Cheat and Charmer (17 page)

That afternoon at the Steiners’, Dinah remembered, Evelyn had been trying to get everyone to sign a petition on behalf of the teacher, Hernando Nuñez—a Mexican artist who had known Rivera, Siqueiros, and Orozco—who was being deported for being a Communist. When she asked Phil Breitner, Dinah remembered, he barely looked up from his
New York Times
crossword puzzle, shook his head, and said he never signed anything, since he might wake up the next morning feeling just the opposite of what he’d felt the day before. Jake apologized, but said he wouldn’t sign because he’d recently signed a loyalty oath at Marathon and vowed to himself he’d never sign anything again. Neither Irwin nor Bea Katzenbach signed, saying they agreed with Phil and Jake. Mel Gordon was about to sign, but Annie, his wife, said, “If you sign that thing with the situation the way it is today, I will personally escort you to the psychiatric ward at L.A. County General.” Dinah, however, had signed. Jake scowled, but he didn’t stop her. Evelyn, who had never done anything more radical than vote for Roosevelt and
Wallace, stuck the petition back inside her pool bag, saying she was very disappointed in all of them, except for Dinah. After all, the hearings were basically over in Hollywood, so why was everyone so afraid? The fact was, her teacher wouldn’t be on the verge of being thrown out of the country if somebody hadn’t named him, and as far as she was concerned it was the finks who named names who ought to be thrown out.

At this, Nelly Steiner looked up from her embroidery. “You really must be fantastically innocent to think it’s all over,” she said, with her slight lisp. “These things are never over when people think they are. You have to be careful.” To which Evelyn, in her hundred-dollar bathing suit from Bergdorf’s, replied, “It’s a question of principle. A fink is a fink is a fink.”

“Uhhhhnnnnnnnh. Uhhhhnnnnnnnnnh.” Those two long, high-pitched wailing moans, full of East Broadway and Henry Street and Saturday mornings in
cheder
, came out of the mouth of a wiry brown body lying in glistening splendor as the sun beat down upon his outstretched limbs. His bald head shone like an oiled brown egg, while a blob of white cream on the end of his nose offset his high cheekbones. “Sign, schmign, it doesn’t make a bit of difference. If you ask me, the real shits are the studio heads and the bankers in New York who won’t stand up to the Committee. The whole thing is so terrible I want to cry.” Thus spoke Manny Steiner, who believed only in baseball, working at home, and getting paid on time.

As their kids got in and out of the pool and asked for towels and snacks, the grown-ups discussed people they knew who had testified and those who had refused, their own little group somehow forming an island relatively untouched by the investigations. Dinah was in fact the only one who had actually belonged to the Party, but none of the others knew about it. Even Nelly didn’t know. It was during a lull in the conversation that Evelyn Morocco chose to say something. “I think you’re all scared of nothing, and I’m very disappointed in you.” Dinah had wanted to say,
Who the hell are you to be disappointed in anyone?
Evelyn had never joined the Party—at least not out in Los Angeles, or Dinah would have known about it. She and her trust fund had arrived in Hollywood early in 1942. It had taken her about four months to land Izzie Morocco, whom Jake had gone to high school with back in Chicago and who, like Jake, had had it drilled into him by his parents that “it’s just as easy to marry a rich girl as a poor girl,” advice Jake had resolutely ignored—just as he had ignored parental orders to marry a rich
Jewish
girl. When Jake started taking Dinah to parties, Evelyn had made it perfectly clear that she was an interloper.

Now, two plates in hand, Nelly was carefully making her way back to Dinah and the diving board when she saw Dinah striding across the patio, her fists clenched and a look of terrible purpose on her face.

It was the bangs Dinah kept her eyes on—the perfect black bangs and the perfect black pageboy and the perfect black satin dinner suit, the whole outfit forming a stark silhouette against the balmy summer twilight. Evelyn Morocco was absorbed, as she often was, in a whispery tête-à-tête with a woman Dinah didn’t know, when Dinah came up sideways to her and tapped her on the shoulder.

Looking up, Evelyn scarcely had time to blanch. “Now, l-l-l-listen to me, you horse’s ass,” Dinah said, pointing her finger in Evelyn’s face. “You and I have known each other for a long time and we’re not exactly cr-cr-cr-crazy about each other, but if you’re going to judge me, then do it for the right reasons, for Ch-Ch-Christ’s sake. Don’t pretend you’ve got some high f-f-f-fucking moral standard that’s better than anyone else’s. What you don’t like about me is that I’m an uneducated long-l-l-l-legged shiksa who can dance better than you and say ‘shit’ in front of men and get away with it. And before I came along, you had Izzy and Phil and Manny and Jake all to yourself, like some kind of a qu-qu-queen bee. Sure, I was in the P-P-P-Party, and I don’t recall ever seeing you anywhere near it. So don’t you d-d-d-dare judge me for trying to live with something you never even had the guts to do in the first place.”

It was over before people realized a scene had taken place. Evelyn burst into tears and ran into the Berman house; Nelly walked over and took Dinah’s elbow. Dinah gently shook her off. She felt exhilarated but faint. “It’s okay. I feel fine,” she said. “But I’m gonna pass out if I don’t eat something.”

“Did you absolutely have to talk back to her?” Jake said as they were driving home later that night. Dinah glanced away from the winding road ahead, as Jake, in his usual relaxed way, changed lanes without signaling. He was trying hard to sound evenhanded and unruffled.

“Yeah, I did.”

“Well, next time, maybe we should take out an ad in the trades.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Jake. She’s a c-c-c-cunt and a phony and I wasn’t going to let her get away with it.”

She waited for him to say something, but he only hummed a tuneless melody, then whistled for a while.

“You’re off-key, Jake.”

He stopped whistling and looked over at her. She had her face turned to the right window, away from him. “Why’re you so sore?” he said.

“Because you’re not backing me up.”

“I thought you would have realized that this kind of thing is going to happen again and again,” he said. “You’re going to have to get used to it. A lot of people are going to cut you, and say things to you that you won’t like. I thought you said you were prepared for it and didn’t give a good goddamn what anybody thought.”

“I am. I can take whatever people say. Only just not from that f-f-f-fucking Evelyn Morocco.”

“But what if I want to work with Izzy again? This could make it awkward.”

“Okay, I’m sorry,” she said bitterly. “It won’t happen again.” Tears filled her eyes, and she opened the window and looked out at the night. Jake started whistling again, and soon made a sharp right onto their street.

S
eptember came, bringing fierce dry heat. Temperatures of a hundred or higher penetrated the brick walls of the Tudor house, baking its usually cool interior. Every window was open, inviting sluggish cross-drafts to collide. Peter and Lorna slept restlessly on sheets spread out over the living-room sofas, while Gussie took a fan to her room above the garage and had to move the sports pages and her
Daily Word
prayer booklets off the night table away from the gusts of cooling air. Making love late in the night, Jake and Dinah soaked the sheets with sweat. Afterward, Jake fell at once into a damp sleep, while Dinah, having slid a pillow underneath her buttocks and elevated her legs against the wall, lay quietly listening to the whooshing sounds of cars on Sunset as the tickling wetness on her skin slowly evaporated in the dark.

It had worked twice before and it should work again, she told herself—although it had been months now that they’d been trying, without success.

Then the heat broke, and the days were clear and balmy, the nights dripping with the scent of jasmine. Mothers and kids came over after school to swim in the new pool, and on Sundays Jake’s entire family—his mother and sister and her husband and kids—showed up and stayed all afternoon and for dinner. People they used to invite only for evening parties now came over with their kids. Time and again the diving board gave off its peculiar dull plunk, like a sound in a cartoon, followed by the crash of kids cannonballing into the water.

Los Angeles was, once again, paradise, and Dinah felt renewed and revived. Her whole body seemed inhabited again by the nine-year-old girl she had been that day in January 1922 when she had stepped down onto the platform of Union Station, taken a deep breath of delicious air, and entered
into an entirely new existence. It had been a perfect morning. To the east rose mountains with the sharpest outlines, their snowcaps dazzling in the blue radiance of the sky. It was so warm that Dinah and Veevi had immediately torn off their hats and coats and run madly around, waving their arms, frolicking, wanting to take off their stockings and kick off their shoes. Dinah had never felt so happy, ever, and was suddenly sharply aware of that, aware that she had been unhappy before, terribly unhappy, but hadn’t even known it. It was from this moment that she had begun to watch herself living her life.

The good weather made her think of Veevi. “Still no word,” she sometimes said to Jake, usually in the evening as he was loosening his belt and trying to decide whether to hit golf balls in their bedroom with his putting machine or go downstairs into his darkroom to develop a roll of film or search the icebox for kosher pickles or take a late swim or, when he had run out of escapes, reluctantly go back to his office at the other end of his dressing corridor and keep working on the umpteenth draft of the new picture. “What does it matter?” he said. “You’ve got to stop this, Dinah, and put it behind you.”

One day a blue aerogram with French stamps and Veevi’s return address arrived from Paris. It was addressed to Ed Milligan and had been postmarked some ten days earlier. So that meant, Dinah reflected, as she placed it in the special envelope in which she saved her father’s Social Security checks and announcements from his Shriner and Masonic lodges, that Veevi and Mike had no doubt returned to Paris from St-Jean-de-Luz and had seen her letter but were refusing to answer it. She was dying to know what was in the letter, but she had no idea when her father would next show up. He was probably still somewhere up in the Sierras, having sent a postcard in the middle of the summer from Yosemite: “I was here in 1905, before I met your mother. Pop.” She called the trailer park in Alhambra that he considered home and asked Mrs. Snyder, the proprietress, if she knew where he was. “Dunno, dearie, but I wouldn’t worry if I was you,” she said. “He’ll be by one of these days, when it starts gettin’ cold up in the mountains.”

In frustration, she went to her bedroom and shook all of Veevi’s letters out of the envelope she kept them in. The place names jumped out at her: Beaulieu, Villefranche, Cap Ferrat, Pamplona, St-Jean-de-Luz, Biarritz,
Klosters, not to mention London, Paris, and Rome. The letters were full of stories about other people—Mike and Veevi’s friends, who were always between pictures or novels or safaris or wars. The friends who were novelists were always contemptuously turning their novels into screenplays; the screenwriters were always piously doing their “real” work, writing novels. The journalist and photographer friends went only to the most dangerous places from which they returned with prize-winning articles and pictures. Veevi casually referred to pilots and jockeys, English lords, Texas heiresses, and assorted Americans doing business in Paris. Not a few of these people had had a “good” war, and Veevi often said things like “Mike knew him in the OSS.” She and Mike enjoyed life: mornings were for writing, afternoons for sport, evenings for the nomadic pursuit of pleasure. Reading the names and places—bars and clubs and bistros—Dinah felt a reluctant envy, as if she were supposed to want what Veevi had. But, gathering up the letters and stuffing them back into the manila envelope, she knew she wouldn’t be able to endure that life. Didn’t the Albrechts and their friends ever stay home for dinner? Didn’t they ever eat with their kids? She and Jake knew people here in Hollywood who were out every night and whose kids ate only with the help, but it was something she and Jake had decided not to do. They went out, they entertained, but not every night. They ate with their kids. And Dinah loved the hours she had to herself to garden and read.