Everything and More

by Jacqueline Briskin

  The nurse stared at her, taking in the old kimono beneath the disreputable sweater, the paper curlers. Then her scornful gaze turned to Roy, who had not yet put on her shoes or socks, her glance rising disdainfully to the curly brown hair that had been blown into a tumbleweed during the ride in the rumble seat. Her glance slid over Marylin to her immaculately polished saddle shoes bought on sale for a dollar because they were scuffed. “That’s for the surgeon to tell you,” she said coldly.

  “Surgeon?” asked Marylin. “But I thought . . . Nurse, hasn’t he had a heart attack?”

  The nurse backed through the left door.

  Before it swung shut, Roy caught glimpses of a corridor that was empty except for a stretcher. She opened her mouth and began to scream.

  The nurse bobbed back. “Quit that racket,” she hissed.

  “What’s wrong with my Pa?” Roy howled.

  “You damned little Okie charity case, don’t you know you’re in a hospital?”

  “Where is my Pa?” Roy shrieked.

  “He’s in the operating room,” snapped the nurse with a malevolent glare. “He was shot in the chest. Doctor’s trying to get out the bullet, and I shouldn’t be surprised if all this caterwauling has jarred his hand.”

  Roy’s screams halted abruptly.

  NolaBee said in a flat, questioning tone, “A gunshot?”

  They stared at one another.

  “There must have been a robbery,” said Marylin dully. “Don’t you think so, Roy?”

  Roy couldn’t answer. She was biting her lower lip to prevent her sobs from welling up.

  “He’ll be all right, Mama, he’ll be all right,” said Marylin, her cheeks streaked with tears.

  All through the morning they sat on the hard, cold couch, NolaBee gripping Marylin’s hand. They were in an isolated part of the hospital and nobody came by except an old black woman swishing a broad, Lysol-soaked mop. She obviously didn’t know anything, but that didn’t stop Roy from inquiring about Mr. Chilton Wace.

  Roy felt as if she were suspended too high in a swing so that her stomach was eternally dropping away from her. Pa, oh Pa, you must get well, you must. Horrible itches erupted on her freckled arms and legs.

  NolaBee reproved in a strangely pitched voice, “You’re not a monkey, Roy.”

  Roy stopped scratching herself. Another itch became excruciating: unconsciously, she flayed it with her nails.

  The big clock over the door ticked with agonizing slowness to eleven-forty-eight.

  Then the same short, fat nurse emerged through the doors.

  The Waces rose, facing her.

  “Dr. Winfield asked me to tell you that Mr. Wace never regained consciousness,” she said without inflection. “He expired a few minutes ago.”

  The widow and two orphans burst into spasms of grief that are natural in moments of disaster. NolaBee sank into Marylin’s arms.

  Roy flung herself onto the chill, comfortless couch, her sobs quickly ceasing. She was shivering with a chill more intense than she had ever experienced. Pa, oh Pa, how could you leave me utterly alone forever?

  * * *

  Mr. Roth came over that afternoon, bearing a large, almond-filled coffee ring. He wept real tears when he passed on the little information he possessed. He had quit work around midnight, leaving Chilton to finish counting the Levi’s coveralls—“Our biggest-selling item, we stock every size,” he explained. This morning he had returned to find his shop ransacked and his employee bleeding and unconscious in a heap of denim. Until now, he apologized, he’d been stuck down at the police station. “I’ll find out for you about the workmen’s comp,” he promised as he left.

  That Friday he returned with the forms. The Wace family would get $500 in cash, and $50 a month—$25 for the widow and $12.50 each for children below the age of eighteen.

  After Mr. Roth left, NolaBee lit her last Camel with tremulous hands. “Five hundred dollars—that’s more money than I’ve ever seen. But I reckon it won’t go much further than paying off what we owe at the hospital and the mortuary.” Her voice cracked on the final word, but she continued resolutely. “That fifty a month is half what your pa made, and we weren’t livin’ right lavish on that.”

  “What about Greenward?” asked Marylin. Tears turned her huge, beautiful eyes greener. “Will we go back?”

  “Back?” Roy burst out with the combativeness that even in her worst hours she was unable to quench. “I’ve never been there. And neither have you.”

  “Your people live there,” said NolaBee, puffing smoke.

  “Swell,” Roy said. “Let’s go where we can personally kiss their pinkies when they donate their smelly old clothes.”

  “Lord, Lord, how I hate those hand-me-downs.” NolaBee sighed.

  Both daughters turned to her in surprise.

  “Well, that’s news,” Roy said.

  “What would you have had me do, little Miss Smart Mouth?” said NolaBee, affectionately tousling the reddish-brown curls. Then she coughed. “I couldn’t let your pa know how much I hated those old things. He felt bad enough as it was, not bein’ a millionaire financier.”

  Roy sniffed back a sob.

  NolaBee handed her a handkerchief. “We’re not going home until it’s a triumph,” she said. As punctuation, she tapped the long ash into her empty coffee cup.

  “Mama, we’re poorer than ever,” Marylin sighed.

  “I reckon we’re never going to let the family think your pa didn’t take real good care of us. I don’t want to hear a one of ’em ever saying, ‘Poor Chilton, he left his family poorly fixed,’”

  “What’ll we do?” Marylin asked.

  “Maybe win the Irish Sweepstakes,” said Roy.

  “I’ll think on it,” said NolaBee.

  * * *

  Two mornings later the sisters woke to find their mother sitting on Marylin’s cot. The air smelled smoky, as if she had been there a long time.

  “You look right young, Marylin,” she said.

  “Everybody says nineteen.” Marylin’s soft voice held a rare hint of testiness.

  “Like this, no more than fourteen,” NolaBee pronounced. “That’s what your age is now.”

  “I’ll be seventeen in August,” said Marylin.

  “You’ll be fifteen then. We’re moving to Beverly Hills.”

  “Beverly Hills!” Iron springs twanged as Roy jumped from the cot. “On what? The big loot from workmen’s comp?”

  “I’ll find work. We’ll manage.”

  “Why Beverly Hills?” asked Marylin apprehensively.

  “The movie people all live there. They have children in the high school.”

  “And the town’s sent out an SOS to recruit impoverished students?”

  “All right, Roy. I’ve had enough of your mouth.” NolaBee spoke tartly, but her hand rested gently on Roy’s pudgy waist. She understood how much the child was devastated by her father’s death. “When Beverly Hills High puts on a play, I reckon there’s scads of important studio folk there.”

  “Mama . . .” Marylin sank back into the mended pillowcase, her eyes glazed with horror.

  “Every place we’ve been, you’ve had the lead.”

  “I try hard, I don’t mind memorizing, but—”

  “You’re good.”

  “Not in a place like Beverly Hills. Anyway, I’m nearly a senior—”

  “You’re fourteen,” NolaBee said inexorably.

  “No, Mama. Please—”

  “You need a right long time to let those big producers see you. Two extra years.”

  Marylin began to sob softly.

  Roy stared at the lovely bent head. And like an electric light suddenly going on, she understood a fact that had hitherto eluded her. Marylin paid a high price for her closeness with their mother. NolaBee, for all her vivid energy, lived by and through her beautiful daughter, vicariously sharing Marylin’s triumphs, accepting her accolades, weeping her tears, intruding into her soul. And Marylin was tender enough to permit the
invasion.

  Roy jerked away from her mother’s grasp. “Mama, the whole idea’s dum-dum. That’s what comes from reading too many fan magazines.”

  “I reckon they do write a lot of hooey about how stars get discovered, but there’s a lot of truth, too. Actresses have to come from somewhere.”

  “You can’t really mean me to pretend I’m two years younger and keep getting up in front of those big shots?” Marylin said, raising her tear-streaked face.

  “You’ve always got the most applause,” NolaBee said, for once adamant with Marylin.

  “And it’s not exactly because she’s Katharine Cornell,” Roy said.

  “I reckon the studio talent scouts know where to find Katharine Cornell, but they aren’t looking. They don’t want Broadway actresses, they want beautiful girls.”

  “Mama, it’s crazy, there’s no chance,” wept Marylin.

  “I reckon you’re a Roy, a Wace, a Fairburn. You’ll make a chance,” said NolaBee. Drawn and pale, she looked like a gambler placing his last chip.

  Book Two

  1943

  This year, because of the war, the Board of Education has been busier than ever. Immediately after the entrance of the United States into the war, the Board ordered air-raid drills to be put into practice. In cooperation with the Civilian Defense, essential supplies were purchased.

  —Beverly Hills High School Watchtower, 1942

  Beverly Hills High School presented its annual Shakespearean Festival on April 23 and 24 for students and for the PTA mothers’ tea. The sensation of the festival was Marylin Wace in the role of Juliet from Romeo and Juliet.

  —Ibid.

  Fernauld, Joshua R.: Writer, director. B. Bronx, New York, Jan. 20, 1896: ed., New York public sch. m. Ann Lottman, two children, Barbara Jane and Lincoln. Newspaper writer, novels Victims and Journey. Began assoc. with screen in 1921, writing Victims (Columbia). Other films include Lava Flow, 1938, Academy Award. Directed Vigilance (Paramount), 1939.

  Pictures include: That Lost Love, Princess Pat, Mr. Kelbo Goes to Berlin, After the Fall, Spring Laughter.

  —International Motion Picture Almanac, 1942–43

  There is an unspeakable clamor as the planes warm up before attack. When the last planes have left the deck, the commander’s specially marked plane appears suddenly on the flight deck, brought up by an incredibly fast elevator.

  —Life article about Navy pilots, April 2, 1943

  3

  Marylin sat holding a script on her lap, part of the semicircle on the dusty, shadowy stage of the Beverly Hills High School auditorium. Like the other girls, she wore a pleated skirt and a pastel sweater that matched her Bonnie Doone ankle socks—the uniform for any girl uninterested in courting a reputation as a freak. The boys onstage wore the de rigueur cords and white shirts with the two top buttons open, and the sleeves rolled to just above the elbow. None of them could afford to look different. As it was, they were already considered weirdos or exhibitionists for taking Radio Speech or working on the Shakespearean Festival or bounding around the stage like cucarachas in the Voice Choir’s production of a home-grown musical, Fiesta. They were the Juniors talented and devoted enough to drama to stay after school for these preliminary rehearsals of the class play.

  They fidgeted tolerantly while BJ Fernauld, an overweight, round-faced girl with a large red bow pinned behind her teetering black pompadour, scribbled down the margin of a smudged mimeograph sheet. BJ’s father was Joshua Fernauld, the famous Oscar-winning screenwriter, and doubtless Miss Nathans, the drama teacher, when selecting BJ’s comedy as the class play, had fallen under the influence of what BJ—in vaguely boastful secrecy—had admitted to her classmates was her father’s “light polish job.”

  “Egads, I’m a genius,” BJ chortled, then pitched her tone a couple of decibels deeper into what she considered a stage voice, booming, “I can’t find any evidence in my grade book to give you a B, Vera.”

  “But Miss Brighton . . .” Marylin, playing Vera, groaned winsomely. “Without the B, I’ll flunk out of school.”

  BJ: Precisely what you deserve.

  Marylin: But why?

  BJ: For just one example, you slept through class while I read Romeo and Juliet.

  Marylin: I always did wonder how it turned out.

  Marylin read the last line with arch yet adorable innocence, and the little group’s laughter rustled through the dusty wings.

  “Every time you say that, it cracks me up,” chuckled Tommy Wolfe, who pulled his chair slightly forward, a ploy enabling him to gaze unobstructedly at Marylin.

  “Perfect comic timing,” BJ said. Her messy pompadour bobbled as she nodded admiringly.

  “Aw, shucks, thanks,” said Marylin, miming diffidence by scraping the toe of one saddle shoe on the dusty boards.

  The next half-hour she submerged her being into that of a flirtatious scatterbrain.

  Marylin was jarringly superior to her fellow players. Though she modestly accepted this, she had no real comprehension of her own talent. The truth was, she viewed herself as a rather wishy-washy type. So how come on the stage she could turn into a fiery sexpot, a gawky brain, a vulnerably grief-stricken older woman in her twenties, a coldly intelligent bitch, a wise-cracking flirt, an ignorant peasant girl? She empathized with people, of course, but a lot of kids had an ability to fit themselves into another’s shoes. She worked indefatigably, but that wasn’t the entire answer, either. The closest she had come to summing up her abilities was to visualize herself as a clear glass pitcher into which every coloration of a role could be poured.

  The important thing was that in the past two years, acting had become her salvation.

  Marylin, dutifully obeying her mother, had kept those two deducted years a secret. She walked the broad corridors of Beverly High and sat in its well-lit classrooms feeling a fake, a phony, a liar. Each time a messenger brought a note for the teacher, fear clutched her. Had Mr. Mitchell, the ascetic-faced principal, uncovered the truth? Was this a summons prior to public expulsion?

  Yet could she honestly label her years here as unhappy?

  How was unhappiness possible at Beverly High?

  The citizens of Beverly Hills spared no expense in educating their young. Few parents, even the world-famous and the vastly wealthy, considered sending their offspring to private schools. Why should they? Beverly High was a lovingly constructed temple to the goddess of learning. Cream-painted wings welcomed the students. Each morning as they trooped up the rolling green lawns, they saw carved on the lintel above the main doorway the gracious Sanskrit quotation: “Today well lived makes every yesterday a vision of loveliness, every tomorrow a vision of hope.” The campus was lavished with patios, vine-covered pergolas, a square bell tower, tennis courts, playing fields; the school had an elaborate auditorium, professionally equipped shops and sewing and cooking classrooms. Its unique feature was an indoor swimming pool over whose chlorinated surface an electrically controlled parquet floor rolled out for dances or CIF basketball games: the cost of this was defrayed by an oil rig that pumped steadily in a discreet corner of the football field. The teachers, selected with more care than most university professors, presided over a campus that pulsated and jumped with energetic, mostly affluent, beautifully dressed, decently polite kids.

  Marylin would have welcomed their friendship. Before this, she had reached out helplessly, gregariously to her schoolmates, but the secret permeated her like a dread disease, and she feared letting anyone close to her. In the crowded halls boys shuffled along worshipfully at her side; they hovered around her lunch table; a few of the most courageous asked for dates. To succor NolaBee’s belief that she was the belle of belles, Marylin accepted bids to proms and hops. The other invitations she rejected: “What a shame . . . I’m busy that night.” In the inescapable affinities of Drama and Radio Speech, she formed tenuous wisps of friendships that she cut the instant she crossed school boundaries. If anyone, male or female, with a car offered her a ride home, sh
e had a standard excuse: “Thanks, but I promised to pick up some things for Mother.”

  The Waces lived on Charleville in an illegally converted apartment above a garage, and when Marylin got home she would stand on the rickety, paint-peeling steps, inhaling long, slow belly breaths until her shoulder and neck muscles unclenched. She could never let herself respond naturally—and told herself she should be glad of the challenge: she was immersed in a perpetual role, wasn’t she?

  “. . . and now where is that shovel?” asked Tommy Wolfe.

  Marylin replied, “In your hand, loverboy.”

  “End of act one,” said BJ. “Curtain to tumultuous applause.”

  Suddenly from the shadow-lashed darkness under the balcony burst the enthusiastic clapping of one pair of hands. “Bravo, bravo!” called a pleasantly timbred masculine voice. “Is this tumultuous enough?”

  The group squinted in astonishment toward their unseen audience.

  “Linc?” BJ jumped to her feet, raising a hand over her eyes to peer. “Ye gods, it can’t be!”

  “No, it’s Douglas MacArthur in the flesh. I just flew in. BJ, that’s a pretty fair play, even if I do detect Big Joshua’s fine hand.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “About twenty minutes.”

  “I mean, in Beverly Hills.”

  “About thirty minutes. Nobody was home but Coraleen. She suggested you might be here.”

  “Oh, you creep, you rotten creep. Sitting up there and not letting me know! Mother and Daddy’ll kill you for not writing that you’ve got a leave.’ BJ ran down the steps and up the aisle toward a tall young man dressed in a pale blue sweater and gray slacks. They hugged, continuing to talk. From the stage their bantering insults weren’t fully audible, only the ripe affection in their voices. Though the intruder wasn’t in a Navy officer’s uniform, it was obvious who he was. BJ’s older brother. She bragged constantly about Lieutenant (junior grade) Lincoln Fernauld, Beverly High class of ’37, a Navy pilot aboard the Enterprise.

  Arms around each other’s waists, brother and sister strolled in step through the gloom toward the stage, and Marylin, looking at Lincoln Fernauld defined obscurely against the shadows, could see that his was a slender, basketball player’s build with long legs and broad, graceful shoulders. As the duo moved up the steps to stage left, she saw the strong sibling resemblance: the same thick black hair (his was crew-cut) and heavy black eyebrows and craggy nose. It was strange, though, how much more agreeably the features translated onto his long masculine face. His mouth went down on the left side as he smiled at them.