Cheat and Charmer (38 page)

Dorshka picked up an aerogram, the kind Veevi had sent to Dinah in the past. Despite Jake’s visit with Veevi in Paris last year, Veevi had never written, and Dinah hadn’t, either. Now she could see the black typewritten letters through the blue paper. She watched Dorshka as the older woman found a particular passage she had evidently read several times. Finally, Dorshka looked up from the letter and sighed. “He thinks she should come home.”

“Who?” Dinah asked. Dorshka’s vagueness annoyed her. “Who wants her to come home?”

“I’m sorry,” Dorshka said, removing her reading glasses. Her large blue eyes looked directly at Dinah. “You must think I am a senile old woman.” She waved the letter. “This is from Mike. Ordinarily, I don’t read my personal letters to other people, but as this concerns you I will break my rule.” And she read: “ ‘The situation can’t go on this way. It’s not healthy for me or V. I’ve told her there’s no hope for the marriage, that I want a divorce and I’m going to marry Odile. She took it calmly enough, but that’s what worries me. It’s as if it hasn’t really sunk in. I will do the right thing financially, but I have new pressures on me now and I think the Laskers, given what they’ve done, should share some of the responsibility for Veevi with me.’ ”

“Oh, does he now?” Dinah broke in.

“Shhh. Let me go on.”

And Dorshka continued:

She put the letter down and folded her arms across her bosom. Dressed in men’s slacks and a man’s sport shirt, her white hair tousled, she looked like an Amazon grandmother. Dinah waited for her to say something, but what could or should have been said failed to issue from her lips. A slight smile—what Dinah always thought of as Dorshka’s “European” smile—sardonic, disabused, given not so much to suspending judgment as to disregarding it once it has been made—played across her mouth. Dinah took advantage of this withheld speech and plunged blindly off the edge with the question she had been wanting to ask her friend since 1938. “Dorshka—was Stefan Ventura Mike’s f-f-f-father?”

Dorshka’s blue eyes widened in speculation but evidently not in surprise. “You know, darling, all these years I’ve wondered about that myself. Frankly,” she said without embarrassment, “it’s entirely possible. And I have always wanted to believe it. But I don’t know.”

She sat back in her armchair, smiled, and crossed one leg over the
other. “Let me tell you, I had a wonderful affair with Stefan. It is how we became the very best of friends. But Mike looks so much like me that I have never been able to make up my mind one way or the other. What do
you
think?”

The question startled Dinah. “What did Joachim Albr-br-brecht look like?”

“Not a bit like Stefan. He was not so tall, not so broad. Thin. Skinny. Very light brown hair—straight, not thick and wavy like Stefan’s. And he didn’t have Mike’s enormous blue eyes.”

“Has it ever occurred to you that Mike is Claire’s father?”

“Mike?
Claire’s
father? What on earth makes you say that, my dear? It’s preposterous!”

Dinah broke out with a laugh. “My God, for once you’re at a loss! I’m sorry to laugh, Dorshka, but I’ve never seen you so s-s-s-surprised by anything!”

“What makes you say that?” Dorshka asked again, her eyes blue fires of curiosity. “Is there something I should know?”

Dinah wished she had kept her mouth shut. “Well, Dorshka,” she said, swallowing. “I s-s-s-saw something—on the beach one night. Before Stefan and Veevi left for France.”

“Something? On the beach at night? Don’t beat around the bushes.”

“I saw Veevi and Mike on the beach, in the middle of the night. They didn’t see me.”

“They were making love?”

“Yes. But I shouldn’t have told you.”

“Oh, don’t be silly. It’s impossible to shock me.”

But Dinah could tell that Dorshka
was
shocked. Very shocked.

“What does it matter now?” Dorshka went on rather too quickly. “Your sister was never in love with Stefan. She was fond of him, she admired him, and he was her ticket out of that horrible American nowhere you came from. And Mike wanted only to forget that he was European. All he wanted was to become an American. He still wants to be an American, only not here, and I can’t say I blame him. So, really, it’s not such a big surprise. On the other hand, I never suspected what you are telling me. That your sister slept with any man who desired her, as long as he had a name of some kind—this already I knew. I knew it from the beginning, I knew it without having to be told. Mostly, they were writers. She slept with all
those American boys who came to the house with their one big screenplay or their one ‘important’ novel. All those comrades making two thousand a week at Metro and Marathon and Paramount and RKO.”

“Are you sure, Dorshka? How did you know?” She was remembering all that heavy flirting between Veevi and Clifford Boatwright.

“My dear,” Dorshka said. “I, too, was once young and desirable and every talented man I knew wanted me. There is a look and a way of acting when an ambitious and beautiful woman achieves power over the men who desire her, and it comes from granting oneself once, but never twice, to such men. When it’s twice, they think they have a claim on you and become tedious. But once? Once and no more means they do nothing but beg. Especially if you belong to a man who is older and more important and it is in some mysterious way contact with him that the other man seeks through the woman. If she gives herself once, and no more, then he is her slave—forever. I saw your sister exercise this power over many men who came to Stefan’s house, while he was suffering the agony of failure here. But those men failed to possess her, and they failed to weaken Stefan.”

“Did he know?”

“I think so—” She looked reflective. “But I am not sure. Certainly he knew that the young men—the puppies, he called them—adored her. He seemed to find it amusing. He also knew that she was not in love with him. ‘Give her time,’ he used to say to me. He thought that if he was just patient enough she would truly fall in love with him. She wanted writers, but she had no idea how to live with a real artist. No idea!” Dorshka said with contempt. “No idea of what he was facing, really. Such a difficult time he was having. And we were both out of our minds with all that was happening in Europe.” She shrugged, and with the rise and fall of her broad shoulders Dinah felt the full weight of Dorshka’s tenderness for her old friend, whom she had known for so long and in so many ways. “It would have hurt him to know this … this abomination you tell me about now. I know he offered to return to Europe without her, and that she was the one who insisted on going with him. Perhaps Stefan asked her if she wanted to remain married to him, whether there was someone else. After all, Mike was still a child. A boy of sixteen! I had decided to send him to a good boarding school in the East. But she went with him. And eight months or so after they left, Claire was born. So perhaps what you say is true. Perhaps Mike is Claire’s father.”

She put her hand to her head. “He loved your sister, and then I think he saw that she wasn’t …”

“A younger v-v-v-version of you?”

“Oh, not me,” Dorshka said. “A younger version of all his hopes, I think.”

“I’ve always w-w-w-wondered whether he knew,” Dinah said, enjoying this retrospective probing.

“I miss Stefan every day of my life,” Dorshka said.

“I remember, that night on the beach, hearing Mike say he thought Stefan was his father. That you had told him it might be true.”

“It was stupid of me to tell him. If you think I am wise, it is because I have done every stupid thing a woman can do.”

“Did he ever bring it up again?”

“Well, yes. When he went into the army, and knew he might die, he asked me again, and I said that I did not know but that I hoped it was true. I told him I wanted everything clear but that I had no way of knowing. He knew already that I had had love affairs. I suppose my example had a strong effect on him.” She stretched her legs out and put a foot up on the coffee table. “He wants a working actress. As I was. To give up her career—this for Veevi is a very big mistake.”

“You’re blaming her? He told her he wanted her there all the time, in the same room with him, sitting on a sofa and reading while he wrote.”

“No, darling, I don’t blame anyone. I don’t blame, period—especially in this matter of love. Even this ugly thing you tell me about, I don’t blame. But Veevi should have put up a fight and resisted him and said she wanted to act again. She was lazy. She did not want to use her talent.”

“But she never wanted to act!” Dinah cried. “
I
did.
I
wanted to. But I had this—this f-f-f-fucking stutter!” She laughed at the stutter, and squeezed her eyes shut for an instant, as if to force back tears.

“Yes,” said Dorshka. “I understand. Still, your sister should not have given my son everything he wanted.”

“You’re blaming her, and that’s unfair,” Dinah said carefully. “I know he’s your son, but a man does not c-c-c-c-customarily end a marriage when his wife is p-p-pregnant or has just given birth.”

“Dinah darling, don’t be naïve,” Dorshka said. “There is never a good time to break up. If you fall in love, you fall in love.”

So that’s where he gets it, Dinah thought.

“Can you speak to Jake about her? Will the two of you help out? I will be glad to have her and the girls come and live with me,” Dorshka went on.

These last utterances, so peremptory, brought Dinah up short, and all
she could say was “Yes, of course.” Wanting to leave, she gave Dorshka a quick hug. “We’ll figure something out. I’ll write to her myself. Tell him, tell her, we’ll do everything we can.”

She drove directly home, dying for her bed and the feel of the afternoon breeze blowing through the windows. When she arrived, however, there was a letter waiting for her in the breakfast room. She felt nauseated and asked Gussie to bring her a Coke and some saltines. Then she went upstairs, lay down, and tore open the letter.

She put the letter down and stuck two pillows under her feet, then lay with her knees up and brooded. She wanted none of this now—not Veevi and her life and its complications. Alone in her spacious bed, Dinah felt crowded and jostled, and she put her hand on her belly and felt the too-hard, prematurely large roundness. All she wanted was to keep what she had intact and inviolate: her husband, her children, the life fighting to grow inside her. She wanted no changes and no invasions. Within her a voice snarled,
I don’t give a fuck about Veevi, I don’t want her here. I don’t want her coming into my house and taking over, because that sure as hell is going to happen. She will come here and eat me alive
.

All this she said clearly to herself, lying with her hands on her belly, wondering whether the mass beneath her fingers was tumor or baby. As she felt the nubby white candlewick bedspread underneath her legs, she remembered the letter she had written to Veevi and thrown away the day after testifying. She wished now that she had kept it. It would have felt good to reread it and have its words look her in the face. No! she was shouting inside. I want no one and nothing coming into our life. But she
felt herself being helplessly dragged toward the magnet of obligation and responsibility. A phrase from the past came to her:
We’ll just have to get the hose out and wash her down
. And then she saw, in her memory’s eye, herself and her mother in all the backyards of all the little houses and bungalows in which the Milligans had lived. Alice would be standing there in an apron, her hands on her hips, her face a nest of worries, while Dinah, all business, took Veevi’s clothes off and threw them in a pile and then picked up the garden hose and washed her sister down. Veevi, irrepressibly gay and nonchalant, was determined to squeeze every drop of pleasure out of the fun she’d had that afternoon with the other kids—the taste of the candy, the feel of the gooey cool mud between her toes, the splash and iridescence of the water in the balmy California afternoon.