Everything and More

by Jacqueline Briskin

  Oh, God, God, here was Althea Coyne Cunningham raising a ruckus and exposing the ultimate shame of being yet another in the long line of idiot females taken in by Gerry Horak.

  She fled down the institute’s three front steps. The door closed swiftly and a chain rattled.

  In the station wagon she sat hunched over the steering wheel. She could not return to that gracious jail presided over by her tormentors—God, they’d have a big, knowing laugh about Gerry’s defection. But where else could she go?

  “Roy,” she said aloud.

  The Waces’ house on Crescent had never become the refuge to her that the garage apartment had been, and the wounds inflicted by Roy still festered unhealed, yet without a demurring consideration Althea drove the few blocks to the small stucco bungalow.

  The door was answered by Roy, wearing shorts and an off-the-shoulder blouse.

  Her large brown eyes widened, her mouth opened in flabbergasted surprise before stretching into a joyous, welcoming smile. “I don’t believe it!” she cried, turning to shout through the empty house to an open window, “Everybody! You’ll never guess who’s here, Althea!” She gripped both Althea’s flaccid hands, drawing her inside. “Joshua and Marylin and BJ are over.”

  “I was passing by,” said Althea.

  “Hey, are you okay? You look sort of beat.”

  NolaBee called from the yard, “Bring Althea right on out.”

  A triangular red brick incinerator barbecue had recently been erected in the small, overgrown yard, and Joshua Fernauld, swathed in aromatic smoke, clad in a checkered sport shirt and Bermudas, presided with a long fork over ripely brown chicken. BJ was rising to her feet—she too wore shorts, displaying her massive thighs. Marylin lay on a new redwood chaise longue, her loose dress showing a gentle mound of pregnancy.

  NolaBee stubbed out her cigarette before hugging her guest. “Well, Althea, I reckon you’ve been a stranger around here too long.”

  BJ patted her shoulder. “Long time no see,” she said.

  And Marylin, smiling her lovely, luminous smile, shifted as if she, too, would rise to embrace Althea.

  “Now, Marylin,” said NolaBee, her eyes anxious. “You know what-all the doctor told you.”

  “Listen to your mother. Stay put,” Joshua commanded his young wife before holding out his big hand to Althea. “You’re a sight for sore eyes.”

  Their welcoming smiles of uncomplicated friendship befuddled Althea: she felt like a soldier behind foreign lines. “I just dropped by,” she said. “I better be going.”

  NolaBee said, “That’s right silly. Call your house and tell them you’re having supper with us. My son here”—she smiled archly at big, paunchy, gray-haired Joshua Fernauld—“makes the grandest barbecue, and I’ve got my beaten biscuits ready to pop in the oven—I reckon you remember my biscuits? And there’s—”

  “No need for commercials, Mama,” Roy interrupted. “Althea, you’re staying and that’s that.”

  “Tell us about the art school,” said NolaBee. “Roy says this Mr. Lissauer takes only the top artists, and . . .” For a couple of minutes NolaBee vivaciously passed on her third-hand knowledge of the institute.

  Althea’s cool, forced smile did not falter.

  Joshua Fernauld, watching her from the barbecue, said, “Althea, girl, you look in need of a pick-me-up. Roy, sneak around your lady mother and give our friend here a medicinal snort of that Haig and Haig I brought last week.”

  “Now, Joshua,” NolaBee said. “I reckon you know the girls are too young to drink.”

  “Oh, Aunt NolaBee,” BJ groaned. “When are you going to get over being such a Carry Nation? Believe me, college is where a girl learns how to hold her liquor.”

  “Beej,” Joshua said, “for that you don’t need college. It’s in the blood.”

  Laughter and that damn Mozart! Althea escaped into the kitchen.

  Roy followed her. “Something’s wrong, isn’t it, Althea?” she said gently. “Let me help?”

  “Dear me, I must have fallen into a snake pit of good Samaritans.”

  “No, simply the other side of the Big Two,” Roy said, patting Althea’s arm.

  At her touch, Althea’s tears began flowing, irrepressible as on the previous night.

  “Hey, Althea, hey,” Roy mumbled awkwardly. “Come on in my room.”

  The pink-and-blue children’s wallpaper had been replaced by trim lines of yellow roses. Roy scooped up skirts and blouses draped over the chair and vanity stool—despite her love affair with clothes, she had not yet learned to treat them with respect. She went to get a roll of toilet paper, “reasonable facsimile,” as the Waces called it, to use as Kleenex.

  Althea dabbed at her streaming eyes.

  “Roy, Althea,” BJ bawled outside the window. “Daddy says the chicken’s ready.”

  “Don’t wait for us,” Roy called back. “We’re catching up. We’ll be out in a bit.”

  Althea gasped out, “I keep hearing this music. A Mozart horn concerto. . . . I don’t even like the revered Wolfgang Amadeus. Roy, if only the music would stop . . . if only . . .”

  Though Roy considered herself an entirely different person from when she had been one of the Big Two (she had become so utterly normal that she had signed up for the fall sorority rush week at UCLA), the claims of friendship never died within her. She could not bear to see Althea, who hid every sign of emotional stress, break down. Near to sympathetic tears herself, Roy tore off fresh lengths of toilet paper as she murmured soothingly. Finally she went to pour Joshua’s Haig and Haig into a tumbler.

  “Here, drink this.” She handed Althea the glass, conscious of similar scenes in various movies.

  Althea’s hand shook: A few drops of Scotch spilled, but she downed the rest, coughing amid her tears. “That horn concerto,” she gasped. “God, I hate it!”

  The wacko remarks combined with the out-of-character, unconsolable tears convinced Roy she could not handle this on her own.

  Outside, in the cooling twilight, Joshua sat at the foot of Marylin’s chaise while NolaBee and BJ occupied the new redwood love seat. After the wrenching sobs in the bedroom, there was something almost excruciatingly normal about four people finishing up a barbecue supper with coffee ice cream—Joshua invariably brought along Marylin’s favorite flavor.

  As Roy stepped onto the patio, NolaBee said, “There’s breasts and drumsticks on back of the barbecue, and biscuits in the oven—I reckon you and Althea had loads to tell each other.”

  “Where is she?” Marylin’s soft voice asked.

  “She’s really shook up about something.” Feeling as though she were betraying a confidence, Roy scarcely moved her lips. “She just keeps crying.”

  “Crying?” said BJ. “That’s not the Althea Cunningham I knew.”

  “She’s been at it since we went inside.”

  NolaBee’s head tilted. “That long?”

  “She looked deep in the slough of despond, at the bottom of foggy hollow, when she got here,” Joshua said, touching his lips to Marylin’s cheek before he stood. (Roy had noted he seemed utterly incapable of keeping his kisses or his hands off Marylin.) “I’ll go check.”

  “Now, Joshua, you just stay put,” said NolaBee. “I reckon after all these years, the poor child’ll feel more comfy with me.”

  “My specialty, NolaBee, my area of competence,” he said. “Working with actors or writers, you either get a bead on hysterics—or you quit.”

  Roy trailed him to her room, where Althea slumped on the bed weeping.

  “Althea,” said Joshua, a deep-chested rumble. “Stop this.”

  “I . . . can’t. . . .”

  He pulled her up from the bed, shaking her. Her head wobbled from side to side, but the sobs continued, mechanical as a cracked record, so he held her against him. Behind her back, he used both hands to mime the dialing of a telephone. “Her parents,” he mouthed.

  Roy shook her head, whispering, “She doesn’t get along with them, th
ey’re oddball—”

  “Get them!” His lips puffed out imperiously.

  In less than fifteen minutes, headlights halted outside the house. Before the chauffeur could emerge from the limousine, Mr. and Mrs. Cunningham were hurrying up the path.

  NolaBee waited at the open door. “Come right on in,” she said. “I reckon you’re the Cunninghams. I’m NolaBee Wace. Roy and Joshua—my son-in-law, Joshua Fernauld—are in with Althea. The room at the end of the corridor.”

  “Before we go in, dear,” said Mrs. Cunningham, gripping her husband’s arm, “shouldn’t we find out from Mrs. Wace what the problem is?”

  “We don’t rightly know,” NolaBee said. “She started to cry after she got here, and she just keeps crying.”

  Mrs. Cunningham’s right eye twitched. “My poor little girl, that’s not like her at all. Thank you so much for your kindness to her.”

  Althea was crouched on the bed like a sphinx, her head bent between her arms, while Joshua, behind her, massaged her quaking shoulders. As her father came in, she raised up, holding out her arms.

  He half-knelt to clasp her. “Toots, toots, it’s all right.”

  Mrs. Cunningham had halted at the door. “What is it, dearest?” she asked. “What happened?”

  “I . . . went to the institute.” Her gasps increased.

  “Hush,” said Mr. Cunningham. “You’ll tell us later.”

  Between them, the Cunninghams supported their hysterical child out of the house. Althea’s sobs had ceased when they reached the car.

  * * *

  After she got into bed, she rested her splotched and puffy face against the pillows and received her parents.

  Her father said, “You were gone so long, nearly all day. We’ve been crazy, toots.” He perched on the end of the bed—he had pulled over one of the prettily upholstered slipper chairs for his wife. “Where were you?”

  Within Althea’s brain prowled the intense pain of the peroxide blonde’s disclosure. Someone else had to share the torment. “It’s too horrendous.”

  “You can tell Daddy and Mommy,” said Mrs. Cunningham.

  “I drove down to the beach and sat on the palisades thinking,” Althea said tonelessly. “Then I went over to the institute.”

  “Why there?” asked Mr. Cunningham. The beruffled bedside lamp cast an odd, divisive shadow across his narrow hawk’s nose.

  “I wanted to talk to Mr. Lissauer about this idea I had for a seascape. He pretended to be really interested. He invited me inside to talk. Everybody had left, we were all alone. And then . . .” She shuddered.

  “Go on, dearest,” said Mrs. Cunningham.

  “He started kissing me. He doesn’t look it, but he’s strong, so strong. He pushed me down on the floor—”

  “That filthy refugee bastard!” Mr. Cunningham jumped to his feet. “We should never have let any of them in!”

  “Did he . . . harm . . . you?” asked Mrs. Cunningham, moving to kiss Althea’s cheek.

  “Not the way you mean, but I trusted and respected him—he was my teacher. It was so cruddy . . . so ugly . . . having to fight him like that. Somehow I managed to push him off and run to the car.” She gave a shudder. “I felt dirty, ashamed—Oh, I don’t know what I felt. I wasn’t thinking at all. The Waces lived close, so I drove there.”

  “My poor precious,” sighed Mrs. Cunningham. “And nothing more happened?”

  “Isn’t that enough?” Althea’s eyes closed. The Mozart was fading, fading into inaudibility. “Mommy, Daddy, will you stay with me until I go to sleep? . . .”

  The Cunninghams sat on either side of the bed until Althea slept, then they moved to the upholstered window seat, Mr. Cunningham fiercely clutching his wife’s hand. There was no need for subterfuge or hiding their innermost secrets. They had an enemy that they could face and destroy together.

  * * *

  The following morning, two Beverly Hills police officers spent less than five minutes in the upstairs office of the Henry Lissauer Art Institute with its founder. They were waiting for him downstairs in the dusty hall when the sharp report rang out. Students burst from the ell-shaped studio, watching while the two policemen shouldered down the locked door. The office with its student paintings reeked with the acrid odor of gunpowder. Smoke still hung in the air above a World War I Mauser that lay next to the body.

  That particular day, August 6, a bomb weighing four hundred pounds was dropped on Hiroshima, exploding with a destructive power greater than twenty thousand tons of TNT, brazing the sky over Japan with the light of a hundred suns. It goes without saying that this miracle bomb crowded the story of the art teacher’s death from the news.

  Althea, with her parents on the Super Chief speeding eastward for a recuperative stay at her grandmother’s Newport “cottage,” Eastwind, did not hear of Henry Lissauer’s suicide until three years later.

  Book Four

  1949

  Best Actress Nominees: Jeanne Crain (Pinky); Olivia de Havilland (The Heiress); Rain Fairburn (Lost Lady); Susan Hayward (My Foolish Heart); Deborah Kerr (Edward, My Son); Loretta Young (Come to the Stable)

  —Motion Picture Academy Awards, 1949

  Former GI’s have bought homes at record pace.

  —Caption under aerial photograph of Levittown, Life, March 31, 1949

  The volcano that bubbles continually on Stromboli, the tiny, northernmost of the Lipari Islands in the Tyrrhenian Sea, is nothing compared to the lava of endlessly flowing gossip surrounding Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini. The latest rumor has it that Miss Bergman is expecting.

  —KNX News Broadcast, August 5, 1949

  Ingrid Bergman, who has been admired and respected in this country, has saddened and disappointed her legions of fans by her infamous behavior. Our hearts go forth to her suffering husband, Dr. Petter Lindstrom, and to her innocent daughter. It would be the gravest injustice to the moral standards of this great nation to permit this foreign national to return.

  —speech read into Congressional Record on August 23, 1949

  31

  Marylin’s alarm buzzed and she squashed down the gold button without opening her eyes. Luminous green hands would only tell what she already knew, that the ungodly hour was 5:35. Shooting would begin on the Versailles set at nine, and Marylin, scheduled for the first scene, must be at Magnum by seven on the dot for her elaborate transformation into an ancien régime glamour girl. (If it weren’t for the powdered wig she would be wearing today she would have had to arrive an hour earlier for a stint with the hairdresser.) Joshua clutched his arms around her, planting a sleepy kiss on her lips. “Angelpuss,” he muttered.

  “Have to get up. . . .”

  “Adore you.” Tightening his grasp, he bussed her again; then his arms loosened, and he gave a shuddering snore.

  Marylin, yawning, padded to the bathroom. Joshua’s three Oscars gleamed on their shelf above the toilet—the one on the left he had accepted this year, 1949, for Best Original Screenplay, Thus Be It Ever. Shucking her nightgown, she adjusted the gold-plated faucets of the outsize shower that her predecessor had planned with the finicky, exacting care that showed in every detail of the Tudor-style house. It had never occurred to Marylin, raised by NolaBee—an exuberantly uninterested housewife—and lacking any sense of rivalry with Ann Fernauld, to make changes in wife number one’s chef d’oeuvre. The decor as well as the household arrangements continued as before, with a business manager paying the bills and Percy and Coraleen holding the domestic reins in their capable brown hands.

  Cold water sluiced over Marylin. She shivered, her mind clearing.

  In her dressing room she selected a sheer summer blouse with a pretty red striped dirndl, calf-length in the New Look, thrusting her bare damp feet into red Capezio ballerina slippers, combing her long brown hair back into a ponytail. The mirrored walls reflected her, diminutively exquisite, remarkably unchanged from the huge-eyed girl who had reluctantly entered Beverly High as a freshman.

  Billy must
have been on the ready for her door to open. In cowboy hat and seersucker cowboy-imprinted pajamas, he burst from his room. She knelt, kissing the warmly pulsing milk-scented neck as she lifted him.

  “Whew! You weigh a ton. Soon you’ll have to pick me up.”

  “That’s what you always say,” he said.

  “It’s true.”

  “Yeah, when?”

  “Already I can’t make it down the stairs with you, can I?” She carried her son into his toy-lined room, putting on his bathrobe.

  Billy had inherited her changeable aquamarine eyes. His small button of a nose had a hint of a bump, a possible indication that it would beak out luxuriantly like his father’s. Other than these genetic endowments, Billy was Billy. A thin, wiry little boy with a narrow, humorous face and thick, curly blondish hair that threatened to turn brown.

  While Marylin ate half a pink grapefruit centered with a maraschino cherry, rye toast, and overmilked coffee, Billy bounced around the breakfast room regaling her with a monologue about the new hamster that he and Joshua had bought at the Beverly Hills Pet Store. “A rat, that’s what Ross calls it,” he said, raising his eyebrows in quick, humorous scorn at his young Scottish nurse’s ignorance. “Hah, I told her! Rat!”

  Marylin’s sparkling eyes followed her son. Billy was her joy and delight, her compensation for marriage to an older husband who elicited her affection, her admiration, even her passion, but never her love. For Marylin Fernauld, love eternally drifted with warm currents in a barnacle-encrusted TBM.

  “Come on up to my room, you can hold him,” offered Billy magnanimously.

  “Tonight.” From the three-car garage came the smooth throb of a well-tuned engine. Reluctantly she set down her napkin. “There’s Percy.”

  “So what time’ll you be home?” Billy demanded.

  “Mmm, around six.”