Everything and More

by Jacqueline Briskin

  “For a while, Sari.” Marylin opened her little beaded purse to take out a check. “Here’s another present.”

  “Marylin,” Roy protested, “you already gave us the sterling.” Chantilly by Gorham, service for twelve, including shrimp forks and iced-tea spoons.

  “The silver’s from the Fernaulds. Joshua, Billy, and—”

  “Me,” whispered Sari.

  “That’s right,” Marylin said, bending to kiss her daughter. “This is just from me.”

  Roy picked up Sari, pressing her cheek against the fine-spun dark hair to control her tears. “I don’t deserve a sister like you,” she mumbled.

  “Money’s the easiest thing to give,” Marylin said, continuing to extend the check.

  “I meant, how did I ever get into a family with someone like you, sweet and gentle? I’m such a monster.”

  “What sort of nutty talk is that?”

  “I’ve always been jealous of you.”

  “Oh, Roy, how dumb. You’re way cleverer than I am—look at how well you’ve done at Patricia’s. You know everything there is to know about business. Everybody likes you.”

  “Sure, I’m a great kid. Just not very . . .” Roy’s voice cracked, “. . . lovable.”

  Sari’s thin litttle arms tightened around Roy’s neck. “I love you, Auntie Roy,” she said in her small, whispery voice, which was like Marylin’s. “I love you a million times.”

  “And I love you so much I could eat you up,” Roy growled in the child’s smooth neck, then she took the check. It was made out for $5,000. Five, thousand, dollars! Her income for a year. “Marylin, I can’t take this.”

  “I want you to have a nest egg, something to fall back on.”

  Roy set Sari down. “Then this isn’t for Gerry?”

  Coloring, Marylin said, “You.”

  “It’s just not fair!” Roy said hotly. “The way you and Mama hold it against Gerry that his family are blue-collar workers.”

  “My feelings have nothing to do with his family.” Thick lashes veiled Marylin’s incomparable eyes. “But you’re so wild about him, and sometimes he’s . . . sort of nasty to you.”

  Voices, laughter, and the string trio’s arrangement of “September Song” sounded through the windows.

  “I didn’t mean that the way it sounds,” Marylin’s beautiful mouth curved pleadingly. “But, well, you’re my little sister, and I thought if maybe you had something of your own, you wouldn’t be such a doormat.”

  “Doormat? That’s how it is for us ordinary girls. We have to work at keeping a man happy because we’re not the most beautiful woman alive, not the object of millions of men’s desire, not an old man’s darling—”

  Marylin gave Roy a stricken glance.

  “I’m sorry,” Roy said huskily. “That was a nasty dig, really nasty.” She injected humor into her voice. “See what I mean? Unlovable. Marylin, I do appreciate the check, it’s wonderfully generous. But I have to put it in a joint account.”

  Marylin started to speak, but the door opened and above the party roar BJ said loudly, “So this is where you are!”

  Never a sylph, BJ had gained a good twenty-five pounds since Beverly High, and below her royal-blue taffeta the Merry Widow corset that constrained her bulk through the waistline, thrust her breasts upward and her ample hips outward. Otherwise she was the same BJ, with messy black hair and her too-orange lipstick eroding on her big warm smile. On the shelf of her bosom rested a large diamond-paved Star of David.

  BJ stroked the dark hair of her spidery little stepsister. “Hello, Sari, babes,” she said, and put an arm around her beautiful young stepmother.

  Each still considered the other her best friend. While Marylin had never confessed that her love for Linc remained the wellspring of her being—BJ, after all, was Joshua’s daughter—BJ accepted this love as a constant. She lent Marylin her mail with Italian postmarks.

  BJ, glancing from Marylin’s pallor to Roy’s reddened face, asked, “Hey, have I barged in on something private?”

  Marylin, the actress, recovered first. “Private? What sort of question is that from one of the family?”

  “To tell the truth, BJ,” Roy blurted out, “I came for my things, and Marylin followed me with some sisterly words about the holy estate of matreemonee.”

  “You want my advice?” BJ asked. “Whip him into shape quickly. That Gerry Horak’s been a bachelor ages too long. They get spoiled and mean.”

  Roy glanced around at the opened packages. “Maybe somebody’s given me a cat-o’-nine-tails.”

  “You’re a real character, Roy,” BJ hooted. “Who knows, maybe there is one in the loot.” She added in a rueful brag, “Lucky you, you didn’t get thirteen percolators like we did.”

  When they emerged, the party was breaking up and Gerry and Joshua were standing arm in arm near the living-room fireplace. Joshua had taken off his sports jacket, and his shirt was pulling out in the back of his ample-waisted trousers. His hair was grayer now, and the grooves in his tanned face deeper, extending his look of dominance. He was pouring Scotch into the highball glasses they both held.

  “How,” Gerry asked, “did I ever get a hotshot movie writer-dash-director for a brother?”

  “And how did I ever get a hunky painter.”

  “The main question is, how did two slobs from the bottom drawer get hooked up to these two classy little Southern belles?”

  NolaBee came over, blowing her customary cloud of smoke. “It’s time for the bride and groom to be leavin’.”

  “Now you’re talking,” Gerry retorted, with a wink.

  NolaBee chuckled. “Don’t you get smutty with me around, else I’ll have to paddle you.”

  “Yes, Mama,” Gerry laughed.

  It was amazing to Roy how her mother had drawn this son-in-law she had so recently rejected into the whirling orbit of her personality.

  Gerry wrapped an arm around Roy’s waist, and they went out the front door, ducking through the hail of rice that BJ had just distributed from an Uncle Ben’s box. Somebody had knotted a traditional string of cans to the Thunderbird’s rear bumper.

  A few blocks away Gerry braked to untie their clattering train. When he returned to his bucket seat, Roy leaned over to kiss his cheek. “It was a lovely wedding, wasn’t it?” she murmured.

  “Terrific, terrific.”

  There was a harsh note in his voice that Roy tried not to let herself question. Marylin was right. She had to stop noticing her new husband’s every arrant mood and worrying about it. He started the car again, and she sat back in the bucket seat, looking up at the one star in the soft Beverly Hills twilight.

  Starlight, star bright, grant the wish I make tonight. Let me be a good wife, let me make him happy. . . .

  Book Six

  1958

  Death came to world-famed conductor Carlo Firelli in the midst of a recording session on March 20 in Milan, Italy. Born Charles Frye in Birmingham, England, 1872, he changed his name but kept close to his working-class origins by refusing knighthood. Considered by many to be the greatest conductor of his age, he conducted the world premieres of works by Verdi, Puccini, Mahler, Ravel, Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky, Richard Strauss. He is survived by a son, Carlo Firelli II, fourteen (by his second wife, Althea Coyne Cunningham, granddaughter of Grover T. Coyne).

  —Time, March 23, 1958

  Today we are taking you to the secluded Mandeville Canyon estate of Mr. and Mrs. Joshua Fernauld. He is an Oscar-winning director and writer; she is known to her fans all over the world as Rain Fairburn. They have lived here eight years, since the birth of their second child, Sara—known as Sari to the family. Hello, Joshua, Rain, Billy, and Sari. . . .

  —Edward R. Murrow, Person to Person, May 1958

  This Nina Ricci, all in shocking pink, has the full blouson top with a wonderfully slender gored skirt. Ladies, this is the look we’ll be watching for this spring.

  —Roy Horak at a Patricia’s fashion show for the City of Hope luncheon
at the Beverly Wilshire, November 10, 1958

  . . . Horak and his huge, enigmatic paintings at Langley Gallery.

  —“People Are Talking About,” Vogue, November 1958

  47

  Late one morning in November of 1958, Althea stood at her bedroom window deciding what to wear. Those cirrus clouds were ominously dark, yet in Central Park far below her she could see the last russet leaves scudding from branches, so what should it be, raincoat or fur?

  Her warm bedroom with its glowing fire was a charming mélange of color and furniture styles. The gilded Louis XIV bed was saved from overmagnificence by a diagonal placement, boxy contemporary armchairs stood in a close conversational grouping, the curtains were made of the white linen that had been used during long-ago summers to shroud her late grandmother’s Fifth Avenue palace, an ultramodern Lucite desk chair suggested the same graceful form as the eighteenth-century lacquered desk.

  Charles was at Groton now, so there was no need to keep the Geneva house open, and Althea considered this ten-room Manhattan apartment, furnished without the aid of an interior decorator, her home.

  She desperately needed a home—a truce place.

  Her two anchor relationships had been her son and Firelli. Then, last March, as the maestro was recording Stravinsky’s Firebird in Milan, his spherical head had suddenly turned crimson and he had crumpled on the podium, his dead fingers still gripping his baton. Althea began to suffer intermittent periods of depression. She recognized that the old man with his undeviating adoration had kept at bay her fiercest panics. (Aubrey Wimborne, a cultivated Londoner, had never seemed quite a human being to her, but rather one of the chic, clever accoutrements of an enviably handsome life that she had constructed.) Without the old maestro’s platonic, unquestioning devotion, she was once again prey to that ineradicable sense of wrongness, that self-loathing, that terrifying lack of power.

  In order to give a sort of spine to her racked, lonely spirit, she entertained relentlessly, using her grandmother’s heavy Georgian sterling and priceless, soft-glinting, Napoleonic Baccarat crystal. She sallied forth to big bashes where the men wore white tie and tails and soignée women’s jewels shone flawlessly. In this exquisitely paneled, signed antique bed she sated her passion with men of unquestionable social background.

  Now, though, standing in her delightful bedroom, for no reason at all Althea thought of her old dream: the sea-swept boulders of Big Sur, a weathered cabin whose unplastered log walls blazed with the work of Althea Cunningham, artist. She hadn’t picked up a brush since leaving the Henry Lissauer Art Institute. What a queer, lonely child I was, she thought, and turned brusquely from the window.

  Wearing Russian sable, she emerged onto Fifth Avenue, striding into the wind. In less than ten minutes she had reached the General Motors Building.

  “Althea!” a man’s voice called behind her. “Althea!”

  Believing the shout had come from the building’s huge sunken plaza, she wheeled around, peering down at the men in topcoats emerging for the lunch hour along with clusters of laughing, bundled-up secretaries.

  “Althea.”

  A few feet away, panting as if he had been running, stood Gerry Horak.

  In that first moment, as she looked into the broad, attractively coarse face glowing with the wind, an instinctive, purifying calm swept through her, and she felt as she once had in his arms. Utterly, irrefutably secure in herself. Then remembrance took over. And she burned with fury.

  Assuming an expression of puzzled hauteur that she would give an accosting stranger, she then permitted slow recognition to dawn. “Larry!” she exclaimed. “It is Larry Hovak, isn’t it?”

  His eyes narrowed, the flesh over his broad, high cheeks went taut with anger. “Bull, Althea, bull,” he said. “You damn well knew me right off the bat.”

  They were jostled by the stream of hurrying pedestrians.

  “Hardly,” she said, forming a patronizing smile. “It’s been years.”

  “Cut it out, baby.” It was that old truculent, challenging tone. “I’m the one who ought to be swinging at you, not the reverse.”

  Remembering the brown children playing war in a vacant lot, the endless rustle of Algerian ivy, that crummy blond, Althea spoke with drawling coolness. “I’m sorry if the truth hurts, but I really didn’t remember. And I can hardly stand here arguing about it. I should be at Lutèce—Senator André Ward is waiting for me.” A deeper inflection as she said the name indicated that André was her current paramour. She had, however, misjudged her reaction to Gerry’s uninhibiting presence. “Anyway, what makes you so positive no woman could forget you?” she heard herself demanding. “You always were too damn sure of yourself, you lousy bastard.”

  He grinned. “It’s good to see you’re still the same tough, hard bitch.”

  How strange that she, ultrasensitive to insult, should be excited by this unpleasantry. Gerry was still grinning. She gave him a springtime smile.

  He took her arm. “You look great,” he said. “The classiest broad in New York City.”

  Without further discussion, they made their way along the crowded pavement to the traffic light. She then said what was on her mind. “The last I heard of you, you were involved with Roy Wace. Did you skip out on her too?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean, skip out too?”

  They were crossing Fifth Avenue. Outside the park, carriages were lined up, their docile, blanketed horses breathing clouds of steam. “You ran out on me,” she said.

  “The hell I did,” he retorted, adding bitterly, “I should have known they wouldn’t level with you.”

  “They? Level with me about what?”

  “The MP’s were waiting when I got home. Statutory rape. Me. You. I hadn’t been discharged. It was the perfect setup for your parents. The Japanese hadn’t signed the surrender papers yet, and the press isn’t admitted to wartime courts-martial. So as far as they were concerned, I could be filed away without a trace. I’d have done my twenty years to life in the stockade if it hadn’t been for Captain Waldheim. A damn fine lawyer, Waldheim. He got me off on grounds of insanity due to combat fatigue. All that happened to me was that I spent one swell year in the military nut dish.”

  His embittered grimace touched seldom-used nerves in Althea, and she winced in sympathy for the injustice done to Gerry Horak. Yet, walking with him into the park, she thought exultantly: He didn’t leave me, he didn’t desert me.

  “Not that I should complain,” Gerry said. “I don’t know the kind of chokehold they had on poor old Henry, but it must have been hell.”

  For a moment her footsteps slowed with the guilt of memory. Henry Lissauer was at her door. But how, as a distraught child of seventeen, could she have known that the German refugee was suicidal?

  Ahead of them an old woman in a man’s topcoat tended a brazier emitting a small, whirling tornado of smoke. Gerry bought a bagful of roasted chestnuts, peeled one and blew on it before he popped it into Althea’s mouth.

  They walked along hunched into the icy, buffeting wind, eating chestnuts, not talking.

  Gerry crushed the empty bag into a wire-mesh trash barrel. “How come,” he asked, “you were so positive I’d done you the dirty?”

  “I went to your place and waited and waited. Finally a blonde drove up. She told me you’d left town.”

  “What blonde?”

  “You weren’t staying with a friend’s wife?”

  “Burt was away for a week, and he never had a wife. How could you figure me for screwing around? Althea, I was so nuts about you I wouldn’t have looked at Rita Hayworth if she’d taken her clothes off and done the slow grinds in front of me.”

  “But the woman walked right up onto the porch with her groceries.”

  “I can’t help that. She didn’t live there.”

  “She certainly seemed at home. Besides, how could she know all about you?”

  “Beats me.” He dodged a red-cheeked, snowsuited child furiously pedaling a tricyc
le. “Think your parents hired some Hollywood type?”

  “An actress to throw me off the scent?”

  “There’s no other way to figure it.”

  “. . . They might have done something along those lines,” she said, nodding.

  “When I was released, you were married to Toscanini—”

  “Firelli.”

  Althea’s correction was absentminded. Forcibly struck by the reason for her April-December marriage—this man’s child embedded in her womb—she drew a little apart from him. An undefinable menace lay in anyone—even Gerry—learning Charles’s paternity. Charles was sacrosanct unto her. Her child alone.

  I won’t tell Gerry, ever, she thought.

  A gust of wind rippled her warm fur, giving a chill, unalterable inflexibility to the decision.

  “Ahh, what’s the use of hashing all this over?” Gerry asked. “What’s past is past.”

  He put his arm around her, a shortish, muscular man in a black leather jacket and faded jeans, hugging a slender, elegantly shod woman wearing a fortune in Russian fur. Althea leaned toward him, and the wind lashed strands of her perfumed hair against his face. Linking his arm in hers, Gerry strode more swiftly.

  Althea matched her step to his.

  They came to a fork and she took the narrower right path. “This is the way to my place,” she said.

  “Jesus, it’s a relief to be with you. You’re the only woman I ever knew who doesn’t yakkety-yak everything to death,” he said. “You’re living in New York?”

  “I have an apartment. You?”

  “L.A. I’m here because Langley Gallery’s putting on a one-man show of my stuff.”

  “Langley’s?” She pulled a knowing face. “Impressive.”

  As they entered the lobby, the warm air stung Althea’s cheeks. Glancing in the oval mirror to see her unusual high color, she remembered Roy’s shy, flushed reflections in Patricia’s as she talked about Gerry.

  “You never told me what happened with you and Roy Wace,” she said. “Do you still see her?”