Flipping through the stack of envelopes gave Kathryn a chance to speculate about the reason for her mother’s uncharacteristic drop-in. But any possible explanations flew from her mind when she spied a logo on the bottom envelope: Massachusetts State Registry of Vital Records and Statistics.
“I’m sorry, dear,” Francine pointed toward the front door. “Were you on your way out with Gwendolyn?”
Francine seemed so poised these days, albeit in a society matron sort of way that made her look ten years older than fifty-three. But Francine’s black and grey velvet hat didn’t sit on her head quite so straight today.
“No,” Kathryn told her. “Gwendolyn’s off to visit with Marcus. He’s under the weather.” Kathryn eyed the way her mother dropped her handbag on the dining table and didn’t seem to notice she was only holding one glove when she placed it beside the bag.
“Look, Kathryn,” Francine said, more tenderly now. “I’m sorry you don’t have any photos of your father.” Kathryn’s eyes fell on the Western Union telegram. It was inches from her mother’s white glove. “If I had packed those trunks differently and not put all our photographs in the same one, then at least you’d know what your father looked like.”
Kathryn moved over to the table and laid her pile of mail on top of the telegram. She feigned nonchalance, picked up a butter knife, and inserted it along the top of the envelope from the Massachusetts State Registry. As she withdrew the folded paper from the envelope, she heard her mother say, “Every girl deserves to know what her daddy looked like and I failed you there, and for that I am so very sorry.”
Kathryn looked up from the letter to see her mother’s eyes wet with tears. It was a foreign sight, almost jarring. Francine Massey was not a woman easily given to tears any more than she was to guilt. Kathryn grabbed her mother by the hand; she could feel it shake.
Francine lifted her chin. “Your father was very good-looking, gorgeous hair. So soft with just a little wave to it. And he had a movie-star jawline, rather like Randolph Scott in a way. His eyes were a darkish green with flecks of hazel. The kindest you ever saw. You have his eyes.”
“I do?” Kathryn felt her own eyes tear up.
Francine nodded. “And everybody liked him. Even the frosty old librarian next to the bank on Chandler Street, and she didn’t like anybody.” Kathryn looked at her mother and saw a gentleness there she hadn’t seen in a long while. “He made me feel like the luckiest girl in all of New England.”
Kathryn glanced down at the folded paper in her hand. “You want to stay for coffee?”
“Only if I’m not keeping you.”
“Tell me more.” Kathryn slid the pile of mail off the table and took it with her to the kitchen counter.
“He used to send me love poems. Maybe that’s where you got your way with words. He had an awful special way with them.”
As she waited for the kettle to boil, Kathryn unfolded the sheet of paper from Dorchester. There was no copy of a marriage certificate, just a letter stating there was no record of a Francine Mary Mae Caldecott having been married in the state of Massachusetts between 1900 and 1920.
The sound of Francine’s voice faded out for a few moments as Kathryn digested the news. There was no wedding, there had never been any marriage, and there were no photos to lose in a nonexistent trunk that never went astray.
A clap of her mother’s hands jolted her out of her revelry. “Oh!” Francine exclaimed, her hands together now as though in prayer: Please, dear God, make my daughter believe what I’m saying about this fictitious man. “And you never met anyone who could see the funny side of life like your father. His laughter, it was so infectious. If he started to laugh at something, before you knew it, he’d have the whole room laughing.”
Kathryn now saw her own mother in a whole new way. She was no longer Mother, so controlling, unforgiving, distant. She was Miss Francine Mary Mae Caldecott, an unwed mother who gave birth to a bastard and proceeded to invent an entire other life for herself. A lovely wedding in an ivory silk dress to a husband everybody loved.
Kathryn looked at her mother’s gold wedding band and wondered where she’d bought it, and if she tried to explain to the clerk behind the counter why she was buying a wedding band by herself. She half listened to Francine as she glanced through the rest of yesterday’s mail and stopped as she came to a letter marked with the official seal of the US Army. Who do I know in the army? She slit the envelope and pulled out the letter as her mother blathered on about her imaginary husband and his imaginary mother’s imaginary meatloaf. Kathryn unfolded the page.
“Katey-Potatey,” it started. Roy was the only one who called her Katey-Potatey. “Please don’t hate me, but I’ve joined the army.”
Kathryn’s eyes wandered away from Roy’s letter. Her mother’s face swam into view as the kettle on the stove started screaming. And screaming and screaming and screaming.
CHAPTER 44
It was the day before Halloween when The Maltese Falcon was ready for its premiere. The evening had chilled to the point that Gwendolyn asked to borrow Madame Alla’s chinchilla wrap again.
Gwendolyn chose Chuck as her date for the night. Chuck was tall—just a smidge over six feet—but didn’t tower threateningly over people the way Monty could. He was handsome too, albeit in a craggy, lived-in sort of way. He liked to give off a world-weary sort of charm, and standing behind the bar at the Cocoanut Grove for all these years, he’d probably seen it all. But Gwendolyn knew that inside his solidly built chest beat a kind heart. And he scrubbed up well in a tux.
The first person Gwendolyn saw when they entered the Warner Pacific Theater was The Maltese Falcon’s director, John Huston. He stood off to one side looming over Peter Lorre, the actor with the bulging eyes. A very stout man with an enormous belly stood with them, his hands fidgeting restlessly.
“Look out,” Chuck said, “here come the Battling Bogarts.”
Humphrey Bogart threaded his way through the crowd with his wife, Mayo Methot. She was an actress, blonde, with a round face punctuated by cynical eyes perfect for the sort of hard-nosed potboilers Warner Bros. built their reputation on.
As Bogie’s star climbed, hers was fading and she’d started to drink. With more liquor came more brawls. Gwendolyn and Kathryn’s current downstairs neighbor, the head waiter at Bogie’s favorite restaurant, Chasen’s, told Gwendolyn that the Bogarts kept a stack of replacement doors in their garage because they were going through them at a rate of one or two a month. Even worse, they’d taken to brawling in public, a couple of times at the Cocoanut Grove. It was dreadful to watch. Cuss words, clenched fists, flying martini glasses—one could never tell exactly when or where the next brawl might break out.
Bogart approached them, leaving his sourpuss wife to trail in his wake. “I wanted to wish you a memorable evening,” he told Gwendolyn. “It’s your first time on screen, isn’t it?”
Gwendolyn nodded. “It’s so very thoughtful of you to remember.”
“Yep,” Mayo said, “Mr. Thoughtful, 1941.” Her eyes were a touch bleary and she had overshot the edge of her mouth with her dark plum lipstick.
Bogart didn’t seem to hear his wife’s comment; his attention had been turned by the waving hand of John Huston, who wanted him to meet a girl that was rather pretty, in an overly eager sort of way, and enveloped in a heavenly white mink stole. It left Gwendolyn inhaling Mayo Methot’s brandy breath.
“Looks like everybody’s shown up for the big night,” Gwendolyn said.
Mayo harrumphed. “Another fucking evening smiling in a corset. Big frickin’ whoop-de-do.”
Gwendolyn maintained her smile and cast around for an escape route. The auditorium’s doors weren’t open yet and a growing throng filled the foyer with animated banter. Where did Chuck get to? And for that matter, where were Kathryn and Marcus?
“And who the hell are you, anyway?” Mayo demanded.
“My name is Gwendolyn Brick and I play—”
Mayo started to
laugh, all throaty and cigaretted gravel. “You’re the Face of the Forties girl! I heard about you.”
Bogart reappeared and gripped his wife’s arm. “Let’s not, dear.”
“Leave me the hell—” Mayo pulled her arm free. “It’s a funny story,” she insisted.
Gwendolyn turned toward Bogart and looked at him questioningly. Bogart shook his head. “It’s not that funny,” and then, without his wife being able to see, he jutted his head away from them.
Gwendolyn mumbled, “If you’ll excuse me,” and bolted.
Flustered by Mayo’s comment more than she wanted to be, she was scanning around for Chuck, Kathryn, or Marcus when she bumped into Harlan McNamara. “There’s my girl!” he exclaimed brightly. “Big night for you, huh?”
“Yes,” Gwendolyn said. Famous Warner Bros. faces were starting to pop up like tommy guns in a gangster picture. “But what about you? Everything good?”
Harlan lit up a cigarette. “I’ve become a whore.”
Gwendolyn had never heard a guy describe himself that way before. “You have?”
“Indeed. About a year ago Jack Warner made me an offer to come work for him exclusively. How could I say no to making three times the money I was pulling in on my own? I couldn’t, so I didn’t, and now I’m a complete sell-out. A rich sell-out, I’ll grant you, but a sell-out nonetheless. Really, I’m no better than those hookers you see down the bad end of Hill Street.”
Gwendolyn didn’t know about the Hill Street hookers and didn’t want to learn how Harlan knew about them, so she changed the subject. “I just heard the strangest thing,” she said.
“What about?”
“I got trapped talking to Humphrey Bogart’s wife and she said she heard something funny about me and Face of the Forties.”
The edges of Harlan’s eyes crinkled up as he narrowed them. “What kind of something funny?”
“I thought maybe you could tell me.”
Harlan blew out a lungful of smoke and bobbed his head. “Your Face of the Forties audition, did you really lose your marbles?”
Gwendolyn blinked. “I guess there are no secrets in this town.”
“Oh, there are secrets all right, but not when it comes to that sort of thing.” Harlan licked his lips. “So? Marbles?”
“While we were all waiting, I needed a moment to gather myself together, so I ducked behind some scenery. That’s when I overheard a confession from someone I thought was a friend. Turns out she’s been trying to sabotage me at every turn. I was still kind of in shock when my turn was called. So, what did you hear, exactly?”
Harlan waved a hand through his cigarette smoke. “The way I hear it, every other gal there was picture perfect, dressed to the hilt, everything pulled together just so. Then you turned up, teary-eyed, blotchy mascara, looking like you were halfway through a nervous breakdown.” He leaned in so their faces were nearly touching. “It helped you stand out from the crowd. It gave you vulnerability, humanity, and genuine emotion. It got you the title, and it led to a part in what I hear has shaped up to be a damn fine movie. You ought to thank the bitch.”
Gwendolyn was still absorbing this when Chuck appeared with a box of Goo Goo Clusters in hand. “Kathryn and Marcus are inside saving our seats. You ready to go in?”
She gave Harlan a thank-you kiss and hooked her arm through Chuck’s. “Oh boy, am I ever.”
* * *
It hadn’t occurred to Gwendolyn to feel nervous until the moment the Warner Bros. shield and the fanfare came on and the title of the picture wavered onto the screen. A scroll of information followed it—something about the Knights Templar of Malta in the year fifteen-something-or-other and King Someone of Spain getting a golden falcon. The realization that she’d finally get to see herself on the screen gradually overtook her, and she lost focus somewhere around the King of Spain and asked Chuck to hold her hand.
The credits began to roll. When her name appeared, Marcus and Kathryn and Chuck clapped and whooped as loudly as they could. It was disconcerting to see her name up there. All this time, she’d never liked it—“Brick” had such a clunky feel to it—but now that she could see it projected up onto a real movie screen, she knew she’d be disappointed if some fake name had appeared in its place.
Gwendolyn squeezed Chuck’s hand even tighter when her scene started. The camera closed in on the words “SPADE AND ARCHER” stenciled on the window, silhouettes of two men outlined in the pebbled glass. The camera pulled back as the door swung open, and Humphrey Bogart and Peter Lorre walked in. Lorre closed the door behind them, looking sheepish.
“Effie, honey,” Bogart said, looking at Lee, “any messages?”
Cut to Lee sitting at her desk. Bogart was standing in front of Gwendolyn; all she could see was her own legs. Bogart and Lee exchanged some banter until Lee nodded at Gwendolyn. “Oh, and by the way, boss, this here’s my sister, Lenore. Visiting from Seattle. Be nice or there’ll be no supper for you.”
Gwendolyn held her breath as the camera swung around Bogart and moved in on her.
“That’s my sister for you,” Gwendolyn heard herself say on screen. “Efficiency is her middle name, and I can’t begin to tell you how annoying it is.” Bogart stuck his hand out and shook Gwendolyn’s. “Pleased to meet you, I’m sure,” she said, and then looked at Lee. “So this is him, huh? He ain’t so much.”
It started as a giggle. A nervous sort of chuckle, staccato and gasping. Then it began to build, deeper and fuller. She tried to hold it back but the pressure in her throat grew and grew until she was virtually choking on it. The laughter exploded out of her like an overfilled balloon and bounced around the hushed theater.
She knew people were turning around to look at her—Chuck, Marcus, and Kathryn included—but she dared not meet their stares. She struggled to swallow the laughter, ram it down into her chest, but the harder she tried, the more it resisted. It pushed against her ribs and swelled her throat until she knew she couldn’t contain herself for much longer.
“Excuse me,” she whispered to Chuck.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
Gwendolyn knew that if she said one more word, she’d embarrass herself, so she just nodded, got to her feet and excused herself down the row until she got to the aisle.
By the time she hit the doors to the foyer, there were tears in her eyes.
CHAPTER 45
The US Navy recruiting officer was about Marcus’ age but noticeably leaner. Marcus wondered if he’d intentionally chosen a uniform a size too snug. “How old are you?” he asked Marcus.
“Thirty-five.”
The officer shook his head. “The Selective Training and Service Act required only men between the ages of twenty-one and thirty register for the draft. You’re not—”
“I’m here and I want to sign up.” Marcus glanced at the brass name pinned to the sailor’s chest. “Ensign Hulsey, it’s not like you’re being overrun with volunteers.” From the well-thumbed newspaper sitting beside him, it looked like Marcus had been this guy’s first customer all day.
Hulsey gave Marcus a leery look and pulled out his rubber stamp. He thwacked it against Marcus’ application and pushed the paper back. “Through there, Adler.” He pointed at a door marked New Recruits. “Welcome to the US Navy.”
Marcus let out a tremulous sigh.
On the other side of the door, another sailor sat behind another desk. He wrote in a couple of boxes on Marcus’ paperwork, thwacked a different stamp on it, and gave Marcus a brass disc about the size of a dollar coin with the number 114 stamped on it. He told Marcus to take a seat until a doctor called him by number.
Ten rows of chairs, each one with at least thirty wooden seats, filled the northern half of the room. Only one seat was taken; a long-legged guy with copper hair sat at the far end, his right leg jiggling up and down with the nervous energy of an escaped con. He couldn’t have been more than eighteen. Marcus debated sitting next to him, but instinct told him to pick the last seat in the first
row. He stared at his paperwork and wondered how he’d look in a sailor’s uniform. Guys always seemed to look more handsome in them.
I ought to know, he thought. I’ve seen more than my fair share of sailors’ suits up close and personal.
The New Recruits door swung open and a doctor in a long white coat stepped out. “Number seven-oh-one,” he called without looking up from his clipboard. The doctor looked so much like Ramon—same profile, same moonless-night black hair not yet gone gray, same intense air about him—that Marcus did a double take. Of course it wasn’t Ramon, not unless Ramon Novarro had given up the stage, become a doctor, and joined the navy all in the last month.
Marcus gave out a soft grunt and muttered “ten years” under his breath for what felt like the five thousandth time. He hadn’t seen or heard from Ramon since that ugly night. Or from Hugo, either. Not that bumping into Hugo on the MGM lot was likely; Marcus spent his days churning out carbon copies of scripts that had been recycled a hundred times before. He avoided the commissary whenever possible and caught the Red Car for downtown, where he drank his evenings away at the Crown Jewel, an appropriately seedy place on Hill Street that had seen better days.
The door opened again and the same doctor walked out, his eyes still glued to his clipboard. “Number one fourteen.”
Marcus followed the doctor into a large hall divided into cubicles by white sheets. A sprinkling of uniformed personnel sat idly around. The doctor led him into one of the nearest partitions.
“I thought you’d be busier,” Marcus said.
“We’re not at war yet. You’ve beaten the rush.” The doctor studied Marcus’ papers. “Hmm,” he puzzled, and peered at Marcus for the first time.
Marcus wondered, What was I thinking? This guy looks nothing like Ramon. He could see the gray creeping through at the temples; Ramon’s posture was much straighter.
Citizen Hollywood (Hollywood's Garden of Allah novels Book 3) Page 31
