Marilyn's Daughter

by John Rechy

  . . . so much like the one Enid had left her—or it had been taken during the same crisis. Normalyn was almost sure.

  “Do you know who she is, Miss Morgan?” David Lange asked.

  “Marilyn Monroe,” Normalyn answered. Her eyes sought again the captured woman of the third photograph.

  “Of course. Everyone recognizes her.” David Lange dismissed his own question. “There’s a President of the United States by that name, but today ‘Monroe’ evokes only her. She was a great actress, who gave one single performance—as Marilyn Monroe. Toward the last of her life, she seemed to survive only for the camera, existing only in photographs,” he said. “That is the source of my interest, Miss Morgan,” he explained, “the reality of artifice.” He swiveled about on the leather chair to face the reproductions and the painting. Then, turning, he stared at Normalyn.

  When Normalyn looked now at the redefined arrangement of photographs about the violent painting, she saw a collage of shapes and forms finding order. Suddenly they were not incongruous in this room.

  David Lange’s expression had changed, as if he had wakened from a dream. “Do you smoke, Miss Morgan?”

  Even his subdued voice startled her in this hushed room. “No. Thank you.” He had called her ‘Normalyn’ only once since she had arrived, when she stood at the door, as if then he had spoken the name aloud to himself.

  “I’m glad. I don’t either,” he said. “The air is contaminated enough, isn’t it?” He smiled, but when he picked a grain of dust off his desk, he frowned.

  Normalyn noticed a pack of cigarettes on a small table.

  “One can’t resist without temptation, Miss Morgan,” he said.

  It was as if he spoke softly so as not to disturb the order of this room. Yet the voice was emphatic. Normalyn would—

  “Monroe was a whore who lucked out and made it to the top, the very top.”

  He said those startling words in the same modulated voice.

  Normalyn stood up, walked to the open door, ready to leave angrily. She would be bewildered only later. Now she responded automatically only to the lash of the words.

  The caring voice drew her back, gentle and bruised now, as if it had hurt him to speak those words: “Please wait, Miss Morgan. I’m sorry.” He stood up while she remained standing at the door for confused moments. “I had to be deliberately cruel to elicit your reaction, your loyalty. Forgive me for that. I had to make sure you really care for her, feel for her.”

  He seemed to be asserting his own loyalty, too, demanding that she match it—and she had. His eyes were even more surprising in their depth and strength when he removed his glasses, to perceive her more clearly—or to emphasize the honesty of his explanation. He remained standing until she responded, bewildered and fascinated, to his invitation to please sit again while he clarified.

  “The others who call in response to the stories about her— the few I’ve seen here—are all so eager to agree to anything, even that,” he said with disgust. “No matter how cruel, or how untrue, ready to pretend anything merely to be connected to her. That woman running out when you arrived was only one. On the telephone, she sounded . . . different. That sad old woman, even now trying to look like her, get close to her; she claimed to be involved in Monroe’s last turbulent days. She even cried, poor, sad creature, when she knew I disbelieved her—and of course I would.”

  That last story in the newspaper had indicated the response he was telling her about, but not his disgust at the pretense. Normalyn felt he was warning her and testing her. She did not know the object of his test. Well, she would test him back! “Why do you write those lies about her?” She remembered from Enid’s clipping—and his presence had reminded her—that he was an honored man, had been a respected, prized journalist.

  “That cheap newspaper is all I have left,” he said calmly. “And this office, from more respected times. Is that why you’ve come here, Normalyn, to judge me?” he asked lightly.

  Again he had used her first name.

  “But I didn’t write lies,” he said quickly. “What I wrote about the woman in the sanitarium is true. What she says are lies. She’s just a poor hallucinating woman craving importance.”

  Like Enid! Normalyn wanted to think that. But could she, after what she had discovered at the Temple of Divine Love?

  David Lange breathed the name as if by itself it summoned cautioning mystery: “Enid Morgan.”

  Normalyn controlled a sense of disorientation when she heard him speak Enid’s name.

  “You left it when you called,” he said. “She was—”

  “—my mother!” Normalyn emphasized.

  “And your father is—”

  “Stan! Stanley Smith!” She asserted the name Mayor Hughes had donated to her identity. Immediately she regretted having answered at all. She knew that both times she had done so to thwart his possible conclusions because she was not prepared to hear the words he might speak.

  “And now Enid is dead, and that’s why you’re here,” he said.

  She had implied that in her message to him on the telephone, she reminded herself, to dispel a feeling—unjustified by what had occurred—that he knew more about her, or about Enid, than she had told him. She had to balance this encounter, this uninvited interrogation. And she knew how, because she had rehearsed with Miss Bertha! She gained courage from that memory. “Did you know her?” she asked him, her eyes as steady on his as his were on hers.

  His hands touched the crystal perfection of the sphere on his desk. He said in a distant voice, “I met her only once, the same night she met Robert Kennedy.” He readjusted the pad on his desk, as if unwelcome change perceived only by him had rendered the wooden surface disturbingly askew.

  He had answered about Marilyn Monroe; she had asked about Enid. A deliberate evasion? Normalyn had to startle him with unexpected words, the way he had startled her throughout these minutes. “There is no mystery about her death, only her life,” she said words he had spoken years ago about the movie star.

  “It’s still true,” he merely said, with a smile. “I follow every clue to that mystery, Miss Morgan, of the last days of her life.” His elbows on his desk, his unflinching eyes continued to study Normalyn, as if he were outlining her features. “Have you come here to find the truth, too, Normalyn?”

  To Los Angeles? This office? To him? She would not answer, not anything! Still she had to remain—just longer—to find out what he really knew, what he was pursuing and why. His soft, firm voice startled her.

  “Just assume, please, that I know.”

  In the silence, Normalyn heard her own breathing; she heard even the sigh of a breeze—but it stirred nothing in this frozen room.

  “Assume that I know people who have been silent for too long, eager to speak, afraid to speak—who will speak only at the exact time, to the exact person. Assume that . . . Normalyn . . . and then I can say this.” He leaned toward her, asserting concern: “Be careful. Don’t move too openly. Exposure could rob you of what you long for most.”

  Her life! He knew!

  “For now,” his soft voice cautioned, “stay on the fringes.”

  On the fringes of her own life! That’s where she was existing! He understood that, too. Might he guide her out of the maze exposed by Enid’s letter? . . .

  Suddenly Normalyn had to assault this man’s strangely commanding words. “I don’t trust you,” she said quickly.

  David Lange did not react in surprise. “I couldn’t expect you to, immediately.” He smiled. “Perhaps I don’t trust you.” He placed his hands firmly on his desk. “So we’ve met. Now we may proceed in stages to trust each other, mustn’t we?”

  Normalyn would not answer. Looking away from him, she noticed that the light had not altered throughout this encounter.

  “May we agree only on this, Miss Morgan? Of course you don’t have to,” David Lange said. “May we agree that we are both searching the same truth?”

  Normalyn rose, to leave�
��to leave and never return.

  David Lange stood quickly. He said, “When you’re ready for the next step, we’ll proceed.”

  Ten

  When she stepped into the street, all that had occurred in the controlled twilight of David Lange’s office seemed to have happened in a distant world that was his, not hers. Normalyn remembered a similar feeling when she had left Miss Bertha’s house in Long Beach. Was it possible that this man and that kind old woman shared the same twilight? With Miss Bertha she had played a clever game. What remained out of the encounter with David Lange was that his pursuit of the movie star’s life contained the seriousness of accumulated years. Why?

  As she turned away from the small street and into the bright “strip” of Sunset Boulevard, Normalyn was besieged by questions. It had seemed in moments that he needed her. Why? What had he meant when he warned her that “exposure” would rob her of what she longed for most? She had gratefully assumed then that he knew she wanted her life, her own life; his words echoed now with other implications. And why—?

  None of that mattered now, Normalyn knew when she boarded the bus, because she had accomplished all she had intended—to assuage her curiosity about him. It had been assuaged. He was a cunning fraud, attempting to get information from her for another of his made-up stories. She would never see David Lange again—ever—nor his strange dark eyes.

  But they haunted her.

  2

  Troja was mending the ripped yellow dress. It lay like a frothy cloud on her lap. In what Normalyn had come to think of as “his corner,” Kirk sat watching the glassy screen of his television. They seemed hardly to notice her when she walked in. “Where you been?” Troja finally asked absently when Normalyn stood right before her.

  “Interview, remember?”

  “Oh, yeah, that secretary job,” Troja dismissed.

  Earlier, that conclusion had annoyed Normalyn. Now it enraged her. “What the hell makes you think the only job I would want is a secretary’s? I could be going out on auditions like you!” Immediately she knew Troja had grasped an unintended meaning, a reference to her dangerous “freelancin’.”

  “What you say—?” The flecks in Troja’s eyes ignited.

  Normalyn said, “I’m, living on the fringes, too, remember?” She had wanted only to feel proud of her survival, link it with theirs, but she had only repeated David Lange’s exhortation to her earlier. “We’re the wounded who walk straight, remember?” Now she wanted to remind Troja that she had once said that about them, but instantly she knew Troja had said it about Kirk, in secret.

  “Where’d you hear that?” Kirk said moodily.

  Normalyn could not make up a quick answer.

  Troja knew Kirk had detected her reference to him. She shoved her anger at Normalyn: “You don’t live on no damn fringes. What wounds you got? You just a rich visitor!”

  Thrust away even from exile! Normalyn went into her bedroom. From under her bed, she pulled out one of her suitcases, still partly packed for lack of room. She wrapped the chipped angel in the tissue she had brought with her from Texas. She placed it in the suitcase, protected it further with clothes.

  Then Troja walked in, closed the door. She said, “Don’t know what to do. Found this today, hidden under his bed. That’s why I’m panicked, hon, crazy with worry.” From the folds of her skirt, she brought out a hypodermic needle. “He’s shootin’ up. But it just started,” she added hope, “just started.”

  When Troja left, Normalyn “unpacked” the chipped angel and pushed back the suitcase under her bed.

  3

  Now she wasn’t even drifting. Drifting assumed movement even if it was slow. She paid Troja rent, by the day, sometimes committing herself to two days. Troja went out, returned tired, edgy. Deciding it was possible to read and live, Normalyn bought The Turn of the Screw and read it in her room in one sitting. She was certain the governess imagined the intrigue of ghosts. When she read it again, she became certain that ghosts were pursuing the woman.

  She did not even glance at the telephone booth when she passed it on one of her excursions to sit in the park with the bust of Rudolph Valentino. She did not even check to see whether she had the telephone number with her—that’s how completely she had succeeded in banishing David Lange from her life. Yes, she could even allow herself to wonder what he would have suggested as “the next step.” Soon she would stop even conjecturing.

  Kirk continued to withdraw into his corner. He would touch his muscles now and then, as if to assert that they, and he, were still alive, still growing. There had been no further reference to his “shooting up.” Normalyn saw him only breathing the cocaine, then checking his finger for any stain of blood. Normalyn had become used to his sudden nosebleeds. Troja would give him the Decadron that controlled them, then nestle next to him, looking like a lost child begging for protection.

  They all sat on the floor watching a rented movie on Kirk’s VCR: The Big Sleep. Her hands cupped at the sides of her eyes to enclose herself in the isolation she felt, Normalyn sat on a ratty pillow. Either her mind was not on the film, or it made absolutely no sense. She decided: It didn’t make sense.

  She would have gone for a walk, but it was night and the streets turned sinister in the dark, many even in the daytime. She was about to go into her room to read when she became aware that for perhaps minutes a car had been idling outside. She walked to the door. It was a new car and it was paused before their house. Just waiting for someone. . . . But the car remained there, the motor gunned faster as if in signal.

  Like the car that had flooded her house in lights that night with Ted Gonzales in Gibson!

  Normalyn took a few steps toward the car, to see the driver. A man. Did he look at her or only in her direction? The man at the Ambassador Hotel! No, she couldn’t see him that well. But he was—

  Behind her, at the open door, Troja called urgently, “You come on inside, hon!” She, too, had reacted in fear to the idling car, which now made a U-turn, paused across the street again, its engine growling, and then drove away.

  Stalking her? Stalking Troja? Normalyn walked back into the house. Troja was trembling.

  4

  Normalyn did go for a walk the next day. She plucked out of the morning a new clarity. The car that had frightened both her and Troja had been just a car, period. She refused to give any deeper meaning to the fact that Troja was combing out the blonde wig today; she dressed it often, cherishing its touch.

  Normalyn decided to go to an area she had seen once, only through the bus window, a beautiful neighborhood called Hancock Park.

  She walked along blocks of magnificent homes, which were stately, proud. In places, trees formed green leafy corridors sequined by sunlight. Gardeners smiled at her as she strolled, the only pedestrian on these rich streets, with her purse firmly strapped diagonally over her shoulder. She actually felt . . . pretty.

  Now she might go to Melrose Avenue, to one of several trendy shops she had glimpsed. She might buy a new blouse! She walked to a bus stop. When the bus approached, she saw that it had inherited on its side a poster of Marilyn Monroe, a new advertisement for the famous wax museum. She looked at the glorious face so long that the bus driver called out impatiently: “Are you coming in or not? Make up your mind!”

  5

  Normalyn called David Lange and agreed to meet him again at his office. There were some questions she wanted to ask, she told him. But she was going there only to find out what he would propose as “the next step”—so that she could dismiss it. When she was ready to leave the house, she told Troja and Kirk she had “a call-back” about her job interview, and she ran out.

  The moment she entered David Lange’s office, it was as if there had been no interruption between their first meeting and this one. The light was exactly the same, steadied twilight. Only his suit was different, but as carefully tailored. He sat behind his antique desk and thanked Normalyn—“so much”— for being there. He spoke in the soft voice she remember
ed. He focused the probing, deeply caring dark eyes on her.

  She made her words sound as casual as she had rehearsed them in the cab: “I have two questions.” If only his eyes didn’t look at her with so much sadness, concern!

  “Please ask them.”

  What do you want from me! She had not had to rehearse that question, but she did not ask it. “What do you think I want more than anything else?” His assumption that he knew had festered from that earlier time.

  “Your life, of course.”

  He did know!

  “And your next question, Miss Morgan?”

  “There was only one.” He had disarmed her.

  He leaned forward, reasserting allegiance. “Perhaps since I’ve answered your questions—your question—we may explore the possibility of taking the next step I suggested.”

  “Before I decide if I want to take it”—Normalyn knew she had to resist—“I’ll have to know, from you, where we’re moving.”

  “Then I’ll tell you more,” he said easily. “Yes, we’ll move step by step until we trust each other.” He smiled, to blunt the words he had spoken. “Please listen to me carefully because this may not be entirely clear to you now—perhaps it is; I promise it will become so . . . Normalyn.” He paused.

  She had begun to listen for when he called her “Normalyn,” and he did so with a slight inflection of his voice . . . as if it were a signal to her. Of importance? Of doubt?

  “When something elaborate is planned with exact precision”—he pronounced each word slowly—“and one single aspect goes wrong, the whole shatters into fragments. The fragments scatter. Then if it is to be understood, the whole has to be pieced together.”

  Normalyn longed to ask for clarity, but he had indicated he would say only so much. Moreover, she knew certain questions might commit her to a knowledge she did not want to expose, questions that might also give him information.

  “There’s only one person left who can put the parts together.” David Lange continued the precise words. “And only one who can find out.”