Divine Sarah

by Adam Braver

  “Who is that?” Baker gave partial attention.

  “The Chinese. The Chinese is who I’m talking about. They are private people.”

  “What about them?”

  “I’m just saying that they are private people. Chinese handle things their own ways.”

  “Well, thanks for telling me that.” Baker needed to decide what to do. He had Bernhardt back at the vicinity of his crime. Every reporter on the police beat knows that that is the first place the cops go in a manhunt—back to the scene of the crime. Some think it is to relive the power and the glory, others think it is to try to make peace with the violence. For Baker it could have been either. It didn’t matter. His assignment was sitting in the exact chair where he had sorted his notes from the bishop’s interview. They wouldn’t have to turn up the wattage of the electric lamp to get him to spill his guts. He’d cop to it. Rat himself out. He was there. Part of the plan. An accomplice. And that’s murder by the legal definition.

  “See, a Chinese guy in your situation…”

  Jesus Christ, enough about the Chinese.

  “…He wouldn’t do what you’re doing. He would just off her in their home, then bury her out back. Whole little private Chinese community would know, but they wouldn’t care. They’d say she had it coming. Honor. Wouldn’t cry a tear for her. Husband would have the right to keep his honor. That’s how they work. Honor and privacy. That’s the Chinese for you.”

  “You think she’s my wife? That’s not my wife. She’s double my age. She would be my mother, if anything.” He was irritated that he found himself justifying his position to someone who was ultimately going to charge him when all was said and done.

  “I told you I don’t want to meddle.”

  “She’s just someone who I’ve been trying to catch up with.”

  “You a private dick for somebody else?”

  “It’s not like that.”

  “If you say so…So there she is. Should I turn off the meter now?”

  Baker couldn’t go through with it. It wasn’t that he was chicken shit, or even that he was too inebriated to steady his thoughts, it was that he wasn’t ready. He had his subject. He had his chance to get her, turn in a story, and get Scott off his back. But he didn’t have his angle. If he went in now the very least that he might get out with was some puff piece that would sadly chart a second-rate comparison to Seabright, something that would slaughter his credibility on the news beat (and that stuff will dog you the rest of your life). He closed his eyes for a moment, heavy and tired from the weight of the alcohol. In his mind he saw the Phoenix, Arizona, that he had grown up in. Small streets with low roofs. The intense heat thundering down. Tall brown mountains surrounding the valley, cutting a jagged edge across the horizon. A city of five thousand people who were all afraid to cross over Baltimore Street, terrified by the thought of open desert and vengeful Navajos. To a young man dreaming of escaping the livery stables and ostrich farms of Grand Avenue, the bright splashing orange sunsets seemed like they took place in some land greater and more powerful, whose color was not a gift but an accidental overflow pouring down the mountains. It took twenty years of dreaming to get across those mountains. Twenty years to find the center of the sunset. And he still didn’t know which way to turn.

  “Let’s go,” Baker said. “Drive.”

  “Sure?”

  “I said, let’s go…And try to avoid Second. I don’t want to go by the cathedral there.”

  The cabbie released the brake. “Where to then?”

  “Take me down by C. C. Brown’s. You know it?”

  Cabbie just nodded and drove, like it was all inside code.

  Baker looked back at Ralph’s. Couldn’t see a goddamned thing. He had to trust his instincts and hope that he hadn’t let one get away.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  May 16, 1906

  THE dilemma for insomniacs is distinguishing the line between night and morning. The moment when Sarah gives up all hope of sleeping, driven by the rationale that it is morning anyway, and the promise of night has now been completely abandoned. She checked her clock to see a painful reading of 4:57 A.M. Partway into five o’clock meant usually giving in to the morning, forgetting about rest altogether, drawing a bath, and opening a curtain and letting the dusty little portents of the day filter in. But the three minutes before five were just enough to abuse the system, pitting a sleep deprivation that begged for mercy against an incarcerated web of nerves pleading for an early pardon.

  They had been up late last night, she and Max. That greasy pit had indulged them until the doors were actually locked. They had sat at the rear booth while chairs were stacked on tables and the stench of ammonia sanitized the floor, their stomachs churning and cackling in deep-fry regret. The lights had dimmed to a conservative working level, while the volume from the kitchen rose in aggressive English and timid Spanish and banging cast iron. She hadn’t even brought up the idea of getting out of the business—not especially after all the attention she had received earlier in that opera set restaurant. But in the midst of the everyday world, where the grilled cheese ruled the plate, and the purple darkness diminished the front window, she could see an end. The point where the young Sarah would turn to a fabled memory, freeing this Sarah from all responsibility of keeping the candle burning.

  They had come a long way from passing their nights in opium dens, where they had tried to hang on long enough for the morning light to splinter, when they would crawl deathly toward their beds with the superiority of battered warriors claiming victory through their wounds. She was old now. Remarkable energy, intrepid spirit, and two layers of pancake could not disguise the fact that she had become an old woman. Her age was perhaps made diminutive by the youthful characters that she portrayed, and her brashness and reckless bullying that had introduced (and maintained) her reputation around the world. But in truth the edginess her life skated upon, the cold steel razor that at once chilled her veins and threatened to sever them, was now dulled and rusted and left out of view. Before, she had burned opium for enlightenment, seeing the present in a way that let it unroll and display itself as an entirely new vision, a new possibility that challenged itself through the ironies. But now when she smoked she was just a pathetic sixty-one-year-old hag, doped-up baggage that only weighted down the earth and slowed its turning. No wonder Max was concerned. She had turned from the rebellious boozer into the alleyway drunk, all because of a matter of thirty years that were nothing more than just the sum cumulative total of days passing.

  She hadn’t said so much to Max, but she had intimated that she was feeling wearied by this latest boycott, leaving it vague and open to interpretation. (Shouldn’t it be obvious? Those kinds of melees are only really meant for the battle-excited young. Imagine, being exiled to the carnival!) Max immediately jumped on the opium issue, apparently sensing her openness as an invitation to express his concern, rather than any professionally motivated irritation. “The fact of the matter,” he said, “is that the hop is terrible for you. Never mind your career, but just for your health and sanity. It’s just bad.”

  Again, she wanted to tell him to stop saying hop. It sounded so juvenile and falsely vogue, and that the word came as stiffly off his mouth as a crippled old man holding on lustily to his buxom nursemaid. But then she realized that for most of her life her entire vocabulary had been a series of slang and exclusive nomenclature for the privileged insiders, only changing when the terms seeped across the borders and polluted the mainstream. Then there was some indefinable point—maybe a milestone—when the old words died away and the new ones seemed shallow or contrived, leaving the general formalities of the language to best express the details. “You are right,” she said, restraining herself from correcting him. “Bad.”

  “It’s just that it is so dulling.”

  She reached over and placed her hand on his forearm. Her sculpted fingers and thumb now bent slightly at the joints with the skin loosened, lines made deeper by the shadows from
the dimmed lights. “I am telling you that I understand. It is not addiction, though. Just a way to cope.” And as she said those words she felt an anger seethe through her body. The real Sarah Bernhardt, the younger version who hadn’t been hideously taken over by this battered old-leathered shell, never needed to cope. If some freakish American church group had come after her, well then je m’en fou! That kind of thing would only serve to inspire the real Sarah. She would tease them, mug at them, and flaunt her virtues, then go out on the town to celebrate, spilling her points of view on the correlation of religious fanaticism and sold-out houses into the drinks and notes of every reporter who would listen. The best way to weather a shock had been to shock back (in her case in a way that reached the whole world). But this Sarah was rattled. Driven to panic and strange memories, where only the narcotics and booze could calm her. Bottom line: She couldn’t take the pressure anymore. She didn’t want to turn into an actress like Cissy Loftus, the kind of star whose perfection was her métier, but nobody could stand her, because when she wasn’t arrogantly demanding perfection she was privately falling apart.

  Max must have sensed the seriousness, because he quickly relaxed his managerial posture and leaned over more Molly-like, his rigid Saxon features softening, taking on a gentle femininity. He caressed her cheek. His hands, although still masculine, stroked with a comforting mercy that was neither patronizing nor sympathetic, rather one that bespoke honesty in its purest form, as though stoking her with true compassion. “You know that I love you” was all he said. And she understood the depth of those words so much that the literal was stripped of every nuance, the letters and phonetics falling away until they were no longer symbols of expression, but the pure, raw expression itself.

  “I am old,” she said.

  Max slid his hand down her cheek and took hold of her hand, pressing it into the tabletop. “I don’t even know what that means.”

  “You don’t know old, Molly?”

  He nodded. Almost convincingly.

  “Just look in the mirror if you don’t know old. And if you still don’t get it, then look at me. Old is what it is, Molly…Old. I’m not going to be dancing side by side with Mata Hari, unless it’s billed as a freak show.”

  “Sarah, you are not…”

  “I’m not the Sarah Bernhardt that you want me to be.” And with that he squeezed her hand, and she pursed her lips so tightly that they hurt, sealing off any other words that might slip out and reveal the brewing of rational and irrational fears that busked throughout her mind. Once exposed they might mutate and take on a life larger than she and Max could possibly imagine.

  To the restaurant workers, they must have looked like an aging couple misplaced after the ball, conversations and discourse long ago exchanged, where the sharing of meals and long-gone expressions are ratified by a gentle touch that symbolizes intimacy. Sarah and her confidant Max sat silently in that deserted diner, his hand left gently on her forearm, their stares vacant and lone, while the floors around them were being mopped and the tables sprayed and sponged. And six thousand miles away among the sooty gray Parisian buildings lay a world that would still fawn over every word that their native daughter had to say. They would still line up at the window, crowding one another and pushing and pulling with a near hysterical determination to catch a glimpse of her. But here she sat with Max. An empty café in a deserted downtown Los Angeles. No less ordinary than any other couple who may have inadvertently found their way in. They could not have asked for a better moment of peace. And Sarah could only hold one thought. One single thought that swirled her mind like a playful pan that turned malicious and started banging the word against the cavity of her skull. One devious thought in two parts.

  Old. And soon to be forgotten.

  Even by the time they had flagged a taxi, she couldn’t shake the thought. The suddenness of the restaurant’s ambience had gone with the closing of the door and clacking of the lock. A warm gentle wind brushed up against her face and seductively wrapped her ankles. The dirty downtown smell oddly refreshing and inspiring. Still nothing could knock away the desperate vision of mortality that overcame her (compounded by having to sleep in circus town). She was glad Max was with her, because if ever there was a moment when she might have hooked herself up to a stash of opium and let it run until it whitewashed her existence, this was it.

  The cab passed under a last streetlamp, which left Broadway looking unlucky and shadowed. The outlines of the giant palm leaves rose as ancient totem smiles. Sarah thought about closing her eyes, but it seemed like more work than just keeping them open. She watched until the cab quickly turned the corner on Second. The concrete cross from the Cathedral of our Lady of Angels stared down upon her, grainy gray, the edges chipped and rounded, and a footprint over the entrance. The name of the cathedral arced above, the once deep engraving now shallow and weathered. Sarah imagined Mother Superior reciting the creed to help herself find a calming peace, then marching right up to the bishop of this California parish to tell him how wildly mistaken he was, that her young novice was a girl of virtue and honesty, and despite a sometimes independent nature the young Mademoiselle Sarah was indeed a true conscript of the Father. (Although she too might have been tempted to give up on Sarah, finally conceding that the Jew in her could destroy all the potential goodness, unable to see that the same spark, the same gentleness and open heart that Sarah—or was it Henriette-Rosine?—had possessed at nine was still beating inside her chest.) Maybe the way that Sarah had gone about navigating the world was far more different than the sister could ever have imagined, but in the end they had both tried to achieve the same goals: to give up one’s self for the love and salvation of others.

  She reached down and took Max’s hand. She looked back one more time at the church. It disappeared in shadows and night, as though it had never existed at all. “Please hold me until we get back to the hotel,” she said.

  “Sarah,” he whispered, “we forgot to talk about Marguerite.”

  She put her index finger to her lips. “Please just hold me.”

  She had gone to sleep rather easily in her room at the King George, the loathing and pity fully exhausting her. It was the morning that thwarted her. The nagging thoughts and blistered questions had sounded an alarm in her head. She tried to lull herself back to sleep with one of the many lullabies that her mother had once sung to her. Then she tried to relive her performances at the Odéon, where she had worked with the director, Félix Duquesnel. She had bombed her first time out (if the chill of the audience hadn’t confirmed that then certainly Duquesnel’s harsh words did), but she persevered until that time in her career was probably her happiest. The rehearsals were often the most joyous—the camaraderie and promise that the cast shared made each day so full of life. They would sneak off between acts, having impromptu football games at Luxembourg, choosing teams based on roles, and trying to stay in character throughout the match. For the first time in her life feeling sweat running across her forehead, actually tasting laughter, and always leaving the grass stains on her knees to remind her of the sweet perfume of happiness. They would run the streets back, full of laughter and conceit, unknown to the world, but certain that their anonymity would be temporary. Mariette in François le Champi had been her real breakthrough. Nobody at the Odéon was afraid to tell her how good she had been, in fact they had rooted for her, stood in the wings, cheering her along with the crowd. And the crew encouraged her in Le Marquis de Villemer when Duquesnel had cast her as a baroness nearly twice her age. The rest of the ensemble called her Madame during the football games, and begged her royal pardon at all times. And she played it to the hilt. Even convincing herself that she was a middle-aged baroness on the verge of dementia, losing herself to her character, unable to see Duquesnel’s smiles and encouragement when her character stormed off the stage, needing to open the stage door and let the cool breezes slap the Sarah back into her. If she had known how her life would turn out, she may never have left those days whe
n the purity of the form was all that mattered. But, despite the camaraderie and seriousness, there was an implied drive for success. The cream always rises to the top is constantly whispered in your ear. That the real reason to hone your craft is in order to be a star. Nobody at the Odéon quite knew what a star was or meant, yet that was still the aim. Despite all her successes, Sarah never felt that she had been as pure an actor as when she was with the Odéon.

  Sometimes those memories comforted her and put her right back to sleep.

  Sometimes they only served to backlight the life she had ended up with, revealing all the contradictions and terrors that faced her each day.

  Sarah couldn’t fall back to sleep that morning. She closed her eyes again, picturing the newspaper headlines from two days ago. She imagined the planning and rallying going on in that church under the same moonlight. Worst of all, she kept seeing that young promising actress named Sarah Bernhardt at the Odéon being crushed under the mountainous rubble of what she had dreamed of being.

  Ten past five. She kicked the covers off and walked into the bathroom. Bent her tired frame over to run the bath.

  VINCE BAKER SLEPT FITFULLY. The night shot up at him in flits, reminding him that he was no longer dreaming. Each time he awoke the room was deep in a purple hue. And nothing felt familiar.

  That’s a lousy hangover for you. The kind that makes you think you’re going to kick the booze forever.

  The room smelled of locked-away boxes. His compass uncertain of which direction he actually faced, having to remind himself that he was even in Los Angeles and not Phoenix or someplace in between. But as the purple began to recede, some of the familiar forms started to take shape. The outline of the pile of unpacked boxes neatly stacked, the top one edged on a slight tilt. The almost unrecognizable rectangle of his couch, where the loose threads stuck out like hair from an old man’s ear and beamed with unusual clarity. And the odd, almost phantasmal cone that he initially took for a mysterious apparition turned out to be nothing other than a pile of clothes overdue for drop-off at the Wash-Rite Laundry around the block. He sat straight up and looked to his side, where the familiar form of a female body lay under a solitary white sheet. Propped on her side, an even line from the peak of her shoulder to the curve of her hip, with the sheet sinking in four distinct wrinkle-waves. Her legs pulled back at a slight angle from her side, flowing straight down until the last bit of form was the slight crest of her foot, toeless under the sheet, cutting like a dancer’s form. He looked at her and said the name Fay, drilling it into his head, as though reinforcing their artifice of familiarity.