Cheat and Charmer (24 page)

Dinah had learned that
The Haberdasher
, the novel that Talcott Engel had published at the age of twenty-two, was closely modeled on something that had happened in real life, when L.J. had visited him at Princeton. Invited to dinner at his son’s mostly non-Jewish fraternity, the old man had sensed both his son’s tremulous fear of being embarrassed by him and the
other boys’ anti-Semitic truculence. When one scion of a Connecticut insurance dynasty turned to him at table and said, “Tell me, Mr. Engel, have you ever read Voltaire?” L.J. answered, with a faint smile and a deliberately thickened accent, “You mean Vol-taire Vin-chell?” This incident was captured word for word in Tal’s novel. His narrator said, “By this inspired gesture of preemptive and ironic self-deprecation, Dad redeemed himself so completely in my eyes that I quit college and asked him for a job in the mailroom at the studio,” which is where his rise to the top begins. As for Tal, he had finished Princeton, but he hadn’t started in the mailroom: he started almost at the top, as the head of the story department. From there, his father wanted him to become head of production—though everybody else knew that what Tal really wanted was to quit the business and move with Veevi to Vermont to write novels. He was simply waiting for his younger brother, Irving, to finish college.

One Sunday morning in the early summer of 1936, Dinah was standing in the kitchen in the tiny, hot West Hollywood apartment where she and Everett lived, her bathing suit rolled up in a towel. As usual, she asked if he wanted to go out to the Engels’ that day. “Not on your life,” he said. “And I don’t see how you can stand going out there week after week with all those pushy Jewboys who think they own the world. Hell, they don’t
think
they own the world. They
do
own the world. Roosevelt’s in the hands of the Jew bankers. And can’t you see that those Engel boys and their friends are all just a bunch of Jew Communists puttin’ one over on the old man? Everybody there’s always talkin’ about how great it is in Russia and how Russia’s damn near heaven on earth. Well, if you ask me, they oughtta be put up against a wall and shot, the whole pack of ’em.”

“Everett,” she said quietly, “how is it possible for the Jews to own Roosevelt on the one hand and be C-C-C-Communists on the other? Isn’t that a c-c-c-contradiction?”

“Don’t you contradiction me, Dinah. Father Coughlin says the Jews’ll do anything to keep in power. They fake being Communists so they can keep on being capitalists. They’ve got it all figured out—they have since the beginning of time. They’re all in it together, with the banks. Come on, it’s as clear as one and one makes two.”

She didn’t feel like arguing with him—he no longer interested her. All
she knew was that she lived for those Sundays at the beach. Last Sunday he had needled and wheedled her into staying in town. They had spent the afternoon working at the restaurant, and then his mother had given them tickets to go hear Aimee Semple McPherson at the Angelus Temple. When the great evangelist accidentally spilled a few drops from a glass of water on an electric microphone and knocked herself out, Dinah let out a rapid-machine-gun burst of laughter. Everett was so furious that he shut her up by digging his fingers deep into her shoulder, bruising her. For the third week in a row, they didn’t have sex, and Everett turned up the volume on Father Coughlin, whom he listened to by himself while Dinah ironed clothes in the kitchen.

So this Sunday she went out to the Engels’ alone, and in the late afternoon, sitting with Veevi’s friends on the warm pool deck, her towel draped around her shoulders just like everyone else, and ignoring her stutter, she told a story—the one about McPherson. To her delight, everyone laughed. Norma Levine took off her dark glasses and smiled at her, as if Dinah were there for the first time.

And then, though it was not on the subject, or any other subject, Dinah ventured another story—about the time when she and Veevi were little girls and their father invited his boss over for tea. When the man arrived, they could all see that he had a very large nose—a huge nose, an enormous nose. She and Veevi kept staring at it, and their mother kept giving them looks, trying to get them to stop. Then her mother poured the tea. And as she handed the cup to the gentleman, she said, “Would you like cream and sugar in your nose?”

Again, laughter—loud chesty laughter. Then a rather hefty man she couldn’t remember ever seeing before asked her to tell him the story again, and the Aimee Semple McPherson story as well. They went off by themselves to sit at the edge of the pool so they could dangle their legs in the water, and she repeated the stories. This time he laughed till tears streamed down his cheeks. His English wasn’t bad, just slow and deliberate, and he had a thick accent that she couldn’t identify. Shyly, she asked him where he was from, and he replied that he had been born in a town called Razgrad. Did she know where that was? Hadn’t a clue, she said. It’s in Bulgaria, he answered, and she confessed that she didn’t know where that was, either. “Is it in Europe?” she asked, and then added, “I must seem like an idiot to you. But I sure as hell don’t know where it is.” He described the complicated geography of the Balkans and then told her that as a young
man he had gone first to Moscow and then Berlin to work in the movies. His name was Stefan Ventura, he said, and he had arrived in America only a week ago. He was a director and was going to make movies. He had been promised a free hand by L. J. Engel, who had arranged his passage from France.

“Why does your name sound Sp-Sp-Spanish?” she asked him.

He explained to her that he was a Sephardic Jew, and that his ancestors had come to Bulgaria hundreds of years ago after being expelled from Italy, where they had gone after being expelled from Spain. “Many Jews here in America, they speak Yiddish, but my family, we speak Ladino. Have you ever heard it?”

He sang a little snatch of something in Ladino, in a gloriously deep voice, and she recognized the word
Hermosa
and smiled. Dinah adored him instantly. Two minutes after he introduced himself, she would have died for him. Already in his forties, he was the first European at the Engels’ with whom Dinah had ever had a conversation, the first one she had actually ever met. He was a large man with a hunkering yet gentle and uncertain gait, as if he felt his body to be powerful but not necessarily graceful. If he did not shave twice a day, his face looked as if it were smudged with charcoal. In his fingers he always held a lit cigarette. Although he had been in Los Angeles for only a short time, the California sun had already turned his face brown.

Dinah found his large blue eyes arresting. He had a way of screwing them up, partly as a barrier against the rising smoke of his cigarette, but partly to concentrate, it seemed. It was a look that contained its own opposites—mocking appraisal and at the same time complete bewilderment. When he laughed again at her story, it was with a slow thunderous motion welling upward from a cavern deep within his chest. “I can see this moment very well,” he said. “The lady is full of excitement and then suddenly she is knocked out—isn’t that what you say? Knocked out like a boxer, lying cold on the stage in her long white robe. It is delicious. Come,” he said, gesturing for her to get up. “I will get us something to drink, and you will tell me more about this fruit compote of a city.”

Dinah felt him looking at her movements and her body with interest, and the blood rushed to her cheeks. Her insides convulsed with a faint sexual nausea—simultaneous shame and desire—and she sensed that he could observe that, too. He asked her about herself. She told him about being born in Pittsburgh and moving to Philadelphia and then coming out
to California with her family in 1922. She told him about the miserable summer heat and bitter cold of the East, and that when she got off the train she thought she had landed in paradise. “It’s different now, there are more people, but it is still p-p-paradise for me,” she said.

He kept asking questions, and soon she was telling him about her father and his father before him—how her grandfather had fought in the Civil War, but on the wrong side, for the South, because the girl he loved in Little Rock, Arkansas, wouldn’t marry him unless he volunteered for the Confederacy. Then he’d ended up at Andersonville. Did he know what Andersonville was? She explained that it was this terrible kind of camp, in Georgia, where men from the Union had starved and died like flies, but her grandfather had been a guard there, and then, after the war, when he’d gone back for a visit to his home town of Bellaire, Ohio, they’d almost lynched him, and had the rope and the tree all ready, when suddenly somebody cried out, “Say, that’s Ed Milligan. Don’t string him up! He got us blankets and medicine and extra food!”

Suddenly Ventura thrust out a large hand and gripped her forearm. “Your grandfather fight in the Civil War? Yes? For the South? Is this the story you tell me just now?”

She nodded.

“Oh, my God—I must tell you, this is a wonderful chance. Please, do something for me. Please read a story I give you. Here.”

The next thing she knew, he pulled a small book out of his jacket pocket. “You know Pushkin?”

She shook her head, embarrassed.

“No matter. Read this translation, please, and tell me: can I from this make a movie about the American Civil War? Read it, please, quick. It take maybe one hour. Then please to telephone me.” He took a fountain pen from his pocket and wrote a number inside the book, under his name, and when she looked at the letters and numbers she found them enchanting. They were different from any letters and numbers she had ever seen—taller, with slanting lines and loops and flourishes. The seven had a horizontal line through it, and the one looked almost like a seven. So this was Europe, she thought—this flowing, elegant way of writing letters and numbers.

“Okay,” she said simply. “I’ll read it at work.”

“Work? You make a movie now? You have a good role?”

“No.” She smiled. “I’m not an actress. I’m not in the m-m-m-movies at all—at least not anymore.”

“You not in the movies? How can this be? You are so beautiful I think you must be an actress.”

No one had ever spoken to her this way, and she tried not to show him how it made her feel. She explained that she used to dance in pictures but that she had gone to work after high school at a paper company and now had a new job as a secretary for a big oil company. Then, sensing that he would understand immediately, she tried out words she had been hearing at the Engels’ but had never used before. “I’m a real proletarian. L-L-L-Lumpen as all hell. I don’t think there’s anyone here who makes less than a thousand a week. I take home eighty d-d-d-dollars a month. I’m lucky to have a job at all. But you’re right. At one time I wanted to be an actress. But, as you can see, I stutter.”

“You what? I don’t know this word.”

“I can’t say certain words.” Of course, now that she was describing the problem she wasn’t stuttering. So she imitated herself stuttering.

“Ah, I see,” he said. “But it’s charming, this—what do you call it?—‘stutter.’ If you are not an actress, is not because you stutter.”

“How can someone be an actress if she stutters? What if Hamlet said, ‘To b-b-b-be or not to b-b-b-be’?”

“It would be very interesting, I think. We see he truly hesitates!”

So far, she hadn’t identified herself as Veevi’s sister or said anything about being married. Instead, she kept saying to herself, My God, at last someone out here has noticed me, and look who it is. A famous director. A big, strong, handsome guy. A smart guy—an interesting, warm guy. Every artery, every vein in her body swelled with love.

“Please, can you help me? Please to find someone to teach me to drive?”

“You want to learn how to drive?”

“They send a car and chauffeur. The chauffeur tell me he want to act in the movies.” Another big laugh thundered from Ventura’s chest. “When I learn to drive, I will tell the chauffeur, ‘You sit in the back and I drive you.’ ”

Dinah said she would teach him.

“Wonderful. We go now.”

“Now?”

“Yes, now! Why not?”

She felt others’ eyes upon her as she and Ventura, his hand lightly touching her elbow, made their way from the crowded poolside toward the stone path to the highway. For once she was the object of attention, and she enjoyed it. It seemed as if her life had been transformed in an instant. Everett came to mind for a moment, and then all thoughts of him vanished.

In the car, she explained the different gears and instructed him to watch her shift from one to the other as she steered the 1930 Ford along the Pacific Coast Highway all the way to Zuma Beach. There she found a stretch of gravel that had been laid down as a parking lot. It was late in the day and only a few cars remained, and there was plenty of room for him to practice. They changed places, and she told him where to put his feet and hands, leaning toward him but not deliberately touching him. He made the usual errors, and laughed at them, but he wasn’t embarrassed, and, unlike her husband and her father, showed no particular interest in proving himself competent with a machine. It didn’t seem important to him to learn how to handle a car—just a necessary skill he had to acquire. She had never known a man who was indifferent to engines, and found it astonishing. At one point, he bumped into a parked car and she looked around, worried that its owner would come rushing up from the beach, kicking sand clouds behind him, but nothing happened. She told Ventura how to shift into reverse, and he lurched the car backward. “I stop now,” he said. “Otherwise I kill us both. Come, let us to walk a little.”