Everything and More (40 page)

Father and son embraced in a masculine bear hug.

Joshua pulled back, staring at his resurrected firstborn. “Linc?”

Linc made an inarticulate noise. He was weeping.

“What’s Mr. Harz doing here?” Billy asked.

“Mr. Harz is . . . Daddy’s son. He’s really Linc . . . you know Linc.” Photographs of Linc as a boy and in his officer’s peaked cap smiled from silver frames on the living-room grand piano and on Joshua’s writing desk.

Joshua, too, was weeping. Seeing them in this emotional embrace, Marylin was struck by the genetic affinities of father and son, the bumpy, dominant nose, the thick, black brows, the very dark, wet eyes. Their revealed emotions made Joshua look older, and Linc—disheveled by travel—younger.

“This is the damnedest, the damnedest,” sputtered Joshua, for once at a loss for words. “I don’t believe it. They said you were dead.”

“The reports were only slightly exaggerated. I was in a Japanese camp.”

“A prisoner?”

“They picked me up and took me to the Philippines.”

“But the war ended years ago.”

“I was sick and then . . . well, reasons, reasons.”

Joshua blew his nose loudly. “So where the hell have you been hiding?”

“Detroit.”

“Detroit?” Joshua turned to Marylin. For a few seconds his moist, piercing gaze settled on her. She summoned her craft, putting on an expression of noncommittal blandness. If only she weren’t standing in the doorway with the morning sun full on her.

Joshua blinked, giving an infinitesimal nod as if a mental cog had slipped into place.

“What the hell are we doing standing here?” he boomed. “Come on in, Linc, no, don’t worry with that damn thing, Percy’ll get it.
Percy! Coraleen!”
he bawled. “Come out here prepared for the surprise of your frigging lives!”

There ensued a swirl of hugs, tears, blown noses, trills of joyous disbelief, a triumphant confusion that Joshua blusteringly led, and it wasn’t until Ross, Billy’s Scottish nurse, her pleasant smile firm, drove her charge off to nursery school that Joshua permitted the emotional volcano to cool off. The servants retired to fix a second breakfast.

Marylin went upstairs. A shower and change of clothing did nothing to alleviate her weariness—or her taut-nerved apprehension. Joshua’s stumbling and tears of joy, his clutching embrace, had been instinctive, the real thing, unequivocal emotional honesty, but after that there had been a subtle shift. His joy at the miracle of Linc’s return was balanced by her three days spent incommunicado, a disappearance speculated about on the front page of every paper she had glimpsed at the airport news stands.

When she returned downstairs, father and son were in the breakfast room drinking Bloody Marys, engrossed in conversation. Quietly she took her place opposite Joshua.

“Billy’s taken over your old room,” her husband was saying. “The kid’s the one big change around here. Linc, your mother did a job on this house, a damn good job, and Marylin liked it too. We’ve left things as they were.” He refilled his glass, adding a jolt more vodka to Linc’s drink in spite of Linc’s negative wave. “But enough of us. Tell me about that goddamn limp. Not that it’s a big deal, you could still beat me at tennis—”

“Did I ever?”

“Who remembers? Let’s hear how you came by the fucker.”

Linc explained about his TBM being shot out from under him, his rescue, and the Japanese medic. When talking to his father, Marylin noted, he fell into an atypical loud archness. And Joshua became a caricature of himself, benevolent yet boomingly profane. The masculine rivalry between the reunited pair tangled deep into the roots of their obvious love.

Percy set out platters of smoked salmon and whitefish, of crimson corned beef and warm pastrami—fatted calf, Beverly Hills style. Afterward he lugged in Ann Fernauld’s heavy Georgian tea set, which was removed from its place on the sideboard only on state occasions, while Coraleen bore in a richly fragrant offering from her own hands, small caramelized coffee cakes that had been kneaded and baked within the hour. “I remembered how crazy you were about these, Linc.”

Joshua speared a pecan-rich pastry onto Linc’s plate. “Jesus H. Christ, can you believe it, can any of you believe it? It’s as if all the mystic Catholic bullshit my mother believed in has come to pass—
Kyrie eleison, Gloria in excelsis deo!
My son returned unto me.” This was as close as he had come to mentioning Linc’s prolonged absence. He had drunk and eaten heavily, as if fueling his fevered pleasure. (Marylin, like Linc, had eaten practically nothing.) “And by God, you’ve beaten me at my own game, won yourself the Pulitzer.”

“How long do you figure it would take a roomful of monkeys to type
Hamlet?”

“None of that modesty crap. Linc, work like
Island
is never accidental. Don’t tell me, I know.” He faked a punch in the direction of Linc’s jaw. The servants left, and Joshua continued in the same unrestrained, endlessly voluble strain.

The evasions boomed unbearable against Marylin’s ears. “Joshua, did you get my telegram?” she asked quietly. “Let me explain—”

“Sure I got the wire,” Joshua interrupted with a stagy chortle. “Believe you me, flying the coop like that was a stroke of genius! It’s about time you showed a little temperament. Angelpuss, haven’t I told you over and over that you let those bastards work your ass too hard? You’re always too damn willing to please, so naturally they take you for granted. Well, this has set Art Garrison back on his heels. We aren’t friends anymore, but I say this without spite or malice. The dwarf’s a roaring little bully. It’s time he had another think about you. Suspension, hell! The squeaky wheel gets greased. Shouldn’t be surprised if Leland won’t get him to tear up the old slave contract and write you a new one. Hell, you’re a star. Let ’em pay you like one.”

“Last June,” Linc said, “I went to see Marylin at the stu—”

Joshua jumped to his feet. “Great God!” He slapped his forehead. “We’ve forgotten Beej! She doesn’t know! Linc, she’ll kill me. Beej’s married, Mrs. Maury Morrison. Maury’s the sweetest guy, in his last year of law school. Those two stinkers, they’ve made an old granddad out of me. Wait until you get a load of the infant—Annie’s the spit of your mother.”

He crossed the hall to the den, from whence they could hear him announcing to BJ that her older brother was alive, yes, dammit, alive.

Linc pushed away his coffee cup. There was a new vertical line between his eyebrows. “I didn’t think I’d feel so much, seeing Dad,” he said. “Love and the whole bag.”

“We have to tell him when he gets back.”

“He knows, Marylin, he knows. Poor old Dad, he hasn’t changed one iota. He’s going to bull his way through.”

“Linc!”
Joshua roared from the hall telephone. “Come say hello to your sister. The brat’s convinced I’ve slipped my tether.”

The house filled quickly. First came BJ and her husband, Maury, sandy-haired and tall, with Annie, who though teething and drooly, did remarkably resemble her maternal grandmother. A brace of Linc’s wealthy Cotter cousins. BJ’s in-laws. Y. Frank Freeman, big boss at Paramount. Leland Hayward, Humphrey Bogart, and a swarm of Joshua’s other friends.

Joshua forced celebratory drinks on everyone, and loud laughter spilled through the big den and sunroom onto the brightness of the pool deck. Trimly uniformed cateresses began passing hot hors d’oeuvres while the extended dining table was being set up as a buffet. Though Marylin had become accustomed to these lavish impromptu gatherings, her weary mind kept shifting back and forth between the present and that long-ago Beverly Hills wake. She forced herself into the role of hostess.

BJ, Maury, and Joshua stayed close to Linc. Women fell on him, reddening his cheeks with lipstick, men clapped his shoulders. Marylin heard endless congratulations on the Pulitzer for
Island.
She heard eerily few probes into his delayed postwar return home—it was almost as if the force of Joshua’s will were silencing such questions.

This was the first time Marylin had viewed Linc in the Beverly Hills surroundings that were his birthright. He was at the same time more charming and more brittle, his face showing tension and a light gloss of sweat.

Billy veered around the adults, constantly darting back to squander his supply of riddles on his newfound brother—not a mere kid like everybody else’s brother, but a regular grown-up.

The crowd grew.

Finally, around five, right after Roy and NolaBee arrived, Marylin felt she would quite literally expire if she remained another minute in this high-decibel mob scene. Without excusing herself, she escaped up the curving staircase, kicking off her high heeled pumps to stretch
fully clothed on the elaborately quilted, raw-silk bedspread.

She slept heavily.

The sound of the door opening awoke her. It was dark outside, but otherwise she had no sense whatsoever of the time. The sounds of revelry continued unabated. Joshua fumbled for the light, closing the door, moving unsteadily toward their bed.

“Took a nap,” she murmured.

The bed springs bounced her as he sprawled heavily on the mattress next to her. He brought into the cool room the smell of expensive cigars, liquor, overspiced food.

“My angelpuss,” he muttered.

Reaching both arms around her, he roughly pressed one heavy leg between hers. Then he was pulling up her skirt, which sleep had rucked. For a moment she was too startled to realize his intention.

“No,” she said, sharp.

“Yes, I say goddamn yes.” His words were slurred, but his movements were iron-strong. He yanked roughly at her silk panties.

“Stop!” she cried.

But she was a tiny woman and his muscles were thick and strong from tennis and swimming daily laps.

Marylin, struggling, could not believe in Joshua’s metamorphosis. Never, even when totally swacko, had he forced himself on her. She hit at his face.

With a grunt, he rammed his knee upward into her crotch.

The agony blinded her.

For a moment she saw nothing but darting white lights; then his face came back into focus. The big features were loose, animal. He lurched his body onto hers.

“No,” she whimpered. “No.”

But a hot, sweaty, implacable two hundred and fifty pounds crushed down.

As Joshua forced entry into that terrible ache he had just inflicted, she screamed, and her scream became part of the hubbub. I hate you, I hate you: the thought seared her brain with each thrust.

He fell away from her. “You’re mine.” His slurring voice came from deep within his barrel chest. “Gonna stay mine.”

“I love Linc . . . you’ve known that always.”

He pushed from her, hoisting himself off the bed, staggering to the dresser. Small objects clinked and thudded as he emptied out her purse. He held up a gleaming object that through her teary blur she recognized as Linc’s ring.

“See this? Take a last look, for we are about to bury it in the ocean deep, where it belongs.”

He stumbled into the bathroom. She heard a splash, and then the toilet flushed.

Returning to the room, he teetered over the bed. “Mine,” he sobbed, and toppled down. Almost immediately, snores burst from him.

She sat on the edge of the bed gathering strength to move. She loathed Joshua with all her wounded, violated body, all her enfeebled, spinning brain. Her one thought was to escape her husband’s house.

  
37
  

Roy sat on the stairs balancing a plate of beef Stroganoff and endive salad; on the step below her were the half-empty dishes that BJ and Maury had deposited a minute ago when Willie Wyler had called them to come have one of those new instant Polaroid snapshots taken with Linc.

Sitting like this, her full, cerise striped skirt draped around her, her soft pink wool blouse tucked into the cinched waistband, her makeup purposefully light, her brown curls cropped in a stylish new poodle cut, Roy was charming. If there had not been the inevitable comparisons with Marylin’s ethereal loveliness, people would have called her a looker. As it was, she dwelt eternally in the shade. She considered herself plain, untalented, and, God knows, no brain.

Years ago, when she had told Althea Cunningham that she wanted to be ordinary, she had meant it with her whole heart, and since then the ordinary had become her hazy, unattainable
fata morgana.
To Roy, her KayZee sorority sisters possessed the glamour of unflappable normality, so she had bent every effort toward becoming like the others. But she never could suppress herself. Enthusiasm, like her brown curls, burst out all over the place. This inability to fit into the
pillared chapter house she attributed not to any lack of the sorority, but to her own unworthiness.