The Magnificent Esme Wells

by Adrienne Sharp

  He looked at me, at the gentle clatter. “What’s that?”

  “I pawned one of my necklaces tonight,” I told him, “just enough to get you out of here. The rest is worth at least thirty thousand dollars.” I put the purse down on the hood of his car. As if to say, Take it. This is for you.

  Not what he’d wanted, not what he’d scraped from the counting room. But it was something. With it, he could reconfigure his scheme, last minute, on the run, seat of his pants. Not ideal. But he was good at this. He’d had lots of practice. He put his hat back on. He studied me, impressed. Impressed that I was like him, the old Ike, unstoppable schemer.

  “All right, Esme. All right. You go home and pack. I’m gonna get going, and I’ll wait for you in Los Angeles, at the train station, and we’ll head out together. Plan was we were driving out of here, rich. What you’ve got isn’t a fortune, but it’ll do. It’ll get us to Mexico City.”

  “Mexico City?”

  “New plan.”

  I knew what the new plan was. Same as the old. I’d already lived it. Horses and cards.

  But he surprised me. “Maybe your grandfather was right all along, Esme. Better a shopkeeper than a big boy.”

  Okay, so maybe no horses, no cards.

  A shop instead. A cash register. Boxes, cans, and bottles on shelves. Better, maybe. Safer, certainly. But how long before my father tired of dusting tin cans and putting pesos in the till and ran off with some of that money to the Hipódromo de las Américas to put it all down on a quarter horse?

  He’d be a shopkeeper for about a Mexican minute.

  “We’ll build ourselves a house on a hill over Mexico City, baby girl, on El Dorado Road.”

  Hollywoodland.

  When he put his arms around me he felt huge to me, a giant, albeit one that stank of anxious sweat. I clung to him, inhaling the scent of him, the panic, the aftershave, the French cologne, and the Chesterfields, suddenly overcome because he was alive and because though I held him now, I wasn’t sure when I would again. But he was impatient with me, with my clinging, and he pulled back. Or maybe he was simply in a hurry, business to attend to.

  “You keep the cash from your necklace,” he said. “I’ll take this.” He picked up my purse from the hood of the car, gave me a salute, two fingers to his forehead. “I’ll see you soon, baby girl. Go home. Pack. Los Angeles. Union Station.”

  The station he’d arrived at twenty years ago, called River Station then.

  “I don’t know, Daddy,” I said.

  “Sure you do, baby doll. I’ll be waiting.”

  And then he got into his car and drove down the hill.

  60

  I waited while the moon dropped slowly behind the mountains to the west and seemingly in counterpoint a pinkish light began to suffuse the sky. I slipped my hand into my coat pocket. Because, of course, I hadn’t given my father everything, every single piece of jewelry I owned. My fingers blind in my dark pocket figured out the clasp of the leather box, out from which I brought my mother’s ring, which I held up while I examined the enormous diamond surrounded by all the little diamonds, baby spiders crowding around the big mother spider, pregnant in the middle. I turned the stone, the tiny flames imprisoned in its many facets flaring up, pinkish, then vanishing.

  If only my mother had had the baby she was carrying in 1939. Then I wouldn’t be alone here now. The four of us would still be living in Los Angeles. If only we had stayed in my grandfather’s house instead of moving all over town. If only my mother had been a different person, a Betty Crocker. Okay, a glamorous Betty Crocker. If only she had made my father take over my grandfather’s painting business and renamed it, made it his own, say, called it Wolfkowitz and Son-in-Law, or, better, the Silver Brush. But my mother wasn’t that kind of a person and if she had been, my father wouldn’t have fallen in love with her. Still. What if she had been? What if we had moved up to the new tract houses in the Valley alongside all the other young Jews when they crawled out of Boyle Heights after the war, leaving the older generation behind? There, my little brother, thirteen years old by now, would be riding his bicycle along Hazeltine Avenue, my father running his Veterans Taxi, my mother, a Harriet Nelson housewife by day, a club act by night. And I, who knows what I would be, but I wouldn’t be this, wouldn’t be here. If only we’d done any one of those things, my father and I would never have found ourselves in Vegas. And now running from it. If only. What if. I put the ring back into its box and closed it.

  I had been this alone only once before, after my father had dropped me off at the Sisters Orphan Home in September 1939, the day after my mother’s funeral. She’d been buried next to her father and mother, in Evergreen Cemetery, in the Boyle Heights she’d wanted so much to escape. With my mother’s death, my father had become the chattering doll grief had once made my mother, insane, saying over and over, “They took her from me, took her from me just like she was nothing,” incapable of taking care of me, weeping and packing random clothes and toys into a suitcase and dropping me off in the middle of the night at the Seventh Street Sisters Orphan Home in Boyle Heights you could see from our backyard, four stories, with a bell tower at its center just like the one at Camarillo, the orphan home where he would leave me for six long months without a word of explanation. It was one big blow to me following another.

  It was all dark that night he dropped me off, and no one was there at the Home. He’d wanted to just leave me off on the step, as if I were a baby in swaddling clothes some wayward Catholic girl might deposit at a convent door, but the night watchman told my father all the construction on Sixth Street had damaged the foundations of the Home and now the children slept at night at St. Vincent’s Hospital. So my father carried me back to the car and drove the few blocks to the hospital, so determined was he to rid himself of me that he made the choice a second time over, palming me off on a nun with a wimple big as a serving bowl and just as white who led me down into a makeshift basement dormitory room and past a long row of beds with a coursework of pipes hanging thickly above us from the low ceiling. The children were all sleeping and so she had me step quietly, and she held one finger to her mouth, a signal for me not to speak. Not that I could have. I was too bewildered to have anything to say.

  I’m not sure I spoke a word my entire six months there. I found out later my father had left me far behind, had gone back to Baltimore, to the family that must have been missing him, as I was, his old family in the East that didn’t know anything about his new family out West. If I had known how far he’d gone from me, I think I would have died. As it was I’d already gone mute with shock.

  Because of my impetigo, the nuns had bandaged my arms like a mummy’s, and they had shaved off my hair, saying it was too full of bugs and tangles to bother with. I had no idea if my father would ever return for me or if he would recognize me when he did. I certainly looked like no version of myself I had ever seen before. But when he did return for me, suddenly, without warning or fanfare, he recognized me at once. I still remember how he looked walking through the tall doorway, with a jaunty step as if a tall doorway could not dwarf him nor his action of six months ago shame him, taking off his fedora and stooping down to me, hand out, certain that after all this time, I would run to him and grab his hand, which, of course, I did.

  After all, you have only one great love.

  I couldn’t be left behind again. To be without my father was simply unbearable for me. And if I were going with him, as his apprentice escape artist, I might as well go with him now, while I still could, before Nate could tighten the ropes at my neck and wrists and belly any further.

  I got into my car, turned it carefully around, and headed back down the hill. He couldn’t have been gone more than five minutes, starting his flight across the desert, likely to be singing to his radio, preparing for his next great adventure, once again, the unformed future.

  61

  Maybe a hundred yards from the bottom of the hill, I saw my father’s Dodge Dart parked at the
side of the road, driver’s door wide open, but no driver in sight, motor running, headlights on but boring into nothing now that the sun had just begun to rise. I pulled up behind the Dart and turned off my car. No one. Nothing. Dirt and brush. I got out and looked around me. Nothing. No sound. And then I looked back and in the red gloaming of my taillights, I saw the tire marks of a second car, not mine, mine being the third, a second car that had veered off the road onto this shoulder and stopped behind my father’s. Had he thought that car was mine, that I had decided to follow him right now, this minute, tonight, just as I had? After all, he knew me as well as I knew him.

  The treads were crisp, recent, the wind not having yet had a chance to blur or efface them.

  Wobbling a bit in my high heels, I walked up to the open door of the Dart and turned off the ignition. The keys had been left in the car but there was not a single other personal item within it, not the fedora my father had been wearing, not his plaid muffler, not his leather gloves. I leaned in. And that’s when I saw my purse, fat as a baby, sitting there on the front seat. I pulled the purse toward me. Still heavy. Still chockfull of rings and necklaces and bracelets and earrings. It hadn’t been overlooked. Whoever had taken my father had left it there for me to see, along with the car, whenever I came down the mountain. And then I saw that my esme necklace, the one I’d pawned not two hours ago, had been reclaimed from that pawnshop near the Golden Nugget and had been strung over the steering wheel, my name dangling just beneath the horn, the letters pavéd with diamonds. e.s.m.e.

  And abruptly, I had to sit down on the ground. Inside my coat, I was all wet.

  Ten minutes went by. Fifteen. Nothing. Dark. Quiet. Animals scrambling in the brush. Lizards. Rats. Bats. Raccoons. Ants.

  I waited. Come and get me, I thought.

  But nobody came. Slowly I understood nobody would.

  And while I sat there, dumb as a doll, sprawled in the brambles and grit, my back against my father’s open car door, a bomb went off miles northwest of the Strip. Its specter rose into the sky in silent opposition to the sun, which was itself rising up over Lake Las Vegas and the Vegas Wash and sending the shadow thrown by the mountains down over the valley floor. I watched the sun tick instant by instant higher in the sky until the shadows across the valley floor shrank away and the dust created by the great explosion spread far and wide. And the red ball of the explosion shifted in the wind, one red eye above the dusty earth opposite the yellow eye of the sun.

  62

  An hour went by before I could stand. By then I could just make out the motor courts and the columnar towers of the Strip, the little blue swimming pools, the miniature suburban neighborhoods, everything flat and small in the just-there light.

  So it looked as if my father hadn’t left this place, after all. Well then, let him stay, let him lie somewhere in this godforsaken valley. I’d never know where. In a thousand years, his bones, bleached and clean, might be found next to those of the mammoths and tigers, that is, if the atomic bombs didn’t first incinerate every trace of us.

  In the pocket of my coat I felt again for my mother’s diamond ring, slid the ring onto my finger. Then I climbed back into my big black Ambassador, headed down to the bottom of the hill, and drove away from all the dirty radiant light.

  Author’s Note

  Readers familiar with the history of early Las Vegas will note that I have compressed events of the 1950s into the space of a few early years of that decade. As well, much, but not all, of the actions the historical personages take in this novel are based in fact, unless, of course, for reasons of story, I required them to do otherwise.

  Acknowledgments

  I’d like to thank my backstage personnel: my extraordinary editor, Sara Nelson, who loved this show from the moment the curtain went up; my agent, the amazing Gail Hochman, who sat through its dress rehearsals; and my husband, Todd, and my children, Madeleine and Aaron, my all-too-fabulous crew.

  About the Author

  Adrienne Sharp is the critically acclaimed author of the story collection White Swan, Black Swan and the novels The Sleeping Beauty and The True Memoirs of Little K, which was translated into six languages. Her short fiction has appeared most recently in the New England Review and Lilith.

  Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.

  Also by Adrienne Sharp

  The True Memoirs of Little K

  The Sleeping Beauty

  White Swan, Black Swan

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  An excerpt from this work appeared in Lilith magazine under the title “In Vegas, That Day.”

  Rights to “Near You,” words by Kermit Goell, music by Francis Craig, copyright 1947, granted by permission of Alfred Music.

  the magnificent esme wells. Copyright © 2018 by Adrienne Sharp. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  first edition

  Cover design by James Iacobelli

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

  Digital Edition APRIL 2018 ISBN: 978-0-06-268481-3

  Print ISBN: 978-0-06-268483-7

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