Cheat and Charmer (89 page)

“Sure did, Gus. On Selma Avenue and Gardner Street. Right after we came out to California. I used to roller-skate around here. I’d roller-skate up and down Hollywood Boulevard. Once I saw Charlie Chaplin. He was looking at us from a restaurant window. I wanted him to discover me and make me a child star, and I started doing all my fancy dance steps—on roller skates. He smiled at me, and then he took one look at my sister and stuck a rose in his mouth.”

Gussie laughed—a roll of chesty guffaws, one right after another. But she had heard this story a hundred times and had noticed the way Dinah talked all the time now about the past.

Dinah stopped the car across from the eight-unit stucco apartment house and then checked the number against the slip of paper in her shirt pocket.

Blue lights from the patch of landscaped shrubbery illuminated the address. “Okay,” Dinah said. “We’re here.” She opened the glove compartment, took out the bottle of Chivas, and offered it to Gussie, who shook her head no. Dinah took a swig and put it back.

“Okay, if I’m not back here in twenty minutes, come in and get me in apartment 3B.”

But Gussie opened the door on her side of the car. “Uh-huh, Dinah. You ain’t going in there by yourself, and I sure ain’t going to sit alone here in the middle of the night. You know about the police out here and how they treats the Negroes.”

“Sorry, Gus. I should have remembered. Come on.”

When they reached the apartment, Dinah could see light through the curtains at the window. She knocked firmly and then pressed the buzzer. The door opened with the chain still in place.

“I came for his l-l-l-laundry,” said Dinah.

The girl opened the door farther. “I am with my housekeeper, Mrs. Crittenden,” Dinah added.

Grace was wearing her kimono. Her red hair had been rolled into big metal curlers that moved backward in orderly rows off her freckled face. A movie was playing softly on the television, and there were magazines strewn about the sofa and the floor, a bottle of red nail polish, emery boards, white cotton balls, and two bottles of Coke on the coffee table.

“Turn the television off, dear,” said Dinah.

“You can sit down if you like,” said the girl. There was no bravado in her cockney accent this time. She seemed tired, and shy.

“Thank you,” said Dinah, sitting down on the edge of the sofa after pushing a copy of
Confidential
out of the way. Noticing all the dolls piled in the corner, she motioned for Gussie to sit as well, but Gussie shook her head and remained standing near the door.

“Please, sit down too, G-G-G-Grace,” said Dinah. She nodded toward the opposite end of the sofa, and waited for the girl to arrange herself.

“This is for you,” she said, pulling off her emerald ring. In the shadows, Dinah heard a groan escape from Gussie. “Oh, Dinah, don’t …”

“It’s all you’re going to get, but I think it will get you through the year that’s left on your contract.”

The girl took the ring, warm with the heat of Dinah’s skin, and looked at it. “How do I know it’s real?” she said.

“You pathetic creature. You really don’t know sh-sh-shit from Sh-Sh-Sh—”

“Shinola,” echoed Gussie.

The girl put it on her finger and then, keeping it there, looked at Dinah.

“Now, I’d like you to get on the phone and call Mr. Burgoyne and tell him there’s no need to meet my husband at Joe Brogan’s tomorrow night—the
matter’s settled and he’s not to lay a hand on my husband or my son. Please do it now, while I’m here.”

“That’s impossible,” said the girl.

“No, do it now, dear.”

Gussie took a step closer to Dinah and crossed her arms.

“Well, what I mean is,” the girl said with a giggle, “he’s here. Asleep in the bedroom. Go on and see for yourself if you don’t believe me.”

The girl nodded her head in the direction of the bedroom. Gussie disappeared for a moment and came back. “He’s in the bed, all right.”

“Tell me, dear. Were you involved with Burgoyne while you were seeing my husband?”

“Of course. But,” the girl leaned forward. “He doesn’t know I’m Jewish. I suppose Jake told you I’m Jewish?”

“No, dear,” said Dinah, “he hasn’t told me.”

The girl covered her eyes with her hands, in relief.

Dinah shook her head in pity, but continued. “Listen, honey. Tell Burgoyne that if he persists in his desire to torment us and wants to make a sc-sc-sc-scandal, tell him to save his breath. To b-b-begin with, I couldn’t care less who knows whether or not I testified; it’s public knowledge. I also don’t care who knows that my husband slept with my sister. Or gave her a job while she was blacklisted. Or had anything to do with the l-l-l-likes of you. It’s of no importance to me one way or the other. I’m through with this town, and this industry. And him.”

A hulking figure in a white terry-cloth bathrobe now appeared at the back entrance to the living room. “Mrs. Lasker,” he roared. “What a pleasure.”

“Well, maybe for you, but not for me,” said Dinah, standing up. “This is my housekeeper, Mrs. Crittenden.”

Gussie looked at him and snorted contemptuously.

“We’re just leaving,” said Dinah. “I’ve given Miss Siddons something she can depend on for a while—not the money you and she tried to blackmail out of us but enough for her to get her away from earning her living on her back.” She looked at Grace. “You ought to go to school, dear. You’re still young, and if you’re clever enough to get involved with a blackmail scheme, then maybe you’re clever enough to get a c-c-c-college degree. Perhaps you can avoid the mistakes I’ve made.”

Grace Siddons was looking at her now, her expression abject and deferential.

“And I was just telling her to inform you,” she said to Burgoyne, “that the d-d-d-date is off tomorrow night at Joe Brogan’s. You can say anything you like about us; it doesn’t matter. Of course, if you continue to bother us, or threaten my husband or my son, you will pay d-d-d-dearly for it.”

Then Dinah turned toward the girl. She tightened her hands into two fists and stood taking deep breaths, while the girl drew back, alarmed. “Dinah,” Gussie said, coming up to her and putting her hands on her shoulders. “Come on, sugar, let’s go home.”

“You. Are. A. Vicious. Stupid. Pathetic. Malevolent. Ignorant. Little. C-C-C-C- …”

“Dinah,” Gussie said again, firmly now. “Come on, honey. Don’t waste your breath on this trash.”

“The whole thing was Duff’s idea,” the girl burst out. “He made me do it. It was just his idea of a joke. Honestly, Mrs. Lasker, I’m sorry!”

Trembling, the girl put her thumb to her quivering lips. “Here, I’ll just get Jake’s things for you.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, dear, burn them. I don’t want them!” She turned to go. Gussie’s arm was around her waist.

“Ah, you guys’re no fun. I’m going back to bed. Turn the lights out, kitten,” said Burgoyne. “So long, Mrs. Lasker.” He began to lumber back toward the darkness from which he’d emerged. Then he paused again. “Why didn’t your sister like my treatment?”

“She read a treatment of yours? Ah—the one you mentioned in Vegas.”

“Yeah. I thought it would make a good Jake Lasker picture. She thought otherwise. I made sure V. Z. Aldrich found out about her.”

“Oh, you’re the one who tried to make trouble,” Dinah said.

Burgoyne laughed. “I wonder why she didn’t like my story.”

“Perhaps,” said Dinah, “it was because she could smell a hack a hundred miles away. She was attracted only to real t-t-t-talent.”

“Oh, who needs this shit? Kitten, make sure you turn off the lights when you come to bed!” He shuffled off, looking oddly, to Dinah, like Jake at night when he wandered through the house in his bathrobe, racked with insomnia.

“Did Byron Cole know about my s-s-s-sister and Jake?” Dinah’s arms hung slackly at her sides.

“Yeah,” Grace said. “She told him about it. She told him she wanted to live your life. Thought she’d do a better job of it than you had. Said you were too simple to be the wife of a, you know, a guy like Jake.”

“Did my husband want to leave me for her?”

“Yes. But only for a little while. I lied when I told you he wanted to go back with her. He didn’t. He was glad it was over. He really loves you, Mrs. Lasker. Honest. In New York, when he was away from home so much, and your sister was falling apart and then had that frightful accident, why, that’s when he found me! I was just supposed to take his mind off his worries about you. He never liked having it off with her, either. Said she was too … what was his word? De-something. Detached. Said she was too detached. He said the fucking was much better with you. And me. That between us we took great care of him.”

Dinah felt the girl trying to make it right somehow, trying to tell the truth.

Grace took the emerald ring off and held it out to Dinah.

“No, dear. You keep it. You’ve earned it. Now, look after yourself.”

The girl took a sharp inward breath. “ ’Cor,” she said. “I don’t know what to say.”

“Come on, Dinah,” said Gussie, who looked at the girl. “You heard all you got to hear.”

Dinah felt Gussie’s arm around her, steering her out the door and around the patio and down the concrete flight of steps to the street, where the car sat parked under a palm tree that was dipping its fronds in the night wind like oars in a stream.

Early one Sunday in November, some three months later, Dinah saw Peter putting on his peacoat and Westminster School muffler. She asked him where he was going. Just up to Hampstead, to meet his new friend Gideon. It was really weird, he said. Of all the kids he’d met at Westminster, the one he’d made friends with was American. He had an English accent and all, because he’d lived here so long, but he was an American and he’d even been born in L.A. His father had been a film writer—Peter said “film” now, not “movie”—out there. They were going to a YCND meeting.

A what meeting?

“Youth Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. They’re going on the Aldermaston march, and I’m going to a planning meeting. I told you about it two weeks ago. Don’t you remember?”

“Oh, I’ll drive you,” she said.

“No,” he said irritably. “I don’t want you to drive me. I’m taking the tube: Central Line to Oxford Circus, change to the Bakerloo, get off at Hampstead.” He liked reciting the tube stops. From the day the Laskers had arrived in London, Peter had been going everywhere alone by tube. He knew the entire system by heart.

“No, I’ll take you.”

“Mom, please don’t. I want to go alone.”

“No. I’m taking you, and that’s that.”

He scowled at this encroachment on his independence. “Why? I’m not a baby!”

“I know you’re not a baby. But it’s dr-dr-dr-dreary indoors, and I want to go out for a while.”

Jake had gone to Paris for the weekend, as he often did now, staying at the Crandells’ flat, and meeting with Willie Weil, who was the executive producer on the new picture he was due to begin shooting in Paris in the spring. She had refused to go with him, saying that sometime soon she was going to fly to Paris alone, during the week, when she could stay with Dorshka and watch Coco from a safe distance in the Bois. Michael had forbidden her ever to see Coco again.

She called the garage and asked for the Vauxhall, and then she and Peter walked together down Green Street, where they’d been living in a maisonette since September, to the garage on Audley Street, past the rubble of a pub that had been bombed during the war. Peter looked glum and embarrassed to be seen, even by the garage attendants, with his mother.

“You know, Mom, I want to go alone,” he said.

“End-d-d-dure it.”

Dinah had mastered the art of driving on the left, a feat her son admired. He now became absorbed in watching her shift, stop, and start in the Sunday traffic on Baker Street. “You’re still in second, Mom. Go into third.”

“I know what I’m doing, dear. Tell me, where does this kid live?” she asked.

Peter took the
London A–Z
from the glove compartment and looked up the street. “Hampstead,” he said. “Frognal. That’s a funny word, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Tell me about this YCND stuff. What is it, again?”

He explained to her that the Hampstead group was important and well-known; one of the kids was the son of a big Labour M.P. There was going to be another demonstration soon, next week, in Trafalgar Square. Bertrand Russell was going to be there. People might get arrested. “I’m joining this group, Mom, and I’m going to the demonstration.”