The Garden on Sunset

by Martin Turnbull

  Kathryn shook Ritchie’s hand.

  “I’ve been here since five this morning, so I’ve got a spot up near the front. You all want to join me?”

  They picked their way past families on picnic blankets, workers in overalls, Great War veterans corseted into their uniforms, marines with bayonets and a tidy German family armed with bratwurst and bread rolls. After what seemed more like a trek across the Rockies than a walk through a field a stone’s throw from Venice Beach, they arrived at Ritchie’s oasis.

  Ritchie’s friends were fellow waiters who’d called in sick too. Ritchie pointed through the crowd at the perimeter the authorities had erected; his site was about a dozen feet away. Given that the Graf Zeppelin was seven hundred feet long, the two-hundred-foot perimeter struck Kathryn as more symbolic than safe.

  “You see that?” Ritchie pointed to a low platform made of milk crates. On top of it sat a camera with the Movietone News logo painted on its side. A cameraman in a tartan beret was tilting the camera to the sky, moving it slowly to the ground, then back up again.

  “You could tell them you’re a soda heiress from Chicago,” Ritchie suggested. “Those Movietone guys love that sort of stuff. Do you think you could dance the Charleston in those heels?”

  “In this dirt? Honey, I could dance the Charleston if you blindfolded me, put me on stilts and shoved me into Lake Okeechobee.”

  Kathryn watched Gwendolyn and Ritchie squeeze their way closer to the camera, then looked at the people around her. Folks from all walks of life had gathered to witness a miracle of the modern age. How anybody could build something so large and fly it around the world in less than a month was beyond her. She pulled out her notebook and started recording her impressions. She took in the lines on people’s faces, the light in their eyes as they scrutinized the skies, hoping to be the first one to spot the approaching airship.

  A man in a dark, tailored suit caught her eye. He looked satisfied with himself, like he’d just had a close shave and a hot towel facial. He stood there with his hands in his pockets, his serene expression angled up to the sky.

  Kathryn nudged one of Ritchie’s friends and pointed out the guy in the suit. “Don’t suppose you know who that is.”

  The waiter only needed a glance. “That’s Billy Wilkerson. He’s at the Derby a few times a month.”

  “Does he work for one of the studios?”

  “Bootlegger, I think. Or a gambler. Throws his money around like he is. Always leaves a big tip. Left me ten bucks once. But he’s going legit.”

  “Doing what?”

  “I overheard him telling some studio big shot that he’s starting a newspaper. Going to call it the Hollywood Reporter.”

  “LOOK!” a woman screamed. “I think I see it! Is that it? There!

  Forty thousand heads turned as one toward the ocean. With the grace of a swan, the airship emerged from a cloud and headed toward them. The crowd let out a cheer that startled a hoard of seagulls into the air and sent them screeching toward the water. The massive vessel was about a mile away now, and moved so smoothly and quietly that even when the crowd hushed, it couldn’t be heard. When the sun broke through the clouds, it lit up the gray zeppelin and made it gleam like molten silver. The crowd erupted in applause.

  Kathryn stole a glance at Billy Wilkerson. He wasn’t waving any flags; he wasn’t even watching the airship. He was looking at the people around him, almost as though he were a camera himself. She broke away from Marcus and threaded a path the long way around until she was standing next to Wilkerson. He was a tall chap with the posture of a tango dancer and black hair that was starting to recede. His clothes were crisp and probably put together by a valet.

  “I don’t know which is more incredible,” Kathryn declared. “The sight of this magnificent zeppelin or the sight of this crowd coming together as one. I’ve never seen anything quite like it.” Wilkerson smiled and nodded, but kept his eyes on the crowd. She went on. “I hope the newspaper reports are able to capture the feeling of what it’s like to be here.” He smiled and nodded again. She decided to take a risk. “I think I know you. Wilkerson, isn’t it?”

  He finally looked down at her. “Yes, that’s right.”

  “We shared a blackjack table on the Rex.”

  California law prohibited games of chance for three miles off the coast, but a few casino boats had cast anchor just outside the grasp of the Los Angeles vice squad. The Rex was the best-known of the lot.

  “Was it recently?” Wilkerson asked.

  Kathryn was poised to launch into an unlikely tale when the crowd let out a gasp. The Graf Zeppelin was barely ten feet from the restraining mast when a gust of wind blew up from the east and barreled over the field. It hit the airship along its flank and swept the ship over the heads of the southern section of the crowd.

  “It’s supposed to resist a wind like that,” Wilkerson murmured.

  The crowd scattered like startled deer. The zeppelin was still a good hundred feet above them, but standing below a whale-sized vessel filled with flammable gas suddenly seemed like a bad idea. People started shoving their way out, ignoring the chief of police’s commands for calm and order over the loud speaker system.

  Kathryn turned to Wilkerson, but he was gone. By the time she’d rejoined Marcus the airship had righted itself and was inching its way to the mast amid a round of applause.

  “God love her,” Marcus said. His eyes were on Gwendolyn, who was Charlestoning for the camera like a woman possessed. “Even when the zeppelin lost its bearings, she kept dancing.” He let out a chuckle. “You know that she’s going to insist we go to every theater in Hollywood until we see her up on the screen.”

  Kathryn nodded, but she barely saw Gwendolyn. A new daily trade paper! To fill a whole newspaper every day, they were going to need reporters, and lots of them.

  CHAPTER 15

  The sound of rain always reminded Marcus of home. The way the fat drops splattered onto the rooftop, light at first and then pounding against the shingles. It was a comforting sound that made him feel safe, even through the spiteful Pennsylvania winters

  Marcus hadn’t heard rain in nearly a year. So when he woke one Sunday morning and heard it beating against the window, he was flooded with memories. He thought of the elm tree in his parents’ front yard, how its leaves must be turning red and gold and starting to fall. The backyard pumpkin patch would be on its way to Halloween fullness, and his father would be checking the snow shovel’s blade.

  Still half asleep, Marcus indulged in an early morning fantasy of what he might be doing right now if his father and the mayor had walked into the town’s jail an hour later than they had that night. He’d probably be roaming the creek on the far side of town with Dwight, the way they used to. Or maybe he’d be romping inside the Adler’s back door and his mom would be offering to make waffles. Oh boy, her waffles were the cat’s meow. He sighed into his pillow and pushed thoughts of his mom out of his mind. He’d come to learn that dwelling on her for too long invariably led to excessive amounts of bootleg.

  When the rain had spent itself against his small window pane, it was past nine o’clock. He slid out of bed, pulled on his robe and opened the door to retrieve the Sunday Times. Instead, he found Jake, the Garden of Allah’s middle-aged bellboy crouching outside his door with a cardboard box in his hands.

  Jake squeezed his eyes shut like it would make him invisible. “Damn,” he said. “You weren’t supposed to see me here.”

  “What have you got there?”

  Jake’s knees cracked as he stood up. He looked from the box in his hands to Marcus, and handed it over. Marcus lifted the flap and peered inside; it was the toy rocking horse he’d bid on at Alla Nazimova’s auction over a year ago.

  “Where did this come from?” Marcus asked.

  “Can’t you just pretend you never saw me? I kinda promised . . .”

  “I’ve got some real gin in my room.”

  Jake’s mouth curled into a grin.


  Marcus reached the door of villa twenty-four and rapped three times with the brass knocker. He waited half a minute and rapped again, a little louder this time. He leaned over to the left to look through the window. The cheap lace curtain wasn’t enough to hide the figure silhouetted in the lamplight.

  “Miss Leventon?” Marcus called. “It’s Marcus Adler. I came to thank you for the rocking horse.”

  The front door slowly opened. Mariam Leventon’s face was starting to line with age, but her smile was warm. Her hair was gathered in a loose bun at the nape of her neck, as though it were too much work to keep it neatly in place.

  “Either you are the world’s greatest sleuth, or Jake the bellboy cannot keep a promise.” She sounded vaguely European.

  “It might be worth remembering,” Marcus said, “that Jake the bellboy is a pushover for gin.” Her laugh was deep and throaty. “I wanted to thank you for the rocking horse.”

  Miss Leventon opened her door a little wider. “I’m making orange blossom tea. Would you like some?”

  “I don’t believe I’ve ever had it, but it sounds delicious.”

  Miss Leventon’s villa was as full of shadow as Kathryn and Gwendolyn’s was full of light. Where the girls had a full dining set, Miss Leventon had two chairs tucked into a small parlor table. The girls’ living room held two sofas, an armchair, and a coffee table, but here a small sofa and mismatched chair huddled around an upended beer barrel that had been painted a desperately cheery red. Her walls were bare, the tables were empty.

  She kept her back to him as she poured boiling water into a delicate red and white teapot. “I’m glad you like the rocking horse. I’ve regretted bidding against you that day, but at the very last minute, I found I could not part with it. My father was not a kind man, but he carved and painted that horse for me when I was a child.”

  “Your . . . father?”

  “My friend, Glesca, was so very angry with me at the auction. Kept telling me to let go of the past. I thought I had, thought I could. But I’d forgotten about Papa’s rocking horse and found it was one thing I could not surrender. I saw your face when you picked it up and it has haunted me ever since. Today I woke up in a nostalgic mood and thought to myself, Enough! Give the boy the rocking horse.”

  Marcus felt his face flush as he found his voice. “I thought you were —”

  Alla Nazimova turned around and smiled at him, letting him see the violet eyes he’d remembered a thousand times.

  “Dead?” Madame Nazimova gave a soft laugh. “No, just closer to broke than I ever thought I would be.”

  Marcus could hardly breathe. “I’m sorry to hear you’re in such financial difficulty,” he managed. He stepped up to the counter between them. “You won’t remember this, but about a dozen years ago —”

  “Diphtheria. I remember you. Very clearly.”

  Marcus could feel the color drain from his face. He needed to sit down. Alla seemed not to notice, though. She shrugged and pulled her face into a frown. “I never should have let them talk me into turning my home into a hotel. But we are all geniuses when we look backwards, no?” She set the teapot and two exquisite teacups on matching saucers onto a pewter tray–the only touch of luxury Marcus had seen–and gestured to Marcus to follow her into the living room. She settled into her armchair underneath a floor lamp with a faded crimson shade. In its suffused pink light, she looked angelic.

  “You must miss living in the big house,” Marcus said.

  “Houses. They come, they go.” Nazimova’s violet eyes pierced him. “What I miss is my 8080 Club. You heard of this, yes?”

  He shook his head.

  “It was a little bit . . . ,” her eyes narrowed slyly, “notorious.” She cut the word loose and let it float between them like a soap bubble. “It was a group of interesting people. Mae Murray, Lilyan Tashman, the Talmadge sisters. And of course, marvelous June Mathis.”

  “June Mathis?” Marcus asked. “The woman who wrote Ben-Hur?”

  “Ah, you know your writers. Madame is impressed. She wrote The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. That is how I met her. She wrote it for Valentino who was Armand Duval to my Camille. Hollywood was a very small town then. Everyone would gather in my living room to talk of important things — culture, the arts, philosophy. And of course . . . ,” she paused for half a second, “about sexuality. Endlessly we would talk!”

  “You mean a salon, like they have in Paris? Gertrude Stein and that whole crowd?”

  Madame Nazimova smiled her cat-with-cream smile and clapped her hands together. “Gertrude Stein! Exactement! And of course we discussed poetry. Ah, such passion for the poets. Do you like poetry, monsieur?”

  “Some,” Marcus replied.

  “What about Sappho? Have you read anything by Sappho?”

  Marcus had never read a poem in his life. He shook his head and wondered when he would stop feeling like a rube.

  “No?” Nazimova pulled her face into a frown. “Tsk, tsk.” She sounded like Marcus’ mother when a scolding wasn’t far away. “Sappho was the greatest poet of her age. She lived on the Greek island of Lesbos. You have heard of Lesbos, n’est-ce pas?”

  Marcus lowered his teacup to the delicate saucer on his lap. “My Greek geography isn’t really up to snuff.”

  “Sappho wrote great poems about the special sort of love that exists between one woman and another.”

  Madame Nazimova watched Marcus’ face with interest and amusement as he licked the orange-flavored sweetness from his dry lips. She had steered the conversation into an area Marcus had never wandered before. Not out loud, anyway. Same sex love. How could that ever be an appropriate conversation in public? He could hear the sound of a clock he couldn’t see anywhere. Tick-tick. Tick-tick. Tick-tick. He looked at his hands and found them drained of color. He could feel her violet eyes boring into him.

  Same sex love was the whole reason why he was tossed out of town by his own father. It’d been two whole years now but the memory of that night still gutted him. Maybe some day I’ll be able to say those words out loud, he decided, but not today.

  “Is there any more tea?” he asked.

  Nazimova reached over and poured them both some more orange blossom tea. The spicy-sweet aroma filled the lonely room. “I always see you with that girl with the pale skin and chestnut hair.”

  Marcus nodded, relieved. “Her name is Kathryn.”

  “I see much when I look out my window,” Madame Nazimova said. “And I look out of my window a lot. I like to see what goes on in my own backyard.” She lifted a shoulder and made a self-deprecating chuckle. “Used to be my backyard. But your Kathryn, she is very smart, yes? And the pretty one she lives with. Tall with the blonde hair. The dressmaker. You are all very good friends.”

  “Yes, we are. I’m very thankful —”

  “It is important to have good friends. Especially when you are so far from home.” Nazimova offered him another enigmatic smile. “So, what do you do for a living, Mister Marcus Adler?”

  “I deliver telegrams for Western Union.”

  “Do you enjoy this work?”

  “It’s a job. But it takes a lot out of you.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “All that pedaling around. It’ll be easier when they get around to paving all the streets. Most times I get home so exhausted that I barely have the energy to write. That’s what I really want to do.”

  “So you are a writer. Madame is not surprised to hear this. Tell me now, Monsieur Marcus, what have you written?”

  Marcus’ first attempts at writing had been the literary equivalent of playing hopscotch in the dark. They were horribly trite, but he’d persisted until he wrote a story he liked. It was about a stage hand in a Broadway theater who planted himself in the wings every night and dreamed of standing in the spotlight.

  “And what do your friends think of it?” Nazimova asked.

  “I haven’t had the courage to show it to anyone.”

  “The artist cannot fear
rejection! Fear of rejection is a fire-breathing dragon. We must fight until all the air is sucked from our lungs.” She leaned forward and fixed him with a stare. “These people, they are your friends?”

  Marcus nodded.

  “Go to them. Tell them, ‘I am a writer and this is my story.’ How will you know if your work is good if you do not give anyone a chance to reject it?” She looked at him softly. “True friends must be honest with each other. If you are not honest about who you are, how can you expect anyone to love you?”

  CHAPTER 16

  Gwendolyn gazed up at the mammoth billboard and wondered if it was too late to back out. It had sounded like an exciting adventure when she’d said yes, and God knows it was the only work she’d secured that was even remotely connected with the movie business in the whole two years she’d been in Hollywood. But now it seemed like an exercise in madness.

  “It’s taller than I’d expected,” said the girl next to her. She looked even paler than the white sailor suit they all wore. She fingered the red, white, and blue feathered hat in her hand.

  “Never mind that,” Gwendolyn said. “Take a look at that platform. I hope it’s wider than it seems.”

  Gwendolyn’s soda-heiress story hadn’t fooled the Movietone cameraman, but he was impressed enough to hook her up with his pal at MGM, who needed “ambitious, outgoing, fun-loving girls” for a brand-new endeavor. It sounded terrific on paper, especially the 175 smackers for seven nights of work. If they were willing to pay her to stand on a platform and do a little dance routine that hadn’t taken but ten minutes to learn, Gwendolyn couldn’t see any reason not to. Especially with The Hammer’s money starting to dwindle the way it was. At least she was working for MGM.

  Gwendolyn noticed Alice standing next to her, gazing up at the looming billboard. When they’d bumped into each other at the rehearsal, Alice had seemed cooler than she had at the Argyle, but tonight she was back to her usual wise-cracking self. She put her hands on her hips and scoffed. “Oh, come on, girls, where’s your gumption? This’ll be fun. A lark! Something to tell your grandchildren.”