“I know what you mean.” Roy sighed. “Me, I never pass up a meal or snack—as if you couldn’t tell.”
“You? Tosh!” He tilted his large, haloed head admiringly at her new shorts and the hand-me-down blouse that bared the freckled upper curves of her breasts. “Tosh, I say. Little Roy, if only you knew how perfect you are.”
They were reclining on chaises near the pool. The water churned with Dwight’s methodical Australian crawl and Althea’s swift butterfly. Roy, having the tag end of her period, couldn’t go in.
“Firelli, why are you in Beverly Hills?”
“To raise filthy lucre. England needs the stuff, you Americans have it.”
Too late she remembered reading about the posh benefits he was doing: with Firelli, though, one felt no humiliation at ignorance. “I’m mad for your records,” she said.
He leaned forward, unabashedly delighted at her compliment. “Which is your very favorite?” he asked.
“The one that has ‘Full Moon and Empty Arms.’”
“The Rachmaninoff, yes. I think it’s jolly good, too.”
“When’s the next concert?”
“I conducted at the Bowl three nights ago. That’s my coda. I stay for a few days at Belvedere. Then it’s back across the pond.” He made a face. “That convoy zigzagging brings on violent seasickness, it does.”
She wanted to ask how well he knew the Cunninghams, but didn’t, not because of any reticence with Firelli but because Althea, squirrely-secretive about her family, might construe this as prying, and Roy did not care to poke any holes in their rewoven friendship.
Firelli pushed heavily to his stubby feet, panting a little. “I am going inside for a cuppa and a snooze. Tell the others I’ll see them at dinner.”
Roy watched the stout little figure waddle up through terracing toward the gracious, rosy-bricked mansion. Imagine! Me talking to Firelli, buddy-buddy!
Dwight hauled himself from the deep end, chest heaving. The polio had slightly atrophied his left leg, and the thigh muscles were a shade less stocky than the right.
Althea, too, got out of the water, pulling off her rubber cap to shake her pale, lovely hair. “The maestro gone up to the house?”
“Yes, he said he’d see us at dinner. He seemed tired.”
“He’s been wearing himself out since the war began, and this tour’s been a huge strain. Mrs. Firelli used to make him rest, but she died last year. That’s why Daddy insisted he stay at Belvedere for a few days.” Althea turned to where Dwight was drying himself off with one of Belvedere’s luxurious pool towels. “Dwight, how about a Blue Ribbon?”
“Is there one?”
“No. That’s why I asked.” Smiling, Althea went through the open French doors.
Roy asked Dwight quietly, “Enjoying yourself?”
“The living legend! Firelli! I can’t believe it!”
“Who can? And what about Belvedere?”
“It’s really incredible.” His eyes were fixed on the shadowed poolhouse, where Althea bent over the miniature refrigerator to get the beer. “Althea’s totally different than I thought.”
“Phooey on first impressions,” said Roy, forgetting she always trusted them.
After dinner—eaten by flickering candlelight on the upper veranda—the old Englishman disconcerted and delighted them by sitting down at the music-room grand piano and, with superb rhythmic swing, playing any popular song they named.
After he hoisted his stout self upstairs, the party pooped out.
Dwight said, “Listen, maybe we better get on home.”
“Here.” Althea slipped the car keys from her slacks pocket, draping the chain over her long, slender forefinger. “You two take the wagon, bring it back when you come over tomorrow.”
Roy glanced at Dwight. The overhead lights caught his eyes with an odd flatness, and as he gazed back at her, his broad lips drawn tightly over his large, square teeth, a vulpine smile that excited Roy so that she could scarcely breathe.
They drove up to a dark, narrow ledge overlooking Beverly Hills. Lights blinked below while the radio spread the cool, limpid notes of Benny Goodman’s “And the Angels Sing.”
“C’mon over here,” Dwight said, putting his arm around her, drawing her to him, kissing her. The skin of his face felt hot yet oddly dry, and he smelled clean, of chlorine from the pool. While they kissed, the hands Roy had longed to cup her breasts, did. Her pulses beating a staccato, she imagined she would swoon.
The radio ballad changed. His grasp roughened, foraying under the square cut neckline of her blouse, and his tongue thrusts pushed deeper into her throat. She felt a chill. “Don’t,” she murmured with the faintest reproval and gripped his thick broad wrist.
In this Oldsmobile station wagon she had necked with servicemen, pick-ups, yes, yet all seemed to recognize a code: they had gone as far as Roy had let them, sometimes persisting in a wordless tug of war, but when, by her actions, she let it be known that there was nothing doing, that she was a “nice” girl, they desisted and either went back to kissing or sulkily removed themselves to the other side of the seat, adjusting uniform trousers.
Dwight, though, ignored her restraining grasp. His hands clamped like an iron pectoral on the bare flesh below her brassiere.
She squirmed. “Stop it.”
“Want you so, baby.”
The endearment thrilled her, and for a moment she gave his hands autonomy. He made a swift sortie, pushing down the zipper of her shorts to invade below the waist of her underpants. Horribly mortified—he surely must feel the elastic sanitary belt—she tried to tell him to stop, but his tongue trapped her voice. His fingers jabbed downward, grabbing crisp brown hair.
He pulled back, and his mouth wet against hers, he said, “I have a safe.”
Safe? A word she had encountered before in this station wagon, and it baffled her. Though Roy talked sophisticatedly, she had only a muddled, unclear acquaintance with the physiological truths of sex. What, exactly, was a safe? It certainly had to do with the ultimate surrender. Was that what Dwight wanted of her?
“It’ll be absolutely all right, I promise you,” he said, sprawling onto her, squashing her down flat on the seat, pushing at her shorts. Using both hands, she shoved him, but he was too strong for her. With a loud, vibrant sound, the shorts tore.
“No!” Summoning all her force, she squirmed from under him. In the wrestle, her knee must have caught him in some vital place, for he released her with an agonized groan.
Pulling back to the wheel, he hunched over.
“Don’t be like this,” she whispered. “I care so much.”
“Some way you show it. Jesus, you could’ve permanently damaged something.”
“I didn’t mean to hurt you, Dwight.”
“Listen, I don’t care you’ve got the curse.”
A subject so taboo that hearing it spoken aloud was like being doused with ice water. “It’s not that,” she mumbled.
“You put out for the others. Pete says you do, he says everybody at Beverly High knows about the Big Two.”
Roy began to cry, her hiccuping little sobs sounding hollow in the dark privacy for which she—in her romantic idiocy—had yearned.
Dwight turned up the radio. Under the cover of a station break, he asked, “Is it because of my leg?”
“Oh, Dwight . . . how can you think that?” She blew her nose, and while Herb Jeffries sang of flamingoes, she mumbled, “That stuff at school, it’s all a horrible mistake. . . . Althea and I, we act different from the others, so people invent the most horrendous lies about us. It’s not true, not true at all. We aren’t that kind of girls.” She blew her nose again, adding in a bleakly apologetic little voice, “I’m a virgin.”
After an endless minute he said, “It’s okay.”
* * *
The next afternoon on the drive to Belvedere, neither referred to the previous night’s contretemps.
Firelli and Roy played gin while Althea and Dwight floated close
together on inflated blue rafts.
The following day was Firelli’s last.
They celebrated his departure with a bon voyage supper in the poolhouse. The huge orange moon that magically lit Belvedere’s domain was twinned in the oil-slick blackness of the pool.
After the lemon mousse, Althea said, “Firelli, we really should play some of your records—a swan song.”
“Let’s, let’s!” cried Roy, who was slightly tiddly from her glass of champagne.
“For my young American friends I’ll choose my best loves,” said the old Englishman.
“We’ll have a Firelli concert in the music room,” Althea said. “You go ahead and pick. I have to get these dishes together—Luther’s already furious about serving us down here.”
“I’ll help you straighten up,” said Dwight.
“Great,” Althea replied.
Firelli started up the brick steps.
Althea said, “Roy, you go with him. Otherwise we’ll be in for total heavy stuff.”
Roy’s bubbly mood broke, and her throat clogged with a nasty tightness that she recognized as jealousy. “It’s not fair leaving you two with the mess,” she said thinly.
“We’ll be up in jig time,” said Althea. “Shoo! Scat!”
Roy stood in a moment of wretched indecision, unable to look at either Althea or Dwight. Blinking with shame at her disloyal jealousy, she ran after the maestro.
Firelli bounced up through the moonlit grounds, vigorous as a rubber ball. Other than his naps and early bedtime, he exuded boundless energy. Suddenly he said, “She’s very unhappy.”
“Althea?”
“Yes. I wish I knew the whys and wherefores.” His English voice was gruff with sadness. “Poor child. However much she laughs and tries to hide her misery, it’s always there, like a recurring theme. She can’t escape it.”
“She does have moods.”
“I’d give anything to be able to help her,” said Firelli. “But she’ll have none of it—she equates kindness with pity.”
Roy sighed.
“Can you accept, Roy, that life is harder on her than on you?”
I guess.
“You won’t let this business hurt your friendship?”
“Firelli, whatever are you talking about?”
“Althea and the boy.”
“You just don’t understand American kids.” Roy gave a fraudulent little titter. “We’re all three on the same wavelength.”
He reached out and took her hand. “That gallantry, that loyal courage, Roy—don’t ever grow out of it.”
In the music room, Firelli browsed around the shelves, taking his time as he selected the heavy albums that he considered his triumphs—the first movement of Brahms’s First Symphony, the final movement of Beethoven’s Ninth, Selections from St. Matthew Passion.
Dwight and Althea did not appear.
Roy’s hands fumbled as she took out Ravel’s Boléro and the popular movement of the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto Number 2, both albums slashed diagonally with FIRELLI in crimson.
“Maybe Althea meant us to bring them down to the poolhouse,” she said.
Firelli shook his big, sparsely haired head. “The machine up here is truer by far.”
“I’m going back down to make sure,” Roy said.
“No,” he said with a force she hadn’t heard from him before.
But Roy ran outside into the moon-drenched night.
The stout old man bounced after her.
When Roy came to the terrace above the pool, she saw the lights of the poolhouse were out.
Firelli, who had caught up with her, gripped her arm with surprisingly youthful strength. “Don’t go down there.”
For a moment she struggled; then he released her.
Reaching the deck, she stumbled over a soft mound. It was, she realized immediately, one of the thick towels. Yet her heart pounded as if she had trod on a corpse. The small, downy hairs on her arms standing up like multiple warning antennae, she moved, stealthy as an Indian brave, to the windows.
Peering inside, she could see nothing in the darkness. They’re not here, she thought, her breath clouding the pane. Then her eyes caught a movement. She rubbed at the moist glass. She could make out the shadowy outline of a slim, upraised leg and bare foot moving in some rhythmic dance that touched not the earth.
Anesthetized by unreality, Roy watched the foot hold absolutely still, clench into an arch, wave frantically, and disappear, becoming part of the big, lumpy shadow that writhed in a violent tempo.
Firelli pulled her away from the window.
22
The chauffeur drove her home.
In her room, she opened the window, resting her cheek against the screen, which had an unpleasant, rusty aroma, thinking words like “alone,” “forlorn,” “betrayed” without assigning meaning to them. She kept seeing the rolling shadow that was Althea and Dwight, the spasmodic jerk of the high-arched feminine foot. What had happened in the poolhouse no longer surprised or shocked her. The past few days, Althea and Dwight had drawn inexorably closer. Why should she be astounded that Althea had gone the limit? Althea has the courage to show Dwight that she loves him, Roy thought with the dull heaviness that stems from a feeling of inferiority.
That night she tossed, turned, and honestly believed she did not sleep. Yet there she was, jerking awake to bright morning light.
“Roy!” NolaBee stood over her bed. “Wake up, Althea’s here.”
Althea stood in her doorway. “You left this,” she said, raising Roy’s white raffia purse.
“I’ll be in the kitchen,” said NolaBee. “Marylin’s new sundress needs pressing for the USO show.”
The door closed. Althea dropped the purse on the bed and sat at the vanity raising her chin in what NolaBee referred to as a Lady-Vere-de-Vere expression. “Why don’t you pin the scarlet letter on me? What else are friends for?”
“All right, so you did it,” Roy said listlessly.
“And not for the first time, dear heart.”
Roy, in a shocked reflex, sat up, staring at Althea. Althea, her reflection wretchedly disdainful, gazed back at her in the mirror.
“But you’re really gone on Dwight, aren’t you?”
“I haven’t altered my opinion one iota.”
“You mean you do it with . . . anybody?” Aghast, Roy groped for words. “. . . in the station wagon?”
“You’d be surprised at how unimportant an act it is.”
Roy’s stunned shock mingled with the dismay of being a gullible jerk. She blurted the first words that came into her mind. “But don’t you worry about, well, a baby?”
Althea gave a low, indulgent laugh. “What do you think I am? A dumb hillbilly?”
Was this a dig at poor Marylin? Suddenly Roy remembered her sister’s beautiful, tormented white face, her protesting sobs.
Jumping from the bed, she raised her arm, putting full force behind her slap to Althea’s smoothly tanned cheek. The blow resounded in the small, shabby bedroom.
“I don’t want to be friends with you anymore!” Roy shouted.
Althea lifted her hand to the reddening mark. “Because of him?” She used the same baiting humor, but there was an odd flicker, like fear, behind her eyes. “All he wanted from either of us, I can assure you, was a quick lay.”
“You knew I really liked him.”
“Well, now you’re cured,” Althea said.
Roy, panting and furious, glared at her, then slowly sat on the bed. “It’s not just Dwight,” she said after a long silence. “It’s us.”
“What’s wrong with us?”
“Everything. The way we shut out the others. The way we sneer at people. The way everybody snickers at us—God, how I loathe our reputations!”
“What’s the dif what those Beverly High clods think?”
“You care as much as I do,” Roy said.
“That’s your opinion.”
“I’m going to change.”
�
��Do tell.”
“For one thing,” Roy said, “I’m not going to spend an hour every morning plastering on makeup. For another, I’m not going to make sophisticated little asides about things I don’t understand. I’m going to be like the other girls. I’m going to be ordinary.”
“Ordinary?”
“Average-ordinary.”
Althea blinked more rapidly. “The reason we’re friends is, you aren’t.”
“I can sure try to be.” Roy’s head had a funny hollow feeling, and her eyes were gritty from lack of sleep. “I can sure try.”
“You need a little time to escape the green-eyed monster. Believe me, there’s no reason to be jealous. I don’t intend to see that 4-F gimp again.”
“Oh, you inhuman creep!”
Althea, with a narrow smile, ran from the room.
* * *
The Big Two patched it up. You don’t cut off three intense years with one knock-down-drag-out fight. Yet everything was different. Roy could not define the change. The best explanation was that an invisible curtain had rolled down, separating them.
Oh, Althea picked her up and drove her home from school, they chose adjacent desks in the two classes they took together, and they shared a table on the crowded patio. But at the beginning of the semester Roy joined SPQR and the Verse Choir, and more often than not she invited other girls to eat lunch with them. Althea responded to Roy’s new friends with either silence or quick, nervous humor. She was often absent.
Neither saw Dwight again.
But every time Roy glimpsed a billboard with Van Johnson’s face or heard a moony song, she would experience a seeping kind of hurt, as if an internal wound had reopened. She never considered blaming Dwight—or even Althea. The episode had reinforced her unshakable conviction that Roy Elizabeth Wace had been born with some freak genetic defect that made her impossible to love.
Yet once she got into the social swim, she became popular among the lesser lights of the senior class, kids who either did not know about her rep or were willing to overlook it.
One blowy Friday afternoon in November, as Althea drove Roy home, she announced, “I’m getting a private tutor.”
“You? Althea G-for-Genius Cunningham?” Althea, unlike Roy, invariably had capital A’s neatly printed down her report card. “Why?”
Everything and More Page 17
