Everything and More

by Jacqueline Briskin

  “Marylin, my sweet, gentle, beautiful Marylin.”

  “You really think he’d be vicious about Billy?”

  “I’m not trying to paint Dad as the heavy, but he does fight with every available weapon, doesn’t he?”

  “Yes,” she sighed.

  He led her along the exterior pathway and down the concrete steps to her Chrysler. “Good-bye Marylin,” he said, leaning on the open window. “Good-bye, love.”

  She notified the studio that she was ill, and drove home with her handkerchief gripped to the steering wheel.

  She went directly to bed. Joshua was out somewhere with Billy. When he returned, he called the internist.

  The doctor, connecting her malaise with the fainting spell, diagnosed a virus.

  She lay in bed the next three days, forcibly kept there by a worried Joshua, surrounded by a funereal trove of flowers—American Beauties from the Versailles crew, white cymbidium from Art Garrison, an enormous mixed basket from her agent Leland Hayward.

  She was back on the set Friday, five pounds thinner (a fortune in period costumes had to be taken in), depressed, and silent except when the cameras were on her.

  * * *

  Shooting ended in mid-July. Joshua rented a sprawling furnished house in Malibu and the Fernauld household moved there.

  Marylin spent her days on the sand under the yellow-and-white umbrella, protected by a large-brimmed straw hat and a loose ankle-length beach coat—the sun’s rays are anathema to a screen actress, whose pigmentation must retain the pristine pallor that embraces Max Factor Pan-Cake.

  Joshua, sleek as a brown bull seal under his Coppertone, would sprawl on the hot sand beside her. Sometimes she caught him examining her with a curious, waiting expression that she could not fathom.

  “What is it, Joshua?” she would ask, quelling her guilty tremor.

  “I’m here with one of the most gorgeous broads in the long history of the planet earth, and being neither a fool nor blind, I enjoy looking at her, that’s what. I’m goddamn happy, that’s what.”

  Other than his occasional piercing glances, her husband was himself. In his deep rumbling voice, he amused her, wooed her, bossed her, and protected her from intrusions of every sort. In the foamy white curls left by the breakers, he frolicked with Billy.

  The hot, quiet days with her child soothed Marylin’s wounds until she returned to that quiescent state of half-life that she had hitherto accepted as marriage. At night, between sheets that smelled of faint must and the sea, she succumbed to Joshua, her mind and body aching for a less-domineering lover.

  * * *

  In October Versailles was scored, edited. The studio fired its big guns of publicity, sending Tyrone Power and Marylin on separate but equal junkets. Detroit was the third city on the Rain Fairburn tour.

  35

  A threatened thunderstorm delayed takeoffs in Chicago, and the flight with Marylin, her fifty-two overweight pounds of baggage, three fellow veterans of Versailles, and Cabbie Frick, Magnum’s head publicist, arrived in Detroit two hours late. As the plane taxied along the runway, a long dark Cadillac drove onto the field, and the stewardesses held back the other passengers until Marylin and Cabbie—he carrying her hatbox—had dashed through the gritty gale from the still-rotating propellers to the limousine. She arrived at a tall-towered radio station for the end of the six-o’clock news. A dispatch about unrest along the Sino-Korean border was canceled in order that Rain Fairburn might breathe a few words of delight about her latest film. She was sped to the Book-Cadillac Hotel, where in her eighth-floor suite the local Magnum man was affably hosting a press party. Marylin excused herself to the eight men and three women, going to the toilet before smiling for photographs and parrying unctuously personal questions about herself, her career, her husband, her child, until seven, when she had to dress for the local premiere.

  There wasn’t a moment to call Dean Harz.

  Cabbie Frick carried along the near-empty plate of soggy hors d’oeuvres, feeding her the unappetizing morsels in the elevator—she couldn’t risk getting grease on her elbow-length white kid gloves.

  In the lobby a group of dignitaries headed by Mayor Smith welcomed her on behalf of the city and, stomach rumbling, she joined a motorcade for the few blocks to the Fox Theater on Woodward Avenue where searchlights probed fingers into the cloudy black sky.

  As the limousine pulled up, an excited blare rose from the crowd: “Rain Fairburn, Rain Fairburn.” Police linked arms to hold back the surging fans. “Rain Fairburn!”

  Two rows of loges had been roped off for Detroit’s top municipal officials and the Hollywood visiting firemen.

  During the newsreel, Marylin excused herself, climbing over knees and feet, leaving a trail of thrills at being touched by a real live Chanel-scented movie star. In the empty lobby she closed the door of a neo-Hindu phone booth, inserting her nickel with trembling fingers.

  The phone was answered on the first ring. “Jeanne de Pompadour, I presume?” Linc said.

  Joy, sudden and sharp, filled her. “I’ve been frantic you wouldn’t be there.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “Then you’ll come to the Book-Cadillac?”

  “Whenever you say.”

  “About eleven. I told them at the reception desk I might have a visit from an old friend.”

  “You will,” he said. “See you then.”

  “Linc, don’t hang up!” she cried urgently. “When you get to the suite, ring room service and order a salad, two lamb chops, and a baked potato . . . and, oh, some ice cream. I’ve only had two stale hors d’oeuvres since breakfast—and breakfast was a tough old doughnut at a Chicago radio station.”

  “Oh, for the glamorous life of a movie star.”

  She returned, beaming, to her seat.

  * * *

  “Linc,” she murmured, “are there any vacation places around here, you know, like up at Lake Arrowhead, where we could rent a cabin?”

  He kissed her naked shoulder—they lay entwined in one of the double beds. “Michigan’s famed for its woods, and I know of the very cabin. But stop me if I’m wrong. Aren’t you in the midst of a ballyhoo?”

  “What about it?” In the darkness her soft voice rose, defensive.

  “Since when have you been the kick-loose type?”

  “Since right now,” she said.

  Kissing her shoulder again, he made a sound of disbelief in his throat.

  “It’s the truth. Linc, if you only knew how sick to death I am of being responsible for things I personally don’t give two hoots about!” Her words bubbled swiftly in concepts hitherto unvoiced, out of shame that she was spitting on what everyone considered the glittering prizes. “My life’s always belonged to other people. First Mama worked and slaved so I could have this career—and she still spends most of her time thinking about advancing me. I’m not complaining, Linc, but it’s a burden, such a heavy burden, to carry another person’s dream. Then there’s Joshua. He pushes me ahead too.”

  “That’s something I’ve often wondered about. The Big Joshua I knew would never have allowed his wife a career.”

  “I think in his mind, the busier I am, the more likely I am to be happy with him.”

  “The devil finds work for idle hands, mmm?”

  “I don’t mean to sound rotten . . .”

  “But there’s a ring of truth in your theory.”

  “At Magnum, you know what they call me? A thorough professional. By that they don’t mean whether or not I can act. They mean I show up as ordered at the crack of dawn for makeup, that I bleach or dye my hair on request, lose or gain weight, go on crazy locations, accept every script, every director, and hop like a Mexican jumping bean across the country doing publicity. Well, for once I’m doing what pleases me.” She twined her arms around his neck, pressing her naked breasts against his chest. “For three days out of a lifetime I’m going to forget what everybody wants of me and do exactly what I want.”

  “And that�
�s disappear?”

  “Sink completely from sight.”

  But in the end Marylin’s aversion to inflicting hurt prevailed, and she dispatched a telegram to North Hillcrest Road: “AM AT THE END OF MY TETHER STOP TAKING OFF A COUPLE OF DAYS STOP LOVE MARYLIN.” She scribbled a note to the rangy publicist, Cabbie Frick, promising in hasty writing to catch up with the group in Baltimore.

  She propped the hotel stationery on the desk. As she and Linc went out the door, the draft blew her message under the flounced skirt of the dressing table.

  * * *

  Sitting on the rustic bentwood chairs, sheltered by the narrow porch, Marylin and Linc watched the curtain of rain advance above the mottled purple waves on the lake.

  She wore thick, fuzzy white socks and a heavy red-and-black lumber jacket bought two mornings earlier when they had halted to stock up on food at an old-fashioned country store—the shriveled septuagenarian shopkeeper called her “missus” without a blink of recognition. This one-room log cabin with the gray-stone chimney, the only structure in the inlet of virgin forest, belonged to Linc, who had bought it with Dean Harz’s back pay.

  The sky split in a dart of lightning. Marylin held her breath, and almost immediately the thunder roared. Huge drops slashed down so hard that the cove bubbled like a boiling caldron.

  “It’s awesome, isn’t it?” she said. “Not exactly frightening, but . . .”

  “But you come from the city, where nature’s tame in tooth and claw.”

  “Exactly.”

  Another bolt of lightning struck yet closer, and she jumped. Linc reached for her mittened hand. They held hands on the porch until the thunder receded and the curtain of rain came down more softly; then they went inside.

  Brick-and-board shelves were filled with books, and in the stone hearth, pine logs crackled. Linc held a spill of fire to the butane stove, scrambling eggs and frying bacon. Watching him go about his homely tasks, Marylin tried to recall the raw-nerved edgy young pilot she had fallen in love with, and though she found faint echoes of him each time Linc’s mouth formed the one-sided smile at her, that abrasiveness was gone. Linc was an exceedingly attractive, quietly literate, compassionate man—he was the one gift that her girlhood self had requested of life.

  He tore off a corner of toast made over the fire. “What beats me,” he said, “is how we knew then that we were right together.”

  She nodded thoughtfully.

  By the time they had finished the dishes, the rain had let up. Arms circling each other’s waists, they crunched through fallen leaves and wet pine needles, the great drops that gathered on twigs sometimes plopping onto their bare heads.

  Marylin took a breath of clean-washed air. “I’m going to tell Joshua,” she said.

  Linc’s arm tightened on her. “Oh?”

  “These couple of days have convinced me that the worst mistake we can make is not being together.”

  “The ramifications still exist.”

  “Linc, he’ll be fair about Billy.”

  “Why? Will the great echo chamber of God’s voice convince him to be St. Joshua the Just?”

  “Must you always be clever when you talk about him?”

  “It was a pretty sad attempt, wasn’t it?” He released her, walking around a mossy fallen tree in silence. “Marylin, listen, some things about me maybe you don’t realize. First of all, I’m never going to be the great American novelist. I don’t have the least desire to write. Working among books suits me to a tee. I like my job, even though it’s unremunerative. I’m not in the least ambitious anymore—possibly the delightful vacation I spent in the Philippines stunted me. Or then again, maybe I was never red-hot fired-up except when it came to showing Dad. I could never make it big in the Beverly Hills faststep.”

  “It’s never been important for me, either.”

  “Face it, Marylin, you’re a top-rank star.”

  “I told you, Linc, always for somebody else, never me.”

  “I have planned how the two of us would confront Dad,” he said quietly. “And every time I do, I think of that mess with Ingrid Bergman.”

  The affair of the Swedish star with Roberto Rossellini, her director in the film being shot on Stromboli, the remote, tiny, barren island in the Tyrrhenian Sea, had resounded throughout the western world. On the confirmation of Ingrid Bergman’s adulterous pregnancy, censure was read into the Congressional Record. The actress’s Hollywood career was completely kaput and her eleven-year-old daughter lost to her.

  “Poor Ingrid,” Marylin sighed. Magnum had borrowed Bergman to play with Marylin in Northern Lights. “Joshua won’t let me go easily, I agree. But before he’d put me through that, he’d give me a divorce. And besides, Linc, he loves you. The ambivalences between the two of you are even worse for him than you—he thinks you’re dead, he despises himself for every argument you and he ever had.”

  Linc’s logger’s boots splashed through a mulchy swamp of fallen leaves. “God, how I’ve missed him,” he said in a low, strangled voice.

  “Then you’ll come back to Beverly Hills with me?”

  His words burst out loudly: “I’m sick to my soul of always skulking with you.”

  * * *

  When she telephoned the junket in Cincinnati, Cabbie Frick, who was being held responsible for her leap from the publicity trail, informed her with obvious satisfaction that Magnum had put her on suspension.

  “I wrote you a letter,” she said.

  “With what? Invisible ink?” The words hissed venomously through the speaker. “I never got any letter.”

  36

  After Linc paid the cabdriver, he hefted the Navy-issue duffel bag stenciled “Dean Harz, Seaman First Class” on one shoulder and blinked fixedly at the house. Early-morning sunlight glinted on the open window of the powder room.

  Marylin, bedraggled after a day and night in airports, in a wreck about the coming confrontation, understood that Linc, in this belated homecoming, must not only be caught up in this same web but also be assailed by dredgings from his earliest boyhood, memories of his dead mother, his living father. She took his free arm. She had no luggage—her new heavy clothing had been left in Linc’s cabin, and the justifiably vengeful Cabbie Frick had abandoned her great mound of tour suitcases in Detroit.

  “Funny,” Linc said bemusedly. “The place seems bigger and smaller than I remember.”

  With a sympathetic squeeze she let go of his arm to extricate her key chain. Just then the door burst open and Billy hurled himself at her.

  Lifting her son, she kissed his cheeks and forehead.

  Then she looked at the front door. Veiled in the hall’s shadows stood Joshua, as strong and thick and as immobile as a Rodin bronze. Across the threshold it was impossible to make out his expression. The morning quiet was broken by the squabbling of two blue jays.

  “Linc?” Joshua said hoarsely.

  “Dad . . .”

  Joshua took an unsteady step forward, halting to lean heavily on the hall table as if to prevent himself from falling.

  The duffel thudded down. Linc moved swiftly up the steps.

  Father and son embraced in a masculine bear hug.

  Joshua pulled back, staring at his resurrected firstborn. “Linc?”

  Linc made an inarticulate noise. He was weeping.

  “What’s Mr. Harz doing here?” Billy asked.

  “Mr. Harz is . . . Daddy’s son. He’s really Linc . . . you know Linc.” Photographs of Linc as a boy and in his officer’s peaked cap smiled from silver frames on the living-room grand piano and on Joshua’s writing desk.

  Joshua, too, was weeping. Seeing them in this emotional embrace, Marylin was struck by the genetic affinities of father and son, the bumpy, dominant nose, the thick, black brows, the very dark, wet eyes. Their revealed emotions made Joshua look older, and Linc—disheveled by travel—younger.

  “This is the damnedest, the damnedest,” sputtered Joshua, for once at a loss for words. “I don’t believe it. They said y
ou were dead.”

  “The reports were only slightly exaggerated. I was in a Japanese camp.”

  “A prisoner?”

  “They picked me up and took me to the Philippines.”

  “But the war ended years ago.”

  “I was sick and then . . . well, reasons, reasons.”

  Joshua blew his nose loudly. “So where the hell have you been hiding?”

  “Detroit.”

  “Detroit?” Joshua turned to Marylin. For a few seconds his moist, piercing gaze settled on her. She summoned her craft, putting on an expression of noncommittal blandness. If only she weren’t standing in the doorway with the morning sun full on her.

  Joshua blinked, giving an infinitesimal nod as if a mental cog had slipped into place.

  “What the hell are we doing standing here?” he boomed. “Come on in, Linc, no, don’t worry with that damn thing, Percy’ll get it. Percy! Coraleen!” he bawled. “Come out here prepared for the surprise of your frigging lives!”

  There ensued a swirl of hugs, tears, blown noses, trills of joyous disbelief, a triumphant confusion that Joshua blusteringly led, and it wasn’t until Ross, Billy’s Scottish nurse, her pleasant smile firm, drove her charge off to nursery school that Joshua permitted the emotional volcano to cool off. The servants retired to fix a second breakfast.

  Marylin went upstairs. A shower and change of clothing did nothing to alleviate her weariness—or her taut-nerved apprehension. Joshua’s stumbling and tears of joy, his clutching embrace, had been instinctive, the real thing, unequivocal emotional honesty, but after that there had been a subtle shift. His joy at the miracle of Linc’s return was balanced by her three days spent incommunicado, a disappearance speculated about on the front page of every paper she had glimpsed at the airport news stands.

  When she returned downstairs, father and son were in the breakfast room drinking Bloody Marys, engrossed in conversation. Quietly she took her place opposite Joshua.

  “Billy’s taken over your old room,” her husband was saying. “The kid’s the one big change around here. Linc, your mother did a job on this house, a damn good job, and Marylin liked it too. We’ve left things as they were.” He refilled his glass, adding a jolt more vodka to Linc’s drink in spite of Linc’s negative wave. “But enough of us. Tell me about that goddamn limp. Not that it’s a big deal, you could still beat me at tennis—”