Make Believe

by Ed Ifkovic

  “No, he wouldn’t,” Alice said sharply.

  “What was I going to do?” Helpless, palms out.

  I smiled. “Obviously not sleep well at night.”

  He crushed his fedora between his fingers and reached for his pack of cigarettes. “Alice, I didn’t come to the memorial service because I felt I didn’t belong there. I wanted to. Max was my friend, but you know the way things have been lately. And I heard what Sol said at the service—how he was probably talking about me, that Yiddish stuff, eating a man’s flesh…I was told that. That’s why I want to see Sol now. On the phone he blamed me outright. He was sobbing and sobbing, talking about Max dying, about Cousin Irving and…” He breathed in. “I have no secrets, Alice.”

  “Everyone in Hollywood has secrets.” For a second she closed her eyes.

  A strange line, I thought.

  “I’m a member of America First, good people, and Sol always condemned us. Blamed us. He attacked Desmond Peake for being a member.”

  “So you are close friends with Desmond?” I asked.

  “We talk at meetings. He knew I was Max’s friend, so he kept warning me. Stay away. He told me about walking Max out of Metro.”

  Silence, no one ready to say anything, Larry fumbling with the squashed fedora.

  “Why are you here, Larry?” Alice asked again, her voice icy.

  “I told you.” He sucked in his breath. “Sol said he’d be here. I think he did. Alice, when I talked to you on the phone, you hung up on me. I need to ask you something. Sol said something about evidence that I betrayed people. Some papers. I don’t know. With Max being murdered and all…well, I thought that I…” His voice was suddenly loud. “Do you know anything about that, Alice?”

  She shook her head.

  “Why would Max have it?” I asked.

  “Sol said Max had written another letter, this time with my name in it. Naming me as a pinko.” He drove his fist into the fedora. “Years back, I signed all kinds of petitions. Me, Sol, and Max. Local politics. Innocent stuff then. But now, through the distorted lens of Washington and even the gossip queens, well, it could look bad for me.”

  Alice scoffed. “Sounds to me like Sol was trying to get under your skin, Larry. Max didn’t write another letter. I’d know.” She frowned. “Just the one that seemed to work its evil magic.”

  “Are you sure?”

  I was angry now. “Mr. Calhoun, don’t you think that this visit is in poor taste? Self-serving, granted, survival of the unfit. Your failed acting career probably resulted from your lack of timing, which everyone tells me is a necessary skill for an actor. Your being here is proof that you didn’t have a chance in hell that…”

  He stood, plopped that crumpled hat on his head. It slipped to the side, giving him a vaguely raffish look, the handsome man gone off on a lark. “Yes, it was a mistake coming here.” He viewed me with appropriate venom, which oddly pleased me. It was the reaction I wanted. Alice seemed inordinately delighted with my harangue.

  The phone was ringing. No one moved to get it. It stopped.

  He was fumbling with his pack of cigarettes. “I’m sorry, Alice. I mean it when I say I miss Max. In the early days he and I and Sol were, well, we traveled together, one man, a bond…”

  The phone rang again. Absently, Alice lifted the receiver.

  Larry was backing away, half-bowing, jittery, while I cast a baleful eye on the shallow man. He avoided eye contact with me.

  At that moment Alice screamed and dropped the phone.

  Larry jumped, spun around, kneed a coffee table. The pack of Camels sailed into the air.

  “What, Alice, what?” I rushed to her.

  She sank to her knees, swayed, covered her face with her hands, and trembled. The phone chord dangled over her, the receiver swinging back and forth.

  I touched her shoulder. “What is it, Alice?”

  She stared up at me, her face awash now in tears. “It’s Sol. He’s dead.”

  I heard a gasp and looked at Larry, a stunned look on his face. Crazily, he took off the battered fedora and then put it back on his head. It was a mindless gesture, the hat lopsided, situated now on the crown of his head so that he looked the vaudeville slapstick comic, the goofy one, the one who didn’t duck when the two-by-four swung around.

  “Tell me,” I yelled.

  But she couldn’t. Leaning over her shoulders, I reached for the receiver. For a moment I could hear nothing, then a faraway voice started to say something. “Hello?”

  “Oh my God, Edna. It’s you. It’s Lorena.”

  “Tell me.”

  Her voice shook. “I’m calling from Paramount. At work. Somebody called me here. Somebody from NBC that I’m friendly with. Harry Levy, a man…never mind. I don’t know what I’m saying, Edna. Sol’s dead. Harry just heard it from a reporter.” She sucked in her breath. “Edna, he hanged himself.”

  I looked down at Alice, bunched up on the floor. She was looking up at me, doe-eyed, pitiful, as though I’d tell her she’d misheard the awful news.

  “My God,” I whispered. “My God.”

  “He hanged himself,” Lorena repeated.

  “Edna.” Alice struggled to stand and touched my shoulder. “Tell me what happened.”

  But I was listening to Lorena. “Edna, he left a note. They found it in his room. He hanged himself with a cord, but he left the door open. The landlady found him.”

  “What did it say?” Fatigue in my voice, a dead tone, low.

  She drew in her breath. “Something about America being a place that has forgotten how to love the people who love it.”

  “Thank you, Lorena.” I replaced the receiver back in the cradle.

  “Max. Sol.” Alice rocked back and forth on her heels.

  Then, suddenly, she stopped moving and took a step toward Larry.

  “Alice, I’m sor…”

  She put out her hand, traffic-cop style, into his face. “Sol is dead, Larry.”

  Quickly. “I heard. It’s so horrible.”

  “He hanged himself.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Stop,” she yelled. “I don’t want to hear your phony sympathy now. He’s dead. Max. Sol.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Stop,” she screamed again. Then a strange smile covered her face, her eyes wild with panic. “The three musketeers are no more. Max and Sol. And Larry is left to pick up the pieces. If I remember correctly, if anything happened to one, the other two got the property they shared. The investments, small as they were. The blood-brother bond you all swore to.” She gave out a harsh, gritty laugh. “Guess what, Larry? You’re suddenly a man with a lot of money.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Ava had promised me a Southern fried chicken dinner. She called to remind me, her voice a rumbling whisper on the phone. “I told you I’m a damned good cook, at least of chicken.” She paused. “I know you’re feeling down about Sol. I heard it was a quiet funeral.”

  I didn’t answer. I’d been lying on my bed, eyes closed, the radio playing Tony Bennett’s “Cold, Cold Heart” over and over, the DJ intoxicated with the song.

  That afternoon, haunted, I hailed a taxi and sailed into the hills, an aimless ramble that let me ponder the sprawling, ungainly city spread before me. The cabbie, at first confused by my vagueness, kept quiet after a while, simply nodding at my directions, probably believing a maddened lady was in the back seat. But no: the spacious landscape allowed me to think, making me more determined than ever.

  “Don’t be alone tonight, Edna. Tonight at my place. Just you and me. No one else. I promise. Cozy, relaxed.” A pause during which I heard her sighing deeply. “No one talks to me about poor Sol, Edna. I don’t know anything but what I read in the papers, and that’s drivel. A photo of Gertrude Berg weeping. Max…and now Sol. I need someone to talk to me about it. Francis avoids the subject.”

  “Just the two of us?”

  “I promise. I’ll come get you. Tonight.”

  I did
n’t know what to answer. The splash and tumult of Sol’s sudden death laced all my brief conversations with Alice and Lorena. Worse, I’d spotted Desmond Peake lingering in the lobby of the Ambassador earlier, then having a drink in the cocktail lounge; but when I approached him, he made a rapid exit, nearly colliding with a woman with too many shopping bags. My nerves frayed, my disposition sour—and my suitcase already opened in my room, a few items dropped in—I didn’t want to stay in the suite listening to the radio all night. Every song—now I was subjected to Tony Bennett’s “Because of You”—reminded me of loss.

  “Yes,” I told Ava. “Yes.”

  ***

  We sat in a long sunroom filled with plants, clinging vines twisting around posts and inching over the window sills, pots of red geraniums and lavender phlox, a gone-to-mayhem spider plant, its shoots dangling over a wicker table covered with movie magazines. Issues of Modern Screen and Flirt and Titter with Ava on the cover. “I don’t know why I can’t stop buying magazines about myself,” she confided. A lived-in room, welcoming. Wide wicker chairs with overstuffed floral cushions. The late day sun peaked through the simple white-cotton dimity curtains, but the room was refreshingly cool.

  She sat opposite me, her feet bare and cozily tucked under her legs as she reclined on the chair. “The tobacco field girl at home. Artie Shaw had a fit when I sat like this. Or walked barefoot in the house.” She grimaced. “Or, in fact, when I opened my ignorant mouth in front of his friends. John Steinbeck, I remember, kept saying, ‘I want to hear her voice, Artie. She has a great voice.’ Like I was a wind-up toy they bought at a fair. William Saroyan wrote a limerick about me after I did The Killers. The girl silhouetted against a chiaroscuro moon.”

  “You look happy sitting like that.”

  She looked surprised. “And I don’t look happy other times, Edna?”

  “Not so happy, I suppose. Out in Hollywood”—I pointed nonsensically out the sunlit windows—“you look…modeled. You know, stylized.”

  She grinned. “That’s Ava Gardner out there. The girl who is nervous when the cameras roll. Acting is…well…embarrassing for me, you know. Here is…Avah Gardner.” She pronounced her name with a Southern twang, the vowels exaggerated and harsh.

  She served iced tea, heady with wild mint she insisted had taken over her back yard. The glass had beads of water on it, cold to the touch. “Good.”

  “Sol.” Ava’s sudden mention of the dead actor was stark, abrupt. “Tell me what you know.”

  I told her about the funeral. “How close were you to him?”

  “Through Max, of course. He’d visit here with Max. We met for lunch when he was back from New York. He lent me jazz records. He was a private man who got nervous around me. He’d stammer and bumble, and that made me tease him horribly.” Her eyes got moist. “But a man who caused no trouble for anyone, a decent guy who liked to make people laugh. Since the blacklist nonsense, he never laughed again. He took it so hard, Edna.”

  We sat with our tea and watched the sky darken, the leaves of the ice bushes brushing against the windows, rustling in the slight evening breeze. “My sister Bappie was very fond of him. After her marriage fell apart, she was footloose, scattered. Some summers back, when he was out here, they found each other, not romantically, I mean, but like two wandering souls who bump into each other in the night. They’d go to the movies, plays, stuff like that. Then she met a new guy and they drifted apart. Sol, being Sol, didn’t resent it, though I think he was lonely much of the time. I know he spent more and more time with Max. And then Max and Alice.”

  “Another life shot down.”

  Ava stood and peered out the window. “Remember back at The Coffee Pot with Sol? How we waited for the rain that never came? Sometimes I pray for rain at night, especially lately. You know, that drumming on the roof, on the windowpanes. When I was little, I slept under the eaves of the attic, the rain drumming ping ping ping all night long, and I’d drift into a blissful sleep.” She turned to face me. “Nothing has ever been that good, Edna. The rain riled the flies trapped under the shingles, and they’d buzz around me. Ping ping ping. You know, I can’t sleep out here in this land of perpetual sunlight. I stay awake all night long.” She tapped the windowpane. “Sometimes when the breeze starts up at night I stand in the dark and wait for rain.” She smiled wistfully. “Help me with dinner, Edna.”

  I hadn’t planned on constructing my own meal that evening, but, led by Ava’s rhythmic direction, I found myself bustling about her kitchen, shrouded in one of her full-length aprons with so many ruffles I feared I‘d become one of the Floradora girls in a vaudeville song-and-dance routine.

  “Now drop the pieces in that flour mixture there, Edna, because it’s filled with special spices my mama told me about. Secret spices.” Then: “Edna, you need to let the butter melt first, otherwise…”

  The two of us moved in curious syncopation.

  Slowly, wonderfully, thrillingly, the meal took shape: chicken sizzling and popping in the hot oil, potatoes mashed and garnished with parsley, green peas—“I grew them myself, but no one will believe me”—gleaming in salted water, a loaf of sourdough bread rising in the oven. Aromas flooded the room, the inviting tang of bubbling yeast, of crispy chicken skin, of peas slathered with butter, a conflicting war of tantalizing smells. Dizzying, the sum of it, but totally satisfying.

  There I was, dressed in my fine black silk dress with the filigreed lace collar, covered now from neck to knee with Ava’s own apron, my hands caked with flour, my eyes watery from the boiling water and the diced pearl onions.

  “Edna, too much salt. What are you thinking?” She moved me aside and tasted with a spoon. She nodded: yes. Yes. And yes. Yes, indeed, I thought. I was flabbergasted by it all, and rapturously intoxicated with her.

  By the time we sat at the kitchen table, side by side—“Not in the dining room, for heaven’s sake, we’re friends”—I found myself smiling with a kind of mindless delirium: I’d rarely had so satisfying an evening as this.

  The sex goddess Ava Gardner—and me, the aging novelist, the world’s finickiest eater, culinary martinet. Delightful, marvelous. I ate everything on my plate and Ava sat back, her eyes twinkling, and watched me. “Good Lord, Edna. You have the appetite of a fifteen-year-old boy.”

  Darkness had fallen outside now, lights switched on. A coziness here, safe haven.

  Of course, it couldn’t last. Ava started talking about Frank’s moodiness lately. “He sulks now. Everything gets him down. His career, Max, Columbia Records.” The wrong conversational turn because, as my old Negro housekeeper liked to say, we talked him up. She made him appear on her doorstep. A car stopped on the gravel driveway as Ava rushed to the window. “I told him not tonight and he promised me.” For a second she shut her eyes, biting her lower lip. “Damn him.”

  I stood next to her as we watched the occupants tumble out of the flashy car. “Damn them.”

  Frank and the Pannis brothers stormed in, resentful that I was there, my arms folded over my chest as though I were a threatening schoolmarm, my cheeks sucked in—my most practiced look of disapproval.

  “Christ, I forgot,” Frank said. “I’m sorry, angel. I did forget.”

  She looked ready to slap him.

  “Tell her,” Tony bellowed.

  “Tell me what?”

  “Calm down, boys,” Frank muttered. “Both of you are making way too much out of this.” But the news obviously bothered Frank himself because his reassuring words were yelled out, rushed. When he looked at Ava, his face seemed to collapse, the blue eyes downcast and troubled, his chin bobbing up and down. Frank suffered out loud, I realized, the public groaner. Taking care of him when he had the flu would be a battlefield assignment. “All right, all right.” Anger in his tone. “The bastards. I should have expected this.”

  Ava walked up to him and placed an arm around his waist. “Tell me, darling.”

  Tony blurted out. “The cops took him in, Ava. Frank Sinatra, the hott
est singer on the planet. They took him downtown. They questioned him like a street thug. Frankie boy. Where’s the respect…”

  Ethan was burning. “Shut up, Tony.”

  Frank eyed him. “I can do my own talking, Tiny.” Said with white-hot anger, his words punched the stage name. Tiny. Dismissal, mockery, the fat slob in the schoolyard made fun of one more time by the class lover.

  Tony shot him a look, not a happy one. He looked ready to cry.

  Ethan nudged Tony into a chair but I noticed he didn’t seem pleased with Frank’s treatment of his brother. Frank was oblivious, his arm around Ava’s waist, his face nuzzled in her neck. “Baby, the way things are in this damn town.”

  Ava tightened her hold on him. “I don’t know what’s going on, Francis.” Loud, insistent. “Tell me now.”

  Frank glanced at me, a look that communicated his desire that I be elsewhere, preferably out of town: the ancient dowager back among her lavender and old lace, her white curls under a Mother Hubbard bonnet. “Yes,” I said, “tell us.”

  “Max’s murder.” The two words hung in the air, ominous. “Can you believe it?”

  Tony joined in. “Just because they can’t solve it and can’t pick up the nut out there who’s popping off the Commies in town…”

  Ethan poked his finger into Tony’s side. “Could you let Frankie tell…”

  Frank rushed his words. “They never talked to me about that incident when I threatened Max at dinner, that stupid squabble, the shoving. Yeah, Louella Parsons and the gossip sheets had a field day, but that’s nonsense for the lame-brained knucklehead readers in Hollywood. Yeah, I had my publicist talk to someone at the precinct—and nothing happened. I never thought the cops would pay any mind to it. But I guess there’s been a few pushy calls to the police, you know, folks who can’t stand me, resent me, and today they made me go downtown.”