Cheat and Charmer (13 page)

Moments later, still wearing her bathrobe, she flew out the back door and raced barefoot down the driveway to the mailbox, which she flung open. She tossed her letter into it as if the force of her motion could make it fly halfway across the globe and land that instant in Paris.

Later, as she dressed for the day, a sudden impulse came over her and she returned to Jake’s office. She rolled another two sheets into the typewriter, and wrote:

She lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. The words on the page, in their neat blocks, looked back at her:
Do you recognize us?
they seemed to say.
You should. You just wrote us down yourself. You can’t take us back. What are you going to do with us? We’re yours, all right. You can’t pretend we’re not
. She
thought immediately of movies in which a character leans into a fireplace and drops a letter into a blaze or lights a corner of a page and watches it slowly go up in flames, and, yanking the letter out of the typewriter, she went into the bathroom, lifted the toilet seat, flicked her gold lighter, and lit the edge of the paper. Then she kneeled over the toilet and watched it crumble into the hissing water.

Returning to Jake’s desk, she gathered up the newspaper and was just beginning to fold it when she saw another item she’d missed:
HUAC CITES ACTOR ART SQUIRES FOR CONTEMPT
. Artie had refused to name names and was going to jail for ten months. Of course, she knew, he would never work in Hollywood again. She took the paper downstairs and out to the incinerator, and set it on fire, too. It burned quickly, and she slammed the iron door of the incinerator to keep the searing smoke and ashes from blowing into her face.

A
s she looked for a parking space later that afternoon, Dinah wondered how Dorshka Albrecht had ended up living on a street lined with fraternity houses. This woman—who had once been a star of the great stages of Vienna, Prague, and Berlin; who had married the renowned Austrian poet Joachim Albrecht and, after his death, written screenplays for Murnau, Lang, Pabst, Lubitsch, and Ventura; who had taken into her bed heaven knows how many eager and grateful artists, actors, composers, and playwrights—today, this woman walked alone to Westwood Village and back. Dressed in loose slacks and a man’s shirt, a pair of blue sneakers on her feet, she carried her groceries past gangly college boys who had no idea who she was or the world she had come from.

With determined steps, Dinah walked up the sun-dappled path to the front door of Dorshka’s apartment. The doorbell chimed two notes, high and low, when she pressed the button. In her mind she had a vivid picture of her friend and expected her to look and sound just the same, even though it had been years since she had last seen her, she recalled guiltily—the summer of ’46, when, after their marriage, Veevi and Mike had flown from Paris to Los Angeles for a brief trip. Dorshka was too proud to call, Dinah supposed, and though Dinah had always been fond of Dorshka and had seen her often during the war, when both of them were grim and desperate about Veevi, Stefan, and Mike, she hadn’t tried as hard as she might have to stay in touch. Jake’s success, Dinah suspected, would have been hard on Dorshka, and she would not have wanted anyone to know it.

Subpoenaed early in the investigations, she had refused to testify and
had lost her U.S. passport and been blacklisted. So of course she couldn’t find work as a screenwriter—work that, in any case, had been scarce enough since the end of the war. After the Venturas left, she had written movies exclusively for the great Austrian beauty Lily Keller, and she might have gone on writing them forever, except that after the war Keller surprised everyone by going into seclusion on Vancouver Island. Since Dorshka worked only with Lily, projects stopped coming her way, and she had to live on her savings, which lasted only a few years, given that she had spent thousands of dollars getting people out of Europe. She stopped going to parties, where she might have made new contacts or revived old ones: she would have been pitied or, worse, flattered into irrelevance by her association with a vanished past that had been the present as recently as five years before—an interval in Hollywood tantamount to prehistoric aeons. Through Veevi’s letters, Dinah knew that Mike regularly sent his mother checks, which she reluctantly accepted. Dorshka also coached young Hollywood “hopefuls” in diction, dialogue, and dialect “for the stage and screen”—something for which she had long been famous. That is, she had been known in the thirties for interrupting young Americans and correcting what she considered to be their offensively nasal pronunciation.

Now, as Dinah heard the lengthening syllables of “Coming!”—an extended high note balanced by an equally extended low one, as if she were echoing the doorbell chime—she couldn’t help remembering how she and Veevi would laugh at the way Dorshka had corrected their diction. “Now say, ‘Faaaaather,’ ” she had gravely instructed them. Only, because of Dorshka’s heavy Polish accent, it came out as “Faaaaah-zer.” She had also taken it upon herself to instruct them in what she called “the arts of the courtesan.” They were to put cold cream every day in their vaginas (
“faginas”
), never let their husbands see them completely naked, and always, even during sex, leave a little something on. Never, ever were they to refuse their husbands or balk at doing anything out of the ordinary, no matter how complicated or fanciful the position.

When the front door opened, Dinah saw that Dorshka was indeed unchanged—still tall and erect, still broad-shouldered, still big-breasted. The short, curly hair, once red, was perhaps a little snowier than Dinah remembered, but the extraordinary skin was still smooth and taut, and as free of wrinkles as a freshly ironed satin pillowcase. The cheeks were still
high and pink, the large blue eyes intelligent and clear. Dinah had always loved Dorshka’s looks, which were striking and dramatic, though not, perhaps, what you would call beautiful. Her wide face and round nose were offset by a thin mouth whose characteristically sardonic smile, had it been less warm, would have resembled a permanent sneer. It was this smile more than anything that marked Dorshka, for Dinah, as a European. No American Dinah had ever seen had a smile like that. It blended infinite tolerance with infinite skepticism, ready warmth with minimal expectation.

The older woman threw her arms around Dinah and led her into the cool apartment, where she had lived now for many years. Shortly after his own arrival in Hollywood in 1934, Stefan Ventura, her former lover and dearest friend, had arranged for her to leave Paris with her teenage son, Mike, and come to Los Angeles as an employee of Lionel Engel’s Marathon Pictures. She had always managed to create a certain ambience around her. In her room at Veevi’s, and now here in the apartment, there were plants in terra-cotta pots, a record player and stacks of records, opened letters strewn over the top of a desk, where there also lay a paper knife in the shape of a miniature scimitar. Books were everywhere, evidence of a rich but largely interior and now solitary existence.

“I’ve prepared a little treat,” Dorshka said, disappearing briefly into the kitchen and returning with a pot of hot coffee and two huge slices of cake. “You look tired, my dear. It takes such hard work to breathe here. So many automobiles making all of this terrible smog. When I came here in the thirties, already there were too many cars, but now they choke the life out of the place. And the public transportation! For a bus you wait on the corner an hour and a half. And if you walk anywhere the police stop you and think you are some kind of crazy.”

Dinah gratefully took the coffee and tasted the cake—a Sacher torte, the kind Dorshka used to make in the old days, so that there would always be something to fill the stomachs of the refugees, who had always just arrived from Lisbon or Marseilles and whom Dinah so often discovered on the Venturas’ chintz sofas as they slept the dead sleep of the truly exhausted. Dressed in their rumpled yet dignified traveling clothes, their worn shoes arranged neatly on the antique braided Early American rug, they woke shy and disoriented day and night to the pounding of the surf and the smell of baking chocolate, which wafted through the house with a
welcoming and familiar scent. After Stefan and Veevi left for France, and Dorshka moved to this apartment in Westwood, she kept on finding beds, apartments, and jobs for the recent arrivals, and, above all, giving them money.

“You know,” Dinah said as they settled in the living room, “you sound just the way you used to. Everything was—wait, let me see if I can r-r-r-remember the word—everything was
‘schrecklich.’
 ”

“Oh God, yes, we complained all the time about everything. Nothing was good enough for us refugees! We must have seemed an ungrateful lot to you.”

“No, not that. Just int-t-t-timidating. I remember Veevi saying, ‘So-and-so’s the most important novelist or composer of the twentieth century,’ but I didn’t know who the hell anyone was, and I didn’t want people to know how ignorant I was. I just felt sorry for them, especially when they first arrived. They always looked so b-b-b-bedraggled. It was hard to see how great they were when I’d find them sleeping on the sofas in their stocking f-f-f-feet. I couldn’t understand a word they said, either, though I knew they were cultured and educated, and even when you or Stefan explained what they were talking about, I still didn’t understand any of it. And then it always seemed like they couldn’t bear anything about us and were always finding fault with everything. God, they made me nervous!”

“Well, it drove me crazy, too. My God, how they complained! Though, as you know, things here at that time weren’t only
schrecklich
. Thomas Mann used to tell me how much he loved the scent of orange blossoms. It was still paradise then. Even Brecht, when he came, had to admit it to me every once in a while.” She paused. “Once in a very long while.” And they laughed together about this, because over the years Dinah had managed to catch up, to a certain extent.

She would happily have chatted on in this vein with Dorshka if it weren’t for the mounting constriction in her chest, which threatened to squeeze the life out of her. She clenched her hands into fists that she held in her lap.

“D-D-D-D-Dorshka …”

“Ach, you struggle still with the
stottern
?”

“Struggle? I don’t know if it’s a struggle, Dorshka. I don’t fight it anymore. It’s just always there.”

“I could cure it, you know.”

“Oh, Dorshka dear, thank you, but no one would know me without it—least of all m-m-m-myself. But there’s something I need to t-t-t-tell you.”

“Yes, darling?”

She knows, thought Dinah. It’s in her mouth, in that smile. But Dinah went ahead in a rush, so that Dorshka couldn’t get a word in edgewise. She told Dorshka what she had done, and at the end she said, “I wanted to tell you myself, because no matter how you hear about it, I’m still the one who should be telling you. And because I wanted to ask you what you think it might mean for Veevi and Mike. I wrote to them this morning. And I’m concerned, of course, very concerned, about you and them. J-J-Jake and I want to help if you need it.”