer of Thy children who gather to dedicate this dwelling and to offer their thanksgiving.…”
Jamie lay, left side down, one skinny, pale leg twisted under him, a pastel smudge on his right hand. A streak of watery pink drained down his tallow white cheek, a meager trickle that somehow worried her more than the rich blood soaking his hair. Red streaks pointed across terrazzo. Flies buzzed.
Punishment, she thought.
Philip, what have I done?
In that same instant she was kneeling beside her son, pressing her fingers under his Black Watch robe. The heart was beating. It was beating.
“Jamie,” she said sharply, as if she were angry.
A fly landed on his head, and automatically she flicked. Never move an injured person. Her thoughts skittered frantically. Didn’t they say never move an injured person? But didn’t they say ambulances could take an hour? Who are they? Jamie’s fingers were relaxed, as if he were asleep. Squatting, she picked him up, not noticing his weight, her only struggle with his limpness. His robe tie fell. He wore shorts. So thin. He. Kicking off her thongs so she wouldn’t trip, she lugged him to her car, heaving him onto the front seat: his arms and legs sprawled, and she arranged them, sitting behind the wheel, propping his head against her thigh before she realized she didn’t have her keys.
She ran inside, swerving around her thongs and the broken radio, slipping on red, balancing herself before she fell. Where was her purse? Where? When Jamie was two he’d fallen on a Venetian glass ashtray—Philip had held him while the doctor picked out slivered aquamarine with tweezers. Yanking open drawers. Shoving aside books at her bedside, books thumping onto deep white carpet. Where? Idiot! The duplicate is in the desk.
The accelerator resisted her bare sole.
She didn’t pause at boulevard stops. An Edsel squealed to a halt, an old man shouted. The fingers of her left hand, some paint-smeared, some clean, gripped the steering wheel. Her right hand spread on Jamie’s rib cage. My son, begotten on me by my enemy. The heart, the heart still beats. Her foot pressed to the floorboards. She was unaware of the red brake-warning light, she didn’t smell burning rubber. At the Emergency entrance she lifted Jamie, then a man in a green tunic came swiftly at her, taking him, laying him on a gurney. The ice chill had shape now, but she couldn’t define it. The stretcher tires made a heinie minoosh,
heinie minoosh, the sound once heard in trains, and a nurse called, “I need information.”
Doors swung shut on the stretcher.
The nurse, separated by windowed counter, mouthed questions. She had a profile like a trout.
A young doctor, an intern or resident, stethoscope in his pocket, came in, leaning toward the nurse. His hair was thin and blond, and he frightened Beverly. After a minute she understood why. He reminded her of Lloyd Rawlings. She had treated Lloyd shabbily by not loving (and leveling with) him. She grew limp with irrational terror. She had been so very callous—would this in some manner harm Jamie? The doctor whispered, the nurse whispered, and Beverly, trying to eavesdrop, caught a word here and there … Surgery … Critical … Massive …
“Mrs. Grossblatt,” the nurse said loudly. “This is Dr. Erland.”
“Is Jamie conscious yet?” she asked.
Dr. Erland shifted in his rubber-soled white shoes. “The surgeon’ll tell you. Louis Sherman.”
“Why didn’t you say Sherman was here?” the nurse asked.
“Scrubbing. We’re in luck.”
“Can I see him now, Jamie, before he goes into Surgery?”
“He’s in now.” Dr. Erland pressed two professional fingers to her inner wrist, staring at his watch. “You’d better lie down.”
“I have to call my daughter!” How could I have forgotten Alix? She must be home by now. Alone, home, alone.
“What’s your number?”
“Crestview six—No! I have to tell her.”
“All right, all right.” Despite the thinning hair, he looked young and embarrassed. “But you’ll have to use the public phones. Regulations.”
“I didn’t bring my wallet!”
“Calm down,” he said. “Doctor’s orders.” And fishing under his white jacket, he came up with thirty cents.
She didn’t know what she said to Alix.
Alix said to her, “Mother, cool it. I’m fine, fine. Listen, will you feel better if I’m at Melanie Cohn’s? I was going to show her my new pink sweater, anyway. You look after Jamie. Mommy, he is all right, isn’t he?”
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