“That family! They’re fatal to our children.”
Joshua crossed himself, grinning to inform her he did not subscribe to such superstitious methods of averting the evil eye. She knew, though, that after a lifetime of flamboyantly outspoken atheism, he had lately been sneaking over for early Mass at the Church of the Good Shepherd on Santa Monica Boulevard in Beverly Hills. His overtanned, dark-spotted face settled back into elephantine creases of worry. “Angelpuss, I don’t like to think this, but our Sari might be, as my dear, departed sainted mother used to put it, in trouble.”
Marylin sucked in her breath. Remembrances of her illicit abortion jumped ruthlessly into her mind. A swallow rustled noisily from the nearest oak, and leaves swayed above them.
“Has she told you anything?”
“It’s not her words, it’s her sad, wan look.” He raised his palms, an unhappy admission of masculine helplessness. “I don’t know what’s up. Time for you to have one of those mother-daughter talks.”
“Where is she?”
Joshua drew Marylin inside the entry hall, which was floored with the same handmade tiles as those outside. “Have your lunch first. You’ve got to take care. You’ve been looking somewhat dragged out—beautiful, haunted, in need of creature care. I worry about you, angelpuss. Kids I’ve got plenty of, but I have only one wife.” His thick arm encircled her possessively, and he bent to touch a kiss on her forehead. “Such as she is.”
He ate a large platter of cheese enchiladas, one of Elena’s specialties, drinking cups of the strong chicory-rich coffee whose beans he ordered air-freighted from Fauchon on the Place de Madeleine in Paris. Marylin barely tasted her cottage cheese and fresh peach. Setting her napkin on the breakfast table, she said, “I’ll go find Sari now.”
“If she’s not in her room, she’s probably mooning around at the old shack. As far as I’m concerned, she’s up that damn hill too often.”
Sari wasn’t in her snug aerie, so Marylin put on her tennis shoes and started up the path.
As she crossed the footbridge, her motherly anxieties were briefly diverted by the sound of rushing water. Her business manager paid the bills, so she was ignorant of the sum that went to the Department of Water and Power to pay for this stream, but she guessed it to be exorbitant. Each month her paycheck disappeared, swallowed up by expenses, and she sometimes awoke in the night, shivering at the thought that The Rain Fairburn Show might be canceled. She had never felt comfortable in this lordly style of living but Joshua—once among Hollywood’s tribal leaders, now left behind by the glitzy pack—desperately needed conspicuous consumption.
Across the bridge, the path was no longer defined by bricks. The Fernaulds’ acreage was gerrymandered into an odd shape like a clenched fist with one pointed finger that climbed the canyon wall. Marylin started the long, steep hike up to Sari’s hideout.
A flat white cloud passed across the sun and momentarily the breeze faded. In the odd light and unstirring stillness, she had the eerie sensation of being an intruder in the distant, vermeil world of photographs made in the previous century. Sari’s world, she thought, asking herself what right she had to encroach?
She climbed more swiftly and her forehead had a delicate sheen by the time she reached the ledge.
In the shade of a clump of live oaks stood a derelict cottage. Crumbling adobe bricks showed veins of whitewash. Many of the roof tiles were gone. Nobody knew when the place had been built, but it probably wasn’t as ancient as it appeared—adobe crumbles quickly back into the earth from whence it comes.
This was Sari’s retreat, her refuge from the inevitable hurts of childhood and adolescence. She had never shared the place with anyone until Charles.
The sun had come out again, and at first Marylin did not see her daughter, whose dark blouse and jeans were camouflaged by a pool of black shade cast by a live oak.
Then Sari raised her arm.
“Oh, there you are,” Marylin said, wiping a finger across her moist forehead. She sat on the cool, mulchy earth next to Sari. “Whew, I’d forgotten what a hike this is.”
Sari gave a smile and said nothing.
Ordinarily Marylin relaxed in her child’s quiet, but this afternoon she found Sari’s unquestioning acceptance of her appearance as frightening, if not downright uncanny.
Gazing up at the sky, she said, “Sari, I wanted to talk to you. We haven’t really talked about Charles since he left.”
Sari shifted away a few inches.
At this faint though pointed antagonism, Marylin tried to focus on her daughter’s face: after staring up at the sun, at first she could distinguish only a pale blur surrounded by dark curly hair. “I thought talking might help.”
“He’s gone, it’s over. You never liked him anyway.” There was a tense misery in the accusation.
“I . . . I changed my mind about him.”
“Oh, Mother, what’s the use?”
As their similar husky little voices intertwined, Marylin shivered. This conversation, in its own way, was starting off as disastrously as the one at the Regency.
Now, able to focus clearly, she saw that the irregular features were drawn and pinched, that greenish shadows lay under the girl’s eyes. Joshua could be right, Marylin thought, ashamed that she had not previously noticed the physical dimensions of her daughter’s unhappiness.
“Darling, it’s not Charles. I do like him. It’s Althea—Mrs. Stoltz.”
“Did you come up here to make things worse for me?” Sari put her head down on her knees.
Marylin’s lips tingled with inadequacy and she blundered into a confession. “I once had an abortion. It was years ago.”
Sari’s head raised questioningly. “But why did you do that?” she asked softly. “Mother, were you on a big movie?”
Do I seem so monomaniacally absorbed in my career? Have I immersed my ghostly passion for a man I haven’t seen since before this daughter was born so thoroughly that she, who is all feeling and intuition, sees me as a nun wed to the holy camera? Marylin drew a tremulous sigh. “I was in love with somebody else. Of course, it was before I met Daddy. . . .” Again her voice wavered.
“Why didn’t you marry him?”
“The war. That’s not the point. I’ve always regretted the operation, felt a huge burden of guilt and shame that I didn’t have the courage to keep the baby.”
“Things were so proper then. How could you?”
“That’s what Grandma said. But in my heart I’ve always felt I could have managed something if I’d been stronger and braver. Sari, darling, if you are pregnant, we’ll figure something.”
Sari bent her head again, and her hair hid her face. “Is that what you’ve been so uptight about? You’re worried I’m having a baby?”
“Daddy thought, well . . . maybe.”
In the ensuing silence the wind soughed, a warbler cried shrilly, and a galaxy of gnats buzzed.
“Are you?” Marylin whispered.
Sari gazed at a distant point above the ridge of the canyon.
“Sari?”
“My period was sort of funny, not much. And I’ve been feeling rotten.”
“We’ll see a doctor,” Marylin said decisively.
Sari turned. Those strange, greenish shadows made her eyes hypnotic. “I’ll go on my own,” she said.
“Sari, I . . . Your father and I want to help.”
“Help me to an abortion?”
“I thought I explained that.” Marylin closed her eyes. “April 18, 1943, that’s the date. I’ve never been able to forget it, it’s haunted me all these years.”
Sari considered, her face showing its bone structure. In this moment she resembled Linc. My God, what a tangle, Marylin thought. What a monstrous, unbelievable tangle my entire life has been.
“Daddy’ll kick up a fuss. You know how he is about me.” Sari’s voice was choked and wavery.
Marylin heard her daughter’s words as a lament for lost love, as a dirge of hopelessness for the future�
�and as a surrender to parental aid. She touched the girl’s slumped shoulder. “Darling, haven’t you noticed that he’s been going to Mass? He won’t push you.”
Another cloud had passed over the sun, and Sari shifted, leaning forward, kissing Marylin’s cheek.
“What’s that for?” Marylin asked.
“Not saying that we could make Charles marry me.”
Marylin had not considered marriage: it was punishing enough, wasn’t it, that the unborn child’s other grandmother was Althea?
67
That same afternoon, mother and daughter drove into Beverly Hills. The offices of Dr. Dash, Marylin’s gynecologist—still considered the town’s best and classiest—remained in a white-painted brick medical building on Bedford Drive. (In this same building Roy still occasionally consulted with her psychiatrist, Dr. Buchmann.)
Women in all stages of pregnancy crowded Dr. Dash’s prettily furnished waiting room. Though Sari lacked an appointment, the reception nurse, who was on the Fernaulds’ endless Christmas-card list, slipped her into an examining room.
Seated between two heavily pregnant women, Marylin hid behind a Cosmopolitan, not reading, assaulted by unremitting waves of primitive hatred. Her small fingers clenched the slick cover, and she thought: I could strangle both of them, Althea and Charles, with my bare hands.
“Miss Fairburn?” The nurse with the thick legs was beckoning her. “Miss Fairburn, Doctor would like to see you.”
Dr. Dash faced Marylin and Sari across his desk, reading them the results from rushed lab work, adding with a stern glance that though he was against terminating pregnancies except for health reasons, Sari was anemic and underweight. He was offering them an easy out.
At twenty past five mother and daughter emerged onto Bedford Drive. Neither spoke. In the brilliant late-afternoon sunlight, Sari’s pallor was more extreme. Marylin, too, had a dazed expression, but her eyes were hidden by dark glasses. Incognito in her trim white slacks, the famous Rain Fairburn hairdo concealed by a scarf, she could have passed as another of the sportif Westside matrons shepherding their generally bulkier female offspring between the boutiques.
The two were silent until they reached the parking structure; at the ticket taker’s booth, Sari halted. “I’m going over to Patricia’s,” she said.
A diesel pickup emerged, spreading fumes and noise. Marylin blinked, positive she had heard incorrectly. “Patricia’s?”
“I figured I’d spend the night with Aunt Roy,” Sari said.
“Now? Darling, didn’t you understand what Dr. Dash said?”
“I’m pregnant.”
“Yes, but he seemed to think, well . . . maybe . . . you aren’t in very good shape. . . .” Marylin’s voice trailed away. I sound like Mama, she thought, wanting to throw her arms around her pale child, then kneel on the pavement to beg forgiveness.
“I told you. No abortion.”
“That’s not what I meant . . . not really. But we should talk the situation over with Daddy.”
“I have to get my head together,” Sari said.
A taste of bitterness was in Marylin’s mouth. My other child deserting me, she thought. But Sari looked so exhausted and haggard that Marylin could not argue. “Go on, darling.”
“It’s nothing against you, Mom. You’re being wonderful. I just need time, that’s all.” She hugged Marylin.
Marylin’s bitterness faded, but not the obdurate pressure of her maternal anxiety. Pushing back the soft black hair, she said, “I’ll call you later, Sari, darling. Say hi to Auntie Roy.”
* * *
Roy had only one lamp on in her pictureless living room and in this tea-colored gloom she watched a moth batter itself against the window. Not since Gerry died had she been swept by such self-remorse. On the cobbler’s-bench coffee table was a near-empty plastic Oreo tray: the oversweet chocolate cookies were a poor substitute for the good stiff drink for which Roy’s body, after all these years, cried out.
The den-guestroom opened onto the living room, and the door was ajar. Sari slept.
On the short drive home from Patricia’s, the girl had briefed Roy on the situation. When Roy had attempted to show her sympathy, Sari had murmured in a wispy, shredded voice, “Please don’t say anything, Aunt Roy. I just can’t hack talking about it yet.” At the house she had eaten a carton of peach yogurt, then gone silently into the den to make up the convertible sofa. Roy, leaving the dishes on the breakfast table, had stationed herself like a guard dog outside the room, keeping her ears pricked for any sound—there had been none.
Without thinking, Roy munched the last cookie, then clasped her arms around herself. Her self-indictments had reached unbearable proportions and she must either go clear screaming out of her mind or seek solace—of any kind.
She ran into the kitchen, where her voice would not disturb Sari, dialing a number she knew by heart: the exchange told her Dr. Buchmann was unavailable tonight. Roy barged back into the living room, going to the hutch that served as her home desk, opening the top drawer for her pink scratchpad. The psychiatrist had suggested when the overpowering blues hit her she should jot down her thoughts as a cathartic measure to rid herself of her worst self-indictments.
Althea, she wrote, then chewed on the end of the ball-point.
Until now she had always accepted that she kept up the friendship out of her innate sentimental attachment to the past—loyalty, if you will. Now, though, listening for the least sound from Sari, Roy came around to Marylin and NolaBee’s contention that she possessed the best of reasons to avoid Althea for all eternity.
So why did I have to renew the friendship?
The answer twisted into a question: Was this another way to tie Gerry to me?
Did it somehow keep him closer to be around his mistress and his son—the son he never knew about?
Gerry never loved me, we were separated when he died, so why have I dragged my widowhood everywhere, like a security blanket? Men have asked me out from time to time—why didn’t I accept? Why immure myself? I’m not Queen Victoria. I built a monument for him, The Gerrold Horak Gallery, wasn’t that enough?
Roy’s eyes moistened.
For years I’ve known that Althea was, as Marylin put it, a snake, so why did I bring both Billy and Sari within striking range of her venom?
She stared down at her round, legible questions, biting her lip.
Why do I assume Althea broke it off between Charles and Sari? For all I know, Charles was delighted to dump the poor, loving baby and begin anew in Stockholm with some gorgeous Scandinavian blonde. Oh, so what? He’s Althea’s son, and without good old Roy, Sari never would have met him. Without my good offices, Althea never would have gotten her nympho hooks into Billy—
There was a rustling within the den. Swiftly Roy moved to the door, opening it a wedge wider.
Her niece slept facedown, both thin arms hugging the pillow. In the color-drained shadows, the hair on the pillow was a dark stain. Like blood, Roy thought with a shudder.
Sari, in her brief explanation, had made it clear that she had no intention of an abortion.
An illegitimate baby?
A great roaring filled Roy’s mind.
Gazing at the dark splotch on the pillow, she felt her throat tighten in a convulsion of pitying love.
She peered at the sleeping girl, her expression changing until she wore her workaday look of competence and decision. Returning to the couch, she picked up the scratchpad, this time not for easement of her soul but to draft a letter. “Dear Charles,” she wrote; then her hand stilled. Roy’s correspondence, mostly business letters, was dictated concisely to her secretary. Now she composed a meandering paragraph, then crumpled the paper. She floundered through the procedure four times before getting out her box of monogrammed stationery.
She wrote one sentence.
Signing her name, she folded the paper into an envelope, addressing it to Charles Firelli/ Sveavagen 56/ Stockholm/ Sweden—she knew the address by heart, having
already sent Charles several letters that purposefully mentioned Sari. (He had replied in his impeccable hand, never mentioning Sari.) Pulling on her coat, she again peered in at her sleeping niece before going out into the misty night, hurrying in long strides to the corner of South Beverly Drive, where the mailbox stood.
Swiftly she pushed the envelope inside, and the slot clinked shut.
At this moment Roy’s second thoughts rushed out. Maybe Sari’s right, maybe Charles has dumped her. How do I know whether he’s a love-’em-and-leave-’em type? If he is, better she get over him now. Being trapped in a marriage with one-sided affection is a hell I wouldn’t inflict on my worst enemy much less this vulnerable-hearted girl whom I adore. Between us, the family could give the baby enough love to make up for lacking a father. What have I done?
She raised the slot, reaching her hand inside to encounter cold, rough metal.
Her letter had been swallowed by the hump-topped inviolable United States mailbox.
Charles would read her words.
The faint haze in the air sent chills of premonition traveling down Roy’s back. I never should have left Sari alone. Her front door lamp shone iridescent ahead of her, and she ran gasping up the steps.
Sari had not stirred.
* * *
At breakfast Sari asked whether she could stay a few days. Roy, with a very human elation that she was needed more than Marylin, waited until she got to work to call her sister at the television station.
“But she’ll be alone all day,” said Marylin’s gentle, worried voice.
“That’s what she said she wants. To crash someplace until she can get it together.”
“She told you . . .”
“Yes.”
“Roy, Dr. Dash said she’s run-down and needs to put on weight.”
“She had two eggs, English muffins, orange juice, and a glass of whole milk for breakfast,” Roy said. “I gained a pound watching her.”
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