Everything and More (11 page)

“You live on Charleville,” said the nurse crisply. “Miss Nathans goes in that direction. She’ll give you a lift.”

“What about my sister?” Marylin’s voice sounded odd and tinny to her. “My sister will worry.”

“I’ll send a note to her class.”

With impersonal competence the nurse helped Marylin off with her wet clothes, giving her a loose gown that tied with strings. Marylin stretched nauseated and light-headed on one of the cots that were separated by a curtain from the dispensary. She could hear the nurse’s quick, expert typing, hear a fly buzzing nearer, than farther . . . nearer, then farther. That gruesome you-are-there clairvoyance was gone and her mind reiterated “missing in action . . . missing in action . . . missing in action.”

Though shivering, she did not pull up the khaki blanket folded over the foot of the cot; though the curtain was bile green, ugly, and menacing, she did not take her eyes from it. Like that poor trapped fly, her mind endlessly revolved around the three words.

Missing in action.

Missing . . . in . . . action. . . .

It meant his plane had not returned, it meant he was somewhere, but not on the
Enterprise.

It did not mean that he was dead.

He was shot down once before and he was okay, she thought, forlornly trying to comfort herself. Why doesn’t the nurse open a window and let the fly out? Missing in action . . . missing in action. . . .

The final bell buzzed. Feet thundered on cement hallways, lockers clanged, voices shrilled and roared.

Roy and Althea burst into the nurse’s office, both demanding at once, “Where’s Marylin Wace? What’s wrong with her?”

“Which one of you is Roy Wace?” asked the nurse.

She sent Althea packing before she would explain to Roy that Marylin had fainted.

“Fainted?” Roy asked. “She’s never fainted.”

“It happens a lot. No wonder, the way you girls diet nowadays. She had a little accident with her clothes. They’re in this bag. And here’s a note for your mother.”

Marylin borrowed Roy’s hand-me-down blue coat.

The three of them squeezed into the front seat of Miss Nathans’s rattly black LaSalle coupe. When the car pulled up in the garage driveway, Marylin said: “Thank you, Miss Nathans.” She had scarcely spoken to Roy in the nurse’s office, and these were the first words she had uttered since they had left Beverly High.

Climbing the steps, Roy gripped her sister’s fragile arm. She felt protective, flustered, sympathetic, and inadequately young. As she used her doorkey, she asked, “Marylin, what happened?

Marylin, without replying or taking off the saggy old coat, sat at the table.

“Anything I can do to help?”

Marylin gave her a blank look.

“What about something to eat?”

Marylin blinked as if somebody had shone a flashlight in her lovely blue-green eyes. “Oh. Maybe a cup of tea.”

Waiting for the water to boil, Roy reached her own conclusions about the fainting spell. In movies and novels a swoon generally announced a baby was on the way. Roy knew only the vaguest outline of the process (oh sure she jabbered with sophisticatedly raised eyebrows to Althea, but that was only
talk
) so she imagined that passing out had been Marylin’s first inkling of pregnancy. And Linc was thousands of miles away! No wonder the poor girl was in a state. How gruesome.

Roy carried a sloshing cup of liquid that was more milk than tea to the table and sat opposite her sister. “Marylin, listen, I’m not a little kid anymore.” Her menarche had occurred in January, by clever chance the same month that she started Beverly.

Marylin looked up. “What?”

“If something’s . . . wrong . . . I’ll do everything to help.”

Marylin shook her head.

“However bad it is,” Roy said, “I promise I wouldn’t tell anyone, not even Mama.”

Marylin stared at her with the wide-open, vague look of a strafed refugee.

Roy’s natural loyalty and sympathy gushed, and she had to fight back tears. “I’m your sister,” she muttered, hugging Marylin’s trembly shoulders. “You can trust me.”

“I’m cold, so very cold.”

“Here, let’s get you into bed.”

At a little after six the rickety outside stairs shuddered under footsteps, and Roy, thoroughly frightened by her sister’s zombielike inertia, galloped to open the door for her mother. NolaBee, as usual,
lugged a big brown bag of groceries. Seeing Marylin, salt white under a heap of faded old patchwork quilts, she thrust the bag at Roy and ran to her crumpled, beautiful child. Marylin sat up, holding out her arms, and when NolaBee clasped her, she buried her face in her mother’s meager bosom and began gasping in terrible deep sobs.

“Darlin’, darlin’. What is it?”

“Linc . . . he’s . . . missing in action. . . .”

“Oh, my poor darlin’.”

“I’m so . . . cold.”

“Mama’s home.”

“. . . and frightened.”

“Mama’s with you.”

Roy, watching her mother rock her sister in her arms, crooning as if Marylin were a little baby, felt her own face and ears go hot. What a juvenile she’d been to leap to the melodramatically wrong conclusion. Then her eyes filled with tears. That dreamy dreamy guy, she thought. To atone for her evil misconception about her sister’s purity, she put away groceries onto the crowded, messy open shelves.

“Marylin.” She went to the bed. “Want me to call BJ? She’ll know what’s going on.”

Marylin jerked from her mother’s arms. “That’s a wonderful idea! Maybe he’s been found. I’ll do it.”

Her hands shook and she could not thumb through F’s in the slim Beverly Hills phone directory, so Roy looked up the number and dialed, handing her the phone.

“May I speak to BJ?” Marylin asked.

Roy could hear a colored maid’s voice at the other end explaining that Lieutenant Fernauld was missing and the family was not taking calls. The febrile excitement drained from Marylin’s face, and she stood holding the instrument as if she did not know what to do with it.

NolaBee hung up and led Marylin to her own bed.

*   *   *

During the night, Roy awakened to hear her mother’s voice, intense and throaty: “You can’t, darling, it’s just plain impossible.”

“And what about that operation? Mama, it’s murder,
murder.”

“Marylin, listen to me, listen. What’s inside you now is nothing, a tiny nothing—”

“It’s part of Linc.” Marylin’s voice convulsed in ragged little sobs that to Roy were even more pitiable than her earlier tears of irreconcilable grief.

“Hush, hush,” NolaBee soothed.

“I won’t kill Linc’s baby.”

“You know what people will call it, I reckon. Darlin’, we can’t let our baby be a bastard.”

“Linc’ll come home!”

“’Course he will. But it won’t be in time. After, you can be married right and proper, and have lots of other babies. This one, Marylin, it’s not fair to the poor little innocent. Even if you do carry it, you’ll have to give it away. A child needs a name, a father, a right proper life.”

Her mother’s Southern voice spoke the common-sense truth, and Roy knew it—yet wasn’t there another, more human truth of life and love?

The covers rustled as if somebody were turning over.

“I can’t do that thing, it’s illegal, and besides, I just can’t. This is Linc’s baby, part of him. Mama I’m so confused, so miserable, but don’t try to make me do it. Because I won’t.”

“Darlin’, it’s the only way. A mistake like this could ruin your life forever. I reckon you’d never get a chance at a career.”

“I hate acting!”

“You hate everything now.”

“I’ve always done what you’ve told me, Mama, you know that. But not this time.”

“It’s only like, well, a scraping. Somebody I know on the wing assembly had it done last month, she had a right good doctor.” NolaBee’s voice cracked and Roy knew her mother was crying. “Oh, my sweet beautiful, as if I like it any more than you do! But there’s no other answer.”

“Why don’t we move?” Marylin said in a stronger voice. “Pretend the baby’s yours. Or that I’m married—”

“Marylin, you know as well as I do how close we are to the bone. Where would we get the money to take care of a baby?”

“I’ll leave school and work,” Marylin said.

“And who would raise it?”

Marylin’s awful, ragged little sobs started again. Roy’s eyes were oozing in sympathy. “Me,” she said, the syllable loud in the darkness.

“Roy. You shouldn’t be eavesdropping,” accused NolaBee.

“I’d have to be stricken deaf not to.”

“You go back to sleep.”

But Roy got out of bed, stumbling around the big wardrobe to the double mattress that her parents had shared, crawling in next to
Marylin, putting her arms around the fragile, shaking body. Even now, in her tears and unhappiness, Marylin had a tenderly sweet smell, not Apple Blossom cologne but her own unique bodily scent.

“Marylin, I’ll leave school too. I’ll look after the baby.”

“Roy,” NolaBee said, lifting up to reach over to pat her younger daughter, “you’re being right sweet, but you girls aren’t talking sense. We can’t ruin Marylin’s life and the baby’s too. There’s just no way out except . . .” Her voice broke into a gasping sob.

The three Waces wound their arms around each other, rocking together as they wept.

Toward dawn, Roy and NolaBee drowsed.

Wedged between her mother and sister, Marylin lay with her aching eyes wide open, her fingers clenching the initialed silver ring, ALF.

Suddenly a plan came to her, a crazily simple plan.

She would go to Linc’s father.

The famous Joshua Fernauld. Rich and powerful. A writer of noble novels and screenplays that celebrated the dignity of human life.

She would explain about Linc and her . . . No. She would give Mr. Fernauld Linc’s stories—Linc had written far more eloquently of what they meant to one another than any words she could utter.

Mr. Fernauld would not let his grandchild be scraped away.

  
10
  

Trudging northward in her bobby socks and navy gabardine suit, a reconstructed hand-me-down that was the most somber outfit she owned, Marylin cradled the box containing Linc’s short stories.

A cold April wind had blown away the mist, revealing each architectural embellishment on North Hillcrest Road—a lavishly tiled
Hispanic dome, the ornamental stonework on Norman crenellations, the elegant fanlight of a Colonial mansion. The impeccably pruned trees and shrubbery were rattling
money, money, money.

Marylin added awe to her morbid churn of emotions.

This morning NolaBee had been determined to call Hughes that a family emergency was keeping her home, but Marylin had summoned her every tenuous acting skill to convince her mother that she was fine now, sound of mind and body, and could rest in bed alone.

After her mother and sister had left, she remained immobile, her eyes fixed on the long, twisting water stain on the ceiling, her mind filled with the horror in the burning cockpit. Though she no longer suffered the immediacy of that first horror-struck paroxysm, a bleakly miserable anxiety enveloped her, and she held tight to that thin shred of comfort: he was missing, not dead. Around nine she attempted to focus on her approaching face-to-face confrontation with Joshua Fernauld, but the incalculable importance of this meeting with the famous stranger paralyzed her already dislocated mental processes. Finally she accepted that her sole chance of success lay in preparing as for a role. Tearing a sheet of three-holed paper from her notebook, she struggled with her dialogue:
Mr. Fernauld, I’m so very sorry about Linc. I’ve been dating him—more than dating. I’ve brought along some stories he’s sent me. The ones he wrote about us are on top. I need to ask your help about something. When you’ve finished reading, you’ll understand.
She rehearsed in front of the bathroom mirror, after a while managing to say her lines without a sob.

At 10:20—she had determined eleven the earliest acceptable hour to call—she had set out, mechanically repeating the speech as she covered the miles.

She crossed Elevado to the seven hundred block, where the Fernaulds lived. Big, gleaming cars lined both sides of the street, and Marylin absently determined a ladies’ club meeting was in progress nearby. The only other time she had been to the Fernaulds’ was when she and Linc had dropped off BJ, and then she had been too involved to fully take in how dismayingly impressive the large Tudor-style house was. She gazed up in dismay at the massive heap of crimson bricks traced with Virginia creeper.