Everything and More

by Jacqueline Briskin

  It was as if he were caught by a slow-motion camera as he sank onto his back. He sprawled, his head lolling over the edge of the path.

  Marylin, already racing toward her husband, screamed, “Joshua! Joshua!”

  Reaching him, she fell to her knees, lifting his head. His perpetual tan was bleached to the yellowish shade of adobe bricks, and his flesh was beaded with globules of mingled sweat and rain. His struggles for breath came in great, raspy sighs. Marylin’s body reverberated with each of his fleshly convulsions. Her heart thumped, echoing his heart’s efforts.

  “Hold on, Joshua, darling,” she cried urgently. “I’ll get help.”

  “No. . . .” The rumbling depth of voice was a thread of itself. “My hour . . . has come. . . .”

  “The paramedics, Joshua—they’ll get here right away. They’ve got equipment.”

  “Don’t want to be . . . old man. . . .”

  “Joshua, I’ll only be gone a minute.” She was taking off her jacket to use as a pillow.

  “No paramedics . . . no doctors. . . .” The gasped whisper was a command. The corners of Joshua’s dark, pain-filled eyes tightened as he gazed up at her. “Stay.”

  He had always, by means fair or foul, forced her submission to his will; at this penultimate moment she found herself obedient to him. She would not go down to their house to summon howling fire department ambulances, she would not attempt to further imprison Joshua Fernauld within his old man’s infirmities.

  Sitting on the wet bricks, she struggled to lift the heaving, slippery weight of his head onto her lap. Tenderly she stroked a wet oak leaf from his chin.

  His face contorted yet more agonizedly, the barrel chest arched, the big, veined hands clawed the air.

  Abruptly he relaxed, blinking up at her as if she were a double rainbow. “. . . Angelpuss, love you . . .” he whispered. “. . . blessed are you among women . . .”

  His breathing rattled into the hush of the drizzle.

  In this solemn minute while death robbed her of a husband, Marylin pondered the meaning of Joshua’s final words. The dark eyes staring into the heart of the ultimate mystery gave her no clue.

  There was only the sound of light rain.

  Her cashmere pullover was drenched through, her hair streamed with rainwater, yet she did not move. Blinded by tears, she stroked back the gray hair of this oversize, infuriating, often cruel, always generous bull of a man, her husband, who had fathered all that she held most dear on this earth. Ecce homo, she thought. She was not positive of the exact meaning, yet somehow the Latin phrase explained all the contradictions that had bound her, recalcitrant and balky, to him for these long decades.

  Ecce homo.

  * * *

  In the bedroom wall safe, Joshua had stashed the complete arrangements for his final ceremonies and rites—an act of egotism, perhaps, but one that made life easier for those who were not quite sure how things lay between Big Joshua and God.

  A requiem Mass was conducted at the Church of the Good Shepherd. He was given sanctified burial.

  The next Monday evening, every seat in the Academy theater was taken for the Joshua Fernauld Memorial—planned, of course, by the deceased. The old Hollywood and the new alike showed up, some dressed in grotty jeans and gold chains, others in dark suits, Loretta Young, Fred Astaire, Greer Garson, Jane Fonda and Henry Fonda; Art Garrison, Darryl Zanuck; Groucho and Joan Crawford, Warren Beatty, Governor and Mrs. Reagan.

  For thirty minutes that seemed less than five, the screen flashed with clips of Joshua’s brainchildren that he had spliced from prints of his favorite films—three of them had won Oscars. Then, according to the deceased’s directions, the children that he had sired stepped onto the stage. Billy, who had flown in from New York, where he was working for Coyne New York Bank, read a section of his father’s first novel. BJ, her loud voice faltering through the PA system, essayed the closing paragraphs of his second novel. Sari gave a speech from Eternal Vigilance, which Joshua considered his finest film. Her words were often halted by tears.

  Joshua had planned that his oldest child would conclude the memorial with Lieutenant Nesbitt’s farewell from his screenplay for Island. The family questioned how he had been so positive that Linc, after all these years of separation, would come to the memorial. It turned out to be by sheerest chance that Linc was not there. Researching the life of Kemal Ataturk, he was driving a jeep through the wild northern Turkish countryside, and despite BJ and Maury Morrison’s urgent cables, couldn’t be located.

  Thus it was Marylin’s huskily soft, skilled voice that came over the microphone. The Academy theater echoed with snorted back tears and heavily blown noses when she came to Lieutenant Nesbitt’s final words, which were the only words spoken on this Monday night not written by Joshua Fernauld: “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels and have not charity, I am become as a sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge, and though I have all faith that I could remove mountains and have not charity, I am nothing. . . .”

  * * *

  When Linc finally returned to civilization, he sent off long letters to his three siblings. His condolence to Marylin was brief: “I mourn him. Whatever my father’s faults, he knew them, and never denied them. There won’t be another like him.”

  Though Linc echoed her own innermost thoughts, Marylin found cold comfort in the note. Why was it so short? Had Linc felt forced by the dictates of good manners to communicate with her? Did he assume that she did not mourn his father?

  Marylin had always worked too hard to be much of a brooder.

  But widowhood had shattered her in a way that she had never anticipated. How could she have imagined that Joshua’s death would so utterly fell her? After all, he had never possessed her whole heart, they hadn’t shared a bed for over a year, she had her career. Shouldn’t she have been able to cope? Yet Joshua had extricated the center of her being as neatly as if it were an apricot pit, taking it with him.

  The Spanish Colonial on Mandeville Canyon had always been a crushing financial burden. She put the property on the market. In 1972, though, Southern California real estate was suffering one of its recurrent slumps and no qualified buyers appeared. She rattled around in the labyrinth of rooms whose spaciousness seemed yet more hollow without her late husband’s booming voice, his heavy step, his massive body, the comings and goings of the bouncy, chipper old men who were his gambling buddies. She no longer pumped the stream. Without its expensive chatter, the trees of her canyon soughed with loneliness.

  When the spate of sympathy calls had dwindled away, she began taking her meals on a tray by her bedroom fireplace, emerging from her room only to drive to the television studio. The Rain Fairburn Show, too, seemed an exercise in futility without Joshua’s extravagances to support. She kept working only out of a resigned inertia.

  NolaBee, whose weakening eyesight had forced her to give up night driving, would come over in the afternoons to fret endlessly around the perimeters of her daughter’s lethargy. Roy used the telephone in an attempt to haul the widow out of her depression—the same ploy Marylin herself had used on her sister after Gerry’s death.

  Sari spoke on the transatlantic telephone every few days: her sensitivity helped Marylin’s depression—briefly.

  BJ dropped by the house often. “You mustn’t let it get you down, Marylin,” she would say, shaking her head. “You’ve got to push yourself and get out.”

  At the beginning of April, BJ suggested that she and Marylin take a couple of weeks’ vacation in England.

  “It’s the perfect time for me. Maury’s all wrapped up in a very complicated case.” A flush showed on the big, caring face.

  “What about my show?” asked Marylin.

  “No problem getting fill-in hosts for a couple of weeks,” BJ asserted. “We’ll stay with Sari and Charles in London. We’ll sneak Thea away and I’ll give you lessons on how to spoil a grandchild rotten.
”

  “I can’t just take off.”

  “If you were sick you wouldn’t be doing the show, would you?”

  “I’m not sick.”

  “Marylin, we all miss Big Joshua, but face it, the last thing Daddy would have wanted was for you to go into a nose-dive decline like this.”

  “You make me sound like a Victorian lady. Still . . . it would be fun to see the baby.”

  “We’ll take her to Eastbourne.” Again there was a hint of fraudulence in BJ’s enthusiasm. “I’ve never been to Eastbourne.”

  Marylin agreed to go. She accepted that this holiday had come about through BJ’s machinations, and she was grateful: for the first time since Joshua died, she was roused from her dull lassitude.

  In the week before they left she was busy making her arrangements and buying gifts, so she did not stop to consider that BJ, whose propensity for minding other people’s business had grown with the years, might have something else up her sleeve.

  74

  Eastbourne is a seaside resort sixty-odd miles southeast of London, where the chalk cliffs of the South Downs dip into the coastal plain. Three levels of terraced promenades face the channel: the salubrious invigoration of these walkways was the major reason that Firelli had made his home in the staid beach town.

  Marylin and BJ spent the first ten days of their vacation at Charles and Sari’s big, casually run house near Hyde Park in London. The company of her happily married daughter and son-in-law (Marylin and BJ privately agreed that marriage had done wonders for Charles) delighted Marylin, but what restored her spirit most was her black-haired granddaughter, Thea. She and BJ wrapped the toddler in the lacquered perambulator, wheeling her on jaunts to Hyde Park, to Kensington Gardens, to Richoux for an ice cream. The plan was for the two friends to take Thea to Eastbourne for the weekend, but on Thursday the child’s tiny (but definitely Fernauld) nose was clogged. “We’ll have to cancel,” Marylin said.

  “That’s ridiculous,” snapped BJ with a querulous note of alarm.

  “How can we take her with a cold?”

  “So we’ll leave her for one night. Marylin, I’m warning you, I’m not going to miss my chance to tell everybody about staying at the Firelli museum.”

  Weekends, Charles opened the downstairs rooms of the Eastbourne house to Firelli buffs and serious music scholars.

  The library, music room, lounge, and drawing room were chockablock with memorabilia. Literally hundreds of gold placques, silver presentation trays, fancifully shaped precious mementos engraved in nearly every language of the globe. A library of cataloged scores marked by the Maestro’s hand. Photographs of the rotund beaming little conductor next to long-dead European royalty as well as the pantheon of composing immortals from Verdi, Puccini, Rachmaninoff, Mahler to Stravinsky. Above the drawing room’s oak mantel hung a portrait of the conductor with his short, stout arm holding aloft his baton: the artist had captured in the round, alive eyes a hint of that cheeky young Charley Frye whose musical genius had wowed Queen Victoria. Facing Firelli across the dadoed room—and the decades—hung a somewhat cloyingly roseate portrait of Althea.

  The caretaking couple, thrilled at entertaining a real celebrity like young Mrs. Firelli’s mother, Rain Fairburn, served the two women a midday banquet which included a joint of beef with savory roast potatoes and a rich treacle tart drizzled with double cream. The afternoon was miserable—cold, windy, with lowering skies that threatened rain. Marylin would have been content to nap. BJ, though, insisted that they walk off the caloric overkill. Swollen by the sweaters and California-weight suits under their overcoats, they buffeted their way along the windswept promenade closest to the sea.

  The tide was high. Choppy breakers charged up the narrow, shingled beach, each seventh wave flexing in a crash against the sea wall. Salt dampness added to the chill. Marylin’s gloved fingers were icy, her cheeks stung. She kept reminding herself that when in England one must accept such weather—but she couldn’t help noticing that very few people were about. BJ, clearly, was having a wonderful time as she commented on the infrequent “real English” types who passed. She fell silent, however, when one man approached them.

  He was tall. The wind pressed his Burberry trenchcoat against his lean frame and tangled his dark, graying hair. He walked with the least suggestion of a limp.

  He looks just like Linc, Marylin thought.

  That’s too wild. I haven’t seen Linc for years—decades. . . . But from those snapshots of BJ’s, he hasn’t altered that much. Crazy, crazy, Marylin. How big are the odds of bumping into him at an out-of-season English seaside resort? A billion to one?

  “Well, well,” BJ’s loud voice chortled. “Of all people, my brother!”

  There are no odds, Marylin thought vehemently. “You set me up!” she cried.

  And with a dramatic gesture quite outside the range of her nonprofessional life, she turned, charging up a gravel path that led in zigzags through the wind-tossed shrubbery to the middle promenade. The outrage pumping through her was the strongest emotion she’d experienced since her husband had died.

  She could not face Linc.

  Since Joshua’s death she had squirmed, flushing each time she remembered those poignant, what-might-have-been reveries. That terse, uncondoling condolence note! What a romantic idiot she’d been!

  “Marylin!” BJ was puffing up the path. “Are you crazy? Look, okay, I did plan it. But even if you’ve suddenly got a mad-on, Linc is my brother, you owe it to me to be polite to him.” Her hair, now dyed its original black, escaped to whip around her indignant face.

  “Why can’t you ever mind your own business?” Marylin shouted. She took a deep breath of salty air, realizing how ludicrously out of proportion her fury was. Lifting her gaze to the elephant-colored horizon, she took a calming breath. “BJ,” she said quietly, “you’ve simply made an awkward situation for both of us.”

  “Linc came of his own free will from Rome.”

  “You’ve been cooking up this little scheme since before you got me to come to England!”

  “Is that such a crime?”

  “Does he think that I agreed to meet him?”

  “So what?” BJ said defensively. “And while we’re on the subject, as far as I’m concerned, it took plenty of guts for him to show.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “That idiotic modesty!” BJ’s retaliatory indignation was diffused by a brown-eyed sparkle. “Honeybunch, I don’t believe you’ve ever once stopped to consider that you aren’t like the rest of us. It hasn’t seeped in that you’re not only unfairly gorgeous and young-looking, but you’re also famous. The goddess of screen and tube gives Linc one look and runs like he’s Frankenstein’s monster—how do you think he feels?”

  Marylin knew exactly how. As abashed and miserable as she felt on reading that note. With an apologetic glance at BJ, she raced down the path to the front.

  Linc’s figure was dwindling in the direction of the Downs, whose summit, Beachy Head, was hidden by a low-hanging, nearly black cloud. She ran after him. By the time she caught up, her face was glowing with exertion.

  “Hi,” she said.

  For a moment he studied her, then, blinking, thrust his hands into his raincoat pockets. “Hi,” he said gruffly.

  Age, rather than increasing his likeness to Joshua, had lessened it, and now there was only the distinctive Fernauld nose and the darkness of the eyes. Linc’s own character had molded an air of thoughtful, quiet masculinity, which was other side of the coin to Joshua’s flamboyant I-am-leader-of-the-pack personality.

  “You caught me by surprise,” she said.

  “I’d never have guessed!” For a moment it flared, that touchy edginess—how well she remembered the taut nerves of a quietly brave young Navy pilot pushed beyond his endurance. Then he said, “So BJ didn’t tell you I’d be here?”

  “No. But I can’t blame her. The past few months, I’ve been in the dumps. Negative about everything.”

 
; A sudden gust of wind fountained spume up onto the cement where they stood. To escape a dousing, they both instinctively ducked toward the bench. The mutuality of their movement drew laughter from them both. Probably it was this laughter that relaxed the tight-wound spring in Marylin’s stomach.

  “I’m sorry I bolted like that,” she said.

  They started walking toward the Downs. Here there was less of a beach, and seawater puddled the edge of the promenade. They gave wide berth to the scallops of wetness.

  Linc said, “Not making the funeral threw me for a loop.”

  “I got your note,” she replied. How could the words come so easily?

  “God, that. I must have rewritten it thirty times.”

  “You really did?”

  They were talking with that old intimacy.

  “I knew too much about your relationship with Dad. Over heavy on the sympathy seemed phony. Everything else was condescending to your marriage. Then there were my own feelings. About us. About you and him. A very rough letter to write. After I sent it, I decided I’d been brusque.”

  “A little,” she admitted, smiling. “A little. But why didn’t I figure how difficult it was for you?”

  BJ caught up to them. “Well, you two, how’s it going?” she puffed. With a glance at Marylin, she raised her big, round arms and ducked comically, as if warding off blows.

  Marylin laughed, a soft, husky sound that was blown on the wind. “You’re forgiven,” she said.

  “Beej, you’re okay,” Linc said.

  “Will you look at that sky?” BJ said. “Come on, you guys, let’s get a move on! It’s about to pour!”

  * * *

  That evening the three of them stayed up talking until nearly two; rain drummed on the windows, but they were lost in the warmer climate of their youth.

  The following morning BJ insisted on returning to her half-sister’s London house by the 10:18 train. “No, I absolutely won’t stay. You guys need a chance to catch up without me and my big mouth,” she said, kissing them both.