Cheat and Charmer (18 page)
Authors: Elizabeth Frank
She stared at the envelope, not sure what she had been looking for, but certain that she hadn’t found it.
The days grew cooler; it was time for jackets and sweaters. Dinah took to sitting in the den, brooding, in the late afternoons, knitting and smoking while the kids watched TV before dinner. Occasionally she took a sip of Scotch on the rocks and watched the rain disappear into the rising mists of the heated pool. There was no sign of a letter from Veevi.
She threw herself into physical activity. On clear days, dressed in blue jeans and one of Jake’s old shirts, she worked in the garden in the front of the house, clipping the box hedges, deadheading the roses, helping Joe, the old Irish gardener, whose bald head and baseball cap always reminded her of her father, pour fertilizer from heavy bags onto the soil and spray against aphids. She replanted flowers in the small patch of dirt left uncovered by
the pool crew in the backyard. On Sunday evenings, she and Jake stood side by side barbecuing hot dogs and hamburgers for the hordes of people who still brought their kids over to swim, even though it turned dark earlier and the kids came out of the heated water and into the chilly air with blue lips and shivering limbs.
She spent two long mornings a week working with Nelly Steiner at the Democratic Party office in Beverly Hills, typing and stuffing envelopes and wetting down stamps with a sponge. In the afternoons, she picked up Lorna and Peter from school, took Lorna to her ballet lesson and Peter for an ice cream cone at Wil Wright’s. Then the three of them went on errands to the hardware store or the grocery store, and then home, where Gussie was waiting to help carry the bags into the house.
She finished a sweater for Lorna and started one for Jake, and never once stopped thinking about Veevi’s silence. She forgot about Evelyn Morocco and remained perfectly cool when Tildy Mizener cut her dead at Chasen’s; she was unperturbed when, at about six one evening in November, at the stoplight in front of the Indian fountain at the junction of Wilshire and Santa Monica, she glanced at the car next to hers and saw Jill Bergman, Guy Bergman’s wife, staring at her with eyes like blue knives and mouthing the word
fink
. She mentioned it casually that night to Jake, who didn’t even look up from the
Herald Examiner
’s sports page.
Nevertheless, the letter that did not come gnawed deeper and deeper toward some dark center of dread that seemed to open up and gape at her just when she was cutting carnations and marigolds for Thanksgiving and trimming the Christmas tree with Jake and Gussie and the kids. Her father showed up just in time for Christmas. She waited anxiously when he disappeared into his trailer, parked in the Laskers’ driveway, to read his mail. But there was no sign on his face, later that evening, that Veevi had said anything especially disturbing. “She’s having another baby, I hear,” Dinah said to him, knowing he would have been too embarrassed to volunteer this piece of information. “Guess so,” he said, adding nothing more. He was kind this year, bringing presents for the children and sitting down at the piano to play and sing his old-time songs. She decided not to ask any more questions, but she kept wondering if there were some way she could get into the trailer without getting caught. She suggested that he take a walk with the kids, but he never left the house. He liked to spend the day in the kitchen with Gussie, listening to the radio and reading the papers. The kitchen windows looked out directly on the driveway and the trailer, so it
was impossible for her to slip in there unseen. Then she had an idea: she would send Gussie and Pop out with the kids to look at Christmas decorations in the neighborhood. They would be gone for several hours if they covered Beverly Hills, Holmby Hills, Bel-Air, and Westwood. What did it matter that she and Jake had already done this with the kids on Christmas Eve? But the day after Christmas she came into the kitchen and found him sitting at the Formica table with Gussie and Lorna reading the letter again. She saw that it was already mightily creased, having been folded and refolded many times. As she poured herself a cup of coffee, she noted how he folded it up yet again and put it back in the breast pocket of his suit jacket. She would never have found it in the trailer, she realized.
And so she gave up. What, after all, was she hoping to hear? Veevi’s silence said it all, she reminded herself. Then, coming home late one Saturday morning in early April, after picking up paper plates and cups for a birthday party later that day for Jake’s sister Elsinore’s son, she saw a white envelope in the breakfast room. It wasn’t the familiar thin aerogram, but the stamps on it were French. As she picked it up her heart beat wildly. So, this is it, she said to herself, and quickly called Jake at the studio. “Can’t it wait till I come home?” he asked brusquely, annoyed at the interruption. She was about to tell him to go to hell and hang up, but before she could stutter the words out his tone changed. “Okay, shoot,” he said. She began to read the densely typed pages.
March 30, 1952
Jake and Dinah
,
A week or so after Dinah’s letter arrived, Veevi was subpoenaed by the Committee, which acted through the embassy here. We retained, at considerable expense, an American lawyer we know here. He went over various impossibilities, but in the end Veevi had to appear before an epicene little toady from the FBI who had no doubt been shipped over in some metal cage for the sole purpose of interrogating her. Among other things, he told her that although many other “friendly” witnesses had named her, it was the testimony of her sister, Mrs. Jake Lasker, that had linked her most conclusively to the Party. Now, would she please confirm that the aforementioned sister had been a member of the aforementioned Communist Party? No, she replied, she wouldn’t.
Well, how about some other names? Again no—no names, no nothing. Sorry, fellas, I’m not going to play. The epicene little toady got very mad, and instructed the gentleman from the embassy’s legal department to issue a contempt citation and confiscate her passport, which they did on the spot. So from here on in she can’t travel in or out of France, except to return to the U.S.A., which she can’t leave again once she’s there. This is a great pity, really, since six weeks ago she gave birth to a daughter, Coco, whom she would like to bring to L.A. to meet her grandparents—in particular your father, whose every letter has but one cry, “When are you coming home?” This is now entirely out of the question, of course, and, given his age, it is extremely doubtful that he and Veevi will ever lay eyes on each other again
.
So, my dear in-laws, since you have chosen to do the unthinkable, I guess I’ll just have to say the unsayable: the two of you are beneath contempt. You are rat finks, squealers, canaries, stoolies—indeed, you beggar my thesaurus. But do you recognize yourselves in these unpleasant derogations? Of course not! Why? Because you’re so “nice,” and “nice” people don’t deliberately or willingly do the wrong thing. Of course, we know how very
sorry
you are. Please, just drop your little tergiversations, your abject expressions of
worry,
your wretched pleas to
help
or do something to make the guilt go away
.
Now I’ll tell you about Veevi. She had a rough delivery—a Caesarean here at the American hospital—is very weak, and continues to be stunned by your perfidy. For Christ’s sake, hasn’t she been through enough? Isn’t hiding from the Nazi butchers for four years and risking her life in the Resistance and finding out what happened to Stefan enough for one lifetime?
You’ve betrayed her past, her history. Worst of all, you’ve betrayed Stefan and everything he died for. Does the word
betrayal
shock you? Of course it doesn’t, because you live in a world where it means nothing. It is in fact soullessness that is the absolute condition of your wearisome, self-important little lives. Is naming names and giving those gray-suited Torquemadas what they want any different from what you already do—daily, hourly, by the minute? Does a friend’s picture stink? You tell him you love it. Your lousy little formulaic sentimental comedies are all about giving people what they want and taking everything you can get
.
Not for you the iron clamp of principle, the dark night of a blind future.
Veevi chose to follow Stefan—my father—into that dark night when everyone was running in the other direction. She knew they could die. This is courage you will never have, Jake—not you, who allowed your wife to abase herself for you, and not you either, Dinah, who could have saved us all, and especially yourself, had you walked out on those bastards, which, for one brief instant you apparently almost did. Well, my dear lady, almost ain’t good enough
.
Perhaps, Jake, if you had ever seen explode before your eyes into a million crimson, never-to-be-reconstituted bits the strong, vital flesh of a nineteen-year-old Tennessee boy who had in boot camp sweetly asked you to teach his big, awkward hands how to tie his wonderful-untotears bad-taste tie because he wanted to go out that night and get drunk and find a French girl against the coming of the brutal dawn, when he would be sent into battle, you would know what losses you could bear, what lines you wouldn’t cross
.
But the only lines you know are the ones you write—the one-liners, the tedious jokes. The world spins its webs of evil and you remain a clown among clowns, punching out a laugh a minute from your script of a hundred and twenty pages, no more and no less. If you bring it in under budget, your conscience is clean, you can sleep at night, and God loves you
.
Know, both of you, beyond all possibility of doubt, that you have spoken your last to Veevi. You will never see her again. As you grow fatter and fatter feeding off the carrion of your murdered ethics, may your self-forgiveness torture you until the chickenshit in which you’re sunk up to your necks forms a loathsome crust upon the skin of your life and reveals you to the world as the moral lepers that you are. You have denied history, you have denied truth, you have denied decency, you have denied your flesh and blood. You have denied everything except the tenderness with which you cherish your infinitely beloved selves
.
Mike
There was a silence on Jake’s end.
“Well?” she said.
“I’m going to the commissary. I hear the corned beef is pretty good today. What’re you gonna do?”
“J-J-J-AKE!!!”
“Darling, listen to me. Take this overwritten, sanctimonious crap and flush it down the toilet. If you allow that strutting, logorrheic gasbag to cause you one instant of doubt or discomfort, I will come home and personally horsewhip you.”
But Dinah wasn’t listening. Clutching the phone tightly, she felt the full force of the irreversible hit her, like saltwater rushing into her mouth, while her sister seemed suddenly to have been sucked away by a vicious riptide of bitter black foam.
“Honey? Honey?” Jake’s anxious voice came over the telephone. “Are you there?”
There was no answer.
“Pull yourself together. He’s a nasty, preening, arrogant son of a bitch pissing words all over us. It’s nothing, it doesn’t mean anything. It’s just writing, just a morning’s writing to him. Look, honey,” he pleaded with her, “forget it, please. I love you. We’re a unit, a team, and whatever happens to you happens to me. Everything’s fine, darling. I’m going to take care of you forever. Get it?”
She was supposed to say “Got it,” and he was supposed to say “Good,” but the words wouldn’t come.
“Dinah?”
Still there was no answer.
“Look, I’ll come home right away.”
This helped her collect herself. She didn’t want to see him, not now. “No,” she said woodenly. “I’ll be all right. Elsinore’s having that birthday p-p-party this afternoon for Jerry. Ten three-year-olds, and”—she laughed a hard laugh—“a hired clown. I told her I’d get the cake, and I’ve gotta go and pick it up.”
“Good,” he said. “That’s just what you need right now. Your regular routine.”
As she drove to the bakery on Sunset Strip, she found herself drifting into the past. She saw herself and Veevi roller-skating home from school, going for chocolate sodas on Hollywood Boulevard, waiting for a glimpse of Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks as their big car drove up to Musso & Frank’s. How many times had Dinah skated back and forth in front of the restaurant, hoping they would see her and “discover”
her! But when Chaplin put his face to the window one day, a rose between his teeth, miming a swooning lover, and beckoning with his index finger, it was Veevi, not Dinah, to whom his passionate gestures were addressed. Parking the car and stepping out onto the pavement, Dinah remembered how her sister had smiled mysteriously at Chaplin, and felt again in her wrist the violence with which she had yanked her sister’s hand away from the window, not letting go, while Veevi stumbled after her, trying to catch up.