Everything and More

by Jacqueline Briskin

  “So late? You need a new contract.”

  She burst out laughing. Joshua, in this precise belligerent disgust, would decry the velvet-lined jail cell that was her seven-year contract with Magnum. Her salary had reached its maximum of three-fifty a week, and more often than not Art Garrison refused to loan her out to Fox, Metro, Paramount, Warner’s for twenty times that. She was bankable, which meant those cold-eyed New York financiers would melt when it came to lending Magnum the wherewithal to shoot a Rain Fairburn film. (Marylin, who was far from the only star thus contractually trapped, didn’t really care: Joshua earned big bucks and her salary more than adequately supported the small house on Crescent, as well as putting Roy through UCLA.)

  She and Billy went into the hazy morning, where she smothered his squirming, protesting face with good-bye kisses. He was waving his black cowboy hat as the big postwar Chrysler pulled away.

  While Percy steered smoothly along Sunset toward Hollywood, she sat in the backseat murmuring her lines, occasionally halting to thumb through a small worn leather notebook for a self-written character note. Though everyone else recognized in Marylin that inexplicable and undefinable phenomenon, star quality, she herself didn’t believe in it. She worked endlessly and hard on every role.

  At the intersection of Fairfax, she glanced around. A small dark blue coupe was keeping pace in the next lane. In the mist she was unable to see the make of the car.

  She returned to her script.

  As Percy eased the car below the arched iron letters MAGNUM PICTURES, a dark coupe halted on Gower Street outside the gate. Was it the same car? The question fluttered momentarily; then she forgot it.

  On the north side of the private road loomed two enormous new sound stages: both had been constructed with profits from Rain Fairburn movies.

  Her most recent Christmas gift from her grateful employer was a refurbishment of her dressing room in the Stars’ Building. In this lavish concoction of white silks and curved Lucite, she sat with her hair smoothed flat to her head, costume protected by an enveloping cape, while Tippi, the crinkle-faced Danish makeup artiste, striped different shades of Pan-Cake over her face and throat. On the dressing table lay a small stack of slit envelopes. Her sacks of fan mail, opened by secretaries in the front office, for the most part were answered with a black-and-white glossy imprinted with the autograph “Rain Fairburn,” but these few had been delivered because their message was in some degree personal.

  Marylin began reading: a request to appear at a benefit for St. John’s Hospital from a Beverly High alumnus whom she had known slightly; a letter from a man who introduced himself as her father’s oldest and dearest friend, announcing he was coming to Los Angeles, and would she take off a day to show him around Magnum studio; a remote cousin soliciting funds for the Greenward Genealogical Society.

  Tippi consulted a chart, measuring a precise triangle from Marylin’s mouth, hairline, and left nostril, affixing a black velvet beauty mark.

  The fourth envelope was different.

  It must have been brought to the studio, for it was unstamped and addressed in large block letters to “Mrs. Joshua Fernauld.” Few fans called her this.

  Tippi began gluing on a furry streamer of lashes. Marylin closed her eyes as she drew forth the letter. Shaking it open, she read: “Marylin, if you want to see me, I will be hanging around the front gate.”

  No signature.

  The paper slid from her limp fingers. Who needs a signature when the large, spiky handwriting is engraved on the heart?

  “Marylin . . . what’s wrong? Marylin, are you all right?” Tippi’s voice was the remote buzzing of an anxious mosquito. “Gott! Rudy, she’s conking out. How should I know why? Hurry! Get that idiot doctor . . .”

  Marylin came to coughing feebly. Ammoniac, vinegary odors burned her nostrils.

  Her brain felt like cottonwool. She imagined herself in her own bed, waking up to the buzz of her alarm clock, and was bewildered by the studio doctor’s black-rimmed glasses above her. . . . Behind him were Magnum’s top executives, the most worried expression belonging to the big boss, Art Garrison.

  They’re all here, she thought. She was lying on the white dressing-room couch, her constrictive corset loosened.

  Turning away from the insistent odors, closing her eyes on Magnum’s top brass, she allowed her disjointed thoughts to float. I passed out. The only other time I did that was at Beverly, when I heard Linc was missing. Linc? The letter . . . Linc’s writing. How could that be? Linc’s dead. Killed in action. The war’s been over four years. He’s dead. But the letter was in his handwriting, delivered to the front gate this morning.

  Staccato masculine voices hammered at her ears.

  “I’ll be fine,” she whispered. “Just leave me alone a bit.”

  “She needs to rest,” said the doctor.

  “Get the hell back to the stage!” roared Art Garrison’s voice. “Shoot around her!”

  They filed out. Garrison’s choleric face bent over the couch. “Rest as long as you need,” he said. “Take the morning off.”

  Only Tippi and the doctor remained.

  He took her pulse. “It’s steady,” he said. “Drink a big glass of orange juice for your blood sugar. And don’t try to do anything for the time being.”

  The door closed on him.

  “I’ll get the orange juice,” said Tippi.

  “And do me a favor? There’s somebody out by the front gate.”

  Tippi’s left eyebrow went up, a studied inquiry.

  Marylin said, “Sign him in.”

  “If you promise not to move from the couch,” the makeup woman replied.

  As soon as she left, Marylin got dizzily to her feet, holding on to white upholstery to reach the light-bulb-surrounded mirror, wincing at what she saw. Restorative sponging had smeared her heavy makeup; the one false lash made the other eye look crazily bald. Tiny rhinestone buttons down the front of her bodice were undone, and her loosened corset jabbed into the disarray of elaborately seamed satin. She pulled off the eyelash, then dragged up her heavy skirts, attempting to refasten the corset, a task always performed by the wardrobe mistress because the hooks were in back.

  A light rap sounded.

  Linc?

  Satin slithered, and Marylin stood immobile.

  It seemed to her that a rhythmic drumstick was beating on the white silk walls of the dressing room before she realized the sound was her heart beating in dreadful hope.

  32

  The near-invisible hairs rising on her arms, she opened the door.

  By the drab light of the wainscoted hallway she saw a tall black-haired man wearing a crewneck sweater. As they peered at each other, his mouth pulled rigidly down on the left side.

  Linc. . . .

  Her mind jigged back to those vivid erotic dreams. So she hadn’t been a nut case after all, the irrevocable bond of love had endowed her body with more certain knowledge than the Navy Department.

  Her eyes were tearing, and he was an iridescent blur.

  Her instinct was to clutch him, to reassure herself of his corporeal reality. As if sensing this, he moved swiftly inside, limping stiffly as he crossed the velvety white carpet to stand by the open window. It was a few minutes before nine, when studio limousines gathered at the Stars’ Building to deliver illustrious passengers to remote sound stages, and the purr of motors idling filled the dressing room as she and Linc continued gazing at each other.

  In Marylin’s convulsion of disbelief and happiness, her first coherent impression was of youth. He’s young, she thought, young. When she had first met him he had been an “older” man, an officer, vastly superior to her in every way including the chronological. For the past six years, though, she had been surrounded by Joshua and industry big shots, by her producers and directors, men with pouched bullying eyes and important sagging jowls. Linc looked so seductively, decently young.

  The deep tan had faded, and his cheeks were tinted with the apricot quality see
n often in portraits of Spanish grandees.

  He gazed back at her with the same bemused disbelief, then shook his head as if to clear it.

  “In this act,” he said, “I guess I play Oedipus.”

  At this, a fraction of the intoxicated bliss drained from her. She was, indeed, his stepmother. “They told us you were killed in action,” she whispered. “I didn’t marry him until a long time later.”

  “Of course it had to be Dad,” Linc said. “He’s the only real man in the Southern California area.”

  Memory has a sanctifying effect, and she had forgotten Linc’s flares of temper. Swallowing sharply, she took a step backward. “He liked me and I . . . well, who else would have been able to understand what I felt for you? What I still feel?”

  “Yes, who else?”

  Wretched at the pain in his eyes, Marylin sought for proof of her enduring love. Going to the desk for her blue pocketbook, she fished out the ring that she always kept with her. She extended it toward him. “Your good-luck charm . . . ALF.”

  “I guess the right person was wearing it,” he said in the same caustic voice, walking in that stiff gait to the dressing table, picking up the lucite frame to examine the photographs of Billy on either side. “My brother, eh? As a kid I always wanted one. Of course he’s a mite young to share a chummy bull session, but—”

  Her small fingers clamped around heavy silver initials as her own indignation exploded. Linc, in his pain, could make cracks at her for marrying Joshua, he could curse Joshua, mock God himself. But he could not say one nastily intoned word about her Billy! Snatching the frame from his hand, she clasped it to her elaborate satin bosom. “We’ve all grieved for you, mourned you,” she said in a shaking voice. “Where were you skulking? Why didn’t you come home?”

  For a moment the gold flecks in his irises glinted too brightly; then he sat on the couch, right leg outstretched, hand at his forehead to shelter his eyes. An abrupt crumpling that wrenched her heart intolerably.

  With a fluid movement, she crossed the room to kneel in front of the sofa. “Linc, I didn’t mean to blow up at you. I can’t help myself when it comes to Billy. I care so very much. With you and him, it’s like my skin is inside out.”

  “Still?” he asked, not looking at her.

  “Yes, still. After I heard you were missing, I thought I would die. Can you imagine what it was like? I was pregnant—”

  He raised his head. “Billy?” he asked with lamentable eagerness.

  “No,” she sighed.

  He sighed too. “The timing’s all wrong, isn’t it?”

  “I wanted to keep our baby more than anything in my life. But we were poor . . . Oh, I can excuse myself for the rest of my life. The simple truth is, Mama thought it was best, and I was weak, so horribly, horribly . . . weak.”

  “Marylin, you’re not weak, you’re gentle. Don’t cry.”

  She dabbed at her eyes, depositing a brownish residue of Pan-Cake on the Kleenex.

  “I’ve been in Detroit,” he said.

  “Detroit? But what happened? When your plane went down, they reported no chutes opened.”

  “They didn’t see mine open, that’s all. After the attack, those of us who were left started back together. We were all nearly out of gas, bucking a fourteen-knot headwind. The Zekes seemed to come out of noplace. My first warning was a spurt of tracers. The plane was already on fire, including the central cockpit. The escape hatch must have stuck, because Buzz and Dawdell never got out.” Linc spoke levelly, but the apricot color had drained from his cheeks. “I figured if the Zekes saw my chute open, they’d strafe me, so I didn’t pull my ripcord right away. I don’t know how far I fell, but I was terrified it was too far when I did pull. The chute opened, jerking me up, and I felt as if God were swinging me on a gigantic pendulum. I hit the water badly and broke my leg.”

  “Who picked you up?”

  “One of their destroyers, a day and a half later. Their medic set the bones. There was infection, but he managed to save the leg—and me. He was no taller than you, Marylin, with thick shoulders and the damnedest bowed legs. They put me in the hold. He used to come down and glare at my leg, sucking in his breath. He wasn’t an officer, so he couldn’t have been a doctor. Maybe he’d been a medical student. I never found out—I couldn’t speak Japanese, and he, of course, had no English. He did his best with me. I’ve often thought of him, hoped he’s alive. God knows he saved my leg—and probably my life, it turned out. Now it’s over, I’d like to write to him, maybe he could use some kind of help. . . .”

  She gripped his hand. “Go on, Linc.”

  “A few days after they picked me up, they fished out another American guy floating in his life jacket. He had third-degree burns over most of his body, and was coughing like mad. I never did find out what happened to his ship, but he was Dean Harz, a gunner’s mate. The squatty little medic sucked in his breath a lot, and swabbed the burns. But in a few hours Harz was dead. Gasoline in his lungs. A lot of Navy guys died that way. I took his dog tags, figuring I’d return them to his family. The Japanese medic was watching. He took away my dog tags. And the next day he brought Harz’s tattered uniform, washed, and made me change.”

  “But . . . why did he do that?”

  “He knew where I was going in the Philippines.”

  “A prison camp?”

  “You could call it that, yes. The Japanese never signed the Geneva convention. It was against their code to be taken prisoner. The commandant of our camp was of the school that all prisoners were scum. And any officer so debased as to let himself be captured alive deserved the big treatment.”

  “Oh, Linc.”

  “Anyway, the medic had known about the camp commandant and had demoted me to enlisted man. I was Dean Harz. So all I got was a visit to the hot box, an occasional whipping, starvation, nothing really bad.”

  “Darling,” she murmured.

  “The seventh level of hell in glorious Technicolor. Beheadings, torture, the works. I wanted to bow out of the whole affair. Marylin, you’re all that kept me going. ‘Island,’ remember? I would spend a whole day recreating a minute or two with you. What you had worn, what you had said, the way your eyes would turn greener when you smiled, the luminosity of your skin, every too-damn-beautiful part of you. Nothing overtly sexual, though. A small bowl of wormy rice with an occasional fish head a day does not nourish the libido. You were my refuge, my shield against the obscenities inflicted on us, the obscenities we perpetrated on ourselves. Contrary to popular literature, a prison camp does not bring out the admirable qualities of humanity.”

  “Linc,” she said quietly. “It’s not in you to behave badly.”

  He formed a sad, dark smile.

  “I know you,” she said.

  “Well, so let’s put it this way. At least I never stole anyone’s rations. That was the most heinous—and most tempting—crime. Toward the end I contracted typhoid. When our guys marched into the camp, I was completely out of it. I woke up in a nice clean bunk on the Brady, a hospital ship. I was, of course, Dean Harz. Good old Dean has no family, unless you count a cousin in Gary, who ignored his letter. There were magazines on the ship. Dean read them and caught up on the news of the late Lieutenant Fernauld’s near and dear. Life is full of surprises.”

  “Linc, we were told you were dead.”

  “Look, I’m sorry I blew up before—seeing you hurt more than I expected. I didn’t mean to sound so accusatory.” He looked toward the window. “Mother . . . Did she die of cancer?”

  “So then you knew she had it?”

  Closing his eyes, he shook his head. “No, but I should have guessed. She’d had one operation, and on those last leaves she seemed, well, frightened. I had my own fears, though, and we never did connect.”

  “Linc, she was a lovely, lovely lady. When we met her, she had lost you, and knew she was going, too. Yet she took the effort to be gracious to us.” Marylin fished through her mind for family tidbits of solacing cheer. “Did
you know BJ’s married?”

  “Little Beej? Married?”

  “His name is Maury Morrison and he’s really nice. He’s at USC law school on the GI.”

  BJ’s husband was Jewish. She, who had always been slippery if not secretive about her mother’s religion, had been married by a rabbi beneath a flowered chupa in the Fernauld back garden, and from then on had become open about her maternal heritage, not in a bragging or defensive way, but as if she had turned an interior knob to adjust. The young Morrisons belonged to Temple Israel in Hollywood, and BJ occasionally peppered her conversation with the Yiddish phrases that her lapsed Catholic father had used for decades. Marylin, always considering BJ her best friend, had moved yet closer to the stout, good-natured, loud-voiced young Jewish housewife.

  Linc was smiling. “Well, hubba-hubba. When?”

  “Two years ago. She dropped out of school. They’ve got this adorable baby, Annie, she’s six months old. Billy’s ready to bust, being an uncle. Annie’s called after your mother, and she looks exactly like her. Linc, wait until you see her!”

  Linc’s hands clenched on his stiffened leg. “Full fathoms five, A. Lincoln Fernauld lies, his bones of coral, pearls his eyes.”

  “Linc, are you telling me that you aren’t going to see anybody?”

  “This one visit is my quota,” he said.

  “Not even BJ and Annie? Or Joshua?”

  He sighed and shook his head.

  “If you had any idea how he grieved for—”

  “Marylin, I never should have come today.”

  “If it’s just this once, why did you?”

  “The flame asks that of the moth?” He pushed to his feet, gazing down as if he were memorizing her exquisite, over-made-up features.

  The lavish decor of the dressing room melted away as she stared back at Linc. In his eyes she found the answer to why he had stayed away for these long years. He had not wanted to wreck the life she and Joshua had glued together. Even when he was at his most vulnerable, a starveling racked with typhoid, he had elected not to imperil them. Instead he had picked up the scattered pieces of another man’s past.