The Magnificent Esme Wells

by Adrienne Sharp

  And what did my mother think she would see through those windows? Perhaps she was hoping to see her parents, the two, like Peg Entwistle, clothed in the attire of another age, inhabiting those rooms. My mother once told me that as a little girl and very sick with the measles, she saw her mother’s ghost sitting quietly at the foot of her bed in the dark. Like me, my mother lost her own mother young. Perhaps that story was my inspiration, but for years after her death, I used to see my mother sitting by my bed, her dark hair grown out as long as my own, her lips St. Petersburgundy red as she whispered things to me, things I should think of, sequins, fur, fishnets, feathers. It never surprised me that those were the things she thought to tell me, trivial showgirl things.

  Maybe she believed, as I did at age six, that even though we and my grandfather were gone, somehow the interior of the house had remained intact, a stage set waiting for the players’ return. This was contrary to all evidence, of course. I had seen my grandfather’s old-fashioned furnishings sold by my avaricious parents, but despite that, the house and its props remained in place, intact in my mind. Everything about it looked the same from the outside. The dark green trim, the red paint on the cement steps leading to the porch, the hydrangea bushes paired like sentinels, some of the giant blossoms browning in the fierce early August heat.

  My grandfather’s hat was surely laid on the dining-room table next to his newspaper, the Daily Forward, which my grandfather would take with him to the drugstore to serve as an eye chart while he tried on reading glasses, I, functioning as his assistant, Miss Esme, holding up all the various magnifications for him. This one? No. This one? His paper was always folded into a long lean crisp, the latest reading glasses next to it, magnification 3.5. My grandfather went to his office every morning at seven o’clock except Saturday. Behind the swinging door that divided the dining room from the kitchen stood Gertrude, the Negro maid, the polisher of all this furniture and the secretary to all this routine and clattering dishes.

  I used to snoop through my grandfather’s study as a little girl, looking in desk drawers at my grandparents’ old boat tickets for the SS Adria, the two of them sailing to America on October 8, 1889, on the Hamburg America line, marveling at their exotic journey and at the neat rubber-banded stack of bank deposit receipts that showed the money my grandfather deposited week after week into his checking account, the small amounts deposited over and over again with such predictable regularity, not the one big jackpot here and there that fell into my father’s hands, but many small purses every Friday, and at rings thick with silver and copper keys, some of the keys so old and so weird-looking and so tarnished that I figured they must be keys for locks long lost or never opened. One of those, I had been sure, must be the lock that held my grandmother’s jewelry safe from my parents’ hands and on which my parents pounced only after my grandfather’s death.

  On the day of my grandfather’s funeral, I had been left behind with Gertrude, and when my parents came home they couldn’t find me for the longest time, my mother weeping and calling my name, thinking she’d lost me, too. But I was there. I had crawled under my grandfather’s bed and fallen asleep, both my hands slipped into one of my grandfather’s gloves, the soft black leather glove with its soft fur lining. Why did he own these? In the overheated basin of Los Angeles there could be only a week’s worth of wearing such a glove. And I remembered, too, how that night my mother had labored so mightily to persuade me to drink my bedtime glass of warm milk, but as she had served it to me, unthinkingly, in a glass used for memorial candles, I had refused it, no matter how many times she sang an old Nestle’s milk ad from the 1920s to a tune of her own invention.

  Thanks for your feed of Nestle’s milk.

  It did me good—my coat’s like silk.

  And now I’m sound in limb and brain.

  I’ll never drink skim milk again.

  She twirled around the kitchen, putting on a big show, playing at being a cat, her black hair flying. I refused to drink because drinking that milk was like drinking down Death. Plus, she was acting so strangely. At the end of it, she’d said, “Fine,” and drank my milk herself. “Happy?”

  No.

  There had been something almost hysterical about her that night that had unnerved me even more than the milk served in a glass that had once held a candle for the dead. Her frenetic cat-like movements, her creepy eyes lit as if they were stealing light from the big orange moon resting in the purple horizon to the east. At some point that night, she went quiet, all the chatter chatter chatter of that evening gone still. Soon after, she’d been taken to the hospital and from there to yet another hospital, the one up in Camarillo.

  So, whatever it was my mother had hoped to see now through the windows of her old house, she did not see. Her parents were both dead. All the furniture had been sold. By my parents. And so had the house. By my parents. A new family lived there now, with their own furniture, their own lives. Another child’s orange-crate scooter lay on its side on the lawn. And while we paused there, car at the curb, gawking, a woman in a duster came out onto the porch to water her potted plants.

  Stupendously, surprisingly, my mother started to cry, which was not at all the response my father had expected from the sweep of his arm, all this is here for your pleasure, peruse your past and be comforted. Now his foot sputtered on the gas pedal. When we moved away from Boyle Heights, my mother’s sorrow had seemed not to chase her. Now, we were returning her to it. I stared open-mouthed as my mother’s face became marked with black tears, which all the speed in the world could not reverse. The Cadillac, and the truck behind us, turned north.

  13

  While Winter Street might no longer be our street, Soto Street, a lesser street, was. My father turned up Soto for a few blocks and then waved the truck up the driveway of a small two-story house that didn’t look all that much different from our bungalow in Hollywood. Spanish-style. What building in Los Angeles didn’t at least make a nod to the Spanish padres? This house had all the tropes. It was stucco. Brown. Green shutters and black ironwork. The paint on the railings was peeling. And in the back, I would discover, a strip of grass with a dead fountain. And beyond it, two streets over, the Sisters Orphan Home, a redbrick Romanesque monument to the Depression, which had parents leaving off their children there, children that they could no longer afford to feed. Visiting hours Sunday.

  Our chairs teetered and our dressers rocked as the truck lurched its way along the cracked drive toward the back of the house, two Japanese men jumping out before the truck had even gotten all the way there to start unloading. My mother slid out of the car in her pretty sleeveless dress and stood at the curb, squinting at the building. My father and I remained in the car. He looked over at me and gave me a wink. “Let’s give her a minute,” he said. I nodded, but I didn’t think a minute was going to change anything. He gazed conspicuously down Soto Street.

  There was nothing to see. My father was stalling. It wasn’t about giving my mother some private time. My father just didn’t want to live through the next few minutes. Or the next few weeks. I didn’t either. If I’m remembering correctly, he did a crossword puzzle, though where he would have gotten the newspaper and a pencil, I don’t know.

  When he figured he’d given her enough privacy, he put the paper down, said to me, “Ready?” so I knew I had to get out of the car, too, the little child that would keep my mother from killing him. He got out of the car and walked jauntily toward her. You had to admire his spirit. I followed him. Reluctantly. Scraping the sides of my shoes on the concrete, as if that might retard my progress.

  As we approached my mother, she turned away from us and said, “I can’t live here.”

  And to that, my father said only, “Yes, you can,” lit another cigarette from a fresh pack of Chesterfields, took out his snappy little lighter and walked off in the direction of the truck, and disappeared from view.

  Now it was just us two.

  My mother crossed her lithe little arms across her ch
est. She had her deciding face on, as in deciding how much more resistance to put up, how much more of a fit to throw. I think I tugged at her elbow to make her arms uncross. All I wanted was for her to go quietly inside and start telling the men where to put our furniture. But I knew that she wouldn’t. Not right away, anyway. Because the minute my mother went inside this new house, it would mean my father had won, that my mother would have to live here. As long as she stood out here by the car, that future was in doubt.

  But what else could we do? Go back to Orange Street or the Hollyhock Motel? No, we could not. Go back in time and return to my grandfather’s house? No, we could not. And that was why my father had already gone around to the truck. To settle it. So it was settled. My father left us on the drive because he would otherwise have to deal with my mother with her purse in her hand, snapping it closed with a click of finality, saying, We’re going back to that motel until you find us a better place. To which my father would say, You think I can get us a palace with the size of that diamond, and my mother would answer, Are you referring to the diamond you bought me?, a variation of a fight I had heard them have many times before. So why would he come check on us? I wouldn’t. My mother could stand out here until nighttime with her arms crossed over her chest, pouting with her red lips and gazing at her unadorned ring finger, stand here until the moon rose and all the stars trembled in the sky, but it was settled. There was no one in heaven or on earth to help her. There was only my father. My grandfather had once been the central pivot on which her life balanced and turned. Now, without him, only my father remained, my father, who had tugged her life out of orbit, and me, a small satellite of no help at all.

  In fact, I was a burden.

  As we stood there, she and I, the Japanese men began carting my parents’ bedroom set up the drive and shoving it piece by piece through the front door. I watched my parents’ bed, central to all operations, go by. Even as a child, I could sense their bed was the locus of some powerful joyous force that worked like gravity to hold us all together, and yet, conversely, theirs was also a private society that excluded me. I was both in the club and outside it. But that night at bedtime, my father was also out.

  Because when he came upstairs, grimy and exhausted, my mother said, “There’s no room for you here. You can fix yourself a place to sleep out in the garage.”

  My father stared at her for a moment, and I could see the flush rising up my father’s face from his neck, as if he had been infused with a vial of red dye plugged directly into his heart.

  I understood. My father had to be punished. She could not move into this dump with the money her ring had bought—or so she thought—and let him get off scot-free, let him brush his teeth vigorously before the tin metal mirror in the bathroom, and then pop into the champagne-colored bed with her in the master bedroom, that bedroom small by any measure but dwarfed further by the size of the suite crowded into it. No. She might not be able to refuse to live in this house or to insist that she and I sleep in the Cadillac until my father came up with something better, but she could refuse him entry to her bedroom. He would have new quarters. The garage would be his punishment, the couch we couldn’t fit into our living room, his bed. This arrangement was not entirely novel. The last year or so we were living at my grandfather’s, when my father’s obsessive gambling had so enraged my grandfather that he could no longer stand to have my father anywhere in the house, the garage had become my father’s bunkhouse. My mother would have to visit him out there, bring him his dinner plate.

  I looked up at my father. What would he do? Usually, he never listened to my mother, ignored three-quarters of the ideas she came up with, but this time, this time, my father picked up a pillow and carted it off.

  14

  I watched him cross the backyard, pass the dead fountain, slide open one of the wooden doors of the garage, and disappear inside the rickety stucco box that would now house his exile. A light went on, courtesy of a bare bulb with a long string you yanked. My father was smoking, I could tell, for the fog from his cigarettes rose up and seeped through the crack at the top of the garage doors. The moon also rose, above me, a big white moon like a baby’s face in the sky, its light flowing down over my body like spilled milk. I was hungry.

  I stood still on that scrap of a lawn and concrete. Two birds skittered around in the leaf-filled fountain, looking for a bath, but there was nothing for them there, no water, just dried detritus. An orange tree stood beside me, and I pulled a piece of its fruit from a branch and peeled it to eat. It was sour. I turned to check on my mother. She was still safely in the house. I could see her though the bedroom window. My father, still smoking.

  It was as if each of them had spun a cocoon, leaving me unattended and unencumbered. For all they knew, beyond their strange opaque busywork, I could vanish from this spot, run across the Sixth Street Bridge and swim like a dark mermaid along the shallow river. It looked like a small creek now, a rivulet. But last year, during an early spring storm, that rivulet had become a torrent. Mud and rainwater cascaded down the San Gabriel Mountains, ran north, south, east, and west. The towns of Anaheim and Santa Ana and Agua Mansa in the east were submerged entirely. Valley farmland in the north disappeared. All over Los Angeles, south of downtown and west to the beaches, buildings and bridges collapsed and streets turned to waterways. Boulders taller than stranded cars rolled on the roadways beside them. The fronts of houses were sheared off, the water drowning sleeping animals and people before dragging their bodies away in the current.

  My parents that night seemed to be preparing themselves, each in his own way, for futures they dreaded and yet found themselves unwillingly dragged toward, and I couldn’t help but wonder what future lay ahead for me. Maybe this was the end of all the magical leisure to which I had become accustomed and which other children were customarily denied, and I would now have to go to school and become an ordinary person.

  There was no greater debasement in our family. Neither of my parents ever wanted to be ordinary and it was doubtful, I thought, that they could love me if I were. I was the darling baby doll on the studio lot, the tiny baby stooper at the track, the misshapen dream of two reckless parents. If my parents were now en route to disaster, surely I would follow them there, as well, all the way down to a desk at the local school and a dunce cap, tall and pointy, for my head.

  But I needn’t have worried. There would be no classroom or dunce cap dangling there yet in my future, though it might have been better for me if there had been.

  15

  Luckily for me, Buzz never minded my being on his soundstage, because in the morning, my mother and I drove off together in our Cadillac to MGM, leaving my father to snap on his brand-new painter’s coveralls and walk by himself over to the offices of Wolfkowitz Paint Co., which had kept my grandfather’s name. Could have been Wolfkowitz & Son Paint Co. But it wasn’t. There, unlike the track, I couldn’t tag along with him, at least not yet, anyway, not on his first day.

  My mother was quiet, wearing lipstick and a lot of bangles that made the only noise inside the car, and she kept her lips pursed as she drove. Her thinking face. I could tell she was plotting. MGM was planning a new Busby Berkeley picture, Strike Up the Band, and Buzz would need 115 dancers for the movie’s biggest number, “Do the La Conga.” Paul Whiteman and his orchestra would be playing at the Riverwood High School dance and a band called Six Hits and a Miss would be singing, and Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney would star in the film because the Babes daily rushes were looking so good that Louis B. Mayer laid down a commandment that the two should be featured in another vehicle. I figured my mother was probably angling for a real speaking role in Band, picturing herself on the soundstage in that yellow bomb of light, face flowering before the big, sun-greedy cameras. For eight years my mother had been, like so many others, the chorus girl who hadn’t broken from the pack, and with Buzz’s rising fortunes, perhaps she was hoping so would rise her own. And for that she needed a screen test.

  Wh
en we arrived at the studio gate, she turned to look at me, and I expected her to tell me then her secret plan to beg a screen test from Buzz, the two of us in cahoots, but instead she frowned at me and said, “You need a haircut,” as if the thought that my hair should be cut had never before occurred to her nor had the fact that she should be the one to do it. She wrinkled her nose at me. “Your hair’s as long as a little gypsy’s. And it smells.” Again, my fault. And, of course, in imitation of her, I wore my own sheath of necklaces and wrist bangles so I probably did look like a little gypsy. And smelled like one. And I had thought I looked like a movie star today. I slunk lower in my seat, ashamed beyond measure, and I couldn’t bring myself to wave, as I usually did, to the guard at the gate.

  I think the reason Buzz never minded having me around was because he, too, had been a little urchin child who followed his actress mother from theater to theater, from show to show, a baby who slept in a dresser drawer turned bassinet in her dressing room. And so he allowed my presence. In fact, he almost always brought some toy for me to amuse myself with while they worked, as if the show in front of me wasn’t amusement enough. I remember miniature garden furniture made of clothespins, a cheap carnival Kewpie doll with a thick swatch of yellow hair, and today on the set he handed me a colorful paper bird with sticks to work the wings. In between takes, I played with it, made it swoop and fly. During takes, I used the sticks to close the bird’s wings, stroked it to sleep so it would be quiet, put the bird in my dress pocket. Sometimes I would write Buzz’s name as my mother had taught me on a piece of paper and keep it in my pocket, too, as if I could put him there, as well, all those z’s a comforting snore.

  Is it possible for a little girl to be in love with a grown man? Apparently. This was my specialty.