She leapt on him from the steps, squeezing him like a child. “Daddy.”
“How’s my Pie?”
“Tired.”
The book was Aeschylus, The Persians.
“I hope that isn’t for my benefit.”
“Summer reading. We have to do one each of the Greeks.”
“Have you done Euripides?”
“Medea.”
“I was going to suggest Orestes. It’s fascinating how he uses the chorus to anticipate the action.”
“Too late.”
“You should read it anyway. I think mine’s in storage.”
“Rats,” she said, snapping her fingers.
He didn’t broach the more awkward topics until they were in the car, starting with Montgomery. Mrs. Sayre had tried to step over the dog, who she thought was sleeping. Sensing her, the dog raised its head, catching her toe, and down she went, taking a candy dish with her. It was her right wrist. She had a cast and a sling and sat in her rocker ordering Aunt Sara around. Scottie tried to help but didn’t know how to do anything right. She hated that every time her grandmother scolded her, she called her “young lady.”
“How was your mother? Glad to see you, I imagine.”
“Oh, you know. She was good the first day. We rode bikes and played badminton and she was fine. She asked how camp was. The second day she was okay. After that it was hard.”
“I’m sorry. Thank you for seeing her.”
“Do you know anyone named Reynolds?”
“I don’t think so.”
“We were on the lawn having a picnic and she stopped talking for a long time the way she does. Then out of nowhere she starting talking about Reynolds and all these things he supposedly told her. Stuff about the planets and the solar system and music coming from another universe.” She shook her head, gritting her teeth and popping her eyes in comic alarm.
“I’m sure it doesn’t mean anything, it’s just one of her delusions.”
“It was actually kind of interesting. She said Reynolds lives inside the sun and travels on rays of light. I was thinking of writing a story about him.”
“It’s probably better you didn’t. Did you tell Dr. Carroll?”
“I did.”
“Good. They need to know if they’re going to help her.”
“She didn’t seem any better.”
“Did she seem worse?”
“She seemed the same,” she said.
“Does she seem well enough to go home?”
He didn’t ask this rhetorically. In all the world she was the only person he trusted to tell him the truth about Zelda.
“No,” she said, and though he gave her room to qualify her answer, watching the road, she left it at that.
Outside the entrance of the Beverly Hills, a great old Stutz landaulet sat like an emblem of bygone glamour. Elegance herself, Helen was waiting for them in the lobby. A slender, wide-eyed beauty, she headlined on Broadway and now for Paramount by projecting the innocence of the convent school novitiate she’d been. Scottie said she remembered her, but might have been starstruck.
“We used to call you Scottina,” Helen said, taking her in hand like an aunt.
“We still do,” Scott said.
She and Charlie had an extra room in their bungalow. To reach it, they had to walk past the pool, surrounded by a trucked-in beach of dazzling white sand, then through a jungle of banana trees. Like so much of the city, it was hokum, a kind of open set, yet he could see it enchanted Scottie. All he wanted was for her to be comfortable, and yet, after the last few years, he had to admit he would welcome it if she attributed at least some of that magic to him.
The plan was to let her get situated and maybe take a nap.
“We’re having dinner with a friend of mine,” he warned, as if that might prepare her, and then it was he who was surprised, a few hours later, when she called and said two boys she knew from Hotchkiss were in town. Could they join them for dinner?
“Why oh why are you such a pie?”
“Please, Daddy?”
“Of course,” he said, already regretting it.
Sheilah was understanding over the phone, and at the Troc seemed not to mind this further intrusion. She’d dressed not for him but for Scottie, in a simple black sheath, seed pearls and silver sandals for dancing. No matter how demure her outfit, she couldn’t disguise her figure, the equal of the stars who were her daily company, and the boys, rather than vying for Scottie’s attention, naturally doted on her.
Fitch and Neddy. Ostensibly he’d met the two before, and recently, in Baltimore, at the dance he’d thrown for Scottie before Christmas, but he’d been tight that night and had no recollection of them. Tall, blond and bronzed from a summer crewing an uncle’s yacht out of Catalina, they seemed interchangeable to him—brash and garrulous in a familiar Episcopalian way, regaling them with overlapping tales of seasick Angelenos. They were both from Chicago, and he imagined the homes they’d come from, the Gold Coast mansions with terraced gardens sweeping down to the lake in earnest midwestern imitation of Newport, the gleaming catboats and runabouts waiting at the dock paid for by the charnel products of feedlots and slaughterhouses. From Hotchkiss they would process to one of the lesser Ivies, Cornell or Dartmouth or Brown, and from there back into the family business of adding and subtracting, incurious as cash registers, all the while maintaining that sportsman’s idle optimism, depending, of course, on how old and well-insulated their money was. He knew several classmates from Princeton who used to summer at White Bear Lake and Harbor Springs who’d had to sell their cottages after the Crash, but these two were far from any decision harder than which of his girls they should ask to dance.
The orchestra struck up “Lovely to Look At.”
“Miss Graham?” they both offered as Scottie looked on.
Neddy deferred to Fitch.
“Miss Graham, may I have the honor?”
“I’m afraid my first dance is spoken for,” she said, taking Scott’s hand.
For a moment both boys were mum, trumped, and then, belatedly, as if just remembering she’d invited them, Neddy asked Scottie.
“Don’t fight over me now.”
“Be nice,” Scott admonished, earning him a dirty look which he parried, unwilling to play the oblivious father.
“I feel badly,” Sheilah said when they were dancing.
“Don’t. She’s a big girl.”
“She’s just a baby.”
“A very charming baby,” he said, because across the floor Neddy was laughing at something she’d said. As Sheilah watched, Scottie peered over his shoulder and gave them a mocking, false smile.
“I don’t know why she’s acting like this,” Scott said.
“I don’t think she likes me.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I don’t know, it’s just the feeling I get.”
“A little jealousy’s healthy, but there’s no excuse for being rude.”
“I don’t want her to be jealous.”
“You can’t help the way you look, which is divine, by the way.”
“I mean jealous of me being with you.”
“Are you with me then?” She was still wearing her obscene bauble of a ring.
“I’m not against you.”
He pulled her close. “Now you are.”
Lovely to look at, heaven to touch . . .
“Why do you confuse me so?”
“Me? You’re the one engaged to a duke.”
“You’re the one married to a wife.”
“Yet here we are.”
“Here we are,” she said.
In the milling crowd Scottie and Neddy had found them. As if this were the Nassau prom, Neddy half bowed, asking permission to cut in. A gentleman, Scott couldn’t refuse, handing S
heilah off and taking Scottie from him. The new couples spun away in different orbits.
“She’s taller than him,” Scottie said, amused.
“Is he the one you like, or is that Fitch?”
“I don’t like either of them that way, they’re just fun. I can see you like her.”
The accusation was delivered so casually that he was almost proud.
“Miss Graham is very likeable.”
“Apparently.”
“What I like most about her is that her real talents aren’t the apparent ones. She’s worked very hard to become a success in a tough business, and she’s done it on her own.”
“I think I’ve heard this speech before.”
“Then you understand why I admire her.”
“An admirer,” she noted.
“I admire ambition in any young person.”
“Plus she has an accent.”
“A very charming one, it’s true.”
“I wish she wasn’t so pretty. Is that awful of me?”
“Pie,” he sympathized, patting her back. It was as much of an answer as he could offer her, and as much as she wanted, because they left that topic as if they were finished with it, moving on to the awkward murals of Parisian landmarks that marred the walls. In wildly varying scales, the Arc de Triomphe and Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame were crammed onto panels that ran unbroken around the room, unsubtle as a folder of postcards. Scottie was properly horrified. Having been to the real Trocadero made the place seem what it was—an overpriced supper club with starlets for hatcheck girls.
“Remember the first time you ate escargots?”
“You told me they caught them right there in the Tuileries.”
“From then on you always looked for them in the flower beds.”
The song ended and another began. Why should I suffer? Why should I care? Fitch cut in on Neddy, who gallantly circled back for Scottie. Their ungainly number guaranteed an odd man out, a role Scott hated playing, but as host he had no choice. Alone at the table with his Coke, he soaked in the long view across Hollywood and the darkened city, the dwindling rows of streetlights like the runways of an endless airport, then the black mass of the sea. Somewhere out there was the Rex, and the past, the night steadily moving west, dragging the stars and tomorrow along behind it. In the hospital it was midnight, Zelda asleep, if there was any mercy. He imagined his producer, insomniac, coming in on a night flight from back East, floating over the vast emptiness of the desert, clearing the last treacherous crown of mountains and seeing Glendale and all the carnival of lights, bright and lively as a marquee, knowing that somewhere below, the girl who might save him waited. Here was life again, after the loneliness of airports, the untethered hours aloft fixing others’ scripts, parsing the meaningless dreams it was his genius to sell the sleeping country.
The band took five and the dancers returned.
“Are you taking notes?” Sheilah joked, sitting down beside him.
“Always,” Scottie said. “Be careful what you say around him.”
“I’ll forget it if I don’t write it down. Blast, now I’ve lost it.”
“I’m sorry,” Sheilah said.
“The other day you were telling me about a hermit who lives in the hills.”
“He has a lean-to behind the sign. They say he did lights for Griffith.”
“And went mad,” Scottie guessed.
“That I don’t know. I suppose.”
“He lives there year round?” Scott asked.
“He’s not much of a hermit. Everybody knows him. We could go see him if you like.”
“No,” he said, because the actuality was suddenly unappealing, the scene in which his producer visits him cheap, flatly emblematic. He wasn’t writing the life of a saint.
Dinner wore on, each course followed by a turn about the floor. Scottie and the boys ordered dessert and coffee, adding another five dollars and twenty minutes to the evening. For no reason he was ill-humored, and then felt stingy when they thanked him for paying.
“It was all just lovely,” Sheilah seconded, and what could he do but agree? After so long alone, he’d forgotten how it felt to be the man of the family.
The boys could have taken the streetcar but he gave them a ride, dropping them at Marina del Rey with a handshake and a promise to take them up on their offer of a cruise. When they were gone, from the backseat, Scottie said, “Thank you, Daddy.”
“You’re welcome, Miss Pie.”
“Thank you, Sheilah.”
“Please, there’s no need to thank me, dear.”
“I told Daddy I wished you weren’t so pretty. Now I wish you weren’t so nice.”
“I think that’s a compliment,” Sheilah said.
“It is,” Scott said, though, knowing Scottie, he could feel the needle of honesty in it.
The Stutz was still sitting outside the Beverly Hills, yet instead of a welcome fixture it now seemed a moribund ornament. He excused himself to Sheilah and escorted Scottie across the sands and through the jungle. Tomorrow she was going with Helen to the studio, where, as a surprise, they’d arranged for her to meet her idol, Fred Astaire—an elaborate gesture meant to impress her, he supposed, with the reach of his old fame. Why was he so prideful with her, when, more than anyone, she knew the depth of his failings? Or was that it, every overdone production designed to redeem him in her eyes? If so, tonight didn’t fit.
Why do you confuse me? Sheilah had asked.
Because I’m confused myself, he could have answered. Because I don’t know what I’m doing anymore.
He knocked on the door. “Did you have fun?”
“I did, thank you.”
“Your friends seem like nice boys.”
“They are.”
“Sheilah likes you very much.”
“I like her too,” Scottie said, noncommittal, as Helen opened the door for them, and he felt let down, as if he had more to say to her, as if he might explain. At the same time, he wasn’t sure he wanted to hear what she honestly thought of him running around with a woman closer to her age than his.
Charlie was there, looking hale. He was a drinker but had recently been through the cure, and greeted him with the exuberance of the newly rescued. He was over at Universal, adapting his last play, a task Scott imagined was like slowly poisoning your own child. He and Helen had been reading, their separate books set aside and waiting on matching armchairs flanking a cathedral Philco leaking Brahms. If Scott had to leave Scottie with anyone, they were a commendable choice, yet their restored happiness only cast his situation in starker relief, and though he would see her tomorrow and every day for the next month, leaving her recalled all the other times he’d abandoned her to the world, and walking back through the jungle and the pool and the lobby he brooded on this, so that when he returned to Sheilah he was subdued, and rotten company, and aware of it.
“Thank you,” he said. “You were wonderful with them.”
“It was easy. She’s very mature.”
“She can be.”
“I’ll confess I was a little intimidated when she ordered.”
“Her French is actually better than mine because she’s had to keep it up. She needs it if she wants to get into Vassar.”
“You must be very proud of her.”
He was, and soberly. For all their skirmishing over grades and smoking and pocket money, he’d come to admire her character. With Zelda gone, the two of them relied on each other that much more, especially living at a distance, and if her absence had forced Scottie to grow up prematurely, it also gave her a sense of responsibility and a grasp of the world he wished he’d had at her age.
“Why,” Sheilah asked, “what were you like at her age?”
“A fool. Still am.”
“I bet the girls all went for you.”
�
�Which only made me act a bigger fool. I was a very selfish child, though I suppose all children are. I haven’t changed much, really.”
“That’s not true. I think you’re the most considerate man I’ve ever met.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Why not?”
“Because then I’ll have to live up to it. I’m married and I drink, and when I drink I have a terrible temper.”
“Then you shouldn’t drink.”
“I agree, but I do, and I wouldn’t want you to get the wrong impression.”
“See?” she said. “You’re being considerate by telling me. You didn’t have to.”
“Stick around and you’ll find out soon enough.”
“I just might.”
“What about the marquis?”
“His mother doesn’t like me.”
“Who is she, Lady Somebody?”
“Lady Donegall. She thinks I’m a climber of the worst sort. That’s why he went back to England, to convince her I’m worthy of the title.”
“Without you?”
“She won’t speak to me.”
“That’s awful,” he said, inwardly exulting.
When they’d first made the date, he pictured asking her back to the Garden, maybe dancing with her in the living room of his bungalow. Now, buoyed by this news, he slowed for her street and turned up into the dark hills. This time she didn’t have to tell him which light was hers.
Walking her to her door, he thought the night had not been the ordeal he dreaded, just awkward. All in all, besides a few cross moments, they’d acquitted themselves well. She was fearless, a natural diplomat. He was glad she’d asked to come. Tomorrow Scottie would have a good day at the studio, he’d get back to work, and everything would settle again.
They stopped before the stoop. A moth orbited the light, its wings beating madly.
“It’s Tuesday,” she said.
Lost in his thoughts, he didn’t know what she meant, and was overwhelmed when she leaned in close and kissed him.
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