Everything and More (26 page)

*   *   *

Three days after the premiere, on December 18, it rained heavily. The north-south streets that centered at the Beverly Hills Hotel followed the ancient pattern of arroyos, and water sluiced along them, running knee-deep at intersections.

The downpour eased briefly as Roy left school, and she slogged through the drizzle with Heidi Ronoletti and Janet Schwarz. The discussion centered on graduation formals.

“Roy, you
have
to come with me,” wailed Heidi, a flat-chested math major with lovely brown eyes and dark curls that turned to frizz in this weather. “When I shop with Mother, she insists on buying me the droopiest thing in sight. You have a real eye.”

“Yes, Roy,” Janet chimed in with her squeaky voice. “You know right away what suits people.”

“Hey, flattery will get you someplace.” Roy grinned. “Over the vacation, let’s make the rounds together.”

When the other girls turned right at Bedford Drive, Roy’s expression grew thoughtful. For a while now it had been apparent there was money enough for her to enroll at nearby UCLA. Roy’s new clique had already decided between the usual feminine college majors, teaching and social work. Neither occupation drew her.

Now a career idea came to her full-blown.

She would be in fashion.

Roy was far from a clothes horse. Still, a brand-new outfit signified much more to her than to most girls—weren’t new clothes a negation of those horrendous, smelly hand-me-downs? Clothes
spoke
to her.

I’m not artistic like Althea, she thought, so that lets out designing. She glanced to her right. In the watery gloom, the creamy facade of Saks glowed softly. Retail shops, Roy thought. I’m pretty good at math, I could take a business-administration course. With that degree I could become a buyer, a manager even.

Her lungs expanded with rain-clean air as she thought: Whoopee! I have a major, I have a major!

She splashed through the gutter, kicking at the racing fingers of eucalyptus leaves, hurrying home to tell NolaBee.

Nearing the house, she thought of Dwight, and the excitement
drained from her wet, freckled face. Dwight, Dwight, Dwight. . . . Will I ever come first with anyone?

Roy was convalescing slowly. Though she had come around to accepting that on her part it had been puppy love, and on Dwight’s merely the promise of sexual assuagement, it was not in her to remove herself easily from any object of her affection, an organic stubborness shared by the other two Wace women.

She opened the front door, which was never locked. From the absence of cheerfully garrulous greetings, she decided that her mother was out. Changing her sodden shoes, she went to fix herself a hot Ovaltine.

In the kitchen, NolaBee hunched at the table, which was bestrewn with clippings about
Island.
Arms folded, head down, she was shuddering convulsively.

Roy’s body went icier than her slippered feet. All at once she was positive that the same type of tragedy that had killed her father had somehow destroyed her sister. “Mama, is it Marylin?”

“She just called from Yuma.” NolaBee raised her head. Tears made her skin yet more piteously bad.

“Yuma? But that’s where people go to—”

“She’s eloped with that man,” sobbed NolaBee vehemently. “She could have had a million beaux at her feet, she could have had her pick of young men, but she’s married him!”

Roy’s terror was alleviated. “You mean Mr. Fernauld? But, Mama, you
like
him.”

“I wanted the world for my beautiful baby,” NolaBee whimpered. “Not an old man. . . .”

*   *   *

“What a hideously rotten thing to do!” BJ cried.

“Beej, I know this is inconceivable to any child, but being a parent does not preclude one from having the emotional needs of the rest of humanity.”

“Oh, we knew
that,
Linc and me, we knew that well. And so did Mother and the entire world!”

“All right, you’ve spilled your bitterness, you have me cut down to size. But the fact remains—the solid, unalterable fact. Marylin and I are married.”

“BJ, I’d’ve given the world not to hurt you like this.” Marylin’s soft voice shook. “We should have told you first.”

It was early the following evening, the newlyweds had this minute returned from Arizona: the hall chandelier of the Fernauld home shone down on the exposed surfaces of three souls.

“And you!” BJ turned her rancorous, tear-streaked face on her friend. “All that talk of loving Linc. What happened to that? As soon as you got his book to star in, did it evaporate?”

“Let it go, Beej,” commanded Joshua. “Calm down.”

“Why? Does it hurt to hear that she’ll hop in bed with any man able to help her big fat career!”

“You’re talking to my wife.” Joshua’s voice rumbled from his thick chest. “And before you take that tone with her, you’d do well to remember that this is
my
house.”

“Oh, Joshua,” Marylin sighed.

“You tell me, then, why she marries a guy thirty years older. She got the role of a lifetime from Linc. What do you suppose she wants from
you
besides another leg up in the Industry?”

“Come on, Marylin!” Joshua shouted, grabbing their two mismatched overnight bags. The curving staircase shook under his angry footsteps. At the top, he turned, booming, “Marylin!” And stamped in the direction of the room he had shared with his first wife.

Marylin did not move. Despite her fragility and seeming pliability, in the territory of the heart she invariably stood her ground. BJ was her friend. “Listen,” she said quietly. “It’s not like that. Joshua’s been good to me, and helpful, yes. But I care for him. . . .”

“Care?” BJ’s messy black pompadour wobbled angrily. “Is that the new synonym for ‘love’?”

Marylin shook her head.

“So why?” BJ asked.

“Because,” Marylin said, “he loves Linc too.”

“My father, Big Joshua, hotshot-about-town, marries a girl in love with somebody else?”

“He accepts that I’ll never get over Linc.”

The outrage and hurt flickered less in BJ’s teary eyes. After a pause, she spoke more calmly. “My living here’s not going to work.”

“Maybe later it will. Please, please try not to hate us. Your father needs you—and so do I. You’re the only real friend outside of my family that I’ve ever had.”

BJ said with the faintest hint of pride, “You were my friend, too.”

“Were?”

“I’ll
try
to adjust.”

“BJ, for me there was no other alternative. Joshua’s the only man who can possibly understand what Linc will always mean to me.”

BJ sighed. After a moment she said, “I’ll be at the dorm. Tell Daddy, okay?”

Marylin poised on her toes to kiss her new stepdaughter’s soft,
moist cheek. Then she followed her bridegroom up the handsome curved staircase.

  
23
  

On May 7, 1945, in the cathedral city of Rheims, at a long, scarred table, Colonel General Alfred Jodl signed the documents of Germany’s surrender.

VE Day!

The task of whipping the Japanese remained, but church bells chimed, factory whistles shrilled endlessly, car horns blared a joyous cacophony as the forty-eight states erupted into a gargantuan orgy of stranger-kissing, boozing, indiscriminate hugging, street conga lines, and sex.

*   *   *

The following afternoon, Althea climbed the steps of a roomy old frame house opposite the Tropics on Rodeo Drive. Next to the front door was neatly gold-painted:
THE HENRY LISSAUER ART INSTITUTE
.

Althea had been a student for three months.

The institute had been at this location less than five years: for two decades previous to that, however, Henry Lissauer had conducted a prestigious atelier just off Unter den Linden in Berlin.

Numerous exiles from Hitler’s Europe had converged on Beverly Hills, glossing the quiet, wealthy community with a sophistication previously lacking. The town now boasted several cosmopolitan art galleries, an elegant Viennese bakery, polyglot milliners and
modistes,
chic jewelers, as well as the Henry Lissauer Art Institute. For the most part, these refugees had a large red J inside their brown
Reisepass.
On leaving their native land, each had become
ein staatenloser
—a
person without a country. Yet the United States considered them enemy aliens. Thus they were tethered to a ten-mile radius of their homes, ordered to carry at all times a pink book with their photograph, and forced to observe an eight-o’clock curfew. But this was very mild stuff when contrasted with what they had escaped.

The main threat, and it struck queasy terror into each of the
staatenlosers,
was that for any small infraction of the enemy alien regulations, or for any minor run-in with the law, he or she would forever lose the chance of becoming a United States citizen.

Henry Lissauer had escaped the greater horrors that were to befall European Jewry only because early in 1936 his rotund, bustling little wife had insisted they apply for immigration. It took nearly two years and most of their savings to procure the necessary papers. A few days before the permits stamped with an eagle-topped swastika arrived, there was a grim encounter with a gang of rowdy Nazi boys. The stout, jolly little wife had taken cyanide.

Now Henry Lissauer lived for two things: United States citizenship and the institute.

Lacking artistic creativity, he nurtured talent as tenderly as he would have the children denied him and the late Frau Lissauer. Each of his twenty-two students had met his rigid if elusive criteria. He insisted on a fresh eye. He had his own mysterious methods of divining this vernal vision, which had nothing to do with technique or formal training—he had turned away several applicants approaching professional stature. Once enrolled, a student could take part in any class from elementary drawing to advanced oil—or needn’t show up at all. The sole obligation was to attend a weekly conference in the institute’s slit of an office on the second floor of the old frame house. During this interview Lissauer would discuss the student’s work and progress, his myopic brown eyes apologetic behind his bottle-bottom-thick spectacles.

Althea, reporting for this mandatory meeting, paced back and forth along the corridor that smelled of paint and chalk, her expression hardening like plaster before she knocked. “It’s me, Mr. Lissauer, Althea Cunningham.”

There was no response. Henry Lissauer, who often ran a few minutes late, had invited his students to step inside and wait.

Along the beaverboard walls of the narrow office he had tacked a pastiche of sketches, watercolors, and unstretched oils. Some of these student works were competent. Many, though, were monstrosities of clashing colors or awkward composition that grated on the eye, or
of subject matter that was banally mawkish—a weirdly proportioned kitten playing with yarn raised Althea’s gorge. Perplexity and envy burned ferociously within her.

No work of hers had ever received the accolade of being pinned up by Mr. Lissauer. What qualities invisible to her ignorant (though fresh) eye did these horrors possess?

Althea’s entire life had been passed, or so it seemed to her, in a frantic attempt to attain what others considered excellence. For her, every compartment of life—looks, grades, talent, success in love—was constructed like an Egyptian step pyramid: you were either at the squalid, crowded bottom, the mediocre center, or atop the airy peak. Those above her she admired enviously, those below she ignored. Before she could climb the pyramid, she must first discern the order of the steps.

She squinted again at the other students’ work. Dreary, dreary, she thought. Yet because these daubs were tacked up, they shone with glamour.

Propping her gold-initialed portfolio against her chair, she closed her eyes.

In the months since she had left Beverly High, Althea’s appearance had improved immeasurably. The ratted, high pompadour was gone. She wore her pale, streaked hair drawn back into a smooth coil at the nape of her long, slender neck.

At Westlake, her tall, thin body and narrow Modigliani face had been at violent odds with what the other pre-teen girls called pretty, so she had considered her appearance monstrous: at Beverly High the makeup she had caked on her adolescent face had been a mask without which she dared not appear. At the institute, though, she had been asked to sit. Henry Lissauer and the two artist-teachers on the institute’s staff had pointed out to the class her unique and unusual qualities. Thus emboldened, she had gone cold turkey, leaving off the pastes and cakes and goos, using not even lipstick—a stultifying departure in style for 1945.