Land of Dreams: A Novel (19 page)

“From
New York
?” I said. “It must have weighed . . .”

“Yes!” she shouted at me, “it did. But it’s a poor house that can’t have a proper feast on Thanksgiving. Now, will you get out of this kitchen and let me get on with it in peace!”

How long had Bridie been sacrificing her beloved sugar and stockpiling it for this special day? She had hidden and packed the heavy sack of sundries in her case, refusing to let anyone else carry it, in case they guessed at her contraband.

As I left the kitchen I turned and watched for a moment unseen, as she threw half a pound of her own creamy, salted butter on the mashed potatoes, her worn face set and stern as it always was—except for the rarest occasion when I’d catch her dragging Tom over to her for a quiet cuddle, or when she’d pushed him up the stairs to bed as a toddler. “Get up those stairs, like a long-dog,” she’d call to him and gently slap his bottom as he crawled up, hands first; doing Bridie’s bidding was one of the first things he learned. Like the rest of us, Tom did as Bridie told him, and he didn’t mind. As she drew the fork backward and forward, fluffing up the spuds as I had seen her do a thousand times before, I realized that it was Bridie, not me, who was the true matriarch of this family. This Thanksgiving meal was hers and—as I did every year—I had set the guest list without even consulting her.

C
HAPTER
E
IGHTEEN

As soon as the food arrived—before I’d had the chance to blow on my soup—Hilla got straight to work.

“You have not set up a studio here,” she said, nodding disparagingly toward the kitchen, “so you are painting nothing. When are you coming back to New York?”

Small mercy, perhaps, that she had at least waited until the Thanksgiving formalities were complete. Tom had been thankful for the frog he had found in the garden that morning (which was now residing in a box under his bed); Leo had been thankful that his career as an actor had begun and, after a glower from Bridie, to his mother for moving everybody to Los Angeles. Bridie thanked the Merciful Lord Jesus and His Mother the Blessed Virgin Mary, and several lesser known saints, for a litany of interventions that they had carried out in the past year—St. Anthony for finding her glasses for her, and the like—purely to embarrass me in front of Hilla, who abstained rudely with a wave of her hand.

I was thankful for the family being together, remembered absent friends and loved ones—the Sweeneys, and then Charles and John.

Even Hilla bowed her head at that. Tom got up from the table as soon as I said his father’s name, curled himself into my side and rubbed the tears from his eyes on the shoulder of my blouse. He was such a sturdy, playful, outdoor child that it was easy to forget he was still grieving the only father he had known. I tried to create moments like these to let the children’s pain out. Tom threw tantrums now, which he had never done before his father died. I had lost so many people—parents, two husbands, countless friends and neighbors in the Irish War of Independence—that grief was a familiar companion. I knew her well. The banshee would settle her black mantle over the bereaved and play out her drama of irrational anger and unreasonable pain. She didn’t care if you were a child or a seasoned widow; neither age nor experience could cheat her.

It broke my heart to see Tom’s jagged tears, but at least I had the comfort of knowing that his pain was escaping. In any case, although his tears for Charles were real, they were always fleeting; the pain flew out of him suddenly, and would then disappear like breath in a gust of wind with the smallest distraction—
Abbott and Costello
on the radio, or a cookie. My own pain was tightly secured, and when loosened from its moorings hung around me for days: a derelict rowing boat in a swamp, gradually dragging itself down the slow river in its own time.

Leo seemed the least affected, and that was the most worrying thing of all. Grief is poison to the soul, and I worried dreadfully about him holding it all in. There was every chance that this rebellion was a reaction to his father’s death, as his insistence on boarding school had been a need to escape my cloying concern for him. It frustrated me that there was nothing I could do to know that for certain or do anything about it.

Earlier that week Leo had come home with his hair greased down into a side parting and sporting a small, fake mustache. “Do I look like quite the cad?” he said jokingly. I got a fright, because he looked so much like Charles when I had first met him back in the twenties. Although Leo was naturally blond like his father, the air of maturity that the makeup had given him and the teasing timbre in his voice were pure Charles.

Leo appeared to be getting more self-assured and adult with each passing day. I did not know if that was a good thing or a bad thing, but I did know that I was losing the supremacy a mother enjoys while her children are young and exclusively hers. I felt the pain of no longer being his confidante and best friend. While I knew that Leo’s moving away from me was the natural order, every day that he grew closer to manhood, I grieved the passing of my importance in his life. I had to compete with his first friends, and now with Hollywood, for my influence over him. I would hold on tight, but deep down I knew I didn’t stand a chance.

“I am doing some drawing,” I said to Hilla, “and I have a studio set up in one of the rooms.”

“This is not a place for you to work. You need to start exhibiting . . .”

Bridie got up from the table, taking her soup plate with her, and began flustering noisily around in the kitchen. Tom went to follow her, but I gave him a threatening look that said stay-where-you-are.

The most important family meal of the year was dissolving into an awkward mess. God, how I wished I were back in New York, with us all sitting around the house in Yonkers with Maureen and the Sweeneys, like we did every year—they felt too far away. When Maureen had gone back, leaving Bridie behind, neither of us had realized how long I would be staying in LA, and our goodbyes had been all too cursory. I missed my friend on this special day—and as for Hilla, she should be back in her own apartment in Manhattan!

“An artist at the studio sketched me this week,” Leo piped up. “It was a very good likeness. It’s for a poster of the film I’m going to be in. I’m going to be in a film, Hilla.”

Leo always made an effort with Hilla. Her cool manner toward him made him anxious to be liked. Bridie noisily cleared away the soup bowls, snatching Hilla’s away while she still had the spoon poised for the last drop of broth.

I didn’t mind Leo being exposed to adult indifference, it was good life training for him, but it drove Bridie half mad when people did not dote over my boys as she did.

“Those people are not
real
artists,” Hilla said, waving his comment aside.

Leo looked crestfallen.

“They couldn’t get a likeness of you, boy, because you are too handsome, and that’s the truth,” Bridie said, touching Leo’s hair as she passed and glowering her disapproval across at me, as if Hilla herself was so inhumanly beyond the pale that she was choosing to hold me entirely responsible for her unwelcome presence.

Hilla said, “I am hosting a symposium of Non-Objective and Abstract art for key collectors in January. You will be back for that, I’m sure.”

Leo looked horrified—as if he might crack at any second and run from the room.

“No,” I said, “Leo is shooting his film in January, Hilla. It’s a very big feature film called . . .”

“Oh, but it’s important you are back by then. There will be an exhibition and—”

There was an almighty crash in the kitchen. I ran over and found Bridie lying on the floor, with the turkey and its pan still skidding across the linoleum floor.

“Jesus, Bridie!”

“I’m fine—stop fussing.” She tried to get up, but grimaced as she put weight on her foot.

“You’re hurt. Don’t move,” I said.

“The turkey . . . ,” she said, reaching across to it. “I slipped when I was taking it out—stupid, stupid old woman! I’ll be fine, let me up . . .”

“Stay there, woman!”

Hilla, who had followed me in, rolled up her sleeves, then miraculously gathered the turkey up in one piece and put it onto its serving plate on the counter, as if managing hot, fallen fowl was an everyday occurrence for her. She closed the oven door, threw a cloth down on the greasy floor and came over to me.

“She has hurt her ankle,” she said, “we’ll move her to the couch.” Grabbing Bridie under the arm and around her waist, she signaled to me to do the same and we literally dragged the old woman backward across to the couch.

“On the chair,” Bridie instructed us, and there then ensued a muted disagreement between the adversaries as to whether Bridie should sit on the couch with her foot elevated on cushions (Hilla) or in her armchair with her foot up on a stool (Bridie), which Hilla won.

Once she was ensconced, I checked Bridie’s ankle for breaks and decided it was just a bad sprain. I bandaged it tightly and made a cold compress for it, all the while with Bridie objecting and insisting that she should get up and finish preparing the meal. In the meantime, Hilla organized the turkey with a practical aplomb that amazed me, bossily instructing my sons to fetch plates, drain vegetables and, in Tom’s case, mash the potatoes. Bridie was bristling with stress, straining her head to watch “the German” moving around her kitchen, and while she was in too much pain to move, she continuously called out instructions: “Don’t forget to put plenty of butter on those spuds. The cream needs whipping for the pie. Put the pie in the oven!” Then she huffed under her breath, “This is impossible,” before shouting again, “Did you hear me? I said: put the apple pie IN the oven and take the pumpkin pie OUT of the oven—oh, this is hopeless.”

Hilla shouted back, “We are managing fine—this is easy. Stop shouting at me, you stupid old woman!”

We set a tray for Bridie and laid a picnic cloth on the floor for the two boys. Hilla and I sat on soft chairs and ate from our laps.

“Never mind me, you lunatics. Sit up at the table like civilized people,” Bridie insisted, but you could see that she was delighted to be the center of attention.

“The turkey is delicious,” Hilla said in a matter-of-fact way, and then, without the hint of a compliment intended, “the best I have ever tasted.”

Bridie said nothing, but her lips pursed in a way I recognized as her determinedly not cracking into a smile.

We drank two bottles of wine with the meal, and ate our food hungrily and casually, picking lumps of turkey up from a platter left on the picnic rug, then wiping our hands on dish towels. Bridie, who was not used to drinking, knocked back three glasses of wine to ease her foot, and was in a considerably better mood at the end of the meal than she had been at the beginning. When we had finished I told the boys to put on the radio so that we could wait for
Lux Radio Theater
—Bridie never missed it. The Glenn Miller Orchestra was still playing and Bridie said, “Come on, Leo, cut the rug there for me.”

Leo bowed and reached for my hand.

“What about our guest?” I said. “I think
she
should have the first dance.”

Hilla blushed like a schoolgirl as my handsome sixteen-year-old swept her around the room in a fast waltz. I was surprised that Hilla was an elegant dancer, but the greatest surprise was Leo’s confidence. He had been taking classes in dance, of course, but it was more his sense of aplomb, the extraordinary ease with which he partnered this older woman, which showed a maturity that shocked me somewhat, but also made me feel very, very proud.

The program ended with that dance and Hilla said, “Show me these sketches, Ellie.”

What with the drama, the dinner and the dancing, I had gathered that I was off the hook, but my mentor was having none of it.

We left Bridie and the boys and went into the spare bedroom. I could not fool Hilla that there was any artistic endeavor going on; the paints were still in their box, the brushes clean and new—the room smelled of camphor and house polish, instead of the usual studio smell of turpentine and sawdust. I quickly picked up my sketchpad and handed it to her, open at the pages of Crystal that I had filled in at Chateau Marmont.

“That’s it,” I said, “that’s all there is.”

The depth of her disappointment was shown in her not huffing and throwing the simple drawings aside, but studying them carefully.

“These are good,” she said, “but then you are a brilliant technician, Ellie . . .”

“There’s nothing in them,” I said defensively, immediately regretful that I had shown her anything at all. “The drawings—they’re just fripperies, a habit . . .”

“No, no,” she said, “she is a beautiful girl, and the drawing is perfect, but you have captured something else here, something more than that—her soul.”

I smiled, half knowing what was coming.

“But it is not your art, Ellie—this is not what you do. Where are you in all this?” She looked around the room. “Where is
your
soul?”

I shrugged deeply and sighed, although really I wanted to cry and throw my hands in the air in despair. I couldn’t paint. I had nothing to say. My art had left me and all I could do was capture the story behind the eyes of a pretty girl. Somehow, in the past few weeks, I had become silenced. My voice was gone and I was becoming ever less certain that it would return.

Part Three

Los Feliz
1943

C
HAPTER
N
INETEEN

Christmas came and went.

It did not feel like winter in California. Without the routines of bad weather, clearing the snow, unpacking our boots and sweaters, it was as if time had stood still.

Leo started filming
Five Graves to Cairo
at Paramount Studios in early January and the producers estimated it would take three months to film, maybe longer. It was a war film, set during the ongoing World War Two and starring Franchot Tone, Anne Baxter and Erich von Stroheim. Leo was cast as a young soldier who gets wounded and is tended by a young female nurse who falls in love with him. All through Christmas he had talked of nothing else, reading and rereading the script until he knew the whole thing by heart.