Tell-All (9 page)

Placing the white cap on the crown of my head, she says,
“Voilà!
” She says, “It’s a perfect fit.” Pressing the lacy cap snug, Miss Kathie says, “That’s Italian for
prego.”

On my scalp, a sting, the faint prick of hairpins feel sharp and biting as a crown of thorns. Then a slow fade to black as, from offscreen, we hear the front doorbell ring.

If you’ll permit me to break character and indulge in another aside, I’d like to comment on the nature of equilibrium. Of balance, if you’d prefer. Modern medical science recognizes that human beings appear to be subject to predetermined, balanced ratios of height and weight, masculinity and femininity, and to tinker with those formulas brings disaster. For example, when
RKO Radio
and
Monogram
and
Republic Pictures
began prescribing injections of male hormones in order to coarsen some of their more effete male contract players, the inadvertent result was to give those he-men breasts larger than those of
Claudette Colbert
and
Nancy Kelly
. It would seem the human body, when given additional testosterone, increases its own production of estrogen, always seeking to return to its original balance of male and female hormones.

Likewise, the actress who starves herself to far, far below her natural body weight will soon balloon to far above it.

Based on decades of observation, I propose that sudden high levels of external praise always trigger an equal amount of inner self-loathing. Most moviegoers are familiar with the theatrically unbalanced mental health of a
Frances Farmer
, the libidinal excesses of a
Charles Chaplin
or an
Errol Flynn
, and the chemical indulgences of a
Judy Garland
. Such performances are always so ridiculously broad, played to the topmost balcony. My supposition is that, in each case, the celebrity in question was simply making adjustments—instinctually seeking a natural equilibrium—to counterbalance enormous positive public attention.

My vocation is not that of a nurse or jailer, nanny or au pair, but during her periods of highest public acclaim, my duties have always included protecting Miss Kathie from herself. Oh, the overdoses I’ve foiled … the bogus land investment schemes I’ve stopped her from financing … the highly inappropriate men I’ve turned away from her door … all because the moment the world declares a person to be immortal, at that moment the person will strive to prove the world wrong. In the face of glowing press releases and reviews the most heralded women starve themselves or cut themselves or poison themselves. Or they find a man who’s happy to do that for them.

For this next scene we open with a beat of complete darkness. A black screen. For the audio bridge, once more we hear the ring of the doorbell. As the lights come up, we see the inside of the front door, and from within the foyer, we see the shadow of a figure fall on the window beside the door,
the shape of someone standing on the stoop. In the bright crack of sunlight under the door we see the twin shadows of two feet shifting. The bell rings again, and I enter the shot, wearing the black dress, the maid’s bib-front apron and lacy white cap. The bell rings a third time, and I open the door.

The foyer stinks of paint. The entire house stinks of paint.

A figure stands in the open doorway, backlit and overexposed in the glare of daylight. Shot from a low angle, the silhouette of this looming, luminous visitor suggests an angel with wings folded along its sides and a halo flaring around the top of its head. In the next beat, the figure steps forward into the key light. Framed in the open doorway stands a woman wearing a white dress, a short white cape wrapped around her shoulders, white orthopedic shoes. Balanced on her head sits a starched white cap printed with a large red cross. In her arms, the woman cradles an infant swaddled in a white blanket.

This beaming woman in white, holding a pink baby, appears the mirror opposite of me: a woman dressed in black holding a bronze trophy wrapped in a soiled dust rag. A beat of ironic parallelism.

A few steps down the porch stands a second woman, a nun shrouded in a black habit and wimple, her arms cradling a babe as blond as a miniature
Ingrid Bergman
. Its skin as clear as a tiny
Dorothy McGuire
. What
Walter Winchell
calls a “little bundle of goy.”

On the sidewalk stands a third woman, wearing a tweed suit, her gloved fingers gripping the handle of a perambulator. Sleeping inside the pram, two more infants.

The nurse asks, “Is
Katherine Kenton
at home?”

Behind her, the nun says, “I’m from St. Elizabeth’s.”

From the sidewalk, the woman wearing tweed says, “I’m from the placement agency.”

At the curb, a second uniformed nurse steps out of a taxicab carrying a baby. From the corner, another nurse approaches with a baby in her arms. In deep focus, we see a second nun advancing on the town house, bearing yet another pink bundle.

From offscreen we hear the voice of Miss Kathie say, “You’ve arrived.…” And in the reverse angle we see her descending the stairs from the second floor, a housepainter’s brush in one hand, dripping long, slow drops of pink paint from the bristles. Miss Kathie’s rolled back the cuffs of her shirt, a man’s white dress shirt, the breast pocket embroidered with
O.D.
, the monogram for her fourth “was-band,”
Oliver “Red” Drake, Esq.
, all of the shirt spotted with pink paint. A bandanna tied to cover her hair, and pink paint smudged on the peak of one movie-star cheekbone.

The town house stinks of lacquer, choking and acrid as a gigantic manicure compared to the smell of talcum powder and sunlight on the doorstep.

Miss Kathie’s feet descend the last steps, trailed by drops of pink. Her blue denim dungarees, rolled halfway up to her knees, reveal white bobby socks sagging into scuffed penny loafers. She faces the nurse, her violet eyes twitching between the gurgling, pink orphan and the paintbrush in her own hand. “Here,” she says, “would you mind …?” And my Miss Kathie thrusts the brush, slopping with pink paint, into the nurse’s face.

The two women lean together, close, as if they were kissing each other’s cheeks, trading the swaddled bundle for the brush. The white uniform of the nurse, spotted with
pink from touching Miss Kathie. The nurse left holding the gummy pink brush.

Her arms folded to hold the foundling, Miss Kathie steps back and turns to face the full-length mirror in the foyer. Her reflection that of
Susan Hayward
or
Jennifer Jones
in
Saint Joan
or
The Song of Bernadette
, a beaming
Madonna
and child as painted by
Caravaggio
or
Rubens
. With one hand, my Miss Kathie reaches to the nape of her own neck, looping a finger through the knot of the bandanna and pulling it free from her head. As the bandanna falls to the foyer floor, Miss Kathie shakes her hair, twisting her head from side to side until her auburn hair spreads, soft and wide as a veil, framing her shoulders, the white shirt stretched over her breasts, framing the tiny newborn.

“Such a pièce de résistance,” Miss Kathie says, rubbing noses with the little orphan. She says, “That’s the Italian word for …
gemütlichkeit.”

Miss Kathie’s violet eyes spread, wide-open, bug-eyed as
Ruby Keeler
playing a virgin opposite
Dick Powell
under the direction of
Busby Berkeley
. Her long movie-star hands, her cheeks marred only by the pastel stigmata of pink paint. Her eyes clutching at the image in the foyer mirror, Miss Kathie turns three-quarters to the left, then the right, each time closing her eyelids halfway and nodding her head in a bow. She bows once more, facing the mirror full-on, her smile stretching her face free of wrinkles, her eyes glowing with tears. This, the exact same performance Miss Kathie gave last month when she accepted the lifetime tribute award from the
Denver Independent Film Circle
. These identical gestures and expressions.

A beat later, she unloads the infant, returning the bundle
to the nurse, Miss Kathie shaking her head, wrinkling her movie-star nose and saying, “Let me think about it.…”

As the nun mounts the porch steps, Miss Kathie thrusts two fingers into her own dungarees pocket and fishes out a card of white paper.… She holds the sample shade of
Honeyed Sunset
to the cherub’s pink cheek, studying the card and the infant together. Shaking her head with a flat smile, she says, “Clashes.” Sighing, Miss Kathie says, “We’ve already painted the trim. Three coats.” She shrugs her movie-star shoulders and tells the nun, “You understand.…”

The next newborn, Miss Kathie leans close to its drowsing face and sniffs. Using an atomizer, she spritzes the tender lips and skin with
L’air du Temps
and the tiny innocent begins to squall. Recoiling, Miss Kathie shakes her head, No.

Another gurgling newborn, Miss Kathie leans too close and the dangling hot ash drops off the tip of her cigarette, resulting in a flurry of tiny screams and flailing. The smell of urine and scorched cotton. As if a pressing iron had been left too long on a pillowcase soaked in ammonia.

Another foundling arrives barely a shade too pale for the new nursery drapes. Holding a fabric swatch beside the squirming bundle, Miss Kathie says, “It’s almost
Perfect Persimmon
but not quite
Cherry Bomb
. …”

The doorbell rings all afternoon. All the day exhausted with “offspring shopping,” as
Hedda Hopper
calls it.
“Bébé
browsing,” in the semantics of
Louella Parsons
. A steady parade of secondhand urchins and unwanted
kinder
. A constant stream of arriving baby nurses, nuns and adoption agents, each one blushing and pop-eyed upon shaking the pink, paint-sticky hand of Miss Kathie. Each one babbling:
Tweet, cluck, hoot …
Raymond Massey
. A quick-cut montage.

Bray, bark, buzz
…
James Mason
.

Another nurse retreats, escaping down the street when Miss Kathie asks how difficult it might be to dye the hair and diet some pounds off of a particularly rotund cherub.

Another social worker flags a taxicab after Miss Kathie smears a tiny foundling with
Max Factor
base pigment, ladies’ foundation number six.

Pursing her lips, she hovers over the face of one wee infant, saying,
“Wunderbar
…” Exhaling cigarette smoke to add, “That’s the Latin equivalent for
que bueno.”

Miss Kathie brandishes each child in the foyer mirror, hefting it and cuddling its pinched little face, studying the effect as if each orphan were a new purse or a stage prop.

Meow, squawk, squeak
…
Janis Paige
.

Another tiny urchin, she leaves smudged with lipstick.

Another, Miss Kathie leans too close, too quickly, splashing a newborn with the icy-cold
Boodles
gin of her martini.

Another, she frowns down upon while her long, glossy fingernails pick at a mole or flaw on its smooth, pink forehead. “As the Spanish would say …” she says,
“qué será será.”

This
“kinder
kattle kall,” as
Cholly Knickerbocker
would call it, continues all afternoon. This audition. Prams and strollers form a line which runs halfway to the corner. This buffet of abandoned babies, the products of unplanned pregnancies, the progeny of heartbreak—these pink and chubby souvenirs of rape, promiscuity, incest. Impulse. Bottle-fed leftovers of divorce, spousal abuse and fatal disease. Even as the paintbrush, the pink bristles grow stiff in my hand, the babies arrive as proof of poor choices. The sleeping or giggling flotsam and jetsam, a residue of what seemed at one time to be true love.

Each innocent, Miss Kathie holds, modeling it for the
foyer mirror. Doing take after take of this same scene. Giving her right profile, her left. Smiling full-face, then fluttering her eyelashes, ducking her movie-star chin, emoting in reaction shots, telling the mirror, “Yes, she
is
lovely. I’d like you to meet my daughter: Katherine Jr.”

Telling the mirror, “I’d like to introduce my son,
Webster Carlton Westward the Fourth.”
She repeats this same line of dialogue with each child before handing it back to the nurse, the nun, the waiting social worker. Comparing paint chips and fabric samples. Picking over each child for scars or defects. And for every infant Miss Kathie sends away, two more arrive to stand in line for a test.

Into the late afternoon, she’s reciting:
Bark, cluck, bray
…
Katherine Kenton, Jr
.

Oink, quack, moo
…
Webster Carlton Westward IV
.

She performs take after take, hours of that same screen test, until the streetlights flicker and blink, flare and shine bright. From the avenue, the sound of traffic fades. Across the street, in the windows of town houses, the curtains slide closed. Eventually Miss Kathie’s front steps descend to the sidewalk, empty of orphans.

In the foyer, I stoop to retrieve the bandanna dropped on the floor. The fallen drops of pink paint, smeared and dry, form a fading pink path, a stream of pink spots tracked down the steps, down the street. A trail of the rejected.

A taxicab pulls to a stop at the curb. The driver opens his door, steps out and unlocks the trunk. He removes two suitcases and places them on the sidewalk, then opens the back door of the cab. A foot emerges, a man’s shoe, the cuff of a trouser leg. A man’s hand grips the door of the cab, a signet ring glinting gold around the little finger. A head of hair
emerges from the backseat of the cab, eyes bright brown as root beer. A smile flashes, bright as July Fourth fireworks.