“Yes, he told me. He said he was set to run away. Instead, he went out for the basketball team. He enjoyed playing, enjoyed it a lot. He said you were right.”
“He did?” Joshua shook his head. “Anyway, that leave, when I saw how shot his nerves were, I wanted to hug him, to soothe him, but of course I shouted and argued at the drop of a hat. Even chewed him out for becoming a Navy pilot—I had in mind a safe desk job for him. I was worried as hell, and that made me even more scurrilous. Then he seemed to calm down, to unwind. That was your doing, wasn’t it?”
“Maybe. I think so.”
“You made him very happy.”
“I loved him,” she said simply.
“It’s damn obvious why he was nuts about you. You’re a spectacularly fantastic-looking little dish, but it’s more than that. You two belonged together. You’re a gentle sort, and so was he.” Joshua paused. “Why did you bring me the stories?”
Marylin could feel the heat travel up her throat to her face. To cover her confusion, she rinsed out two cups—every dish they owned was dirty and in the sink.
Joshua kept watching her. His eyes might be the same darkness and shape as Linc’s, but the resemblance ended with flesh and pigmentation. Joshua Fernauld’s eyes were alertly probing, twin instruments voracious for her soul’s secrets. In a flash of insight she realized that Linc’s characters were drawn from someplace within himself, just as his father’s films emerged from acute powers of observation.
“Why?” he repeated.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said.
He leaned forward, continuing to stare at her. The cup in her hand slipped, and she fumbled, catching it maladroitly against her empty, cramping stomach.
He asked, “A baby?”
After a brief hesitation she nodded.
He looked at the faded robe, her drawn, lovely face. “And now?”
“Now it’s too late,” she said, turning away.
“You had a D and C?” His voice was gruff with misery.
She dropped her face into her hands and gave way to the ragged sobs. He reached his arms around her, drawing her to a thick, hard body and the smells of aftershave and sweat. She made no attempt to stop weeping, but let Linc’s weeping father hold her. Both were sobbing for the same reasons, for a sensitive, fine young man whom the war had first bitterly traumatized, then destroyed, and for his baby, whom between them they had contrived to kill.
They were quietly drinking tea when NolaBee came in with her inevitable bulging grocery sack.
“Mama, this is Linc’s father, Mr. Fernauld.”
NolaBee’s pitted cheeks blotched with redness. Marylin, between gasping sobs, had told her of her trip to the Fernaulds’. Setting the bag on the floor, she folded her arms. “We thought the world of your son,” she said with rapid ungraciousness, then added, “Mr. Fernauld, I reckon you needn’t have come visiting Marylin when she’s ill.”
“I understand her illness, Mrs. Wace.”
NolaBee pulled back her thin shoulders, a peppery, acne-scarred little woman facing down a man she certainly had a use for. “You might reckon Marylin is a tramp, but that’s not so. She made a mistake not because she’s a bad girl but because she loved your son. She’s a lady through and through. A Wace, a Fairburn, a Roy, and where we come from, that means a lot. Her great-great-granddaddy was General Fairburn, on Lee’s staff, and—”
Joshua raised a large paw-thick hand. “Peace, Mrs. Wace, peace. We stand at the bier, weeping together.”
She stared at him in confusion and then said, “Marylin, you look right peaky. You sure this man hasn’t been upsetting you again?”
“Mama, he brought me back Linc’s stories. We’ve been talking about them.”
“Humph.” NolaBee’s snort meant she was unconvinced. She looked around. “Where’s Roy?”
“I asked her to go to the library for me.”
“Mrs. Wace, won’t you join us for some of your own tea?” Deliberate charm was in Joshua’s invitation.
NolaBee plumped down in the chair, getting out a cigarette.
Joshua sat next to her. “I was drunk and behaved despicably when Marylin came to the house. It was the worst day of my life, but I promise you, I’m not a lush or a bastard.” He fished a gold lighter from his shirt pocket.
The flame illuminated NolaBee’s drab skin for a long moment. Then she bent to accept his light. “I reckon you’re a bit of one and a whole lot of the other, Mr. Fernauld,” she said with a coquettish smile.
* * *
By the end of the following week, Marylin had recovered enough to return to school.
12
Though most of Beverly High’s wide-flung breadth slept in obsidian dark, the far north windows—the auditorium’s foyer—streamed yellow brightness. The school’s triangular parking lot had long ago filled, and nearby streets crawled with cars squandering rationed gasoline in the search for a space.
It was May 17, the night of Vera, the junior play.
The cast (including Marylin), the stage crew, BJ, and a jittery Miss Nathans had been at the school since four this afternoon.
Night made the familiar steps exotic, strange, and Roy and Althea fell silent as they climbed. Roy wore a peculiar, knee-length crimson cape which had been in some long-ago trousseau, a nose-thumbing gesture at the sea of camel topcoats. Althea, too, defied convention with a chubby of some odd, ultra-soft gray fur.
A few steps below them were NolaBee and Joshua Fernauld. At the last minute, Mrs. Fernauld had suffered a recurrence of some chronic, unnamed ailment that often confined her thin body to bed, so Joshua, alone and tardy, had picked them up. Althea was already in the apartment, sharing the scrambled-egg-sandwich dinner.
NolaBee was saying, “. . . that you’re in for a big surprise tonight.” All keyed-up, she had been talking ceaselessly.
“Life is full of ’em,” retorted Joshua Fernauld. “But my BJ, Lord bless her, has a mouth on her, and we’ve heard nothing but Vera, Vera, Vera for months. She’s served us up every goddamn surprise there could be.”
NolaBee chuckled. “Marylin—”
“I anticipate being bowled over by your lovely.”
“You aren’t going to be even the teeniest bit sorry about . . .” NolaBee lowered her voice confidentially so that Roy could not hear the rest of her remark.
In the month since Mr. Fernauld’s visit, the two families had become quite close. The Fernaulds had invited the Waces to a barbecue supper in the garden of their palace, where Joshua had entranced them—especially NolaBee—with the inside dope about movies he had written and directed, the bickering, the foul-ups, the famous stars. The Fernaulds had taken the Waces to two screenings at the Academy, a shabby private theater on Melrose, where Roy had been struck dumb at the sight of so many known faces in human size, and had even been introduced to a pair of genuine greats in the living flesh, Ronald Reagan and his wife, Jane Wyman.
The two girls pushed ahead into the vestibule, where, from the ceiling, was strung an enormous poster:
VERA
a play by Barbara Jane Fernauld starring
Marylin Wace and Thomas Wolfe
Diagonally across the ticket window was slashed a streamer printed SOLD OUT, and lines waited at the two auditorium doors for girls with black sashes to take the tickets. Inside studying their programs were many of the student body, Mr. Mitchell, the principal, and other faculty members, as well as the doctors and lawyers, the star sports columnist, the famous composer, the movie people, plumbers, millionaires, shopkeepers and divorcees who made up the big and little fish parents of Beverly Hills High School.
As Roy and Althea moved to the front of the auditorium, several groups of girls smirked or raised eyebrows. Roy flushed. Althea gazed right back with her cool little smile. All cover-up. Though she had applied her cosmetics and worn her mother’s chinchilla to attract attention, she shrank from the critical eyes. Althea was balanced on a tense plateau between superiority and inferiority, betwe
en shyness and hauteur. She would accept nothing less than the right crowd, agonizing to be noticed and accepted by them, yet she was too timid to make any move toward their company. And Roy, intensely loyal, knowing Althea’s indifference was a pose, allowed herself to be locked into one of those symbiotic alliances so commonplace in early adolescence.
The girls jostled into the last available seats in the third row. Several rows behind them, NolaBee’s old violet felt hat bobbed animatedly toward Joshua Fernauld’s thick shock of prematurely gray hair.
The overhead lights dimmed in uncertain waves, and a spot wavered against the folds of crimson velvet. The left curtain pulled back and Miss Nathans stepped onto the proscenium. Her Viking figure was encased in tight purple rayon, and a huge corsage of red roses and silver ribbon bristled on her shoulder.
“I take great, yet sad pleasure,” she intoned in her most resonant theatrical voice, “in announcing that the junior class has voted to dedicate their annual play to the memory of Lieutenant Abraham Lincoln Fernauld, Beverly High, summer of 1937. At intermission the Minute Maids will pass among you. They will be wearing the red-white-and-blue aprons that are familiar to students. We urge our parents and guests to dig down deep and buy war stamps and bonds in honor of Lieutenant Fernauld, who—like many another Beverly Hills High School graduate—has given the full measure of his devotion that we might continue to enjoy the fruits of freedom and democracy.” She paused. “Would you please join me in a moment of tribute to a gallant young man.”
The spotlight shifted jerkily to the flag.
People rustled to their feet; the men—and two women—wearing uniforms snapped up their hands, holding their salutes. A backstage bugle sounded taps, slowly, truly. This was one of those moments that redeem warfare by permitting humans to emerge from their fixed, immutable loneliness. The Beverly High auditorium was welded into one being, the poignant notes universally shivering on the skin and bringing ubiquitous tears. Roy’s eyes dampened solemnly not only for Linc but for all the immortal dead, for all the brave young heroes who rode eternally into the wild blue yonder.
At her side, Althea whispered derisively, “How tacky can you get? Cashing in on BJ’s brother to sell a few dollars’ worth of stamps.”
That’s Althea all over, Roy thought, blinking. She never gives in to mushy group emotions, she has a kind of hard honor. Maybe her family’s royalty.
After a long minute’s darkness to allow the audience to dissolve its somber mood, the curtain edged apart on a living-room set.
Marylin was alone onstage. She wore a red sweater and pleated plaid skirt, saddle shoes. The lights picked up the gold glints in her hair as she hunched over a very large, thick book. Waiting until the scattered applause had faded, she ran a finger across the page, lifting her head to frown with her painted eyes.
Without saying a word, she had limned the dumb bobby soxer. She was Vera the adorable dimwit. After a perfectly timed pause, she hurled the encyclopedic tome to the boards, and while the audience roared with laughter, she turned on a prop radio. An instant too late the “Hut Sut Song” blared. Marylin bounced around center stage doing a gay little solo jitterbug as she sang the mindless words in her husky little voice.
In less than ninety seconds alone on the stage, she had stamped an evanescent lightness on the evening.
Poor Tommy Wolfe overturned a prop chair and drew hoots of laughter which demoralized him into going up in his lines. The inadvertent clangor of the air-raid alarm, a repetitive series of three blasts of the bells, jarred the others into going up in their lines. Nothing could dismantle the joyous, comic mood set by Marylin.
Among the shaky, made-up high-school kids, she played Vera with the authority of a star.
Roy found it impossible to believe that this ebullient dummy lighting up the stage was Marylin, Marylin who yesterday had wept her private tears, then crumpled on her bed as if her delicate bones had just been stretched on the rack, a silent misery that had caused NolaBee to dart continuous worried glances at her.
The first-act curtain brought thunderous applause. The bustling Minute Maids sold well over the two thousand dollars’ worth of war stamps and bonds that had been set as the entire year’s quota for the junior class.
The response to the final, second-act curtain was yet more electrifying, a hooting, stamping, whistling pandemonium. “Vera, Vera, Vera,” the audience chanted when the cast stepped forward to take their group bows. Curtain call followed curtain call.
NolaBee, Joshua, Althea, and Roy forced their way amid the congratulatory throng to the green room.
Backstage, there was an orgy of kissing, giggling, hugging by Miss Nathans, the stage hands and cast. Marylin, in her sweat-drenched costume, was the center of weeping girls and swains with shy, adoring eyes. She radiated excitement, her heavy stage makeup glowed.
BJ had her partisans, too. Joshua shoved them aside to lift his plump, large-boned daughter from the dusty boards in a great bear hug.
“By God Almighty, Beej, I better look to my laurels!”
“Daddy, you know the lines that got the biggest laughs were yours.” BJ, having something to brag about, suddenly turned modest.
NolaBee was embracing Marylin. “My baby. I was so proud.”
“A star was born right on our own Beverly High stage,” said Roy, her wisecracking tone sinking timorously downward. Marylin’s performance had awed her: it was as if superhuman plasma had been injected to blaze within her sister’s veins.
“The rest of the show was lousy,” said Althea. “But you were something else, Marylin.”
Marylin turned her gaze on her sister’s odd friend. “Why, thank you, Althea. But all of us were super—until that darn air-raid alert went off.” Her vivid smile showed this was not intended as a reproof, but as a generous sharing of success with her fellow thespians.
Joshua draped his thick arm over Marylin’s shoulders in a demihug. “And as for you, star lady, I’m dumbstruck!”
“It was a great audience, Mr. Fernauld.”
“Great audience, bull! You were magnificent, you quiet little thing, you! God knows why I’m so astonished—I’ve been around enough top actors to know it’s basically an introvert’s business.” He released her. “Has your mother told you about my nefarious wheeling dealing?”
Marylin turned to NolaBee. “Mama?”
The small brown eyes glinted with triumphant secrecy. “Mr. Fernauld’s ruined the surprise.”
“But—” Marylin started. She was interrupted by a surge of the ecstatic crowd as a fresh wave of admirers fell on her.
“I reckon we’ll have time to talk about it when we celebrate,” NolaBee called over the shrilling. “Mr. Fernauld is taking all of us to the Tropics.”
* * *
Sugie’s Tropics on Rodeo Drive was one of the movie hangouts often mentioned in the columns of Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons. To the open lanai and the famous Rain Room came Errol Flynn with his jailbait cuties, Tyrone Power, Robert Taylor, Johnny Weissmuller, Ida Lupino, Hedy Lamarr, Ingrid Bergman—all of them.
The restaurant was dimly lit, and though Roy craned her neck it was impossible to see if any stars were hidden in booths behind fake palms and ferns. Joshua ordered enormous platters of crisp fried shrimp, richly meaty spareribs, and rumaki. Roy, who had never eaten Chinese food, devoured most of the plump, bacon-wrapped chicken livers.
NolaBee, BJ, Roy, and Althea (who was spending the night at the Waces) leaned over the table in a postmortem of Vera, their excited voices rising above the blare of the band’s continuous reprises of “Sweet Leilani” and “The Hawaiian War Chant.”
Marylin was silent, swirling the ice in her ginger ale. Her extravagant vivacity had drained and her lovely features were tired and sorrowful.
A camera girl wearing a flowered sarong stood over their table. “How about a picture?”
Joshua glared up morosely from his third bourbon.
But NolaBee said, “It’d be a right nice memento of the
night for the girls.”
So the four crowded together on one side of the curved booth. Roy and Althea wet their lips in a glamorpuss way, BJ pushed a heavy black strand of hair into her pompadour, and Marylin formed her beautiful smile a shade mechanically.
The flash bulb flared, and the photographer inquired, “How many copies?”
“Six,” Joshua said. “One for everybody.”
When they were again spread out in the booth, NolaBee lit a cigarette, blowing a smoke ring. “My, Marylin, aren’t you the teeniest bit curious about the surprise?”
Marylin looked at Joshua. “Mr. Fernauld, you said you had been wheeling and dealing?”
“Of course you know who Art Garrison is, Marylin?” Joshua asked, and without waiting for a reply, continued. “Art Garrison is founder and great white chieftain of Magnum Pictures.”
“Magnum!” BJ cried. “That sausage factory!”
“Pardon me, Miss Beej Know-it-all! Okay, I grant you Magnum’s not Metro or Fox or even mine own Paramount, but it rates about with Columbia and it’s miles above Republic. The point is that Art Garrison is my buddy, my poker buddy. Last week I let him win two pots in succession, then prevailed on him to set up a screen test.”
NolaBee gave her throaty chuckle, Roy gasped, and Althea and BJ stared admiringly at Marylin.
She clasped her empty glass with both small hands.
“No need to be nervous,” said Joshua, his booming voice strangely gentle. “All it means is that Art’ll arrange for some footage of you so he can see how you photograph.”
“Marylin, just what you’ve been longing for,” said NolaBee. “Aren’t you going to thank Mr. Fernauld?”
“After what I saw tonight,” said Joshua, “Magnum will be thanking me.”
“No,” Marylin whispered.
“What?” NolaBee’s voice broke with surprise.
“I can’t.”
Joshua said, “Sure you can. I never saw anyone with more of the right stuff. Talent oozes from your pores. All you need is an agent with clout, somebody to speak up for you. Leland Hayward is like a brother to me.”
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