Laura Lamont's Life In Pictures (14 page)

That evening, Harriet put the girls to sleep and Laura and Irving spent the night in the Biltmore Hotel. Their suite was larger than the house Laura and Gordon had lived in, with two rooms and a balcony. One of the hotel maids had used rose petals to draw a heart on top of the coverlet, no doubt at Irving’s request. Laura excused herself and went into the bathroom to change—there were too many lights on in the room. She felt as if she were still on a film set, only this time she didn’t want to be. One mostly pretend marriage was enough. The bathroom was mirrored from floor to ceiling, and Laura watched herself pee and then wash her hands and face. She thought about putting her makeup on again, but didn’t. They were married—he could see her face. Without the dramatic eyebrows and painted lips, Laura’s face looked so pale that she might fade away. It was the first time in days that Laura had seen her own freckles. It was almost summertime, and the sun had been out in full force. As a wedding gift, Ginger had given Laura a proper peignoir set, with peach-colored marabou feathers that hung off the sleeves. Laura unfolded the silky material and slid it over her body. She didn’t need to go to Paris. All she needed was Irving. The thought of spending the rest of her life with him filled Laura with an actual, physical sense of relief, the same way that
the cold water of Lake Michigan had been a relief on the hottest days of the year. The body of water was always there, winter or summer, wider and deeper than the eye could see.

Irving had turned off all the overhead lights, leaving only the bedside lamps illuminated. He was sitting up in bed, naked to the waist, with the top sheet falling loosely around his legs. His bare chest was speckled with brown hair, and his stomach receded behind his rib cage, concave against the sheet. His waist was as small as hers, and she’d never known it. Laura had a brief flash of all the things she still didn’t know about her husband, and it filled her with both excitement and fear, like she’d just jumped out of an airplane with only a wedding ring. Irving still had his glasses on, and he adjusted them on his nose as Laura stepped out of the doorway.

“You look lovely, my bride.”

“I don’t have any makeup on,” she said.

“Neither do I.” Irving pulled down the sheet on the empty side of the bed. Laura walked quickly around the foot of the bed and climbed in, tucking her legs under the covers. Irving turned onto his side to face her.

“Are you nervous?” Laura asked. Her heart was a marching band, a polka band, a big band. Irving slid closer, and took her chin in his right hand, and led her face toward his. It wasn’t anything like kissing Gordon, with his slippery tongue darting in and out like an archeological exploration. Irving was slow and persistent, his mouth strong and unafraid to seek out what it wanted. She could feel it in her belly button, in her spleen. Irving stopped and propped himself up on his elbows.

“You’re the one who should be nervous,” he said. “Once I take my glasses off, I won’t be able to see anything. You could steal my wallet and I’ll still be holding on to this pillow, telling it how nice it looks.”

Laura chuckled. Her new husband reached up and pulled off his
glasses. He folded them neatly and placed them on the nightstand. When he turned back to Laura, his face was brand-new. Everything looked bigger: his brown eyes, his Roman nose, his mouth. Laura cupped her hand around his cheek. Her entire body felt like it had been flooded with new blood, like her heart had decided to flush out every cynical thought she’d ever had about Gordon or love, and all she wanted was to have her husband as close to her as possible, forever. She crawled on top of him, not caring that the sheets were bunched up and in the way and then falling onto the floor. Irving’s delicate hands slid her peignoir off her shoulders, and the silk felt like a sigh against her skin. When Laura felt Irving’s mouth on her bare stomach, it was all she could do not to cry out, to shout to the world that something good had finally happened, something real. Then she remembered that her children were miles away, tucked safely into their beds, and no one would know or care if she did cry out, and so Laura did, over and over, until she and Irving were slick with sweat and panting for breath. When exhaustion forced them to sleep, they could hardly wait until morning to do it all over again.

T
he polls were clear: Audiences wanted Laura Lamont either sultry or sad. After
The Ballad of Bayonets
, they swooned over her in
Girl Thief
, in which Laura crept around a hotel room on a remote Greek island, pilfering jewels and antiques. By the film’s close, it was her heart that was stolen by a competing cat burglar played by Robert Hunter, whom everyone in Hollywood thought was a homosexual, and everyone in the rest of America thought was the handsomest bachelor in the world, both of which were equally true. The last scene of the movie showed them both wearing all black, standing outside a well-lit hotel, holding hands. They liked Laura most of all, however, in the role of Sister Eve in
Farewell, My Sister
. Sister Eve was a young nun who returned home to her family farm following the death of her twin. Sister Eve then fell in love with her dead sister’s fiancé, resisted him, and turned back to God.
Farewell, My Sister
earned Laura an Academy Award nomination, as well as an endorsement from the Catholic League of America, which included several young, good-looking politicians. Irving stayed by her side at
every party, eyes narrowed at any dapper young man who had perhaps missed the lollipop-size diamond on Laura’s left hand. When Laura put on the ring every morning, it felt gloriously heavy on her finger, as though all of Irving’s tender love were riding on that single digit.

Louis Gardner himself called Laura to tell her to be sure to attend the Academy Awards ceremony, as if she would have missed it. Cosmo and Edna set to work on her dress, and Irving supervised all the fittings. Edna’s first sketch was for a feathered cape, which Cosmo thought was gauche, given that so many of Hollywood’s men were still overseas. Her second sketch was for a slinky black crepe gown with shoulders that jutted out, giving Laura the silhouette of an Amazon woman, larger than life and twice as fierce.

Cosmo and Edna brought the dress over to Laura and Irving’s house, and set up a mini tailoring shop in the living room, to see how it moved.

“Don’t you think the shoulders are a little large?” Laura said, tapping her fingers lightly against the elaborate black fabric draped over her collarbones.

Edna pulled the fabric tighter across her waist. “Which corset are you wearing?” she said in response. There were always at least a dozen pins held in between Edna’s teeth, but she didn’t seem to find them a hindrance. “No,” she said, in answer to Laura’s question.

“Irving?”

Her husband was standing by the door, at a distance, watching the way the gown moved. “Yes, dear?”

“What do you think?”

“I think you look like an Academy Award winner.”

Edna applauded, and stuck in a few more pins across the back. Laura would rather have worn something more simply feminine—
something satin, something that moved—but knew better than to argue. These were not her decisions to make.

Irving took the Academy Awards as an overdue opportunity to fly his in-laws and sister-in-law to California. Laura hadn’t seen her parents in nearly ten years, since she was eighteen, and on the day they were due to arrive, Laura fussed nervously. She stood behind Harriet in the kitchen and questioned the thickness of the tomato slices she was cutting for the girls’ lunch. At Irving’s insistence, and despite Laura’s protestations, Harriet was wearing a uniform, a stiff black dress with long sleeves and a white apron on top. Laura ordered Clara and Florence to change their clothes whenever a speck of childish filth appeared, as it often did, on their elbows or knees. Clara was nine years old, and always a mess. Her sister was slightly better, as she enjoyed playing outside less, and was more likely to be found under the bed playing with one of Laura’s stoles that still had the face attached. Irving was not immune to Laura’s critical eye, and was forced to change his tie three times, from brown to black and back again, and every time he coughed something into his hankie, Laura whisked it away into the laundry basket. Gardner Brothers sent a limousine to the airport, and Laura tried in vain to sit on the sofa with her ankles crossed and wait. Instead, she paced back and forth the length of the room, sitting for only a few seconds at a time before her body propelled itself up again.

The news of her second marriage had not been met with great excitement. Laura was nervous to call, and had written a letter instead. John and Mary had written a letter back, though Josephine had telephoned to congratulate her, still no closer herself to a wedding. Though Gordon-from-Florida had been no one’s idea of a perfect match, her parents had at least been able to set eyes on him before the blessed event occurred. That Irving Green was wealthy and powerful
mattered little; he was an older man, and a Jew. How would he treat the Emerson girls, the erstwhile Pitts? Even thinking about her daughters, and the fact that they had not yet met her parents, made Laura’s throat clamp shut and her head begin to throb. It was too much for one visit—she should have gone home to Wisconsin; she’d meant to, so many times. At first, Laura had been waiting for success, but when success arrived, she still didn’t go. The Cherry County Playhouse was doing better than ever, due in no small part to her growing fame, Josephine had told her on the telephone. Laura could close her eyes and be in the barn whenever she liked, and the smell of the wood and hay never changed. It was almost too frightening to imagine the possibility that time had marched on in Door County as it had in California.

The doorbell rang, a simple
dong
that couldn’t possibly contain all the notes it needed to. Laura was on her feet before she even realized she’d heard the sound, and halfway to the door in five seconds’ time. She’d warned them about her dark hair, about her thin figure. She’d told them about Clara and Florence and Irving and Harriet and Ginger and everything else she could think of—the color of the walls, the shape of the house. There were no secrets waiting to be told (save, perhaps, Gordon’s drinking and subsequent firing by the studio), but still Laura felt paralyzed with nerves. She had aged almost a decade. The room was too warm; they would surely think so. Laura wanted to hide in the bedroom and make Harriet answer the door—it was too much all at once, to just open a door and see them standing there, as though her parents were no different from the mailman. The doorbell rang again.

Laura twisted the knob and pulled the door open. Josephine stood in front, her thick finger still hovering before the bell. She’d cut her hair short, though not in the fashionable way Ginger recently had.
Josephine’s hair looked as coarse as straw, and stood on end. Laura wondered whether she’d cut it herself, but then remembered: Of course she had, just as Laura would have too, had she not left Door County. Her sister was standing at her door. It was almost too much to believe. Laura wanted to reach out and touch her sister’s cheek, to know that what she was seeing was real.

“Elsa?” her father said. It was a shock to hear her old name pass so naturally through his lips, though of course Laura had expected him to use it. Josephine moved to the side and let him through. Before Laura could even take in the figure before her—white hair, sloping shoulders, soft belly—she was in his arms. When she closed her eyes, he smelled just the same. Laura briefly wondered why she had ever left home, when there was this much love there, this much warmth.

“Oh, Dad,” she said. “Dad.”

John pulled back, keeping his hands gripped tight around Laura’s arms. Though his hair was all white, a downy shade the color of a pigeon’s underbelly, her father did not look old to her the way her mother did. Mary stepped forward and stood at John’s side. At the studio, the makeup ladies warned Laura not to smile too much, for fear it would give her wrinkles. Laura knew that her mother rarely smiled, but all the time she’d spent frowning seemed to have done an equally strong number on her face. Delicate, thin lines crisscrossed the skin around her eyes and mouth.

“Hello, Mother,” Laura said, stepping forward to kiss her mother’s cheek. Mary wrapped her arms around Laura and began to cry without the added histrionics of noise or tears. Her body jerked up and down for a few minutes, and when she was finished, she let go and straightened out her traveling dress. Laura pushed her hair off her forehead and led her family into her home.

“It’s so garish,” Mary said, looking around the room. “You must have spent a fortune on the lighting fixtures alone. Of course, it’s not your money, really.”

Laura brushed her finger against her own lips, as if it would soften her mother’s words. In the center of the living room, Irving waited with his fingers knitted together at his waist. He looked so small, standing there all alone, so much smaller than her father, whose comforting heft she had forgotten. Laura hurried to his side, and saw the room as her parents did. The ceiling was high, as tall as the loft in the barn, tall enough for a family of giants. Covering the walls in a damask silk had been Laura’s choice—she loved the way she could sink into the walls if Irving pushed her against them with his thin, taut arms, like they were always rolling around in bed, no matter where they were in the house. Surely her parents could see that on her face, that she’d become a sex-crazed harlot, a hysterical woman. The lights were too low—the whole room felt like a bordello. Thank God she hadn’t chosen the red silk for the walls, as she’d considered. John, Mary, and Josephine shuffled into the room like herded cattle, their eyes looking everywhere except where they were going, which was toward Irving.