City of Flickering Light

by Juliette Fay

  “Uh, yes. That did come to my attention. We’d like to address the matter before there’s talk.”

  “That’s your job.”

  “It is.”

  “I understand you’re very good at it.”

  He didn’t seem to know if this was a compliment or not, and Millie wasn’t quite sure, either. Could you be proud of concocting lies for pampered stars so they could engage in all manner of naughty behavior, including sleeping with people to whom they aren’t married and having babies out of wedlock?

  His pride in his work, or lack thereof, wasn’t the issue. Whether he could help her keep her baby and her job was.

  “I’d be very grateful if you could suggest a place I could go until the birth that would let me adopt the baby later.” She smiled sweetly but earnestly.

  “We generally like to employ a more speedy solution. We have doctors who’ve performed the procedure many times for—”

  “For girls like me. Yes, I’ve heard. But, Mr. Sharp, I’m too far gone for that, and besides, I feel very strongly about having the baby. I’m sure you understand, being such a keen observer of human nature as you are, that I’m the type to get despondent over this. Very, very despondent. And unhappy actresses don’t make wildly successful pictures, do they?”

  A week later it was all arranged.

  “I don’t want to go to Nevada,” Millie whispered in the dark. “I want to stay here with you.” Her packed bags loomed like hulking malevolent shadows in her room, and she’d come in to Irene’s to escape them.

  Irene pulled the covers back, and Millie slid in next to her.

  “It might be nice.”

  “It won’t be nice. It’ll be boring and lonely. And then I’ll have to have a baby, for goodness’ sake. That’s no fun.”

  “It’ll be fun when it’s over and the two of you are all cozy together. Set your mind on that.”

  “It’s not just me I’m worried about.” Millie sighed. “I’m all you’ve got now.”

  “That’s not true,” Irene scoffed.

  “You haven’t seen Henry or Dan for three months.”

  “It hasn’t been that long.”

  Millie didn’t bother to correct her. They both knew it had been exactly that long. Irene liked her solitude, but Millie had watched as she’d become more and more isolated, sinking back into herself, scribbling away at her pad as if it were the only thing keeping her from living on an Arctic ice floe. “Those people aren’t real,” Millie had said to her only last week, and Irene had replied, “They are to me.”

  Millie didn’t want to go to Nevada. But even more than that, she didn’t want to leave Irene with no one to drag her back into the land of real love and friendship, however messy and un-happy-ending-ish it could be. “You could write in Nevada. We’re like sisters now. We shouldn’t be separated.”

  The silence from Irene’s side of the bed was loud. Millie could hear her not breathing. “What did I do?” she whispered into the dark.

  “Nothing.”

  “It was something. You don’t have to tell me, but don’t say it was nothing.”

  “I’ve told you about my sister.”

  “You told me about vaudeville, and how she died from the flu.”

  “She didn’t just die from the flu.”

  Had Millie misremembered it? She could be forgetful sometimes, but never about something like that. “Oh . . . I thought you said . . .”

  “I gave her the flu, Millie. I got it first and I was quarantined. No one was supposed to come into that room except the doctor. But I thought I was dying and I wanted to see her one last time, so I called out to her, and she came. I was selfish and I gave my sister the thing that killed her.” Irene’s voice went weak and breathy. “I killed her.”

  Millie felt her friend’s guilt like a physical blow. Tears came to her eyes under the weight of such an avalanche of remorse and sorrow. “No, Irene. No,” she soothed.

  “Yes,” Irene whispered. “I did. You shouldn’t wish to be my sister, Millie, because I’m selfish and I hurt people.”

  She began to cry, but she kept talking, a torrential river of regret that had finally breached its banks. “I hurt Dan because I was so ambitious, I chose the possibility of a promotion over his feelings, and I hurt Henry because he told me he’s a . . . a . . . he likes men not girls, and I’m such a country bumpkin that I didn’t know what to think, much less what to say, so I just said nothing, and I don’t think he’ll ever trust me again. He shouldn’t. Neither of them should. And it’s a good thing you’re leaving because neither should you.”

  Millie wrapped her arms around her friend and held her close. “No,” she murmured. “No, it’s not good that I’m leaving, because all I want to do is stay here with you. But I made a mistake—a big one. A mistake so big it’s a whole person. And it’s not the only mistake I’ve made. You know that. You more than anyone, because over and over again you saved me from those mistakes. Joining up with Chandler? Saved me. Having no job or money for two straight months? Saved me. Going off to dance with strange men and smoke special cigarettes? Saved me, and how! You’ve made mistakes, Irene. Welcome to Millie-ville. It’s a lovely place as long as you have friends.”

  “But what about Dan and Henry?”

  “You can try to fix those mistakes. Maybe they can be fixed or maybe they can’t. But if you can’t fix them, it’s not because you’re meant to be alone, Irene. You’re meant to be loved.”

  Irene began to sob, and Millie held her and waited and thought about all the times Irene had pushed people away. Now she knew why.

  Also she thought about Henry. Apparently he was a homosexual! Well, that was surprising but it also explained some things, like why he was never terribly interested in holding her hand, much less getting her into bed, which most fellows seemed at the very least to consider. But Henry liked men. Okay, she thought. That’s a good thing to know about a friend. She was learning all sorts of things tonight.

  Irene’s weeping slowed to small sobs and sniffles.

  “All is not lost,” Millie soothed.

  Irene stopped crying. “Is that a line from that maid flicker you did?”

  Millie winced. It had sounded so natural when she’d said it on set. “Yes, but it’s still true, even if a writer wrote it.”

  The smallest little chuckle came out of Irene. “I’m glad we earn our keep once in a while.”

  At 8:00 a.m. the car Carlton Sharp had ordered pulled up in front of The Hillview Apartments. Millie hugged Irene one last long time, and Irene could feel the hard bulge around her friend’s midsection.

  “Write to me every day,” said Millie.

  “There won’t be something to say every day.”

  “Then make something up! That’s your job, isn’t it?”

  The car door slammed, and Millie was on her way to a home for unwed mothers in some little town in the middle of nowhere called Las Vegas, Nevada. She’d probably charm everyone in a mile radius within an hour.

  Irene went upstairs and sat in a chair by the window. It was foolish to cry, to miss someone so terribly only five minutes after they were gone. Her longing for Millie had taken that brief time to equal her longing for Dan. She had ruined that one but good, hadn’t she? At least she would see Millie again, though not for a solid four months. She’d been friendless for years before she met Millie, but now she was spoiled by love. So much of it from so many directions.

  And Henry. She had seen him here and there, crossing paths at the studio with a brief hello. But she hadn’t known how to raise the subject that had stunned her into silence, and as time went on, she felt more and more awkward about it.

  Everyone she loved was gone. Maybe she’d been foolish to love them in the first place. Because now there was nothing Irene wanted more in life than to stop missing people.

  42

  The only things we really keep are the things we give away.

  William Desmond Taylor, director, actor, producer, who was shot and ki
lled in the prime of his career. His murder has never been solved.

  The party at the Garden of Alla was no garden party. Famed actress Alla Nazimova had purchased the forty-room mansion on the western end of Sunset a few years before and spent thousands renovating it, adding a pool in the shape of the Black Sea, which bordered her native Russia.

  “Is that really the shape of the Black Sea?” Gert asked Henry.

  Apparently the host, clothed in matching black silk camisole and harem pants, heard her, because as she passed by she murmured, “Darling, it is. But who cares? Get a drink.”

  Tip had left Gert in Henry’s care soon after Edward’s driver had dropped them off. He’d taken one look at the vast sea of white skin and asked, “Y’all sure about this?”

  “It’s Alla’s,” Edward said. “There are far more unusual things to see than a colored man.”

  And he was right. Most of the guests were in some state of disinhibition and undress, whether from the impressive variety of alcohol being served or from the marijuana cigarettes being passed around the pool. Jean Acker was there, and Bessie Love. In the pool itself, two women had just jumped in naked and were kissing. Alla waved at them as she walked by.

  Nevertheless, Tip went over to say hello to the jazz trio, three black men who were taking a break from entertaining the guests, enjoying cocktails brought to them by a white-coated waiter. The older men nodded and laughed and seemed to be poking fun at Tip. Suddenly they all looked over at Gert and smiled with approval. No one else seemed to care at all.

  Edward came back with drinks. The jazz trio started up, and Tip returned. The four of them stood there, sipping their cocktails among the guests, not saying much, likely hoping, as Henry was, that the alcohol would soon hit their bloodstreams at a gallop.

  Edward smiled at Tip and rested his hand on Henry’s shoulder. Tip took one last glance around and slid an arm around Gert’s waist. She grinned and leaned into him.

  “At last,” said Edward, raising his glass and making them all laugh at their own self-consciousness.

  It was a wonderful evening. Tip danced with Gert, spinning her this way and that, holding her close for the slow ones; they gazed at each other as if they were falling in love all over again. In the month since he’d turned up on the set of Fox Trot on the Congo, Edward had placed him in several more scenes and recommended him for small parts in other films. He was in enough demand as a tap dancer that he could perform in theaters around the Southwest and be back to Hollywood within a day or two.

  When he went to refresh their drinks, Gert made her way over to Henry and Edward, who sat at one of the tables, holding hands.

  “We’ve never danced together before!” she said still catching her breath. “Isn’t he something?”

  When Tip returned, they congratulated him on his skill. He ran the tip of his brown finger down the dimple in her pale cheek. “She could make digging ditches look good.”

  “You’re a great lead,” she said, eyes shining up at him.

  “It’s a good thing, too,” he teased. He turned to the men. “I had to muscle her a bit in the beginning. The girl knows her mind!”

  “And that’s why we love her,” said Henry, feeling loose with affection for all of them.

  A breeze blew through the lemon trees, the jazz trio picked up again, and sitting there with Edward’s hand in his, Henry thought he might just possibly be the happiest he’d ever been in his life.

  Then Hazel Hampton stumbled in.

  It wasn’t clear where she’d come from—the house? The street?

  Edward groaned. “She’s ossified.”

  “Let’s get her a cab.”

  “She can’t go back to her place. All the dope peddlers know where she lives, and in her state she’s likely to buy anything.”

  Henry gripped Edward’s hand a little harder. “I don’t want this night to end.”

  “I don’t either, sweetheart, but I also don’t want her to die. There’ll be other nights.”

  Henry let go. Edward kissed him, then stood and headed for Hazel.

  Henry awoke in his apartment to a thumping sound, rapid fire, and for the briefest moment he wondered if it were his own heart. The pounding began again, and he stumbled through the dark to his door. It was Carlton Sharp.

  “Put some clothes on.”

  “What? Why? How did you—”

  Sharp averted his eyes from Henry’s bare chest. “I’ll explain in the car.”

  They sped down a very familiar route: the way to Edward’s house. Sharp refused to give any straight answers.

  “You tell me what’s going on right now,” Henry warned, “or I get out at the next stoplight.”

  Sharp turned to face him. “Edward Oberhouser’s been shot.”

  Henry’s vision wavered, oceans crashing through his head. Edward. Shot. Edward. Shot.

  “It appears to be a drug deal that took a turn. Neighbor called the police. Police called me.”

  Henry began to shake. “Is he—is he—?”

  “I need you to come into the house and help me gather up anything that might be . . . unflattering. Love letters, unusual clothing, certain things that a police investigation might turn up. You know what he has and where he keeps it. This is for Edward, you understand. You’ve got to do this for him.”

  The car pulled up in front of Edward’s garden apartment, the sky just beginning to lighten around it. Henry didn’t know if he could walk. Sharp jumped out on his side and hurried around to wrench Henry’s door open. “For godsake, get out of the car. We don’t have much time.”

  He saw himself approach Edward’s apartment, but he didn’t know how. His legs didn’t feel attached to his body. Sharp opened the door as if he owned the place. Two uniformed policemen stood in Edward’s front hallway.

  “This is the friend. He needs to see,” said Sharp, and the policemen stood back.

  There sitting on the tile, his back collapsed against the hall table, was Edward. The front of his crisp white shirt was dark red, and a trail of blood ran from a hole just above one of the shirt studs. His head hung at an awkward angle from his neck, his eyes open but unseeing.

  Henry lunged for him, but the officers caught him and held him back. “Whoa, there son,” said one of them in his ear. “We’re good enough to let you in before this goes public. Don’t tamper with the evidence, or we’ll never find who did this to him.”

  “HE SHOULD BE IN A HOSPITAL!” Henry bellowed.

  “The only place he’d be welcome in a hospital is very, very cold,” said the cop. “He was gone before we got here.”

  They lowered Henry to the floor, and he crawled the last few feet to his beloved.

  “Edward,” he whispered, though his throat felt as if he were being slowly strangled. He took the hand, only faintly warm now, and cradled it against him. “Edward.”

  43

  We told stars what they could and couldn’t say, and they did what we said because they knew we knew best. When things went wrong, we had a way of covering up for them, too.

  Howard Strickling, MGM head of publicity

  Irene had finally earned her spot back in the Scenario Department, with a far fuller knowledge of what went into a good take from her three months as a cutter girl. Editing was said to be a job any reasonably intelligent ten-year-old could do, but she suspected it was just a ploy to pay the girls less. For every scene, she had the final decision of which take captured it best. A different cutter with a different instinct could mean a very different film.

  As hard as she’d worked in editing, she worked even harder in scenario and spent almost every waking hour there. The apartment seemed to echo like a cavern without Mille in it, so she came to the studio early, stayed late, and submitted so many more scenarios and continuity scripts than the other writers that she’d been given a raise. She kept that to herself, though. Nobody liked a coworker who showed them up.

  She often thought about the mistakes she’d made, as Millie called them, and s
he realized there was one she could fix quite easily. She wrote to her aunt and uncle and told them where she was, and that she was okay. She apologized for making them lose two nieces instead of one but also explained that she had needed that time. They responded immediately with a letter so full of love and gratitude for her safety that she wrote again right away. The correspondence gave warmth to an otherwise tepid existence.

  As for her mistakes with Dan and Henry . . . she hadn’t quite mustered the courage to face them and ask forgiveness. Not yet.

  Her courage or lack thereof became moot, however, on a Thursday morning in early October.

  “Irene, I need to speak to you.” By the seriousness of Eva’s expression Irene knew it couldn’t possibly be work related. She followed Eva out to the hallway. “Edward Oberhouser was shot last night.”

  “My God, is he—”

  Eva shook her head dolefully.

  “Where’s Henry? Does he know?” Irene immediately regretted any mention of Henry, not wanting to reveal his very personal connection to Edward, but Eva seemed unfazed, as if she’d expected it.

  “They’ve got him holed up in his apartment,” she said bitterly, “no doubt worried that he’ll jeopardize the studio if word gets out about the profound depth of his grief.”

  The profound depth of his grief.

  Irene’s thoughts flew to her sister so quickly she had no time to steel herself against the wave of sadness before it broke over her.

  “I haven’t heard you mention him the last couple of months,” said Eva. “Are you still friends?”

  Henry. Tears stung behind Irene’s eyes, and she could feel her own loneliness swell to encompass his.

  “Yes,” she said, “we’re friends.”

  She still had a key to his apartment, so she let herself in the front door of the building, flying up the steps past Dan’s floor. She hesitated. If he’d been up all night, maybe he was sleeping. She’d let herself in and be there when he awoke. He shouldn’t be alone. She’d been so alone after Ivy died, and look how that had turned out—with her trapped in a soul-crushing striptease show. She turned the key in the lock and quietly twisted the knob so as not to wake him.