Roy asked, “From where?”
“Up north, Marin County,” he said. “Hey, Roy, stop!”
They had reached the block-long Beverly Hills post office that by some architectural blunder faced grandiosely onto the tracks. Roy swerved to the curb, jamming down the brake. Dwight jumped out, then leaned on the window. “Thank you.”
“De nada,” Roy said.
“It won’t be nada in one second,” Althea said. “The police will be upon you.”
Roy gave Dwight her sparkle smile and pressed on the accelerator. They swerved around the corner.
“Yech,” Althea said.
“I thought he was c and c. Also intelligent.”
“I heard no sign of brilliance, only that he was 4-F.”
“He never said he was. Maybe he’s a medical student or underage.”
“How about that limp?” Althea asked.
“What limp?”
“You didn’t notice?”
“No.”
“You need glasses.”
“Who, me? Hawkeye? Listen, if I didn’t see, it’s nothing. Maybe he sprained his ankle playing football.”
“Who are you suddenly? St. Bernadette of the cripples?”
Roy didn’t even try for a comeback. Althea had sunk into one of her unpredictable morose spells.
The air was not fully clear between them until they left Warner’s chattering about the Bette Davis character in Mr. Skeffington.
Without discussion, they drove to Simon’s.
As usual, the brilliantly lit drive-in lot was jammed with cars full of young people, as were the two interior semicircles of counters and booths. From counters at the center constantly flowed laden trays, which were picked up by high-stepping, short-skirted carhops. Energetic ribbons of bebop twined from every car window.
Simon’s was the ground zero of Beverly High’s social life. On these summer evenings, everybody with the least pretension of being hep wound up here. Althea, who was driving, had to cruise around endlessly before a slot in the fourth row was vacated.
In their marked station wagon they were amply conspicuous targets for masculine innuendos while they waited the routine thirty-five minutes for pretty, blond Kitty, the most popular carhop, to take their orders of club sandwiches and lemon Cokes.
“Hi, Roy . . . hi, Althea,” said a quiet masculine voice.
Dwight Hunter had one saddle shoe on the running board.
“Well, fancy meeting you here,” Althea said in a level cadence. “Still hitching?”
“I walked over.”
“Then,” Althea said, “you better trot on in. I see a free stool at the counter.”
Roy blurted, “I’m still stuffed from dinner. But idiot that I am, I ordered a club sandwich.”
“Want me to help you out?” Dwight asked.
“That’s the idea,” Roy retorted happily.
He opened the back door, slamming it shut with a firm, satisfying thwack.
Wound up for disaster—any crude crack directed from a nearby car—yet intoxicated with pleasure, Roy perched on her knee, her arm braced on the back of the seat to face Dwight, and asked questions. This summer he had graduated from Menlo, a prep school near Stanford, his father, a vice-president at Onyx Motor Company, had been promoted from their San Francisco plant to head up the assembly in Glendale, where they now spewed out tanks. Kitty returned with their trays, affixing them to the rolled-down windows.
Althea spoke for the first time since Dwight had entered the station wagon. “What about your foot?”
“Leg, you mean,” he said in a subdued voice. “I had polio when I was a little kid.”
“So you’re 4-F?”
“My right leg is only a little shorter. I haven’t taken the physical, but I’ve heard of cases like me being inducted. If I am, the Army’s hardly gaining much in the way of a soldier.”
Roy watched him, her eyes round, her freckled, sun-reddened forehead creased with concentration. “What do you mean?”
“To be honest, I’ve never understood the quirky thing inside us humans that makes us put on uniforms and march out to kill our own kind,” Dwight said.
Althea said, “Sounds like conscientious-objector talk to me.”
“It must take a lot of courage to be one, a conchie,” Roy said softly.
“A lot of courage,” Dwight replied. His smallish features dissolved into a boyish uncertainty.
And Roy rushed in. “Heard the new Tommy Dorsey, ‘No Love, No Nothin’’?”
Then the carhop was smiling her blank, pretty smile into the car. “Will that be all?”
Dwight reached for the check.
Roy smiled her thanks at him. Then she heard herself say, “We’re the only Waces in the book.” Blood rushed to her sunburned face. Wrong, colossally, stupefyingly wrong! If Dwight wanted her number, he had a larynx.
As he moved around the thick-parked cars, Roy noted that he stepped with idiosyncratic force on his right foot.
“See?” Althea said. “That conchie talk’s cover-up, sheer cover-up.”
“He can’t help having polio. And you didn’t have to tell him he was yellow right to his face,” Roy snapped. She was furious at Althea—and at herself for making that excruciating gaffe. “I like him.”
“There’s no accounting for tastes.”
“Look, maybe we shouldn’t go to the beach tomorrow. I’d like to stick around the house a bit.”
Althea’s hand tightened on the gearshift until the knuckles went white, yet her voice retained that arch inflection. “All alone by the telephone?”
“I don’t want to go to the beach, all right?”
“As I live and breathe,” Althea said. She turned the ignition key, her face set in her superior-sad-frightened look.
For once Roy neither relented nor backed down.
20
I quarreled with Althea, Roy thought when she awoke the next morning. Her lack of guilt or dread astounded her. I made a jerk of myself with Dwight Hunter. Even this distressing fact did not dampen her buoyant well-being.
Stretching, she conjured up Dwight Hunter, his grave, slow voice, his even features.
After a while she pulled on the long, old cardigan that had belonged to her father and now served her as a bathrobe, and went into the bright, disordered kitchen. NolaBee sat at the table, a saucerless cup of coffee on the Los Angeles Examiner, which was opened to the drama page. As Roy came in, she smiled. “You slept mighty late. It’s after eleven. After the picture show, did you girls go someplace?” She was at the refrigerator, taking out a half-filled tumbler. “Here, hon. I squeezed too many oranges when I fixed Marylin’s.”
“Thank you, Mama. We went to Simon’s, and this interesting UCLA man I know was there.”
NolaBee took a fresh cigarette, her small, alert eyes twinkling on Roy. “What about Althea? Was there a beau for Althea?”
Roy shook her head.
“I’ve been meaning to mention this, Roy. Seems like it’s time for you to branch out a little on your own. Sometimes Althea can be standoffish, and men don’t like that. You’re bright and cheerful. Lots of men goin’ to fall for my curlytop.”
“Mama, I did something awful.” Roy swallowed. “I gave him my phone number.”
“’Course you did.”
“It doesn’t seem pushy to you?”
“Pushy? How else could he call? Roy, you’re going to have to learn to have some confidence around men. Remember, you’re a Fairburn and a Wace.” NolaBee tilted her head fondly, surveying her younger daughter’s freckled, embarrassed face. “And a right nice-looking girl.”
Roy, anxieties propitiated, sipped at the pith-laden orange juice with its not-just-squeezed flatness.
NolaBee ran her finger down the column. “Listen to this, Roy, from Louella Parsons, ‘Word from Paramount is that Island will be the box-office smash of the year! And rumor hath it that its lovely new star, Rain Fairburn, is seeing mucho of Joshua Fernauld, who penned the script from hi
s hero son’s novel.’ That’s real nice publicity, it’s good for Marylin. Wouldn’t the fans laugh if they knew the truth?”
“Mama . . .” Roy chewed at a bitter orange seed. “Maybe she likes him.”
“’Course she does. Mr. Fernauld is Linc’s father. And just look at how he’s helped her. Why, she wouldn’t be anyplace without him.”
“I mean, the way the newspaper says.”
“You’re bein’ silly, Roy. Why, he’d easier be my conquest—he’s older than me.” Refilling her coffee cup, NolaBee frowned. “She ought to have some proper beau by now.”
Roy nodded absently. Snips of music floated ethereally through her head.
At the ring of the telephone, she jumped up and ran.
It was Dwight. “Are you busy this afternoon?” he asked.
“No,” she breathed solemnly.
“I have a class until three . . . okay if I come over right after?”
“That’d be groovy.”
At two she was ready in her new blue-and-white-checked cotton sunsuit.
At 3:37 the doorbell buzzed. Before, she had been in the car with Dwight; now she realized he was shorter than she had imagined, only a couple of inches taller than she. She smiled at him, trying to think of some witty remark, but he was so deep-minded, a real brain.
“Uhh, can I get you something?” she stammered.
“I’m dying of thirst.”
“Water or lemonade?”
“Any beer in the house?”
“For that I have to see your ID,” she retorted.
He laughed. Elation jumped through her, and her nervousness vanished.
They carried their glasses to the backyard with its pungent, uncut grass—NolaBee ignored the lawn mower, concentrating on the victory garden along the wall. Facing each other on the glider, they rocked idly, easily, back and forth.
“Do you know my brother, Pete?” he asked. “Peter Hunter. He’s a junior at Beverly High.”
For a moment the motion of the swing nauseated her. School and that idiotic unearned reputation! “No,” she mumbled, shaking her head.
Dwight moved his knee, touching her calf with his own.
Her flesh trembled and her forebodings evaporated. He leaned forward, lightly touching his lips to hers. Every part of her concentrated on that sensitive pressure, her very soul seemed connected to him through their joined lips.
The front door opened and NolaBee, singing “Begin the Beguine” loudly, moved through the house to the kitchen. Opening the screen door, she stuck out the old blue turban that she had enlivened with a large rhinestone Scottie. “Well, you have company,” she said.
Roy introduced them. For the first time she felt an edginess that somebody might not fall for her vivacious mother. But wasn’t she the exact opposite of the carefully put-together north-of-Santa Monica ladies?
NolaBee chattered cordially a few minutes before remarking, “I’m frying up a pair of chickens for dinner and that’s way too much for us three women. I’d sure appreciate it, Dwight, if you’d help us out.”
“I don’t want to put you to any trouble, Mrs. Wace.”
“Trouble? We’re just going to sit out here on the porch and have a picnic.”
“I’d love to stay, then.”
While he telephoned his mother, Roy whispered, “Mama, doesn’t he look exactly like Van Johnson?”
“Mmm, maybe a little, around the nose and chin. Yes, I think I see it.”
Marylin, gorgeous with only lipstick and her hair yanked back into a ponytail, got home around six, and a few minutes later Joshua Fernauld drove up in his enviable British car.
The patio lacked furniture, so the five of them sat on the low cement-block wall of the patio, eating hot, crispy chicken and biscuits dripping with honey. Roy noted that Mr. Fernauld planted his large self next to Marylin, an unimportant observation that faded in the woozy delights of sitting so close to Dwight that their arms sometimes nudged.
After supper, Mr. Fernauld offered Dwight a lift home.
Roy said, “You don’t have to leave yet, do you?”
“Now, Roy,” NolaBee admonished, “have you forgotten? We’re going on over to the Morgans’.”
Roy, who never willingly visited the Morgans, the elderly, fussy Christian Science couple next door, pierced her mother with a reproachful glance. After the pair had driven off in a triumphant roar of mufflers, she demanded, “Mama, why did you do that?”
“Roy, first thing you have to learn is never let a boy suppose you have nothing on your mind but him. Let him dangle a bit. That Dwight’ll call soon, you’ll see.”
* * *
NolaBee’s prophecy came true. The next five days, which remained hot, Dwight visited every afternoon, remaining for supper at NolaBee’s behest.
He had no car. Confined to the house and yard, they were forced to comport themselves sedately. A frustrating state of semiderangement to Roy. She ached to have Dwight initiate the caresses she had fought off so adamantly in the middle seat of the station wagon.
Island’s royalties had paid for a maroon brocade couch, which was deep, soft, and perfect for necking purposes, but alas, those warm nights the living room became a highway along which NolaBee and Marylin traveled for endless glasses of ice tea and lemonade.
The only undisturbed body contact permitted them was a few minutes of groaningly ardent soul kisses outside the front door—NolaBee terminated these embraces by switching on the dim yellow porch light. “Oh, Dwight, thought I heard you leave.”
When Dwight wasn’t around, Roy would daydream of him, her delectable reveries occasionally shattered by a bleak thought that swooped down on her like a persistent bird of prey: I wonder what’s with Althea?
The sole other time since the inception of their friendship that the girls had been incommunicado for longer than a day was the previous Christmas, when the three Cunninghams had gone back East to the Archie Coynes’ camp in the Adirondacks, a virgin tract of lakes and mountains that, Althea mentioned in passing, had its own ski lifts.
As the hot August days passed, the enforced separation took its toll on Roy. She felt lousy enough at having lost her confidante, at being unable to pour her wondrous new emotions into her friend’s delicately molded ear, but what felled her utterly was the guilt of knowing that Althea missed her far more. After all, she had Dwight.
I really have to give her a buzz, Roy would think. Each time she reached this decision, she would hear—actually hear—the bitchy note in Althea’s cool voice as she called Dwight chicken. Like an unworshiped icon, the telephone remained in the ledge indented in the rough stucco of the hall.
* * *
On Thursday morning Althea phoned.
“Hi,” Roy mumbled. “Long time no see.”
“Yes, a lot of water under the proverbial bridge,” Althea said, pausing. “Firelli’s at Belvedere.”
“Firelli!” Roy gasped. “You can’t mean the Firelli?”
“None other. He’s a friend of my parents. They’re in Washington—I told you Daddy’s a dollar-a-year man for the State Department, didn’t I? It’s fallen on little me to entertain the maestro.” Althea’s voice dropped to lecherous depths.
“Your parents really know Firelli?”
“Through my grandmother. Are you and Dwight an item?”
“We’re seeing a lot of each other, yes,” Roy said guardedly.
“Then why don’t the two of you drop by and spend an afternoon with him?”
“Sounds fabuloso, but I’ll have to ask Dwight.” Then Roy burst out, “Althea, without you it’s been Lower Slobbovia.”
“Ditto,” Althea said.
“I mean, it’s swell of you to call.”
“You’ll adore Firelli. It’s hard to believe he’s so ancient.”
“We have one minor problem. No car.”
“Pick you up, natch.”
When Roy hung up, she leaned back in the folding chair by the phone, limp as if a great, crushing stone had been r
emoved from her body.
21
It was hardly a secret that Carlo Firelli was English.
His life was an open book—a renowned open book. The thirteenth child of a poor greengrocer, he had been the youngest applicant to win a full scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music, had conducted his first triumphant concert before that black-clad dwarf, Queen Victoria, and had refused knighthoods from both George V and George VI.
Roy, however, knew Firelli only by the patronym splashed across the few classical albums that she enjoyed. So what surprised her most about the famous old conductor was his English accent—not hoitytoity, but a pungent, musical Birmingham.
She broached the subject of his misleading Italianate name.
“In my youth I had the idea that a bloke called Charlie Frye would never be seriously considered in the world of music. So I transcribed my name to Italian, and it pleased me mightily.” His sweet, deep bass wordlessly sang a triumphant theme unknown to Roy. “Now when I look back on that boy, I rather approve his vanity, yes, I admire that brash lad.” The round old face broke into a gay cobweb of preordained wrinkles as he chuckled. “Does that sound swollen-headed, little Roy?”
“No, honest.” She returned his smile. “You seem to enjoy everything, Firelli.” (On being introduced, he had insisted that she and Dwight drop the prefix of “Mr.”)
“Why not? Life is a gift, and to refuse a gift is churlish.” He glanced down ruefully at his stout belly. “But I daresay I should be a good sight thinner if I didn’t enjoy the nutritional oblations so much.”
The old Englishman’s thick haunches and short, very wide legs were clad in dandified white flannels, a cravat circled his roly-poly neck, and he had rolled up his shirt sleeves because, he told Roy, the California sun blessed his arms. A jolly halo of white hairs stood out from his pink skull.
Roy had never met anyone like the British conductor. It wasn’t his fame—lately through Joshua Fernauld she had met several famous people. None, however, possessed this gusto, this indefatigable delight. In his late seventies, Firelli fitted right in with the young people, so they felt none of the constraint that elders generally stamp on gatherings. He radiated good cheer and tolerance. His small raisindark eyes were innocently wise, nonjudgmental, accepting.
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