I thought about going into Limelight Liquors to say hello to the depressive Ukrainian chess pro who worked the cash register, but there was a line of revelers inside and so I crossed the street, heading toward my apartment. I had nearly passed the first rectangular blocks of shrubbery that flanked the staircases leading to each Peyton Hall four-plex when someone said, “Happy New Year, Sandy.”
The voice was suave and accented, and I looked up to see Jaz, the building manager, sitting on a chair next to the potted plant on his small landing.
“Candy.”
“Sandy, Mandy, Candy . . . what’s in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet.”
I nodded. “Well, Happy New Year to you, too . . . Spaz.”
The building manager held up a bottle of champagne. “Touché. And for that, you must share a quick glass of bubbly with me.” With his other hand, he crisscrossed and jabbed the air, unable to greet me, it seemed, without some imaginary swordplay. “Or perhaps you’d like to go a few rounds first?”
His pronunciation was extra crisp, as if he were trying very hard not to slur his words, and although I would have rather kept walking, I climbed the steps, feeling charitable because of the holiday.
“I’ll pass on the duel, but I’ll take the champagne.” I nodded toward a row of stacked plastic glasses next to his chair. “You’re expecting company?”
“On New Year’s Eve, one should be prepared,” he said, twisting the top glass off the stack and filling it with champagne. “Here you go.”
“So where’s Aislin?” I asked, taking a sip.
To my great surprise, he did not offer a casual, “In the loo,” or “Watching Guy Lombardo.” Instead, he set down his glass and, stretching his mouth as if trying to stifle a yawn, he slumped forward in his chair, buried his face in his hands, and began to cry.
As he sniffled and snortled, I stood frozen even as I wanted to flee.
After a long awkward moment, he lifted his head, and drying his tears with a drag of his fingers, he said, “She’s gone, you know.”
“What do you mean? I just saw her on Christmas.”
He nodded. “She told me on the telephone all about your little beachside picnic. She sounded so happy, but when I got back from Vancouver on Thursday, she was . . . gone.”
“Gone?” I was suddenly scared for Aislin. “Are you sure she’s not just taking a trip or something?”
Jaz swiped at his nose with the back of his hand. “She left me a note. Well, actually a Christmas card. Left it propped on the kitchen table, against the little cactus plant we got in Joshua Tree. It read”—he looked up like a child about to recite his lessons—“‘This will be a Merry Christmas for me as I’ve finally decided to give myself the gift of leaving you. Don’t bother looking for me because even if you find me, I’m never coming back.’”
His Technicolor blue eyes widened as if registering what he’d just reported.
“Where,” I asked, taking a step forward then rocking back, “where do you suppose she went?”
Jaz shook his head and exhaled a sigh that was close to a moan.
“Most of her family’s still in Ireland, but she’s got a sister in Boston. Maybe there.” He finished the remaining champagne in his glass and looked at me for a long moment. “Why are you standing like that?”
“Like what?”
“Crouched over. Like you’re about to run a race.”
“Maybe I am.”
Jaz’s smile was weary. “Don’t worry, the invitation to Plato’s has been revoked.”
“Please. Don’t make me gag.”
A question that had nagged at me popped out of my mouth before I could consider the wisdom in asking it. “Did you ever hit Aislin? Is that why she left?”
Color faded on Jaz’s face.
“Because the first time I ever met her, she had a big bruise on the side of her face. She tried to hide it behind the door.”
We stared at one another. I was breathing fast, as if I’d just sprinted up and down the stairs instead of merely spoken a few sentences.
Breaking the stare, Jaz looked at his glass.
“I never hit her,” he said, his voice low. “But I did throw a cream pitcher at her. After she threw a sugar bowl at me. I know that’s no excuse—I could throw a lot harder than she could—” His words were choked by a sob, and he leaned forward, as if he were trying to expel it. His plastic champagne glass fell to the cement with a little bounce. “God, I never meant to do that!”
His fingers made a cage over his face and he cried behind them. “I never, ever meant to do that!”
I stood there, to use an expression of my grandmother’s, like a dumb cluck. Several New Years seemed to pass before I laid my hand on his shuddering shoulder and patted it.
Finally he lifted his tear-streaked face, laughing a little by way of apology.
“My movie is supposed to start production in March. Did I tell you I’ll be playing Errol Flynn?”
“Only every time I drop off the rent.”
“Aislin was so excited when I got that part.”
Five minutes with the guy and my emotions vacillated from amusement, pity, disgust, and now pity again, but a softer kind.
“She said something nice about you at that picnic,” I said.
“She did?” He swiped a finger under his right eye. “What was that?”
“Well, we were sharing little Christmas memories, and she said that the two of you had spent your first Christmas together in Madrid.”
“Yes, yes, I was in a touring company of Guys and Dolls.” Jaz smiled at the memory, and I saw how truly handsome he was when he wasn’t trying so hard to make sure I noticed.
“She said you played Sky Masterson and that when you sang, ‘Luck Be a Lady Tonight,’ all the young señoritas swooned.”
“She said that?”
I nodded.
“That was nice of you to tell me that. Thank you.” His mouth bunched up and he stared at his hands for a moment. “And who knows, if she said that . . . maybe she will come back.”
“Maybe she will. Happy New Year, Jaz.”
The building manager picked his glass off the stoop and after refilling it held it up in a toast. “Happy New Year, Candy.”
THE SONG “YOU LIGHT UP MY LIFE” streamed from the radio of a passing convertible, and from the stereo of an apartment across the street Mick Jagger sang that Lord, he missed me, and as I walked to my apartment, I repeated my secret power mantra like a chorus. I considered how its message applied to the events of the day, the year about to close, and no doubt would apply to the year about to begin. Maybe that would be my resolution: to be a devoted yogi with a serious practice of brandishing my life saber.
Another resolution: I would ring in the New Year by baking a cake. When I got back to my apartment, I started humming as I got out the flour and eggs. A yellow cake with my famous fudge frosting.
29
IT HAD BEEN MY INTENTION to start out 1979 by greeting the dawn with an early-morning swim, but on the way to the pool I came across Madame Pepper taking out her garbage.
Startled, we both gasped, and after we caught our breaths she whispered, “What are you doing up so early?” just as I asked, “What are you doing?”
I gave my explanation and she held up a plastic garbage bag.
“I always empty the trash on January first. It’s good for the soul—and for the apartment.”
“But you didn’t feel a need,” I said, gesturing at her copper-colored beaded gown, “to take off your party dress from last night?”
“This I just put on,” said Madame Pepper, holding out her shawl like batwings to better expose her dress. “For the second part of ritual.”
“Which is?” I asked, following her to the garbage bins.
After she’d tossed in the knotted plastic bag, she brushed off her hands and smiled, like someone about to reveal a secret and wanting to enjoy it by herself for just a moment more.
“Join you for what?”
Impatience scuttled across her heavy features. “For second part of ritual.”
“Okay,” I said, intrigued. “I’ll just get some clothes on and I’ll meet—”
“—I am thinking it’s perfect the way you are.”
I was barefoot and wearing an old terry robe over my swimsuit, but the old woman’s expression taunted, I dare you, and never good at turning down dares, I said, “All right. Let’s go.”
We stole quietly through the grounds of Peyton Hall and to the sidewalk and didn’t speak until we were nearly at the La Brea intersection.
“Wow,” I said, looking down the expanse of Hollywood Boulevard. “There’s nobody here.”
“Precisely,” said Madame Pepper. “It is the first day of New Year and we have one of the most famous streets in the world all to ourselves.”
She took my arm. “Since 1942, Candy, every January first, I have walked down to Vine and back as the sun comes up. And always in fancy clothes, as the ritual demands.”
“And you do this because—”
“—because I am able! Because it reminds me, that worldwide symbol of mystery and allure and dreams—is right here!” She flung her free arm east. “And here it is that I make my resolution to accept mystery and allure and dreams for another year!”
“Why, you old Hollywood romantic,” I said, giving her a little nudge with my hip.
“When there’s nothing else to believe in, why not choose romance?”
This was not the blithe response I was expecting.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
The old woman’s fingers tightened around my bicep.
“Candy, how do you think I got here?”
“Here to Hollywood?” I asked, and when she nodded I said, “By plane? No, wait; they hadn’t been invented yet.”
“Ha, so funny. But, you are right, I did not take plane. A boat. In 1933. I was twenty-two years old.”
I did some quick calculations.
“You’re younger than my grandma.”
“You sound surprised.”
“I never thought I’d defend my grandma’s leisure suits or the dye jobs she gives herself . . . but they are a little more youthful than shawls and long skirts and head scarves.”
Madame Pepper snorted a laugh.
“You remind me so much of my sister, Sophie. She also was smart aleck.”
“Is she in America, too?”
“Sophie? Oh, my Sophie’s long gone. She died in the war. Not in your mother and father’s war. The one before it.”
I shivered in the cool morning air, wishing I were wearing more than a swimsuit and robe.
“I’m sorry.”
“Me, too,” said Madame Pepper. “Ah, Greta Garbo.”
We stopped for a moment, looking down at the star of the Swedish actress.
“My friend Polly said she had the prettiest shoulders. They were broad, like yours.”
“Tell me more,” I said, and covering the hand she had tucked in the crook of my elbow with my own, we walked slowly, the hem of Madame Pepper’s long dress dusting the smooth granite of the Walk of Fame.
We walked far enough in silence to convince me she didn’t want to honor my request, but then she began speaking, in a dreamy voice so soft that I had to lean in toward her.
“Friedrich Pfeffer was cinematographer, an artist! Most of his work is in silent pictures, but also he filmed A Star to Hold and Gentle Lies, which can be seen on the late show. But most importantly—to me—he was my husband.”
“Pfeffer,” I said, “so Pfeffer is—”
“—yes, I anglicized it. You have to make things easy for Americans.”
I smiled at the insult.
“We met in summer of 1931. He was older than I by a dozen years and already established in the European cinema. He was part of a German crew filming a movie in my hometown, Bucharest. I was exiting Dancescu’s Bakery with my marmalade rolls as he was entering for his tea biscuits, and it was either love at first sight, or lust; either way, it didn’t take long before we were sharing a bed.” She frowned at me. “This shocks you?”
“Why would it?”
“The young sometimes think that premarital sex is their discovery.”
I let my jaw drop. “Is that what you meant, that you were having sex? Because I thought you were just sharing a bed, you know, for sleep!”
The fortune-teller snorted.
“Just like Sophie.”
Her quick laugh was replaced by the long sad whisper of a sigh.
“A year after we marry an offer from Hollywood arrived and of course Friedrich takes it. I would have loved Sophie to come with us, but she now had married also, to Josef, a doctor.”
She turned again toward me and to a casual observer it might look as if the old woman were looking directly at me, but the storytelling veil had dropped over her eyes, and I knew that in her gaze she wasn’t seeing me but the people of whom she spoke.
“With Friedrich’s help, I got work in costume department—it’s true, in Hollywood, it often is who you know. That is where I first met my friend Polly, although she left MGM for Paramount and Edith Head. I loved the work, loved not just the artistry but being the ear to so many stories. You fit someone, you dress them, you hear their stories!
“My letters to Sophie were like confections, filled with descriptions of this strange world I found myself in, where oranges, grapefruits, and lemons hung like jewels from backyard trees, and where air was perfumed with this jewelry fruit, and also flowers which I had never seen. And how she loved for me to tell her the gossip! I would write of a dinner party where the person across the table, asking to ‘Please pass the butter’ might be Carole Lombard or William Powell. ‘Tell me more!’ she would write, and for two years my letters were filled with this glamorous piffle. Then Friedrich died.”
I drew in a quick breath of surprise.
“Of stupid accident on the set! They were shooting in sound stage and he falls off the crane! The crane he had been on hundreds of times before!”
“I’m so sorry.”
Madame Pepper’s nod was slow. “There was much to be sorry about at that time. I was of course devastated and angry, too—how could he fall off crane and make me a widow at twenty-four?—but I am thinking at least this is worst my life will know.
“Time passes; that is its cure and curse. Sophie’s letters, usually so bright and filled with news of their baby Anica, or Josef’s patients—once a butcher paid his bill with spoiled sausage making Josef joke, ‘Was my care that bad?’—grew darker with news of Hitler, and I beg them to come to America. Begged.”
Madame Pepper’s lush eyebrows lowered as she squinted her eyes, as if the memory was a bad headache.
“Josef’s family on his mother’s side was Polish, and he and Sophie and little Anica were visiting these relatives in September of ’39.” We walked at least ten steps before she said, “In Wielun, Poland.
“It was a surprise bombing on the city. By the Germans. The beginnings of the war, and my sister and her family perished in it.”
“Spare change?” asked a ragged woman, stepping out from behind a ticket kiosk by Grauman’s.
Madame Pepper shook her head, and I stated the obvious, “We didn’t bring our purses.”
“The Supreme Court justices are all aliens,” said the panhandler. “Except for Thurgood Marshall. He’s from Baltimore.”
“I would have gladly paid for that information,” I said and two seconds later I apologized. “When things get too heavy, my reflex is . . . never mind. Please. Go on.”
“Yes. That is all I could do: go on.” She stared ahead, nodding her head. “All during the war, I was frantic to get my mother, my father, my brother Gavril here, but they wouldn’t leave—even in wartime! Bucharest was bombed and they survived, but for my parents it was a survival that finally wore them out. Both died several years later, not able
to believe what had become of their world.”
We stepped on one, two, a dozen stars, and when she didn’t speak again, I said, “I’m so sorry. So sorry for what you had to go through.”
“Yes,” said Madame Pepper. “But I am not alone in having sadness. You, too, know it.”
“I do. We’re in the same sad club.”
“The Club of Sorrows.”
“The club that no one wants to be a member of.”
“The club where people get turned away for not having enough pain.”
“That’s right,” I said. “We’re exclusive. You’ve got to know death and devastation to join our club.”
Our laughter was of the resigned, Whaddya gonna do? variety.
“Look here,” said Madame Pepper, stopping to examine a star. “Vivien Leigh. If I could have a different face—hers I would have. Or Hedy Lamarr’s—who could have been her sister.”
AS WE BEGAN WALKING AGAIN, Madame Pepper took my hand, and we swung them, like kids.
“So tell me more about your ritual,” I said. “What made you want to ring in the New Year by walking the Boulevard? By walking the Boulevard in an evening gown?”
“It is the end of 1941,” she said after a moment. “I had been dropped off from a party in Beverly Hills—the fanciest, most festive New Year’s Eve party I had ever known. Pearl Harbor had been struck only weeks before and now the war, already such a terrible reality for me with the death of Sophie and her family, was real for Americans. But that party! Everyone—the stars, the producers, the directors, all of Hollywood royalty—danced and ate and drank, and at midnight we clung to each other singing ‘Auld Lang Syne,’ and, Candy, there were no dry eyes.
“No one, it seemed, wanted that party to end, but finally I was chauffeured home—I had just moved into Peyton Hall—by a director who’d worked with my husband Friedrich. It was nearly dawn when I climbed out of that car, a little betrunken from the flow of champagne, but instead of going to my apartment, I decided to take walk down Hollywood Boulevard. Being tipsy did not save me from how I felt—so sad and hopeless, wondering, Who knows? Maybe the bombs come here and this street will be no more. Maybe next year, I, like my husband, like my sister, my niece, my brother-in-law will be no more. So, Candy, the first time I walk it; well, it was more a stagger, and I was not so much the romantic.”
Best to Laugh: A Novel Page 18
