Suspicious Circumstances (14 page)

‘Married!’ I gasped.

‘Married!’ gasped Ronnie.

Mother clung to my arm, which didn’t make my maniacal driving any less maniacal. ‘Not your father, Nickie dear. It was after your father. Just before I came to the States. It was a secret marriage, mad, reckless, completely crazy, doomed.’

‘But who?’ said Ronnie. ‘In the name of all that’s holy, who is your husband?’

It was a shattering moment but it was slightly less shattering because Mother was getting back to being Mother again. The bone-structure was reasserting itself and the good old One and Only, far-away, romantic look was taking over.

‘Darlings, I’ve had to confess, but you must swear never to breathe a word. Not for my sake so much as for his. I can’t tell you his name. If I did, I would never forgive myself, for in his own country he’s — well, he’s a National Figure, and, you see, shortly after I came here, there was a crisis. For political reasons, he was forced to marry quickly; there was no time for a divorce.’

I looked at her, my mouth agape, back being fascinated by her as well as quaking in my shoes.

‘But, Mother, who is it? I shall go mad! Bulganin? The Shah of Persia?’

Mother was enough herself again to give me a sidelong, rapier glance and suddenly the excruciating see-saw of suspicion which had been in my mind for weeks, started to settle down again on the okay side, because if this was all Norma had against Mother, surely it wasn’t enough for murder. Embarrassing, of course, for her distinguished bigamous husband, but for Mother what would it have entailed but publicity? Immensely juicy publicity, of course, but when had Mother ever quailed before publicity? Then … then …

It’s all right, Nickie. What do you mean it’s all right when Sylvia…? I mean it’s all right about Mother being a pusher.

While this split-personality dialogue was going on inside me, Mother had been watching Ronnie with mournful sympathy.

‘So, Ronnie, poor Ronnie, you do see …’

‘But … but Anny, what am I going to do? The most romantic marriage since Vilma Banky and Rod La Roque? Anny, I can’t face it. It’s beyond the bounds of human endurance. It’s …’

‘Now, now, Ronnie, dear, we mustn’t let ourselves get rattled.’

Somehow or other I seemed to have reached the turn which led up the canyon to our ‘home’. Mother leaned back against the upholstery, gazing straight ahead of her with the Field Marshal look. After a long moment, just as I was coming up to our gates, she said,

‘Ronnie dear, has Sylvia shown this letter to Mr Denker?’

‘No. She told me that. She doesn’t trust anyone, that python. She just hinted enough to him and put it away in a sealed envelope in his safe.’

With the faintest ripple of her brow, Mother looked out of the car window, saw our gates and exclaimed. ‘Why, here we are. Nickie darling, be a dear and stop right here. You and Ronnie can walk up to the house.’

I stared at her. Ronnie stared at her.

‘But, Mother …’

‘There, darling, be a good boy.’

Brokenly, Ronnie and I scrambled out by the mailbox. Mother moved over into the driving-seat, waved to us gaily and drove off.

On the terrace I found Delight, practicing our opening buck-and-wing with a professional ferocity that would certainly get toned down by Mother. I told her what had happened.

Soon Ronnie joined us and for about an hour, while all our insides, I’m sure, were doing Ronnie’s elastic band routine, we waited and waited. Finally Mother came drifting down to us through the cactuses and the succulents and the palmettos. She passed a hibiscus bush, turned back, sniffed delicately at a huge, perfectly scentless red blossom and sighed, ‘Ah.’

Then, while we all stood with our mouths slightly open, she came up to us and kissed us all.

‘Mother . ‘ I began.

But, ignoring me, she patted Delight’s cheek. ‘Delight dear, run in and get everyone, the servants and everyone. In the living-room. We’re going to have a lovely present orgy.’

As Delight hurried away, Mother followed her for a moment with a rather sorrowful glance.

‘Poor girl,’ she said. ‘So eager. So ambitious. I’m so afraid she’ll over-reach herself. It’s her background, of course. Such sordid beginnings, I’m told. Positively sordid. I must have a little talk with her. Explain about team spirit. Now, dears …’

At any other time I should have leaped savagely to Delight’s defense, but this wasn’t any other time, because very casually, as if she were producing a piece of Kleenex, Mother took a sealed envelope out of her bag and handed it to Ronnie.

‘Ronnie dear, I think you underestimate Mr Denker. He’s very homely, of course, and probably quite a shady little man. But he can be quite sweet, too. He adored my last movie. And — do you know? Deep down inside him, I don’t think he likes Sylvia very much.’

Ronnie had ripped the envelope open. I rushed to his side. Together we looked down at Norma’s familiar, illiterate, sprawling handwriting.

‘Dearest Lettie …’ I saw.

With a moan of relief, Ronnie started tearing it into fragments.

‘Of course,’ Mother was saying, her mouth drooping in an apologetic smile. ‘It’s going to cost you quite a bit, Ronnie dear. I swore, I positively swore you’d send poor little Mr Denker a nice check, because he may lose Sylvia as a client and I’d hate him to be out of pocket. But then, in the long run, it’s an economy, isn’t it? I mean, it’s not going to be half as expensive as signing that five-year contract with Sylvia.’

‘Anny,’ gasped Ronnie.

The warm glow. The lovely warm glow. She hadn’t pushed. I knew she hadn’t pushed. But even if she had, at that moment I shouldn’t have cared. Nor did I care if my stepfather was Colonel Nasser. I threw my arms around her and clutched her to my bosom.

‘Mother,’ I said. ‘The One, the Only, the Incomparable Mother.’

Three days before the Opening, Steve Adriano sent a private plane to take us all to Las Vegas — Mother, Pam, Uncle Hans, Gino, Tray, Delight, me, the Balmain dress and a colored maid called Cleonie whom Mother had borrowed to take care of it. For some reason, the publicity about us had reached a high pitch of hysteria by then. Every celebrity in Southern California, it seemed, was pulling strings to get Opening Night reservations and, when we boarded the private plane, we were besieged by columnists and reporters and even newsreel cameras.

By that time my stage-fright was so appalling that I was living almost entirely in a fantasy world of my own. In Steve’s plane, which appeared to have every known accessory except a Drive-In Theater, I sat with my arm around Delight because Mother, who ever since her return from Paris had become unaccountably stuffy about ‘pawing each other in public, dear — so boring’, was safely up in the cockpit with the pilot, teaching him, presumably, how to navigate.

But even Delight’s inspiration wasn’t helping much. I just sat looking down at the vast unnecessary stretches of desert below us, praying we would plunge to our doom. We didn’t, of course. A fleet of limousines — if three limousines make a fleet — was waiting for us at the airport and drove us down a single street, lined with improbable, mammoth-sized motels, which seemed to be all that Las Vegas added up to.

When we finally reached the Tamberlaine, which looked. at least ten times bigger than any edifice should, a huge plastic pyramid sat outside, holding up a sign which in vast neon letters, made the terrifying announcement :
COMING SATURDAY ANNY ROOD AND FAMILY
. We were driven past an interminable swimming-pool to a particularly splendid hacienda-type building which stood on the fringes of nothing — unless you call sand anything. This, apparently, had been set aside by Steve Adriano as our own private quarters. Dozens of maids and bellhops and assistant managers and the manager himself were hovering to receive us.

Steve Adriano was one of those overlords who believe in being powers strictly behind the scenes. On paper, he didn’t own anything in Las Vegas. For all I knew, on paper, he showed up as an under-privileged ex-G.I. who operated a single filling-station in Flagstaff, Arizona. But his unofficial effect was marked. The moment Mother inquired about ‘darling Steve' to the snooty manager, he blanched like an almond and the service we started getting would have terrified the Dalai Lama. There were flowers in every individual bedroom and so many in Mother’s that she could have set up in business as the Happy Gardener.

Gino put his finger on it. ‘Boy,’ he said, ‘think of the dough that’s gotta be lost at the crap tables to pay for us.’

I had hoped for at least a little period of peace and quiet, but I was completely out of my reckoning. The telephone rang unceasingly with all the frustrated Hollywood celebrities whose pulled strings hadn’t worked. ‘Anny, darling, we’d just die if we weren’t there rooting for you. One table, sweetie, just one teentsy table…’ On top of that were the Vegas reporters and, the final crushing burden, a contingent from
Life
Magazine which had arranged to cover a rehearsal.
Life
always believes in covering things before they happen on the theory perhaps that they never will.

Less than an hour after our arrival we were all in the Mona Lisa Room, running through the act in front of an array of empty, intimidating dinner-tables to ‘get the feel of the stage’, while infinitely bored
Life
characters took pictures.

Luckily, we had to get out of the Mona Lisa Room by six because the current Dinner Show was due to start at seven. Somehow, after Mother had caused havoc walking through the Gaming Rooms, we got back to our quarters and there was only the telephone and the service to cope with again.

I was lying in a tub trying to get some sort of feeling back into my numbed frame when Gino barged in, grinning.

‘Hey, kid, on the double. Dinner with Steve Adriano in ten minutes.’

‘Oh, no,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ he said.

And then there the limousines were again at the door. Since Steve Adriano owned the Tamberlaine, it had seemed to me that he would live there. But it wasn’t as simple as that. He owned or rather ‘didn’t own’ at least six other of the tourist traps and, apparently, shifted from one to the other of them as restlessly as a Berber. Only about three people in the world had the super-secret telephone number which could always reach him. Mother, of course, was one of them. That day he was living in a big new joint which looked as if a very angry Frank Lloyd Wright had designed it on an uncomfortable camel ride in the Middle East. It was called The Hopi.

As we were whisked through the foyer and into a private elevator, I had alarming visions of grilled doors and tightlipped henchmen with sawed-off machine guns. But, in fact, the door of the penthouse suite was opened to us by a very handsome, very tweedy, very blond man with a boyish smile who looked as if he should be duck-shooting with the Duponts in Delaware.

We were all drawn into a huge living-room which was indeed immensely grand but which was positively littered with signs of cozy, simple, one-hundred-per-cent American domesticity… The dreadful baby which Mother had christened was crawling all over the floor and a very young, very pretty, equally Dupont type girl scrambled out of a nest of toys and newspapers to be clutched to Mother’s bosom with little cries of ‘Mary!’

Apparently my conception of Italian gangsters was terribly out of date. I hadn’t even realized they could be blond. But there it was and it was soothing because, since I never trusted Mother, I had been terrified that she had wangled the engagement by doing some dangerous ‘siren’ bit with some trigger-happy psychopathic killer. But it wasn’t that way at all.

You never forgot Steve Adriano was Steve Adriano, of course. The look of panic on the faces of the waiters who scurried in to serve us champagne was enough to remind you of that. But otherwise it was all very homey and Mother played Grannie to the hilt. She and Steve even changed a diaper together and, after a fabulously de-luxe dinner, we all had to go and look at the hideous baby lying in its crib.

‘Darling god-daughter,’ cooed Mother.

‘Dear Anny!’ said Mary Adriano.

Steve beamed and looked tweedy and thrust a pipe into his mouth. ‘It’s fine having you here, Anny.’

Mother kissed them both. ‘But, darlings, wherever you two dear things are is always home to me. Now, everyone early to bed. We’ll have to get our teeth into things tomorrow.’

Steve Adriano took us to the door. ‘Remember, Anny anything you want — any time …’

Anything she wanted! I thought. Why did Mother have to make life hideous for us all, singing, dancing, yodeling, getting her teeth into things? Why didn’t she just relax and have dear Steve and Mary write her a check for a million dollars?

But there wasn’t any relaxing, of course. For the next two days we just went on and on and on rehearsing and Mother got younger and younger and younger and more and more and more talented and more and more and more firm about ‘toning’ Delight down, while the others were swept up into a ghastly ‘trouper’ mood. All night before the opening, Mother tormented us in the Mona Lisa Room. Tray took exception to a new ruff which was slightly larger than his rehearsal one and for one glorious moment, during his finale dance with Pam and Mother, I thought he was going to bite Mother, but he didn’t. It was almost four by the time Mother finally released us but then, at least, she had the decency to say we could sleep all the next day so that we could be ‘lovely and fresh’ for the Opening.

Next morning, I awoke with a jolt, thinking: This is It, chum. I glanced at my watch. It was one-thirty. I struggled into a bathrobe and went out into the living-room. No one was there. We had a kitchen, but Cleonie refused to cook because she felt herself to be exclusively a wardrobe mistress and Mother had been too busy even for a fondue, so we always used room service.

I was staggering to the telephone to order breakfast when it rang. I picked up the receiver, still moronic from sleep. A lovely, musical feminine voice, said,

‘Hello, are you theah?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m here.’

‘Nickie darling,’ said the voice. ‘This is Sylvia.’

I felt myself shuddering all over but, gamely, I said, ‘Sylvia — who?', hoping that some miracle would make it Sylvia Sydney or Sylvia Marlowe or Sylvia Fine or almost any other Sylvia in the world.