by John Rechy
Lady Star was quiet, deliberating.
Normalyn had to ask: “Was that the only reason you needed me so urgently—because you thought I’d help you get on the cover of that magazine?” She pointed to the magazine on the floor. The sketched drawing pasted on the cover seemed desperate now.
“Why else?” Lady Star was clinging to her grand demeanor. “For some reason unclear to me, the photographer who saw you running out that first day thought you looked a lot like her.” Her pointing finger tried to locate a photograph of Marilyn Monroe among the others cluttering the room. “He was sure we had a good chance, with a good Marilyn.” She said that almost wistfully. Then her husky voice returned. “Why, what other reason did you think, darling? What?” Her eyes did not blink.
Was that the only reason? No, it had been an important part of it for the Dead Movie Stars; but there had been more, Normalyn was sure, much more that had to do with Mildred Meadows, the Crouches—
“But none of that matters now,” Lady Star said as if to herself.
“Because you’ve been trapped by real life, little girl,” Troja said.
“Real life!” Lady Star winced with deep dread.
Betty Grable yelled into the room as she hurried past the door, her hair a mountain of curls, “It’s all going to happen just like we wanted!”
“I’m not so sure,” Lady Star thought aloud. She fluffed out her red hair, just in case she was wrong. She leaned against her chaise. “No, I’m not so sure at all it will happen like we wanted.” She let her body slide down, slowly, down to the floor. She sat there like a heavily painted doll. “This may be the death of the Dead Movie Stars,” she said to Normalyn.
Normalyn nodded.
Troja looked at Lady Star in fascination. “You’re really a sad little girl, aren’t you?” she said.
“No!” Lady Star groped for her chaise. She raised herself on it. She stood to her full height. “You’re wrong,” she said to Troja. “I am the only one left who knows what real glamour is!” Fatigue oppressed her at the impact the news might have on their survival. She lay back on the chaise, arranging herself like a laid-out corpse. In her deepest voice she said, “I am the last of Hollywood, the last of glamour, the last of the great beauties, the last of the great tragic Dead Movie Stars.”
3
Outside, television crews were converging.
Normalyn and Troja drove away in the old Mustang, Normalyn’s suitcases loaded hurriedly in back.
Normalyn was eager to tell Troja of the events of the past nights and days. She could not help feeling slightly proud to have been discovered in such a terrible place. Troja’s suddenly distant look did not invite conversation.
They reached the familiar house. Normalyn rushed out, so eager to be back she did not notice at first Troja’s hesitation to get out. Normalyn looked back and saw that Troja had closed her eyes, against the painful absence she was encountering again and again and again.
Kirk’s section was cleared, the mattress replaced with a table, weedy flowers put in a drinking glass. Troja had made an unsuccessful attempt to clean the house—boxes were pushed against the walls. Normalyn tried not to stare at her, but she saw Troja’s hands tremble, her eyes slice away from the dead television. Normalyn was encouraged that she had not seen Troja breathe the cocaine.
Studying her, Troja said, “You look beautiful, you really do.”
“And you’ve been . . . okay?” Normalyn asked with concern.
“Got a good lead on a job,” Troja said quickly. Her voice faltered. “I’m trying!”
She closed her eyes and spoke meted words: “I have to keep reminding myself, grasp it. Kirk couldn’t make love to me because he was trying to think of me as someone else. But that last night he saw me. He was telling me he loved me—and proved it before he had to take himself away.”
Yes, Normalyn understood, there were so many shapes of love.
In increasing silence, their movements now became very careful, courteous. Normalyn unpacked her clothes, folded them, unfolded them. Touching it, Troja called her attention to a small new glass angel on the table meant to replace Enid’s. But it didn’t! Normalyn thought, and controlled the urge to remove it. It was garish, painted brightly, ugly. But it was Troja’s way of indicating her regret for what had occurred. Normalyn looked away from it. “It’s wonderful,” she managed to say—and located Enid’s makeup box beside it.
Troja understood. She removed the angel from the table, cupping it in her hands as if to hide that it had existed. She held her breath; she closed her eyes. “I’m sorry I was mean to you that day, hon, and I’m real happy you’re back,” she said. She embraced Normalyn tightly. Then she forced away the emotion: “Now tell me where you been?”
Normalyn told her some—only some—of the highlights of the last days.
“Why are you going through all this, hon?” Troja asked her carefully.
“Because I—” Normalyn started. “Because I may be—” She started again: “Because I’m beginning to think that I am . . . Marilyn’s daughter.” Immediately, she wanted to seize back those strange words, scream out, Enid is my mother!
4
Normalyn and Troja rode on the freeway to Long Beach. Normalyn was returning to see Miss Bertha. She would show her the letter and—
“So many sailors,” Troja said. “They look so sad.”
Miss Bertha would call Jim afterwards. He’d come over. Normalyn told Troja about Jim.
Troja liked him immediately—then remembered: “While you were gone, that Mayor of Texas called, and so did Ted Gonzales, from Arizona.”
“From Texas,” Normalyn corrected. Was she sorry she had missed his call?
“Him, yes, but he was calling from Arizona,” Troja said. “That’s why he couldn’t leave a number. He’s on his way to Los Angeles, hon.”
Ted in Los Angeles! He existed for her in Gibson—and by the Rio Grande. Would he bring all that with him? Or would being here separate him from it, make him a really new Ted Gonzales? Normalyn was not sure whether she felt anticipation.
Sailors wandered the streets of Long Beach. To this beach town, Alberta Holland had fled finally, tired, away from the people destroying lives. From memory, Normalyn guided Troja to the Victorian house.
There it was! No . . . Normalyn did not see the disordered naturalness of Miss Bertha’s garden. But that was the house. The garden was tidy, ordered.
Troja parked the car. “You sure this is it?” she asked into Normalyn’s look of wonder.
“Yes,” Normalyn said, but she wished she wasn’t sure.
“I’ll take a walk by the ocean, soothing, while you—”
Normalyn did not want Troja to be alone, and she didn’t want to be alone now. “Please come with me.”
Troja’s hands were trembling ominously. “Okay.” She fixed the dark sunglasses more securely to filter the world.
Normalyn ran to the door. She rang, knocked.
An older man came to the door. A woman called from within the house: “Just tell them we don’t want anything.”
The man looked at both women. His eyes tried to hide his approval. “Yes?”
“Miss Bertha.” Normalyn could hardly pronounce the name. “She’s my friend.”
“You mean the lady who claimed she knew all the movie stars.” The man smiled, not at all unkindly.
Troja touched Normalyn’s hand.
“She does know them,” Normalyn said. This house was already pulling away into a finished memory.
“I’m real sorry to tell you, young lady,” the man said softly, “that your friend is dead.”
Normalyn turned away from the unwanted word. Troja reared back, assaulted by it.
“We just rented the house.” The man was eager to restore life, share his memories. “Used to live down the block, always liked it—and her. Maybe you know her friend?”
Jim. “A sailor,” Normalyn said, wanting to cry.
“Yeah, him—and the old lady who came
in to take care of everything.”
“Who—?”
“A small woman,” the man said. “Left soon after that. Very elegant. She wore white gloves, spoke with a Spanish accent. Why, she stopped by one day, I remember so well. She said she was used to death—her husband died in a car crash after surviving a whole revolution, imagine!—but she said death still shocked her. . . . She and the sailor took care of everything right away. It may help your sorrow,” he offered Normalyn quickly, “if I tell you it was the sailor who found your friend dead, just like she had fallen asleep, in an old chair she favored, with one of her cats purring away on her lap. She was a good woman who deserved to die peacefully.”
Forty
Miss Bertha was dead, her voice silenced! Insinuating itself into Normalyn’s sorrow was the thought that gone with Miss Bertha was all she might have learned from her. But a new presence had entered the living past, an elegant Spanish woman who had come to Miss Bertha—“to take care of everything right away.” There had been a figure like her in Alberta Holland’s life.
In the car riding through the whiteness of Long Beach, Normalyn avoided looking at the sailors on the streets. Now Jim—she did not even know his last name—was locked with Miss Bertha in one memory to which nothing could be added.
“I’m sorry, hon,” Troja said as she drove onto the freeway.
“She did know all those movie stars.” Normalyn was surprised by what she had chosen to affirm. But did Miss Bertha really know them? The Spanish woman added some evidence.
Troja turned on the radio. The music that came out was the kind Kirk liked. Troja banished it—and the fevered voice of a cursing preacher. Frantic, she shifted past words, blasts of music. She reached for something in her purse. The trembling hand withdrew. “Goddamn, goddamn, goddamn!”
Normalyn realized how frailly Troja’s control was held; she had been seeking in her purse the destructive solace of the drug. . . . The soft music Normalyn located for her was replaced by the litany of the day’s horrors, news spoken in a voice meant to predict fair skies. Normalyn listened only when she heard the familiar name:
“—Mary Yarrow in our special report on today’s news,” the announcer introduced. “Police have arrested her former boyfriend, Danny Palance, also eighteen, and charged him with her murder. In a bizarre initiation, known as ‘auditions,’ Mary Yarrow recently ‘assumed’ the identity of famed movie star Verna La Maye. Like the star, Mary Yarrow was strangled. She belonged to a cult group known as the Dead Movie Stars, purportedly dedicated to the restoration of ‘tragic glamour’ to Hollywood. The group was founded by Molly Ullman, whose grandmother organized the first Marilyn Monroe fan club in the world; William Jackson, a runaway from Oakapine, Tennessee; and Rosa Mendoza, a Valley High School dropout. Police lieutenant Otis Sleighton dismissed the group as “just another shabby band of disturbed young people,” but psychologist Howard Kissel, himself well known as a dis—”
Normalyn snapped off the radio. Just another shabby band . . . How would they hear that, she wondered? The same reporters who had courted the Dead Movie Stars would now rake through the drabness of their real lives. Lady Star was a pitiful girl—malicious, mean, but still pitiful like the others. They were not responsible for the girl’s death, but she was dead. Her death, the death of Kirk, of Miss Bertha, all deepened Normalyn’s awareness of sudden loss. She felt a renewed urge to live.
When they reached the house, Troja tossed her head slightly back, a hint of the way she had exited the Hollywood Four Star Club, Normalyn wanted to think. “Gotta keep moving,” Troja said. “Always harder to start again than to go on.”
“Yes!” Normalyn agreed quickly.
Inside the house, Normalyn immediately saw what had caused Troja to rear in horror: her blonde wig discarded between boxes on the floor. Troja went to it, picked it up, and flung it into the shadows of the house.
Not even Troja’s urgency could summon Normalyn’s attention now because as she saw the wig floating within dark shadows, she recognized the missing association that had kept her haunted memory blurred for years. Now she saw it all:
On the shoreline in Galveston, in Texas, when Normalyn was three, Enid led her to the dark edge of the Gulf—“to meet a woman who yearns to see you.” Click! Enid’s lighter sparked. In flickering instants, Enid vanished into the darkness out of which the blonde woman emerged. Normalyn thought she knew her; she felt protected as they sat for moments on the sand. “I came to tell you I love you; I wasn’t able to before,” the woman said. She stroked Normalyn’s head resting on her lap. Then she said to Normalyn, “Wait here, I want to show you something.” She walked closer to the water and reclined on darkness, raising one hand over her breasts. “I’ll just lie on the darkness,” Normalyn heard the woman say, “and finally it will be soft at last and kind.” A black wave advanced as if to engulf her. Normalyn was about to run to her. The woman stood up and shouted, “Don’t come too close, the darkness mustn’t touch you!” Click! Enid removed the blonde wig she had been wearing and flung it into the water. It floated away into darkness. “You’re mine!” She clasped Normalyn.
With a sigh now, Normalyn knew it had been Enid, only Enid, who had been with her on the distant shoreline.
2
The next day—Troja had left very early on a temporary job as a “backup”—Normalyn dialed Stanley Smith’s number in Palm. He answered. “Who is this? Who? Who!” There was fear in the repeated voice. “I’m Enid’s daughter, Stan,” Normalyn warned, and hung up.
Then she made herself up differently—from memory.
She took a cab to the bus depot. At a small magazine shop, she bought a chrome cigarette lighter.
3
When Normalyn stepped off the bus in Palm, the day was hot, sweaty, cloudless. In the small city, she saw scarce buildings, scattered houses, a few people—staring, hostile. All roads branched off from a short main street dominated by a single towering palm, which looked ancient, its lower fronds shredded, brown. An old man at the gas station that doubled as bus stop told her she could walk to the address she showed him.
As she moved to her destination, she retained the memory of what Enid had been—vibrant, charming—before becoming embittered, attempting to soothe the past with liquor and curses.
The two-story house Normalyn reached courted a further separation in this isolated town. It touched the desert. Wooden columns flanking dark steps created a stark symmetry against the fierce white sky, where a desert bird glided so slowly that it seemed suspended in unmoving heat.
Normalyn walked halfway to the steps and waited.
The front door opened. Still muscular, in his fifties, a man stood there.
“Stanley Smith.” Normalyn said.
“I’ve been waiting for you to show up,” the man said. Behind him, a woman appeared at the open door. Her silhouette was joined by a youngman’s.
“Why did you wait for me?” Normalyn shouted at Stanley.
“To see you. To tell you to your face. I am not your father.”
“I’ve never asked you. You’ve denied it twice.”
“David Lange called me about you, told me.”
Then he had prepared that interlude, lied to her. Normalyn pushed away the insistent presence of David Lange. “I know you were hired, to find a woman to abort!”
The woman advanced out of the door. She was thin, Stanley’s age, her hair flecked with gray.
An inexplicable sadness touched Normalyn’s anger.
The slender handsome youngman emerged into the scorched day.
“What do you want from us?” Stanley said.
“The truth about your child and Enid’s.”
“Ask her in, father,” the youngman said.
“No!” Stanley rejected. “She’s here to judge, Ellen,” he warned the woman.
“I don’t want to come in!” Normalyn said. In the burning heat, she would assert her determination to know. “Tell me, Stanley!”
Ellen looked at her h
usband, questioning silently.
Words from another time bolted in rage from the man: “Our son died and Enid blamed me!”
“Because you rejected her when she was pregnant, ran away on your goddamn motorcycle!” Normalyn put into her voice the slight insinuation of a Texas drawl that had seeped into Enid’s.
Stanley looked away from her.
Normalyn tasted her own perspiration. “Did you ever see your child, Stanley?” It was information she must have, but the sadness in her voice surprised her.
“No—because Enid went away to Texas, had him there.”
“After you left her.”
“But then I wanted my son back when she told me he’d been born,” Stanley said softly. Under his thin shirt, the hair on his chest matted with sweat.
“Did you want Enid back?”
“Oh, sure. Of course. Her, too.” He looked away from Normalyn, from his wife. “We were involved off and on for years.” He couldn’t keep the pride of conquest from his voice: “She thought I’d marry her finally.”
Bastard! Normalyn said for Enid.
“I’ve told you everything!” Stanley turned away.
“No. There’s much more. I’ve heard you at night when you’re drunk,” the man’s son said.
“Jason! How dare you!” Ellen spoke for the first time.
“How? Because I’m inheriting your ghosts,” Jason said to both of them.
He shared her sense of being bound to the past! Normalyn knew.
Beads of moisture glistened on Ellen’s face. She inhaled. “Tell it, Stanley, for you, for me. For Jason. Finish it, finally—”
“Shut up!” Stanley stopped her.
“—or I will, what I know of it,” Ellen finished.
Had Enid known Stanley had replaced her with an obedient version of her rebellious self? Normalyn understood her saddened fascination with this woman.
