by John Rechy
“It’s none of your goddamn business,” the movie star shot back.
“And so what if she’s pregnant?” Enid said.
Then Enid knew that, but not what Mildred sought now to discover: “By him! By a Kennedy!”
“Is it him?” Enid shouted at the movie star.
Exact aim! Her goals accomplished! Mildred left careful words: “Only I can save you from this scandal now, Monroe. I will give you”—she consulted her diamond watch—“exactly twelve hours to decide whether you want to hear my conditions for your salvation!”
“You vile, evil—” Mark Poe tossed more vulgarities at her as Mildred walked back to her waiting limousine. She heard footsteps behind her. Enid. She would be an ally more powerful than any other. Mildred faced her, aware, even then, of Enid’s unique beauty, which roused memories of— . . .
“Is it true?” Enid asked softly.
“Yes, the President and his brother have treated her like a—”
At the same time that Mildred said, “—whore,” Enid said, “— an unwanted orphan, a weak orphan.”
* * *
“And Enid became my ally,” Mildred Meadows told Normalyn in the darkening mansion. “She came here, you know. She sat in that exact chair you’re sitting in, my dear. She chose Zanuck’s chair, like you. And she asked for iced tea, like you.”
Normalyn felt locked in a past littered with questions. How far could she believe this woman? Certainly she would not accept that Enid had become her ally. She was glad to learn that Enid had chosen the same chair she now sat in—she touched it, tenderly—and that both had requested iced tea. Or was this cunning woman still probing at what she had evoked earlier, the odd possibility that David Lange had “coached” her in certain matters. There were times during Mildred’s narrative when it had seemed to Normalyn that the old woman was compelled to tell everything.
As if to make sure that her version is heard, dearheart, in case you might hear another. Miss Bertha had nodded awake.
Mildred Meadows had extended her moments of suspense long enough. She continued: “Enid agreed, the very day after our encounter, when she came to me, that she would persuade Monroe, had already begun to, of the absolute correctness of my guidance. Enid agreed with me that the child must not be born. That was the only way to separate Monroe from the scandal. She would abort the child.”
That had been this evil woman’s demand. For such enormous revenge there had to be more reasons than she was allowing.
Listen, dearheart, it’s difficult, but just listen for now, listen carefully, Miss Bertha counseled, wide awake again.
In the withering light, Mildred Meadows looked like a delicately decorated moth, faintly powdery, as if she might turn into dust; but her voice was firm: “Enid told me when and where the matter would occur. Of course, I was there to verify it—” Only for a moment did the voice fade. “And I kept my word.” The voice was again in full control. “Just as I agreed to, I reported in my column that Marilyn Monroe had, again, ‘miscarried’ after a ‘sweet attempted reconciliation’ with the ‘most loving of her husbands.’” She drank soberly from the goblet. “It was my last column.”
Within a sense of relief and release from Enid’s letter, Normalyn felt sorrow for the sad movie star who had been deprived of what she had wanted most: a child, a daughter—
“But did she really abort?” Suddenly Mildred Meadows made a clutching gesture with one hand, as if resisting her own fading within the diminishing light of the day.
Normalyn winced at the startling words that yanked away the reality she had been eager to accept from this monstrous woman.
The old woman’s voice was as cool, as casual, as if she were inquiring about a minor event: “Did Monroe really lose the child . . . Normalyn?”
It was the first time Mildred Meadows had used her name, in an inflection not unlike David Lange’s. Normalyn turned away from the woman and her sudden burning scrutiny.
Mildred Meadows stood up. “So, Normalyn, you have come to face me! Then face me!”
Normalyn stood up. Then that was what David Lange had told her. And what else? She stared evenly at the woman.
Tense seconds extended, extended.
“Oh, my dear, please, let’s do sit down,” said the subdued voice of Mildred Meadows. “‘I do like a bit of drama, don’t you? But one can’t hold it too long, and not at the expense of comfort.”
Weary, confused, so confused, wanting to flee, Normalyn was about to sit back down. But she remembered Enid’s and the movie star’s defiance of this woman, that first encounter, and she said, “I will not sit down—and I am leaving now!”
The tiny form of Mildred Meadows glided across the glacial room. “Tell me why I received . . . these? Do you know who sent them just days before David called that you were here?” Even now she was in complete control.
Normalyn looked at what Mildred Meadows had gathered from a white marble table.
A clutch of lavender flowers! Jacaranda blossoms!
With disdain, Mildred let them fall to the floor.
They were like those left behind in Enid’s abandoned room in Gibson, like those in Miss Bertha’s dining room next to the lithograph of Marilyn Monroe—except that these were real. No. Real ones would have disintegrated when they fell.
Normalyn knelt to study them more closely. These, too, were artificial, but they were new, only recently fashioned. Normalyn touched the frail petals. She saw that several of the blossoms—and parts of all of them!—looked decayed, ugly.
Fourteen
She was not running away from Mildred Meadows, whom she left standing over the fallen flowers—she was running away from questions, questions, questions in the past, the present, even in the future. How could Mildred Meadows claim to have witnessed the losing of a child and still be wondering whether one had been born? Who had sent the artificial jacaranda bouquet mottled with decay—and why since her arrival in Los Angeles? Would she have to return to David Lange now, for answers or more questions? When would her life begin! She had been roaming with ghosts for hours. No, she was the ghost; the restless people in the past were more alive!
She realized that she had only thought she was walking out of the house. She had just moved farther into its cavern of rooms, all furnished in icy opulence. Certain the butler was following her to force her to return and answer Meadows’s questions, Normalyn ended up on a veranda conquered by vines. The butler did appear, only to guide her to the front entrance and inform her that “the baroness’s limousine and chauffeur” were at her disposal for her “return home.” Normalyn walked with rigid dignity past the old woman and said, “No, thank you very much.”
Outside, she ran across the vast lawn and past the stiff chauffeur waiting by the open door of the limousine. It looked sinister, an abandoned prop from the past.
Beyond the gates of the mansion, which sank behind her among trees, Normalyn stared at her surroundings: one long, long curving street, houses in seclusion behind closed gates, no one walking anywhere—and evening shadows about to banish remnants of daylight. She ran back to Meadows’s gate. Door still open, chauffeur at its side, the limousine expected her. She got in wordlessly—and rode away from the past in the despised gray car.
She jumped out across the street from her house. She didn’t want to have to explain to Troja why she was returning in a limousine.
2
“Got the job? Worked late?” Troja leaned against Kirk on the floor. Kirk stared so raptly at the television that it seemed to Normalyn that he had begun to watch the glass itself, removing himself even from the life of the old movies. Retreating from too much life, while she—
“No.” That was all Normalyn said in answer to Troja’s question. They had hardly looked at her. Determined to assert her presence, her existence, to be noticed, Normalyn went to the refrigerator, noisily pulling out whatever she could find to eat, clanging dishes, dropping silverware, becoming angrier. “Goddamn, goddamn, god damn!”
“Huccome you so rattled? You gettin’ your period real bad, hon?” Troja said that with concern.
For Normalyn, that did it. “Are you?” she shot back.
Troja stood beside her. “I don’t get no periods. That’s huccome I can’t have no babies—never!”
Normalyn felt utterly defeated. She had inadvertently bruised a deep, hurting wound in Troja. . . . It was all useless! And she would never be able to think of Troja as other than a woman, and if Troja didn’t see that, then she had the problem! To thwart the apology she heard herself about to form—pleadingly—Normalyn went into her room.
She noticed a paper on her pillow. A note in Troja’s handwriting: “Hon—Ted Gonx—Gonz—Gons—” Several attempts to spell “Gonzales” had been ruled out, but the message was clear: Ted Gonzales had called.
3
The next day proceeded in frosty silence between Troja and Normalyn. Damned if Normalyn would apologize for something she hadn’t done when it was she who had been insulted.
Troja answered the telephone. “Yeah, sugar.” She tried to sound light, but her voice trembled. “Yeah. Gotcha. Yeah!” She was writing down an address. “And thanks, sugar. . . . Thanks loads.” When she put down the telephone, her hands were shaking. “He didn’t say nothin’ about being the black Monroe,” she said in relief.
Duke had re-entered her life. Normalyn looked at Kirk in accusation.
Kirk went to the porch to work out; Normalyn heard the barbells clanging fiercely.
In minutes, Troja was ready to go out on the date arranged just now by Duke.
Normalyn walked to De Longpre Park—away from Kirk and away from the possibility that the telephone would ring and it would be Ted Gonzales. Her reaction at the prospect was in limbo. Would she hear the voice of the man he had become or the man he had been?
Normalyn sat on a bench near the littered memorial to Valentino. New dust had turned it gray. She would not think about David Lange nor Mildred Meadows! A few people, mostly young, idled about. Some children played noisily.
A youngman with a bandanna tied across his forehead like a head band sat next to her. “Wanna feed the pigeons?”
Normalyn looked around. There were no pigeons.
He threw crumbs on the grass. “Just in case they come,” he said. His eyes were shiny, dark, his shirtless torso thinned into etched sinews. He said, “I’m gonna audition to be Montgomery Clift. Know who he was?”
Normalyn slid away on the bench, preparing to get up.
“Famous movie star,” the youngman answered himself. “He died in a wreck. Then the studios had this other guy take over as him, see? To cover why he looked different, they said Clift had to have plastic surgery because of the accident. I’m gonna tell that as my tragic secret at the next auditions for Dead Movie Stars; never know exactly when till they’re set—secret. You seen the Dead Movie Stars on TV? They’re gonna be on ‘Life As It Is’ tonight. You ever seen that?” He fed more crumbs to more invisible pigeons. “You think I look like Montgomery Clift before the accident?”
“Yes,” Normalyn said, although she wasn’t sure whom he was talking about. She walked away, slowly, unobtrusively, not wanting to hurt his feelings. When he didn’t even seem to notice—he was now talking to a girl with frizzled pinkish hair—she felt annoyed. She walked to the dry littered fountain and wiped the dust off the proud bust of Valentino.
She saw it, a car stopping abruptly in a no-parking strip nearby. Knots of youngish people loitering in the park reacted to it—they sat up; some walked away with studied casualness. Two men emerged from the car. Both wore sunglasses.
Normalyn had the ugly sensation that they were looking for her! She’d run! . . . She controlled herself; she had no reason to be afraid, none. She sat on the edge of the fountain.
The two men strolled into the park, surveying it. They stopped before someone, asked a cursory question. Now they were talking to the girl with pinkish hair and the youngman who had been feeding absent pigeons. One of the two men inspected the youngman’s bare arms. The other one, heavier, faced in Normalyn’s direction. She swung her legs at the edge of the fountain, just for something to do.
“What’s your name, miss?” They were standing before her, with open wallets, exhibiting identification as police.
Hoping her voice was steady, she answered, “Normalyn. Normalyn Morgan.” She had nothing to be afraid of, nothing.
“Normalyn,” the heavier man repeated. “That’s a pretty name. You from Texas?”
“How do you know that?” Her voice lost its firmness.
“Cause you got a soft drawl. Lived there myself a while,” said the heavier man. The other, silent, studied her from behind dark glasses. “Got some I.D., Normalyn?”
She fished in her purse, feeling for the newer birth certificate, not wanting to be seen hunting. Had she chosen the right one!
The man scrutinized it. “How come your name isn’t Smith, like your father’s?”
“That’s none of your—” Anger flashed, with relief that she had shown him the right document.
“No need to be scared, Normalyn. Just checking up on the park,” the heavy man told her. “Now you have a good day.” But they remained facing her for long moments. Then the man who had not spoken said, “Watch you don’t get into trouble, Normalyn.”
She was the last person they spoke to on their vague tour.
“Routine check for drugs and shit, man,” the girl with frizzled hair said to her. “Just hassle, hassle, hassle.”
Normalyn left the suddenly strange park. It was then she realized with a clarity that stunned her that she had been carrying with her a letter and papers that if believed—! . . . She would hide them in one of her suitcases. Were they safe there? She’d place them in a safety box! That seemed even chancier, indicative of secrecy. . . . Again, she was imbuing everything with imaginary dangers! She knew that, completely, when she looked back at the park, so placid again.
She passed the telephone at the gas station. She stopped. She did think of calling David Lange. He was counting on her calling him. But she would not. On her own, she had to find someone out of that same past but not connected to David Lange.
4
Troja was in good spirits. “Been waitin’ for you, hon. Wanna do your hair, show you makeup, like I been promisin’.”
Normalyn didn’t remember that exact promise, and she did not welcome the prospect, but it would calm the unextraordinary incident she kept remembering from the park, and she could not reject such an extravagant offer from Troja. So she sat in the chair Troja indicated.
In his corner, Kirk was watching a movie—Leave Her to Heaven—about a woman who loves her husband so much that she kills herself to bind him to her in death rather than lose him. Every few minutes, station breaks tantalized with hints of coming catastrophes to be revealed on the news.
For a moment Normalyn had considered telling Troja and Kirk about what had occurred in the park. That would show them that she, too, lived dangerously. But she hadn’t been in danger. She hadn’t.
“Now, you trust me, hon,” Troja said. Now and then consulting an open book next to her as a guide, she expertly used a brush, water from a basin, a blow-dryer. “Got such pretty hair and you don’t even know it.”
Normalyn heard snipping scissors. She saw a strand of her hair fall to the floor.
The movie ended—the dead woman’s sister married the beloved man—and Kirk shifted to another station. A mousy sportscaster with the absurd name of Jacques “Jock” le Sourd was announcing breathlessly that— Kirk clicked him away.
“Can we watch ‘Life As It Is’?” Normalyn called out.
“It comes on in a few minutes, after the news,” Kirk informed her.
“Hold still!” Troja said when Normalyn tried to look at the book she was consulting. “We’ll let your hair set awhile.” Her fingers touched her creation lovingly. “A little makeup now.”
Normalyn was becoming impatient, nervous. She would
have ended it except that Troja was so clearly wanting to be giving, bountiful.
On the television screen, Clive Barnes, the “rhymin’ weatherman,” was tipsier than usual as he predicted “patchy clouds bring lessened crowds to the beach.”
“Hold real still or you’ll ruin the eye shadow!” Troja said as “Life As It Is” came on.
“Today we’ll take you to the Trianon Château off Franklin Boulevard.” Tommy Bassich was identifying his location. “The château was built by William Randolph Hearst for his mistress, Marion Davies. Now among its tenants in its many decaying rented rooms live the founders of a group known as the Dead Movie Stars—”
And there they were, the odd young people in strange clothes surrounding the skinny girl with reddened hair and a felt orchid in it.
Tommy Bassich was explaining: “These young people claim to represent the glamour—”
“—and tragedy,” Lady Star reminded as the camera panned a crumbling old building, its elegance in shreds, courtyard leprous with weeds, steps eroding into dust. “Glamour and tragedy go together.” Lady Star spoke in a huskied voice that now and then slipped into a squeak.
“Lady Star, would you introduce us to the members of your group?” Tommy Bassich was deeply serious.
Lady Star waved a languid hand toward the others, who firmed their borrowed poses of glamour: “Hedy Lamarr, Tyrone Power, Rita Hayworth, Veronica Lake, Errol Flynn, Betty Grable, Billy Jack—” A youngman wearing an open shirt and cowboy boots pushed into the frame. Lady Star subtly edged him away and continued: “—James Dean.”
“Hedy Lamarr isn’t dead,” Tommy Bassich informed. “Neither is—”
“They’re dead when you think they’re dead,” Lady Star stated.
With profound gravity, Tommy Bassich reminded Lady Star that in an earlier news segment she had claimed that “the people who were there” provided them with the “secret information” they claimed to possess, about tragedies and scandals. “For example?” Tommy was probing, probing in depth.
