Everything and More (66 page)

Marylin breathed deeply, then resorted to an actress’s tone of neutrality. “Offhand I’d say she doesn’t have a thing to worry about.”

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know Charles very well, of course, but it seems to me he’s the last one to do anything rash.”

“Oh, Mother.”

“I didn’t mean that as criticism. But he, well, he’s very sure of himself.”

“That’s only how he
seems.
He’s great-looking, terrifically intelligent, he has a famous name and a family mentioned in every history textbook. But underneath it all, he’s . . . I don’t know. Vulnerable. He can’t express his feelings, so he pretends he doesn’t have them.”

Marylin’s maternal instincts jangled. Sari had dated two boys, and both of them, the stammerer and the tall one with the terminal acne, had fit like two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle with the girl’s boundlessly loving tendencies toward nurturing. This insufferably stuck-up, poker faced son of Althea’s has somehow roused her sympathies. He’ll break her heart. I’ll kill anyone who hurts her. Reaching out in the darkness, she encountered her daughter’s soft hair.

“Mother . . . won’t you try to like him? For me?”

“Then there is . . . something?”

“It seems wild, doesn’t it?” The soft voice shook with joy and uncertainty. “He’s so far above me.”

Marylin was remembering back through the years, to a deeply tanned young naval officer who in his whites was surely a deity descended, an impoverished girl who lived above a garage . . . that awful bleak doctor’s office with the stirrups . . . the ignoble demise of part of her soul. . . . Nobody had set out to hurt or maim.

“It’s not a matter of who is too good for whom,” Marylin said. “It’s just that Charles is different. He has to be. His kind of wealth is like living behind a thick wall. It sets you apart from other people, and life. It can make some men, well, exploitive.”

“Charles isn’t stuck behind some ‘thick wall,’ he’s not different.”

“I just can’t bear for you to be hurt,” Marylin cried. “That’s the worst part of being a mother. You can feel all of your child’s pain whether the child is grown or not.”

“Then try to see Charles as a person, not a stereotype.”

Chagrined and taken aback by her daughter’s hostility, Marylin was silent for a moment. “You’re right. I
have
been connecting him
with that mess with Gerry.” She paused. “It’d be so easy for anyone with his name, his family, to be a phony, but Charles certainly seems sincere.”

Marylin spoke her lines skillfully, but Sari, of course, caught the placatory note.

She sighed and said nothing.

Marylin asked, “Have you heard Billy’s car?”

“No—maybe he’s still with Mrs. Stoltz.
Him
she likes. He cracked her up all through dinner.”

“He did?”

“I think he made her forget her father,” Sari said, rising to hug her mother, a dismissal that was firm yet not uncharitable. “Good night.”

At the top of the stairwell, Marylin gripped the hand-carved banister. Under normal circumstances, she brooded about her too-sensitive daughter and seldom gave a concerned thought to Billy—other than his draft status. Billy had emerged unscathed from a near-fatal head injury not to mention lesser broken bones and a ruptured appendix. Billy was a tough, wisecracking survivor.

Billy’s only twenty-four, and Althea has a son his age, Marylin told herself. It was a kind gesture for him to drive her home. Now stop being ridiculous.

With stoic effort Marylin blocked these worries from her mind and slowly descended the stairs.

*   *   *

Althea had just broken down in a storm of tears.

She and Billy were in Belvedere’s music room, surrounded by stereo components that had been installed by Firelli’s top sound engineer. She had set a recording on the balanced turntable, and as the bouncy, perfectly recaptured notes had filled the room, she had recalled—too late—that this Dennis Brain recording of Mozart’s horn concerti included Number Two in E Flat Major, the piece that had accompanied that monstrous, losing battle with her parents.

As tears poured from her eyes, she snatched up her purse for a handkerchief.

“Hey, Althea, hey there.” Billy’s voice, lacking its aggressive humor, sounded oddly subdued.

She yanked the stylus from the revolving disc. “It’s my father. . . .”

“I know, I know.”

“His favorite . . . record . . .”

“Listen, it’s okay to cry. I do it myself sometimes.”

The devastating complexities of Althea’s love-hatred for her father had always tormented and baffled her, and the only way she could
bring herself under control was to count backward from a hundred. By the time she reached the fifties, her sobs subsided.

“Better?” Billy asked gently.

“I keep expecting the phone to ring,” she said.

“Your father’s that bad?”

“He’s just lying there, a corpse already.”

“The usual medical heroics?”

“To the hilt.”

Billy was sitting at the far end of a couch, his loafers resting on the low tray table. “It’s ugly,” he said sympathetically.

“Why in God’s name can’t people just die anymore?”

“In my opinion the answer has something to do with our medical fraternity’s profound respect for life,” Billy retorted. “How can you rack up a profoundly respectable Beverly Hills lifestyle if your patients conk out pronto?”

Althea smiled faintly, then began to weep again.

“In Dad’s movies,” Billy said, raising his horn-rims, “when this situation came up, the male lead usually put his manly arm around his tear-stricken costar. Critics of the time wrote that his scripts showed a deep knowledge of human behavior. Do you think that analysis holds up?”

She wiped her eyes. “Possibly.”

He shifted across the couch, resting his arm around her. He was bony, thin, and she could smell his deodorant and sweat, the comforting odors of masculine youth. She leaned her head on his T-shirt.

“You have sort of an outré relationship with your father, don’t you?”

“Did Charles tell you that?”

“You mustn’t keep underrating me, Althea. True, I write jokes for the idiots to snicker over, but that doesn’t mean my mental processes are deficient.” His fingers rubbed her shoulder soothingly. “Your father’s been ill for years, and you should have adjusted, but you’re still on the rocky edge. Want to dump on me—or do you save that for your shrink?”

“I don’t have one. Sometimes I think I need one. But the thought of having somebody’s dirty little eyes prying into me is—” She shuddered.

“My sentiments exactly.”

“Billy, get out of here. When I’m shook, I do things I’m sorry about later.”

“I’ll take my chances. Since I was fourteen and a half you’ve been the heroine of my wet dreams.”

“I bet you tell that to all the girls,” she said.

“Yeah, but with you it’s true.” He nuzzled her ear.

Althea’s affairs were carried out with mannered discretion and absolute secrecy. The minute any relationship threatened to go public, she ended it. Her innate and demanding instinct for privacy had been strengthened as if with a steel spine by her admiring love for Charles. It was deep necessity that she appear pristine and untouched—save by her legally wedded spouses—to her son. She could not risk seeing disgust in those clear hazel eyes.

She said carefully, “I’m a good deal older.”

“Venus must be at least four thousand and sixty if she’s a day. And if she materialized, I’d have a hard-on too.” Billy pulled away so he could look at her.

Dismayed to even briefly lose the warm comfort, she admitted that she was diverted by and attracted to this thin, humorously clever young man.

“Nothing like coming right to the point,” she said.

“Well?” he asked with a faint tremor. “Are you going to order me forth?”

“The castle keep’s no place to conduct an amour,” she said.

He put his arm around her shoulder again. “You wouldn’t want Charles to catch on, is that it?”

“Precisely.”

“He won’t, I promise you.” He nuzzled her ear again. “Mmm. Nice.”

Althea, responding instantaneously to the flick of his tongue in her ear, caressed the tendons of Billy’s neck. They stretched embracing on the long couch.

Suddenly the side door, which led onto the porte cochere, slammed. She jerked swiftly to her feet, going into the hall. “Charles,” she called. “We’re in here.”

The hall chandelier shone on Charles’s pale hair, which for once was not smoothly combed, and in the bright light she could see his expression clearly. He looked dazed, as if he had just been aroused from sleep—or reverie.

“Oh, Mother, hello.” Recovering, he strode swiftly across gleaming marble to her.

With an intense surge of denial, she told herself that there had been nothing out of the ordinary in his manner.

She could not bear any additional losses.

*   *   *

The Del Monte, a two-story pink stucco apartment complex on Wilshire Boulevard with lush tropical foliage surrounding a kidneyshaped
pool, offered daily maid service and catered to out-of-towners who paid a minimum of attention to their neighbors. A few days later Billy moved out of his parents’ house and rented a one-bedroom unit in the Del Monte.

  
61
  

At the beginning of April, two weeks later, thick gray clouds from the north clamped over the Los Angeles basin. Although the air was chill and heavy with moisture, Charles and Sari remained sitting on the bare, tamped earth by the stream. Charles sat with his back spear straight, Sari angled toward him with upthrust knees so that her poncho fell around her, forming a gray tepee from which her hair emerged like soft black smoke.

Marylin could see them from her window.

As she had promised Sari two weeks earlier, she now saw Charles with a clear vision, simply for what he was. And what sane mother could pick fault with a tall, intelligent, superrich, internationally well-educated paragon who voiced his opinions with a confidence that inspired absolute faith? Yet Marylin could not silence the small, naggingly disloyal question: what did this flawless gem see in her unspectacular though dear child? And each time she came up with only one answer: in this time of trouble, Charles needed some of Sari’s boundless loving kindness. Beyond this understandable larceny, there was nothing to rouse the least maternal distrust. His treatment of Sari was a mixture of comradeship and
sang froid
politeness. Wouldn’t he display a hint of shamefacedness if he were “taking advantage”—whatever
that
meant nowadays—of her daughter?

Marylin and Joshua had been forced to accept that Charles approached
Sari as a genuine swain, Billy having with characteristic restlessness decamped into a service apartment on Wilshire. Charles dropped by the house every day, often joining them for lunch, dinner—a couple of times even for breakfast. He hiked with Sari, he listened to her records. An old-fashioned kind of romance that, as NolaBee put it, was right cute.

Charles picked up a pebble and skimmed it over the stream; a live oak branch hid the small stone’s trajectory, but from the window Marylin could see Sari lean closer to touch the white cable stitch of Charles’s sleeve. He nodded, pushing to his feet, extending his hand to help her rise before he brushed off his slacks. They started along the shell-lined path that led up the canyon to where a derelict adobe, Sari’s old hideaway, marked the end of the property line.

Marylin’s breath clouded the windowpane as they disappeared from view.

*   *   *

The next morning, Saturday, BJ came to visit. Maury and their two younger daughters had returned nine days after the baby’s birth, but BJ (mother of three girls) had been unable to tear herself from the miracle of a grandson. She had stayed on, arriving back in Beverly Hills on Thursday, and used the next two days to recover a bit from jet lag and have her photographs developed. With Joshua, Marylin, and Sari she sat in the den, opening package after package of color prints. “Will you look at this one,” she kept saying in her loud, cheerful voice, boasting about every inch of her grandson, about Annie’s immediate recovery from the birth (“Remember, Marylin, we stayed in the hospital a full week and then came home in an ambulance?”), and about the enormous party on the kibbutz for the baby’s circumcision.