Cheat and Charmer (70 page)

B
y early June, Dinah’s whole life had become consumed with details and arrangements. Jake, fully recovered, was already in New York, living in an apartment in the East Sixties and spending eighteen-hour days in a rehearsal hall on West Forty-sixth Street, where he held auditions with Hart, O’Rourke, and the director-choreographer, Buzz Keegan. Dinah, the kids, and Gussie were due to leave as soon as school was out. She was on the phone several times a day with Elsinore, explaining where everything was, giving her phone numbers for the plumber, electrician, exterminator, gardener, pool man, and laundress; Elsinore and her family and Jake’s mother would be living in the Delfern house while the Laskers spent the summer on Long Island in a house Jake had rented in Springs. He would do as New York families did: work in the city during the week and go out to the country on weekends. For the Lasker kids, who had never been out of California, this custom, and everything connected with New York, was as exotic as going to the moon. The previous fall Jake had ordered the upcoming salmon-pink ’56 Chrysler station wagon, and Dinah had come up with the very ambitious idea of driving the kids and Gussie across the country. Let them see America, she proposed to Jake, who was all for it, especially since the house in Springs wouldn’t be available until the first of July.

About three weeks before school let out for the summer, Dinah went to the AAA office in Beverly Hills, where a grandmotherly woman cheerfully mapped out a cross-country route for her with a green felt pen and gave her a stack of booklets with the names of motels and hotels in various states along a generally northern route from Nevada to New York. Jake was going to meet them in Chicago, where they would stay with his cousin’s family in
Highland Park. He had an interview on the Kupcinet show, and then he would drive Dinah and the kids to the South Side and point out all the places where he had lived as a kid and some of the places he was putting in the show. When they got to Pennsylvania, Dinah, in turn, would show them where the Milligans had lived in Beaver Falls, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia.

Her errand completed, she was thinking about how many hours a day she would realistically be able to drive with a car full of kids when she pulled up to a red light a couple of blocks west of the intersection of Santa Monica and Beverly Glen. She was in the right lane, squinting a little against the sullen orange-gray glare that was determined to burn its way through the June cloud cover, when her eyes lit on a two-story motel on her right. A man and a woman were exiting a room at street level, moving briskly toward a black Chevy convertible parked in front of their door. The couple looked absorbed and silent: “postcoital,” thought Dinah. They couldn’t possibly see her, which was awfully lucky for everyone concerned, because the man was Michael Albrecht and the woman was Jill Trevor. The actress was still blond and beautiful despite her stalled career—the result, Dinah had heard, of a nasty divorce several years ago from Willie Weil, who, Dinah remembered, had so charmed Jake in Paris.

The couple quickly got into the convertible, and Dinah could see the back of the man’s head as he leaned forward to start the engine. She felt a panicky urge to escape, and pressed the accelerator the instant the light changed, moving swiftly ahead into what was still fairly light morning traffic. That it was Mike Albrecht she had seen, she had no doubt. He had the same head of thick curly hair that she remembered; the same broad shoulders; the same round face and high cheekbones (now that he was older, she could see that they were unmistakably Stefan Ventura’s); the same stiff-backed yet forward-tilting walk so exactly like Dorshka’s that she would have recognized it anywhere.

The next time she looked in the rearview mirror, the Chevy was gone. She had planned to go into Westwood to buy a new bathing suit for the East Hampton beach, but she made a sharp right turn. Some ten minutes later, she was climbing up a steep lane off Stone Canyon Road. She stopped in the circular driveway of a white colonial house that looked out over a vast hilly sweep to the sapphire Pacific. As she parked, she saw a wiry brown man running around the circumference of the driveway. He was wearing blue bathing trunks and white tennis shoes, and his bald head
glistened with suntan oil. A blob of white cream shone on the end of his nose. Around his waist was a belt to which he had attached a small transistor radio; he was enjoying the baseball game at full volume. He waved and blew her a kiss but didn’t stop to talk, motioning, instead, to the back of the house with a jerk of his thumb. She knew where to go, and, walking down a series of brick steps, she saw her friend Nelly Steiner doing her daily hundred laps in the pool. Planting herself in a chair in the sun, Dinah sat for another ten minutes or so before Nelly noticed her. Her friend held up her hand and squeezed her fist open and shut twice, meaning that she had ten laps to go.

Finally Nelly came out of the pool and wrapped herself in a white terry-cloth bathrobe.

“I’m sorry I didn’t c-c-c-call first,” Dinah said. “But I’ve got to talk to you.”

“Uh-oh,” Nelly said, putting coconut-scented oil on her tanned legs and arms. “Should I brace myself?”

“Yes, br-br-brace yourself.”

Dinah then told her what she’d seen.

“Well?” said Nelly. “And what of it?”

“Well, the thing is, shouldn’t I do something or say something, Nelly? To my sister?”

“You’re sure it was Michael?”

“P-P-P-Positive.”

“So where’s the French girlfriend?”

“How the hell should I know?” Dinah said. “Probably pining for him in Paris. Probably getting l-l-l-lovesick telegrams from him saying how much he misses her.”

“Well, maybe he does. Maybe he’s just, you know, having one of these meaningless little flings.”

Dinah shrugged. “Well, sure—maybe that’s all it is. But, Nelly, I’m at the end of my rope with Veevi. She’s still in love with Mike. She doesn’t know he’s a c-c-c-cad. She doesn’t know they’re through.”

“Now listen, Dinah,” Nelly said with her slight lisp and precise German accent. “The fact is, you don’t know anything about them. You don’t know whether Mike is still with the French girl. You don’t know if the thing with Jill Trevor is just a big nothing. You don’t know why he’s here, how long he’s staying, or even if he’s in contact with your sister. True? These things always
look like one thing to outsiders and another thing to the people concerned.”

“True. But I know he’s not coming back to her.”

“How do you know it?”

“I can’t say, but I know it. Just like I know our husbands aren’t like that.”

Nelly laughed. “Well, that’s what
we
think. Tell me, has Veevi said anything to you about his being in town?”

“Nothing.”

“So most likely she doesn’t know. Well, what you’re going to do is very clear: nothing. Do you hear?”

“Yes,
mon c-c-c-commandant
.”

“You didn’t see it, you know nothing about it, it didn’t happen.”

“But, Nelly,” Dinah protested. “She’s bound to find out. If it’s for a short visit, she’ll be let down as all hell if he doesn’t see her, and if he does, she’s in for a miserable time. She ought to just get away for the summer—Jake really ought to change his mind and invite her to Spr-Spr-Springs with us.”

“He doesn’t want her to come? Why on earth not?”

The sun ducked behind a swirl of clouds and the wind blew ripples across the pool, giving Nelly goose bumps. She beckoned to Dinah to come up into the house. Over tuna salad sandwiches, Dinah explained that Veevi, after a pretty good year in which she seemed to be on an even keel, had been having a difficult time again. She’d been a big help while Jake was in the hospital, but as soon as he’d come home she’d started seeing that awful Saul Landau again. He was still in the Party, apparently, and Veevi had gone to a couple of meetings with him somewhere in the Hollywood Hills.

“You wouldn’t believe how depressing it was,” she’d told Dinah. “There were four or five people I recognized from the old days. It was like visiting a cemetery. The thinking hadn’t changed at all. You know, Khrushchev’s Stalin speech was a pack of lies and just a way of furthering his bourgeois counterrevolutionary compromise with the West. Stalin couldn’t have killed all those people, and if he did, then he knew what he was doing—he was protecting the revolution. All the old clichés came out. You know—‘to make an omelet you have to break eggs.’ It was unbelievable. I couldn’t breathe in there. It was like time had come to a complete standstill. But it was terribly sad, too.”

Of the four or five old-timers Veevi knew, all had refused to testify and had been cited for contempt. One, an art director at Paramount, had
served time in jail and was selling men’s clothes at Desmond’s; another, a cutter, was selling radio advertising over the phone. Landau wanted her to come back to the Party, and they’d quarreled about it and she’d stopped seeing him. There didn’t seem to be any likely prospects in sight. Besides, she’d told Dinah, she couldn’t stand him in the sack.

“I don’t know what to do with her, Nelly,” Dinah said, putting down her glass of iced tea in exasperation. “She still reads, supposedly, for Jake but produces maybe one synopsis every other week. She has no training for any other kind of job. She can’t even type. Because of the blacklist, she can’t get work in TV or the movies. I can’t think of a single single guy to introduce her to.”

“So where does New York fit in?”

“Two big reasons, Nelly. Blacklisted actors have been doing more or less all right in the theater—at least some are s-s-s-surviving. And there’s the social life. Jesus, everyone in the theater goes to East Hampton in the summer—writers, directors, producers, actors. Everyone. If she comes with us, she’s bound to meet someone. Her best hope is a new fella, and Jake knows that.”

“So why he is so against it?”

Because, she answered, he didn’t trust Veevi to take advantage of the situation. She wasn’t making an effort in L.A. Why would she do it in New York? And if she didn’t make an effort, she’d start drinking again, and stay in her room all day, and be critical and superior about everything, Broadway in particular. He just wasn’t in the mood for it, he’d explained to her, not when he was devoting himself a thousand percent to the show.

“He doesn’t really like her that much,” Dinah said. “I mean, he likes her, but she p-p-p-pisses him off.”

“But what about acting? Doesn’t she want to get back to that?”

“Not really. She never liked it even in the thirties,” Dinah explained. “She doesn’t really believe in herself as an actress. She says things like ‘Actors are children,’ and ‘I hate all forms of public display.’ ” Jake had said he could just see it: he’d set up auditions for her, and she wouldn’t show up. She’d have an excuse for everything, just as she does for the synopses that are always late.

“Perhaps she just needs a push. To get her self-confidence back.”

“Well, that’s why she should come East with us,” Dinah said. Then she explained, a little shyly, that since his heart attack Jake had been very, well, sort of sweet with her. He’d insisted on having his family all to himself.

“I just want the four of us, plus Gus, which makes five,” he’d said. “We cannot devote our entire lives to your sister’s emotional and social rescue. We’ve done everything we can, and she’s having none of it. She doesn’t like our friends, she can’t stand Hollywood, she has nothing but contempt for the show and my career. You’ve got to face the fact,” he’d told Dinah, “that your sister doesn’t like you or us or our family. We’re all she’s got right now, but that doesn’t mean she loves us. For some reason, she needed to exile herself from her own crowd in Paris, but every time she thinks of them she wants to punish us for not being them.”

“How do you know all this?” Dinah had asked him, suspecting that he was right but wanting to stand up for Veevi, too.

“Because I’ve talked to her about my project. I’ve asked her to do research on it. She thinks it’s a big pile of schmaltz—a big load of cornball commercial horseshit. And if we’re in East Hampton and having people over or going to somebody’s house”—and he’d exploded—“I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to sit by while she gives those nasty little looks and those contempt-filled little smiles whenever the subject of my show comes up. To hell with that. I’ve just had a heart attack, and Justy Brody says I’ve got to take it easy and avoid aggravation. Honestly, honey, if you bring her East with us I might just as well drop dead. I’ve been supporting her uncomplainingly all this time. I have a right to a vacation from Her-Royal-Pain-in-the-Heinie.”

“So you see,” Dinah said to Nelly, “maybe I should tell him about Mike. Maybe that would soften him a little. I’m worried about her, Nelly. The last thing she needs right now is a brush with that shitheel husband of hers.”

“You don’t have to tell me about Veevi’s little ‘everybody-in-this-room-is-an-idiot-except-you-and-me’ smiles,” Nelly said, shaking her head so that her egg-beaten curls fluttered as she spoke. “But you know,” she said, with her mild lisp, “somewhere in a Tolstoy novel—I think it’s
Anna Karenina—
a character says, ‘Things will shape themselves.’ And I tell you, Dinah, for your own good and for the good of your sister, this thing you saw today you did not see. Do not say a word. Let things shape themselves.”

Manny Steiner suddenly came through the kitchen door, brown and glistening. He ran up to the table, grabbed his wife’s face and kissed her on the mouth, ran to Dinah’s side of the table and kissed her on the mouth, and ran out the back door and down the steps toward the pool.

The two friends smiled at each other, and then Dinah’s face became serious
again. “You’re right, Nelly. You always are. I’ll just forget the whole thing.”