Everything and More

by Jacqueline Briskin

  Althea stared at the traffic light. “I’m departing the hallowed halls of Beverly.”

  “Leaving school? Are you allowed to?”

  “If not, then Mother’s arranged an illegality.”

  “Althea, you only have a bit of your last semester left.”

  “It’s all decided.”

  “We’ll still see each other, won’t we?”

  “Why not?” said Althea.

  After Roy got out of the car, she stood in front of her house, her skirt whipping around her as she watched the station wagon with “Big Two” emblazoned on the front doors disappear up Crescent Drive. An inconsolable sadness overwhelmed her, a haunting sense of loss, as if some living thing—a plant, a kitten—entrusted to her care had died.

  She had let their friendship die.

  * * *

  On an overcast December night, Marylin, BJ, Roy, and NolaBee, wearing formals, drove with Joshua in a Paramount limousine to Grauman’s Chinese Theater.

  Police linked arms, struggling to hold back the excited fans who surged toward every arriving car. In the courtyard with cement impressions of famous hands and feet, Marylin was asked to speak a few words for the radio public. She whispered into the microphone, “The story was everything. I wouldn’t have been anything without Lincoln Fernauld’s magnificent novel.”

  The announcer for once was silent, a long valedictory pause while Marylin stood absolutely still in her shimmery white strapless, a gown that every reader of gossip columns would soon know had been made by Adrian from a parachute donated by a downed naval pilot.

  Then she put her hand on Joshua’s arm, and he escorted her into the lobby. Marylin Wace entered Grauman’s Chinese a beautiful girl with an inordinate amount of newspaper coverage in a hard-eyed business where a hefty press push meant nothing—unless the customers laid down hard cash to see your image.

  She emerged Rain Fairburn, a star of the same box-office magnitude as those other young luminaries, Lauren Bacall, Jennifer Jones, Jeanne Crain, June Allyson.

  * * *

  Three days after the premiere, on December 18, it rained heavily. The north-south streets that centered at the Beverly Hills Hotel followed the ancient pattern of arroyos, and water sluiced along them, running knee-deep at intersections.

  The downpour eased briefly as Roy left school, and she slogged through the drizzle with Heidi Ronoletti and Janet Schwarz. The discussion centered on graduation formals.

  “Roy, you have to come with me,” wailed Heidi, a flat-chested math major with lovely brown eyes and dark curls that turned to frizz in this weather. “When I shop with Mother, she insists on buying me the droopiest thing in sight. You have a real eye.”

  “Yes, Roy,” Janet chimed in with her squeaky voice. “You know right away what suits people.”

  “Hey, flattery will get you someplace.” Roy grinned. “Over the vacation, let’s make the rounds together.”

  When the other girls turned right at Bedford Drive, Roy’s expression grew thoughtful. For a while now it had been apparent there was money enough for her to enroll at nearby UCLA. Roy’s new clique had already decided between the usual feminine college majors, teaching and social work. Neither occupation drew her.

  Now a career idea came to her full-blown.

  She would be in fashion.

  Roy was far from a clothes horse. Still, a brand-new outfit signified much more to her than to most girls—weren’t new clothes a negation of those horrendous, smelly hand-me-downs? Clothes spoke to her.

  I’m not artistic like Althea, she thought, so that lets out designing. She glanced to her right. In the watery gloom, the creamy facade of Saks glowed softly. Retail shops, Roy thought. I’m pretty good at math, I could take a business-administration course. With that degree I could become a buyer, a manager even.

  Her lungs expanded with rain-clean air as she thought: Whoopee! I have a major, I have a major!

  She splashed through the gutter, kicking at the racing fingers of eucalyptus leaves, hurrying home to tell NolaBee.

  Nearing the house, she thought of Dwight, and the excitement drained from her wet, freckled face. Dwight, Dwight, Dwight. . . . Will I ever come first with anyone?

  Roy was convalescing slowly. Though she had come around to accepting that on her part it had been puppy love, and on Dwight’s merely the promise of sexual assuagement, it was not in her to remove herself easily from any object of her affection, an organic stubborness shared by the other two Wace women.

  She opened the front door, which was never locked. From the absence of cheerfully garrulous greetings, she decided that her mother was out. Changing her sodden shoes, she went to fix herself a hot Ovaltine.

  In the kitchen, NolaBee hunched at the table, which was bestrewn with clippings about Island. Arms folded, head down, she was shuddering convulsively.

  Roy’s body went icier than her slippered feet. All at once she was positive that the same type of tragedy that had killed her father had somehow destroyed her sister. “Mama, is it Marylin?”

  “She just called from Yuma.” NolaBee raised her head. Tears made her skin yet more piteously bad.

  “Yuma? But that’s where people go to—”

  “She’s eloped with that man,” sobbed NolaBee vehemently. “She could have had a million beaux at her feet, she could have had her pick of young men, but she’s married him!”

  Roy’s terror was alleviated. “You mean Mr. Fernauld? But, Mama, you like him.”

  “I wanted the world for my beautiful baby,” NolaBee whimpered. “Not an old man. . . .”

  * * *

  “What a hideously rotten thing to do!” BJ cried.

  “Beej, I know this is inconceivable to any child, but being a parent does not preclude one from having the emotional needs of the rest of humanity.”

  “Oh, we knew that, Linc and me, we knew that well. And so did Mother and the entire world!”

  “All right, you’ve spilled your bitterness, you have me cut down to size. But the fact remains—the solid, unalterable fact. Marylin and I are married.”

  “BJ, I’d’ve given the world not to hurt you like this.” Marylin’s soft voice shook. “We should have told you first.”

  It was early the following evening, the newlyweds had this minute returned from Arizona: the hall chandelier of the Fernauld home shone down on the exposed surfaces of three souls.

  “And you!” BJ turned her rancorous, tear-streaked face on her friend. “All that talk of loving Linc. What happened to that? As soon as you got his book to star in, did it evaporate?”

  “Let it go, Beej,” commanded Joshua. “Calm down.”

  “Why? Does it hurt to hear that she’ll hop in bed with any man able to help her big fat career!”

  “You’re talking to my wife.” Joshua’s voice rumbled from his thick chest. “And before you take that tone with her, you’d do well to remember that this is my house.”

  “Oh, Joshua,” Marylin sighed.

  “You tell me, then, why she marries a guy thirty years older. She got the role of a lifetime from Linc. What do you suppose she wants from you besides another leg up in the Industry?”

  “Come on, Marylin!” Joshua shouted, grabbing their two mismatched overnight bags. The curving staircase shook under his angry footsteps. At the top, he turned, booming, “Marylin!” And stamped in the direction of the room he had shared with his first wife.

  Marylin did not move. Despite her fragility and seeming pliability, in the territory of the heart she invariably stood her ground. BJ was her friend. “Listen,” she said quietly. “It’s not like that. Joshua’s been good to me, and helpful, yes. But I care for him. . . .”

  “Care?” BJ’s messy black pompadour wobbled angrily. “Is that the new synonym for ‘love’?”

  Marylin shook her head.

  “So why?” BJ asked.

  “Because,” Marylin said, “he loves Linc too.”

  “My father, Big Joshua, hotshot-about-town, marries a girl in l
ove with somebody else?”

  “He accepts that I’ll never get over Linc.”

  The outrage and hurt flickered less in BJ’s teary eyes. After a pause, she spoke more calmly. “My living here’s not going to work.”

  “Maybe later it will. Please, please try not to hate us. Your father needs you—and so do I. You’re the only real friend outside of my family that I’ve ever had.”

  BJ said with the faintest hint of pride, “You were my friend, too.”

  “Were?”

  “I’ll try to adjust.”

  “BJ, for me there was no other alternative. Joshua’s the only man who can possibly understand what Linc will always mean to me.”

  BJ sighed. After a moment she said, “I’ll be at the dorm. Tell Daddy, okay?”

  Marylin poised on her toes to kiss her new stepdaughter’s soft, moist cheek. Then she followed her bridegroom up the handsome curved staircase.

  23

  On May 7, 1945, in the cathedral city of Rheims, at a long, scarred table, Colonel General Alfred Jodl signed the documents of Germany’s surrender.

  VE Day!

  The task of whipping the Japanese remained, but church bells chimed, factory whistles shrilled endlessly, car horns blared a joyous cacophony as the forty-eight states erupted into a gargantuan orgy of stranger-kissing, boozing, indiscriminate hugging, street conga lines, and sex.

  * * *

  The following afternoon, Althea climbed the steps of a roomy old frame house opposite the Tropics on Rodeo Drive. Next to the front door was neatly gold-painted: THE HENRY LISSAUER ART INSTITUTE.

  Althea had been a student for three months.

  The institute had been at this location less than five years: for two decades previous to that, however, Henry Lissauer had conducted a prestigious atelier just off Unter den Linden in Berlin.

  Numerous exiles from Hitler’s Europe had converged on Beverly Hills, glossing the quiet, wealthy community with a sophistication previously lacking. The town now boasted several cosmopolitan art galleries, an elegant Viennese bakery, polyglot milliners and modistes, chic jewelers, as well as the Henry Lissauer Art Institute. For the most part, these refugees had a large red J inside their brown Reisepass. On leaving their native land, each had become ein staatenloser—a person without a country. Yet the United States considered them enemy aliens. Thus they were tethered to a ten-mile radius of their homes, ordered to carry at all times a pink book with their photograph, and forced to observe an eight-o’clock curfew. But this was very mild stuff when contrasted with what they had escaped.

  The main threat, and it struck queasy terror into each of the staatenlosers, was that for any small infraction of the enemy alien regulations, or for any minor run-in with the law, he or she would forever lose the chance of becoming a United States citizen.

  Henry Lissauer had escaped the greater horrors that were to befall European Jewry only because early in 1936 his rotund, bustling little wife had insisted they apply for immigration. It took nearly two years and most of their savings to procure the necessary papers. A few days before the permits stamped with an eagle-topped swastika arrived, there was a grim encounter with a gang of rowdy Nazi boys. The stout, jolly little wife had taken cyanide.

  Now Henry Lissauer lived for two things: United States citizenship and the institute.

  Lacking artistic creativity, he nurtured talent as tenderly as he would have the children denied him and the late Frau Lissauer. Each of his twenty-two students had met his rigid if elusive criteria. He insisted on a fresh eye. He had his own mysterious methods of divining this vernal vision, which had nothing to do with technique or formal training—he had turned away several applicants approaching professional stature. Once enrolled, a student could take part in any class from elementary drawing to advanced oil—or needn’t show up at all. The sole obligation was to attend a weekly conference in the institute’s slit of an office on the second floor of the old frame house. During this interview Lissauer would discuss the student’s work and progress, his myopic brown eyes apologetic behind his bottle-bottom-thick spectacles.

  Althea, reporting for this mandatory meeting, paced back and forth along the corridor that smelled of paint and chalk, her expression hardening like plaster before she knocked. “It’s me, Mr. Lissauer, Althea Cunningham.”

  There was no response. Henry Lissauer, who often ran a few minutes late, had invited his students to step inside and wait.

  Along the beaverboard walls of the narrow office he had tacked a pastiche of sketches, watercolors, and unstretched oils. Some of these student works were competent. Many, though, were monstrosities of clashing colors or awkward composition that grated on the eye, or of subject matter that was banally mawkish—a weirdly proportioned kitten playing with yarn raised Althea’s gorge. Perplexity and envy burned ferociously within her.

  No work of hers had ever received the accolade of being pinned up by Mr. Lissauer. What qualities invisible to her ignorant (though fresh) eye did these horrors possess?

  Althea’s entire life had been passed, or so it seemed to her, in a frantic attempt to attain what others considered excellence. For her, every compartment of life—looks, grades, talent, success in love—was constructed like an Egyptian step pyramid: you were either at the squalid, crowded bottom, the mediocre center, or atop the airy peak. Those above her she admired enviously, those below she ignored. Before she could climb the pyramid, she must first discern the order of the steps.

  She squinted again at the other students’ work. Dreary, dreary, she thought. Yet because these daubs were tacked up, they shone with glamour.

  Propping her gold-initialed portfolio against her chair, she closed her eyes.

  In the months since she had left Beverly High, Althea’s appearance had improved immeasurably. The ratted, high pompadour was gone. She wore her pale, streaked hair drawn back into a smooth coil at the nape of her long, slender neck.

  At Westlake, her tall, thin body and narrow Modigliani face had been at violent odds with what the other pre-teen girls called pretty, so she had considered her appearance monstrous: at Beverly High the makeup she had caked on her adolescent face had been a mask without which she dared not appear. At the institute, though, she had been asked to sit. Henry Lissauer and the two artist-teachers on the institute’s staff had pointed out to the class her unique and unusual qualities. Thus emboldened, she had gone cold turkey, leaving off the pastes and cakes and goos, using not even lipstick—a stultifying departure in style for 1945.

  Without Roy Wace, Althea’s loneliness had been an actual illness at first. She had stuck in her room, shivering with a subnormal temperature, too disconsolate to read, playing the same records until they were malevolently scratched, emerging only to take her lessons from the whispery old Bostonian who had tutored Archie Coyne’s children. Roy, whom she had trusted absolutely, Roy, her mainstay, Roy had deserted her—and because of that nonentity, that square, that cripple, Dwight Hunter! Those occasional Saturdays with Roy were torment. When they were over, Althea would succumb to fits of animal trembling. Finally, with surgical precision, she cut off all contact, refusing to take Roy’s telephone calls.

  The misery of those winter months proved to Althea what she had always known: people were her nemesis.

  Since she had entered the institute, though, her life had begun to take on logic and meaning.

  Not that the drawings she produced pleased her—Althea possessed the misfortunate faculty of overdiscriminatory self-criticism. Yet the end result did not alter the inexplicable, all-enveloping pleasure she experienced as she sat on her canvas stool holding her drawing board tilted against one knee. Drawing was not a new thing to her. She had enjoyed it as a small child, before she knew it was shameful to enjoy a solitary pastime.

  She waited in Henry Lissauer’s office nearly a half-hour before the door opened. “I am sorry to keep you so,” he said in his halting Teutonic voice. “A few countrymen were celebrating with me this great victory.” Eve
ning gatherings were verboten by the curfew, so other exiles sometimes dropped by the institute in midmorning or late afternoon to talk of intellectual matters while sipping strong, brandy-laced coffee from thin Meissen cups. “Hnn, so on this occasion you forgive me?”

  “Everybody’s been going wild,” Althea said with a smile.

  Though Lissauer’s baffling artistic selectivity maddened her, he had somehow gotten through her armory of defenses and she trusted him. Possibly she was disarmed by his unprepossessing, near-comic appearance. With his small, thin body clothed in a neat, foreignly narrow dark suit and overbalanced by his massive head, he reminded Althea of a large balloon on a string.

  Still smiling about the defeat of those Nazi scum, Henry Lissauer sat behind his desk inquiring about Althea’s week of work.

  Encouraged by the shy benevolence of the eyes behind thick spectacles, she volunteered how much she enjoyed drawing and sketching.

  “Do you have perhaps some charcoals to show me, then?”

  She unzipped her portfolio, hesitantly bringing out a single sheet. This week, stationing herself in Belvedere’s fountain-centered French rose garden, she had turned out at least fifty sketches. Although this rosebush was far from the technical best, as she had worked she’d felt a spontaneous, urgent knowledge of the leaves, the blossoms, the thorny stem that grew from the yellow California adobe rather than the softer, older soil of France.

  Henry Lissauer peered at the sketch, laying it above the clutter on his desk, pressing his bony fingers on either side as he bent down, scrutinizing. He raised his pale, large face. “Hnnn. Hnnn. This you really felt. There is a quality here, a sense of being . . . How do you say it? Of not belonging.”

  She blinked in surprise. “That’s it exactly.”

  “This I should like to keep, if I may?”

  “Of course, sure.” Althea leaned forward, not attempting to hide her pleasure as the oddly proportioned little German made space and tacked up her rosebush.

  He stepped back, nodding.