When Althea was in this kind of a snit, any remark, however innocuous or placatory, was a flung gauntlet.
Without further conversation they listened to the dreary movement which, Althea told Roy, was composed in a presentiment of death.
Afterward they went down to the tennis court. Roy had learned to play only last semester at Beverly, while Althea’s years of private lessons had endowed her with a crushing forehand and a near-professional serve, both of which she used with calculated determination. It wasn’t a game, it was a rout.
They ate dinner alone in the breakfast room.
To Roy it seemed weeks before M’liss came up to say she would drive her home. Althea elected not to accompany them. At the side door she said in a low, swift voice, “It’s been hideous, hasn’t it?”
“Not really.” Roy’s voice cracked. “Oh, Althea, you were so mean.”
“It’s this ghastly place, Roy, it’s nothing to do with you.”
“Positively?”
“You’re my best friend. You always will be.”
“Honestly?”
“All my life.”
Roy opened the door of the gray Chevy feeling happier than she had all day.
* * *
That night Roy lay awake a long time. NolaBee was still riveting wing assemblies at Hughes. Marylin’s quiet breathing sounded on the other side of the wardrobe: all at once she gave a muffled cry that seemed to hang in the stuffy air of the apartment.
“Marylin,” Roy whispered.
The bewildered sobbing continued. Since Linc’s death, Marylin often cried in her sleep. Roy padded across the dark room to touch her sleeping sister’s shoulder.
The piteous little sounds quieted, but Roy stood in the darkness, her hand poised compassionately for several minutes before she returned to bed.
Were there really morbid disorders behind Belvedere’s oleandertangled box-hedge? Wasn’t it possible that Althea, embarrassed about hiding the truth, had heaped on insinuations of dark, dire secrets to cover up her lies?
Roy squeezed her eyes shut until she saw red dashes. She despised herself for thinking this way, yet she couldn’t stop questioning the mysteries surrounding Althea’s relationship to her parents.
She was still puzzling things through a hour later when NolaBee unlocked the door. She tiptoed around, undressing, washing, then came over to Roy’s bed. Roy could smell the staleness of work, the cigarette smoke, on her mother.
“Roy, you ’wake?”
“Yes.” Roy held open the blanket. “Come on in.”
NolaBee snuggled down on the cot, as she often did with Marylin, pulling the covers over her, whispering, “Well, how was it at the Cunningham’s? What did you do over there? Did you meet them, Althea’s parents? What time did M’liss bring you home? What did you have for dinner? Did you have a nice time?”
“They live north of Sunset in a huge, huge mansion that makes the Fernauld’s place look pipsqueak.”
“I reckoned they were very well-fixed. Go on, hon, tell me.”
Roy whispered enthusiastically about the forty-three rooms, the tennis court, the swimming pool with its own house, the six-hole golf course, the vast shady porch where they’d lunched—“It wasn’t truffles under glass or caviar, like you’d expect, just plain food.” She described Althea’s perfect room, adding with enthralled awe, “I guess you’d call it a suite.”
“Her folks sound right nice. Why do you figure Althea didn’t want you to meet them?”
Roy’s eyes closed. She had always yearned to have such a nightwhispered conversation, the kind Marylin and her mother shared, but the price for such closeness was too steep. Talking about Althea’s veiled hints regarding her parents—or her own reservations—would be exposing her friend.
“Oh, a lot of kids like to keep stuff to themselves. Mama, I’m dead tired.”
“Good night, curly-top, sleep tight,” NolaBee said, kissing her forehead, and climbing out of the cot.
16
Althea, too, was awake.
She lay on her back, the position in which she normally fell asleep, but her muscles were taut and her face hot as the events of the day whirled in her mind. This morning, when Mrs. Wace had forced the issue that Roy visit Belvedere, Althea had fought off nausea. It was that old, bitter sickness. Would she always experience this furious helplessness with people?
As a small child at Belvedere, she had found life bearable, even happy sometimes. A governess and tutors had given her lessons until she was eleven; then she had started Westlake School for Girls. Sensitive and timid, entering school late, she was a natural patsy. When the other girls discovered she was part of the Coyne family, they immediately nicknamed her “Your Highness.” Althea, on the surface of her mind, understood that they picked on her because her wealth made her different, yet behind conscious thought hovered the question: could her schoolmates see through her flesh to that unmentionable shame? Did they have some clue, undetectable by her, yet visible to their eyes, that she was a pariah?
She had battled until her parents reluctantly allowed her to transfer to Beverly High. She had made her first friend. The hours she spent with Roy at the Waces’ funny little apartment were the happiest of her life. Losing Roy was more than she could bear, so she had never risked inviting her to Belvedere. Yet miraculously, Roy’s brown eyes had still shone with affection even after seeing the place and hearing her mother’s patronym. This fidelity, for some odd reason, made Althea think less of Roy. And possibly Althea’s feelings of superiority over her friend had brought about that one dangerous moment during the Tchaikovsky album when she had been tempted to blurt out the deep, heinous truth about herself.
Althea shifted restlessly, opening her eyes to stare into the blackness. The chintz curtains were triple-lined, so no hint of light penetrated the room.
On the New Year’s Eve of her tenth year it had been dark like this. . . . She shivered as memory rose up to confront her.
* * *
The sound intruded above the rustle of branches and the tenacious throb of crickets, a spontaneous creaking within her room.
Althea’s heart banged heavily as she jarred awake. Drawing on her deepest wellspring of courage, she opened her eyes.
There was no night-light!
In the terrifying blackness, her breath burst from her lungs in a gasp of terror.
A big girl of ten shouldn’t be afraid of sleeping in a room without the bedside lamp, or so her mother often repeated with a warm hug. Her father had worked out a compromise—Daddy was a genius at smoothing things between them. He suggested placing a small night-light in Althea’s dressing room, with the door left ajar so that a slim beam pointed toward the twin beds. How could she have forgotten to turn it on?
Then she heard another sound, this like the panting breath of an animal.
Althea’s mind raced through her litany of terrors, the ghost stories she had heard from M’liss and the horror tales she had read about malevolent spirits who refused to die with their fleshly abodes, foul incubi, werewolves. But those dreads belonged either in the past or in some remote Teutonic mountains. This was the present, some moment between December 31, 1938, and January 1, 1939—Daddy had brought a bottle of champagne to her room and he, Mother and she had gravely clinked each other’s glasses, then her parents had gone off to their New Year’s party. This wasn’t a place where supernatural beings dwelled, it was Beverly Hills, California, USA.
“Who’s . . . there?” The night blackness swallowed her quaver.
This time the creaking sounded closer. It was footsteps.
Once a cat had climbed up to her parakeet’s cage, and that poor bird’s frantic acceleration of wings was how her heart now felt.
“Go away.” Her whisper was shaky and thin. “Please, please, go away. . . .”
A body lurched onto her bed, shaking it. Gasping and hot, it enveloped her in the overwhelming stench of liquor. With a jagged groan, it crushed her chest against something crisply stiff
, mashing its scalding, moist face to hers.
The cheek prickled. The crispness was a dress shirt. It’s not a ghoulish horror, Althea thought. It’s a mere human mortal.
“My daddy keeps a gun,” she whispered, hoping she sounded brave, knowing she didn’t. “He’ll come in and kill you.”
The man put his mouth over hers in something that she did not recognize as a kiss, for it was all slobber, smells of stale liquor, teeth, and a huge, predatory tongue. She struggled, flailing her hands, kicking her bare feet. But she was a thin, terrified ten-year-old, her assailant a grown man.
His hands fumbled on her shoulders and down her flat, gasping chest in a caress that was more insidious than cruel, his fingers forming rough circles on her belly button. With a series of swift, rough yanks, he pulled off her pajama bottoms. His hungry fingers burrowed in her butt and the most private place that nobody else touched. Even when she was little, M’liss had always handed her the sponge to wash the convoluted creases. She knew that these rubbing, pressing fingers were not only painful and terrifying, but also shameful.
She tried to squirm away, and, failing, clamped her thighs together. One swift, rough movement of his knee pried her legs apart.
Suddenly he released her. She could feel him fumble with his clothes before he crawled on top of her, crushing the breath from her. His heart pounded through the starched shirt, beating with the same wild rapidity as her own.
Again he fingered her private place—no, he was shoving a hard, pulsing thing there. Big, huge. What could he intend? He was pushing and battering until the pain was unendurable.
She screamed in terrified agony as the enormous thing somehow went inside her.
She was torn apart with pain. As the thing jerked back and forth, she screamed again and again, but the gasping mouth over hers muffled the sounds.
The heavy body convulsed, and then the torso raised up and she could breathe.
Tears were streaming down her face, there was a hot, unpleasant smell, and the bed was wet.
The mattress springs shifted as he got up. Footsteps staggered away.
The bedroom door opened, admitting a faint light from the corridor.
Gripping the doorjamb, his evening clothes disheveled, stood her father.
The door closed quickly and quietly.
Althea lay shuddering and shaking with convulsive sobs, hurt radiating in waves from the violated core of her.
Now she understood that abominable freaks of nature are not the real danger. You are destroyed by those close to you, those you love and trust.
She had no idea how long she lay there, but after a while she moved stiffly to turn on the bedside lamp. She was oozing blood and there was blood all over the sheet.
She dragged into the bathroom. She washed herself and pulled on underpants, stuffing them with hankies. Then she gathered up the soiled sheets and her pajamas, shoving the wadded bundle into the back of her dressing-room closet. Tomorrow, she thought, I’ll bury everything in those tall papyrus behind the Italian gardens. Nobody goes up there.
Her instinct to hide the evidence came from a shame that had penetrated the marrow of her not yet hardened bones. Her father was strong and brave, the most wonderful man alive, so she must be unspeakably wicked for such a thing to have happened.
* * *
The following day was very hot. Althea and Roy went to Roadside. They lay on their towels, giggling each time a boy charged over the blazing sand on his way to the surf.
Althea made no mention of Belvedere or the previous day. Roy avoided the subject too.
17
That fall there was no question of Marylin’s returning to Beverly High. If she were under eighteen she would have had to attend classes in the clapboard bungalow that was the Magnum schoolhouse, but NolaBee produced her birth certificate and Marylin was absolved.
Once the edges were rubbed from her awe as a newcomer, Marylin realized that the studio was a war-mobilized factory similar to Hughes, except that rather than building aircraft, Magnum employed a large group of highly nervous people to keep up the morale of civilians and the armed services by grinding out every budgetary level of film—and, not incidentally, making abnormally large profits.
To NolaBee’s disappointed chagrin, the studio put no effort behind making anything of Marylin. Art Garrison had dismissed her from his mind as soon as she was turned over to the Magnum department that groomed “talent,” the generic term for “actor.” Marylin Wace—the powers that be had not gone to the minor effort of changing her name—lined up as one more pretty young fledgling actress whose option could be dropped at the end of the year. Her publicity consisted of one glossy that displayed her lovely curves in a two-piece bathing suit, a shot that rather than making her appear cheesecake sexy showed her as luminously vulnerable, plus a layout in Modern Screen with three other Magnum starlets.
Marylin, grieving and guilt-ridden, lacked that pathological drive so indispensable for success. She had no plans for self-aggrandizement. In a town of voraciously ambitious beauties, she had come this far only because of her mother’s prodding maneuvers and Joshua Fernauld’s apparent need for penitence. She was a dispensable cog in the factory wheel. In November, the end of the first six-month period, her option was picked up. She could just as easily have been dropped.
Through the fall she played a variety of silent bits.
* * *
Just before Christmas, Roy brought home the news that BJ’s mother had died.
The Waces had seen nothing of Ann or Joshua Fernauld since Marylin had signed her contract back in June, yet to the three of them her death seemed a monstrous unraveling at the top of the fabric of Beverly Hills. To them, Ann Fernauld’s bony, smart presence epitomized that rarefied, exotic creature, an upper-echelon Industry wife. Marylin wept for Linc’s mother. NolaBee and Roy wore somber faces for a few days.
Immediately following the private funeral, Joshua and BJ drove down to the Fernauld house in Palm Springs.
The Waces mailed their condolence notes to the desert resort.
* * *
In December Marylin was assigned to Angels, a quickie espionage film, and given two lines, her first speaking part.
Early on the morning of January 3, the first workday in 1944, Marylin was on Stage 2, where Angels was shooting. Her minuscule role was that of a tough, collaborative French demimonde, a prime case of miscasting. In her skintight print dress, with her hair coiled elaborately atop her head, wearing screen makeup—orange Pan-Cake, false eyelashes, and nearly black lipstick—she looked a sad, sweet child forced by the most harrowing of circumstances into the streets. She sat on a folding chair well out of range of a brightly lit bustle of activity that surrounded a sleazy brasserie minus a ceiling and front wall. The property master was straightening the interior under the shrill-voiced scrupulousness of a buxom elderly script girl whose job was to ascertain that no prop had strayed from its position on the previous day’s shooting.
Marylin’s character was to wriggle her derriere across the brasserie set-up, and she gazed at the marble tables, envisioning her undulations.
She retained her ability to lose herself in a role. Otherwise she was not getting over Linc’s death at all. From the beginning she had dreamed of him, but the last few months the dreams had taken on a ruthlessly sexual dimension from which she would awaken hot and sweating, her breath coming fast, her thighs clenched together.
These joinings with Linc were not dreamlike. They did not fade or shift insubstantially in the manner of dreams. He encompassed her flesh with such fully contoured sensory verisimilitude that she had begun to entertain a furtive belief that the original missing-in-action report had been correct: either Lieutenant (jg) Abraham Lincoln Fernauld was alive on some remote atoll or else constant mourning had driven her around the bend. Who but a madwoman could share such an overpowering erotic passion with a man whose firm flesh had long since dissolved into warm Pacific currents? Her body, familiar friend who told her when
it was time to eat and sleep, her body must possess knowledge that the Navy Department did not.
She gave a tremulous, unconscious sigh, unaware that Joshua Fernauld had emerged from behind a nearby backdrop and stood watching her.
“Happy New Year,” he said.
She blinked in disbelief. Roy had passed on the info that BJ and Joshua were planning to stay away a full month.
“Mr. Fernauld. We heard you were in Palm Springs.” She paused, adding with delicate and sincere sympathy, “We were so very sad about Mrs. Fernauld. She was a fine person, a lovely, generous lady.”
“Yes, I got your notes. No need for sadness, Marylin. The last months were monstrous for Ann. The big C is no delicate disease.”
“Cancer?” Marylin’s low, soft voice wavered. The word was never printed in an obituary, seldom spoken aloud.
“Yes, cancer. She had a hysterectomy two years ago, then a breast removed last winter, but it had already spread through her. If that merciful Jesus of my boyhood truly existed, she would have gone before Linc.” The heavy, overtanned features sagged.
For the first time, Marylin found herself pitying Linc’s overpowering father. “You’ve had a terrible year, Mr. Fernauld,” she said softly.
He shrugged and pulled a folding chair next to hers. “Joshua. It’s really not too difficult to master. Three syllables. Josh-yew-ah.”
“Joshua.”
“You’re a quick study,” he said. “Marylin, Random House wants to publish Linc’s novel.”
Months ago—it must have been at the beginning of summer—Joshua had borrowed the stories for a week to copy.
“Publish?” she asked blankly. “Novel?”
“A bit of stitchery with a few unifying paragraphs. Presto, a novel. I sent it directly to Bennett Cerf.”
Her enameled fingernails pressed into the flowered print over her thighs. “You shouldn’t have.”
“Why? It’s the finest, most sensitive work to come out of this war, and I am quoting Cerf.”
A balding young man had come over: he was Johnny Kaplan, the second assistant director. “Hi, Marylin,” he said.
Everything and More Page 13