Marilyn's Daughter

by John Rechy

  Stanley shook his head.

  “Stanley hired me to abort our child,” Ellen said to Normalyn. “That’s part of what you’ve come to discover. Only Stanley can tell the rest.”

  Stanley had offered his own unborn child for pay! That’s what Enid had discovered at the hospital. Within the stagnating heat, Normalyn felt nausea.

  “Crouch needed a pregnant woman, we needed money!” Stanley thrust into the woman’s confession. “And you agreed.”

  “Yes,” Ellen whispered.

  The white sun scorched the barren desert.

  “We have to know everything now, Jason,” Normalyn said to the youngman.

  “Yes!” Jason said to his father.

  “Tell her, Stanley,” Ellen pleaded.

  Stanley crossed his arms over his chest in locked silence.

  Normalyn pushed her hair back. She opened her purse. She took out the cigarette lighter she had bought earlier. She positioned it so that it reflected silver in Stan’s face. Then she clicked it, flameless.

  “Always pursuing her goddamned ‘justice’!” Stanley looked toward the horizon. “She’d play with that lighter of hers. Then the plotting started, in her eyes. They tilted, those eyes of hers,” he remembered. “I could see her plotting—”

  As Stanley spoke, Normalyn added to his blunt memories intimate details from her own knowledge of the woman she was constantly discovering.

  “—saw it, so clearly, in her eyes,” Stanley said, “the beginning of her damned vengeance on me, that time she called me to come to her house, told me she had a surprise—”

  * * *

  —but she didn’t tell him what.

  She lived in a second-floor duplex connected to the lawn by a flight of steps overhung with bougainvillea. From her bedroom window, she could see rows of jacaranda trees in full bloom. It was still spring, an exceptionally hot day, like summer.

  So Enid cut from the garden two enormous white roses laced with pale gold. They would have died in the fierce heat outdoors. She placed them in a vase on the table where she would tell Stanley her surprise.

  Stanley Smith—some considered him handsome, in a flashy way—brought champagne. He was in an exhilarated mood. He had just finished a job for Mickey Cohn, a “gig” involving political blackmail. He didn’t tell Enid this because she always refused to be “a part of that part” of him.

  Stanley was pleased by the loud pop of the cork. He poured the champagne. “Now, what are we celebrating?”

  Tiny bubbles teased Enid’s glowing lips. “I’m pregnant with our child, Stan,” she told him.

  “You’ll get rid of it.” Stan savored the expensive champagne. “I’ll give you the money.”

  Enid was aware of added heat, choking her. She had forced herself to believe he would welcome her news. They had been involved for years, and she had convinced herself he would marry her, leave the ugly world he moved in.

  “I intend to have this child.”

  “I’ll make sure you don’t. I have connections, you know,” he underscored in ugly determination.

  “You’re only a crook.” She still smiled. She plucked a petal from one of the roses she had picked. In ripe bloom from the sudden heat, it disintegrated at her touch. She had spoken so sweetly that she had thrown him into a quandary; he did not react to the insult. She reached for her cigarette lighter on the table where she kept her cherished figurine of an angel.

  “You’ve seen other men, I bet,” he told her.

  “Only you—for very long.” He had been the first.

  “Of course.” He accepted—expected—her fidelity. . . . Now from his wallet he took out bills, large bills. He spread them on the table so Enid would see how much he was lavishing on her. “That’ll take care of whatever is necessary.” He added more. When she still did not acknowledge his generosity, he encouraged, “Go to the D’Arcy House, if you want the best care. It’ll keep things quiet, too,” he added importantly. “Now I’m going to San Francisco, for a few days, on my motorcycle.” He had never outgrown that—his motorcycle, the feeling that he was a young outlaw.

  Enid clicked her silver lighter.

  He looked at her. He saw the signs of beginning vengeance in her eyes. Perhaps he “saw” them only later, when he remembered the strange moments.

  At the door, she placed something into his hand and closed his fingers over it. He was surprised to discover it was a cheap glass “necklace” he had given her years ago—a childish lark, five marbly blue beads knotted with an ordinary string. He was baffled she had kept it. “You know this is worthless,” he reminded her.

  “I know it now,” she told him. Her smile intact, she said, “This child will cost you much more than money, Stan, I swear it.”

  He went to San Francisco, just left on his motorcycle, stayed away. Much later, she telephoned him at his office; he even had a secretary for his “gigs.” She left word that she was at the Texas Grand Hotel, in Gibson. He assumed she had preferred distance and remoteness to the sheltered comfort of the D’Arcy House. He did not answer her call. She telephoned again. She told his secretary she was sure Stan would welcome what she had to tell him. When he answered, she told him, “You were right as usual. I understand what you want.” The ended pregnancy, of course, Stan knew, although he had not even thought of it since that day.

  Enid remained in Texas. Near the water of the Gulf, she took long walks, clicking her empty cigarette lighter at nothing, at indifferent black waves of water. That is what she told Stanley when she called him again from Texas. “And our child was born here, Stanley, a handsome boy full of life. Like you, Stanley, exactly like you.”

  She had let him believe she had got rid of the kid! By then he had another woman, a “Hollywood girl,” Ellen Berrent. He was proud of the fact that when Alberta Holland had required some casual information from him once, she had remarked that Ellen reminded her of Mildred Meadows’s beautiful daughter.

  Enid’s words kept echoing in Stanley’s mind: “. . . a boy . . . exactly like you.”

  Stanley called Enid in Texas. They just talked. He telephoned again, twice in one day, again at night. “How is the kid?” “Oh, handsomer than this morning, stronger than yesterday; he’s you again, Stan, so much you.”

  Stanley told Enid—firmly—that he wanted his boy.

  Enid returned to Los Angeles. She registered at the Ambassador Hotel, in a room that overlooked the flowered lawn. She told Stanley she would see him there.

  And give him back his child, Stan was sure.

  She had never looked more beautiful. He told her that. “You just haven’t been able to use your beauty. Like Marilyn. . . . Where’s my kid?” He looked about the hotel room for his son. How old would he be? he tried to remember.

  “Your son is dead,” Enid told him. “I came back to tell you to your face. He was born despite you, but he didn’t survive long—only long enough to reveal that he would have looked exactly like you. Every moment of the pregnancy, I was in danger of losing him, because of your threats. I knew you were capable of carrying them out. That affected the child finally, despite his early strength. The doctor confirmed it: You killed your son, Stanley.” She flung at him the exact bills he had given her.

  * * *

  Heat whitened over the desert of Palm.

  Normalyn felt the impact of Stan’s betrayal of Enid—so proud, so vulnerable, so proud.

  “And then we bought the death of our own child, too,” Ellen accused Stanley.

  Stan shielded his eyes from the stare of the sun.

  “Enid didn’t allow it—I did.” Ellen judged herself.

  “I made it up to you, I gave you a son,” Stanley said.

  Jason walked down the steps. He stood with Normalyn.

  “And I married you!” Stanley reminded his wife.

  “To silence me! And because I reminded you . . . of her, without her spirit,” Ellen chastised herself. “You even told her that, on the telephone. I heard you, Stan—the day you called her
, to see her again.”

  “Yeah!” He thrust this as evidence of commitment at Normalyn. “I tried to help Enid when I discovered they’d been trapped in Holland’s plan. But she lied to me, told me Marilyn’s daughter was dead, exposed me to danger—just as she knew would happen when I reported her lie as fact, and I did!”

  Sweat stung Normalyn’s eyes. “How do you know she lied?”

  “Because Crouch tried to get me to go tell Marilyn her kid wasn’t dead.” Again pride seeped in: “Of course I refused. I had my honor. I wasn’t working for Crouch any more. Besides. I knew he was just trying to set me up, trying everything to save himself.”

  Then Crouch called Marilyn to tell her her daughter was dead! “Did Enid know you hadn’t gone?”

  “Yes! . . . when it was all over.”

  Normalyn had to learn everything quickly now—Stan had turned away. Click! She snapped the lighter.

  Stanley whirled about.

  “You said you wanted to see me, Stan. Why!”

  “Because I’ve never been really sure what happened to my kid!” Stanley shouted back.

  ‘Why!” Normalyn’s lips were parched.

  Stanley shook his head. “Enid always worked things out exactly, to get the response she wanted.” He seemed now to speak to himself. “Sometimes I wonder if my kid wasn’t born, and she made that all up to hurt me.” He seemed to be studying Normalyn closely. “Maybe she had a girl, told me the kid was a boy to make sure I’d want him back.” His look did not waver from Normalyn. “All of it could have been part of her revenge—never to allow me to be sure.”

  “If she had had a daughter, you wouldn’t have wanted her?” Normalyn asked, immediately detesting her words. She did not care whether he would have wanted her or not!

  Stanley looked away from her. He frowned. “Enid’s dead now, with all her secrets.”

  “But someone else is keeping the intrigue alive!” Ellen said suddenly. “Whoever is sending those artificial flowers Monroe loved, reminding us again . . . of everything.”

  “Show me the flowers!” Normalyn demanded.

  “I burned them. I hated their brown ugly blossoms!” Ellen said.

  “Normalyn!”

  She looked at Stan. He had spoken her name as if in sudden surprise.

  “Normalyn,” he repeated softly. “That’s a pretty name, young lady.” He held his breath, released it. “Maybe I am your fa— . . .”

  “I wouldn’t want you as my father!” Normalyn shouted.

  At the same moment, Jason turned away from him.

  Normalyn touched the youngman’s hand, an acknowledgment of closeness.

  Sweat drenched Stan’s face, his body. Wearily, he brought from his pocket a glass necklace, dulled blue. “This is what Enid returned to me that day. It meant something to her. I looked for it after you called. Take it.”

  “Throw it to me, Stan,” Normalyn ordered.

  He did.

  Jason’s back remained to him. Ellen’s hand reached out toward her son.

  A sudden shadow, like a blade, severed the white landscape.

  Normalyn allowed the necklace to fall to the ground. With one foot, she rubbed it in dirt. Then she picked it up, wiping the glass beads. “Now it’s clean from your touch, Stan,” she said.

  Forty-One

  A cool breeze sighed into Los Angeles as the Desert Valley bus pulled into the Hollywood terminal.

  In the cab riding back to the house, Normalyn sorted into two sequences of possibilities what she had discovered in the white desert city. In the first, to fulfill her sworn vengeance, Enid lied to Stan, claiming a dead son when she had a living daughter—her, Normalyn, left safely protected in secret Texas when Enid returned to taunt Stanley with the contrived death. Seeing a replication of her own dilemma in Marilyn Monroe’s dangerous pregnancy, she remained in Los Angeles through the perilous time. She returned to Texas after Alberta’s plot smashed and both Marilyn—and the child—died.

  In the second sequence—Normalyn evaluated as the cab passed the Chinese Theater while dozens of tourists, always there, inspected the prints of the great movie stars—Enid returned to indict Stanley in the real death of the child she had forced him to want. After the tumult of the last days of the doomed movie star, Enid claimed Marilyn’s daughter as her own, at first in protection, eventually in total possession, to replace her own dead child.

  Certain events fitted either possibility: In a ritual of loyalty performed on the Galveston shore, Enid, disguised as Marilyn Monroe, shared her own daughter with the movie star—or “returned” her to her rightful mother. Trapped in a coil of the madness both women feared, a coil made taut by guilt that she had not reached the movie star before the suicide, Enid felt both love and resentment toward the child born out of turmoil. At the end of her life—to share her own daughter with the star completely and beyond death—or finally to rectify the deception of years—she “returned” her to Marilyn Monroe by way of her letter.

  Normalyn faced this as the cab moved out of a street of glorious flowers and silver-green trees and into the gaudy remains of Western Boulevard. In the first set of possibilities, the despised Stanley Smith would be her father. In the second, her father would be one of two blurred figures—John Kennedy or, more probably, Robert Kennedy.

  When Normalyn got out of the cab before her house, she pushed everything out of her mind.

  Except this—

  Stan had spoken with genuine wonder of Enid’s exact plotting to bring about her desired effect. Enid had left her own name on the birth certificate, to which she had added Marilyn Monroe’s in the entry designating “Name of Mother.” The annotated newsclipping provided information and a guide to discoveries. There were the odd initials, N.J.R.I.R.—and the two photographs left side by side on the table with the chipped angel. Did all provide one message Enid had left for her to find?

  At dinner, Normalyn caught Troja studying her. Troja explained: “Sometimes you do look like Marilyn, hon—maybe like Norma Jeane—and then sometimes, like tonight, you look like someone else. And then, you know”—she smiled—“you look just like you.”

  “And you look beautiful again.” Normalyn was disturbed by Troja’s observation. Now she was surprised that Troja did not react to her words, as if that had begun not to matter to her. She would wait to tell Troja about her confrontation with Stanley Smith; Troja seemed suddenly preoccupied—and so was she, with fragments of mystery.

  “The wing of the angel.” Normalyn echoed aloud the phrase that had entered her mind, from the night of auditions. She answered Troja’s look of surprise: “It’s just another mystery.”

  “Not everything is a mystery, hon,” Troja said. “The Wing of the Angel is a famous orphanage in Hollywood. It’s real name is the Norton County Home, but everyone knows it as the Wing of the Angel because Marilyn spent a long time there and that’s what she called it.” Troja announced, casually, that—if Normalyn wanted to go there—she could drive her because her “important audition” of today had been postponed “for a few days.” Then she slammed the table with both hands. “Not true! I did go today. But I panicked. I ran out!”

  In the morning Troja announced her determination to attend the rescheduled call. She kept redoing her eyes—“all wrong!”— then her lips—“can’t get them to look right!” Finally, hands trembling, she was ready. She did not ask, “How do I look?” before she left.

  Normalyn walked to the Wing of the Angel Home. She was saddened that the jacaranda trees had lost their blooms, their limbs oddly barren among trees just beginning their full lives. No filigree of petals remained on the streets—except here and there, against a curb, a sweep of dusty lavender.

  The administration building at the Norton County Home was two stories of brick, its windows framed white. Lawns were neatly mown. Lush shrubbery was trimmed in rectangles. Behind the building were two smaller ones, dormitories. The playground was enclosed by leafy trees. A statue remained from a time when the building was
a private home and the ample grounds were a garden—a female angel looking down at her bare feet. One wing seemed about to rise, in tentative preparation; the other was pressed against her body.

  That was the angel Enid tried to evoke with the figurine she had kept, Normalyn knew. And this is where “the game” had begun, where Enid Morgan had met Marilyn Monroe—“under the shadow of an angel’s wing, an angel that had abandoned hope of flying again.”

  Quickly, Normalyn walked away from the home.

  2

  Her life had to begin!

  From a telephone booth, she reached David Lange in his office. She told him she must see him right away. There were certain “urgent matters” she had to discuss. And this time she would, she told herself. He agreed to the time she set.

  Back in her house—tired, longing for a cool shower—she almost didn’t answer the telephone.

  “Normalyn! Fm in Los Angeles!” said Ted Gonzales.

  Warm anticipation was swept away by apprehension. She tried to conceal her confused emotions: “Fm glad you’re here, really glad.”

  Ted explained excitedly why he was in Los Angeles. “Fm working for this lawyer who came to Gibson about the real terrible conditions of migrant workers in the fields. He thinks he can bring a suit against the growers there like he’s doing now in California.” He slowed his rushed explanation: “Fve missed you a lot, Normalyn. I can’t wait to see you. Fm in East L.A. I borrowed a Jeep—I could be there in just , a few minutes—. . .”

  A shadow flung itself across her mind, across her body lying by the Rio Grande. “Not today . . . tomorrow . . . but please call me first.” Her voice became frantic.

  Forcing enthusiasm back, Ted promised to call tomorrow.

  3

  The door to David Lange’s office was closed. To catch her breath, Normalyn paused at the ledge of a window in the corridor. She breathed deeply. One day she would be able to enjoy this beautiful city.

  “You look radiant in that reflection.” David Lange had been looking at her.

  She stood up, destroying his vision of her.