Loose Diamonds

by Amy Ephron

  Two

  The Birdman

  I was sitting on the sidewalk drawing pictures on the pavement with pastel-colored chalk; the shades of pink, turquoise, yellow, and luminescent green sparkled in the sunlight like neon. Each square of the cement was a blank canvas waiting to be filled. A monarch butterfly seemed to hover at eye-level, for a moment, before flying on, as if daring me to sketch it. It wouldn’t be hard—two triangles and a couple of lines. The roots of an old oak tree pushed up gently but firmly from the ground, the cement slanting up at an angle, so that it felt as if I could fall into it. I had recently read Mary Poppins in the Park but realized there was no way I could create the kind of picture Bert the Chimney Sweep had that would allow me to step into and travel to an alternate world. Or, at least, I didn’t think that was a possibility that spring afternoon.

  I saw her walking across the street, down the expanse of lawn from the neighbor’s house. She was a wearing a finely starched uniform, her figure trim, the skirt above the knee, her hair tucked into a lace bonnet, and she looked as if she had stepped out of the Bankses’ house in London rather than a Spanish Moorish house covered with tropical vines in Beverly Hills. The more curious part was, she was walking towards me.

  It was a different time, innocent and guileless. For the most part, doors were left unlocked and though there were certainly dark secrets lurking behind some of them, on the street we were always civil and kind to one another.

  I did not get up to greet her, just sat there quietly watching as she approached me. She had a slight Austrian accent and a voice like a bell so that it always sounded as if a laugh was caught in her throat somehow (although I don’t recall ever hearing her laugh). She told me that her name was Marion and, this is where it gets a little goofy, that she’d made cookies. It was a different time; child abduction was not even in the lexicon—well, the Lindbergh baby, but not the way it is now. She told me that the man she worked for was lonely and not well and asked if I would come and visit with him. Implicit in this, somehow, was the idea, correct, it turned out, that his wife had recently died.

  I asked his name. (A rule of my mother’s: You must always know the first and last name of the person you’re engaging with—a good rule, the theory being that if anything ever happens to you, you’ll know the name of the person you were with, assuming, of course, that anyone ever hears from you again . . .)

  I mangled it, at the time. I think I misheard her. I asked how it was spelled and mangled that as well. I thought she’d said Samuel Clemens. This occasioned much excitement at home that evening when I told my mother the story and she pulled out the Oxford Companion to American Literature just to make sure that Samuel Clemens a.k.a. Mark Twain really was dead and didn’t have a son. None of which would have made much difference since I didn’t get the name or the spelling right to begin with, but I wouldn’t know that until many years later.

  I followed Marion across the street—I don’t remember telling anyone where I was going—up the large expanse of lawn. She opened the front door and the first thing that struck me was the sound, as if I’d walked into a tropical rain forest.

  The interior walls of the living room had been smashed out and in their place were floor-to-ceiling birdcages with parrots of all kinds, none of whom had been taught to speak English (or Spanish or, for that matter, French). They communicated in a language of their own. I remember standing in the doorway, marveling at the parrots and the macaws in their room-high tropical cages.

  But as prominent as the birdcages were, it was just a tableau—almost as if someone had painted a background or an elaborate frieze on the wall—as it was the most beautiful house I’d ever seen. It had wood floors that were a deep mahogany color, covered with a French Aubusson carpet. The sofas were elaborately upholstered. There were small bronze statues from the ’20s that I’m certain were signed. Every lamp and table was a work of art in its own right. It was sort of a Ralph Lauren fantasy before Ralph Lauren existed. The art and objets seemed to come from around the world, not to mention the birds, and I imagined (because even then I had an overactive imagination) that the man who owned the house was a retired diplomat.

  “Mr. Clemens” was lying on the sofa underneath an afghan. He was in his early or late 60s and there was a fragility to him, as if he had been ill. He had patrician good looks, not a line on his face, and his eyes were those of both a younger and an older man. Though he was softspoken, there was a tenor to his voice as if he was used to giving commands. He was oddly fit, as if he’d been quite athletic, and had an East Coast air about him, as if in earlier times he would have been at home at the helm of a sailboat. I remember standing in his living room in quiet awe of both the birds and the decor until he asked me to sit down.

  I was used to being in the company of grown-ups—Hollywood Park on Saturday afternoons in my parents’ box, convincing my father to put two dollars on a horse to win because I liked its name and, between races, marveling at the pale-pink flamingos who lived inexplicably in the center of the track; long afternoons at the tennis club, where my father would disappear into the “gin rummy room” where gambling was allowed and no one under 21 could cross the threshold, and where the “younger set” lived in an enforced quiet because there were top-seeded pros practicing on the front court, which was inconveniently located in front of the club’s swimming pool; Sunday dinners at Chasen’s. I don’t recall ever seeing toys on the floor in our house in a room they didn’t belong in (except on Christmas morning).

  “Mr. Clemens” didn’t treat me like a child, rather an invited guest. And I sat in the wing chair next to the sofa and talked with him, still marveling at the parrots, who seemed to live in a world of their own.

  There were cookies, as promised, amazing crescent-shaped things with raspberry jam inside that were still warm from the oven. I don’t remember what we talked about that first day, but at a moment he stopped me and asked if I would like to see the rest of the birds. He didn’t call out or summon anyone. It was almost as if it was magical. Suddenly, an older Japanese man in a white suit appeared in the doorway of the living room, waiting to lead me out into the back garden. My memory is that his name was Kioshi, but I could have that wrong as well. On the off chance that I’m right, it’s curious that kioshi is one of the Japanese words for “quiet,” as he had the stillest voice I had ever heard and his footsteps never seemed to make a sound.

  I followed him down a long hallway past a library with floor-to-ceiling dark wood shelves and ladders that slid from side to side, furnished with luxurious leather sofas and chairs, the color of dark chocolate and standing lamps waiting to be turned on. Skipping to keep up, I followed him into a sunroom with many panes of glass that was filled with light and so inviting I wanted to linger for a while. But then Kioshi opened the back door and led me into the back garden.

  The first thing that struck me was the sound, as if it were amplified, followed by the bright splash of color from the garden itself, and the fragrant freshness of the air, as if I’d entered into a tropical rain forest or fallen asleep and woken up in a Kodachrome version of the Jungle Ride at Disneyland . . .

  “Mr. Clemens” was the largest collector of tropical birds in North America, and he’d built for them—planted for them—a habitat that was like their own. There were stately palms, delicate ferns that grew in abundance, coral trees with bright-orange flowers, Brazilian nut trees with pale peeling bark that was almost white. There was Torch Ginger, crimson and dramatic, and Queen’s Tears whose purple flowers with their delicate green centers wafted to the side like dancing fairies in a debutante slouch. At the back of the yard, walling it in, was a line of banana trees with dark-green striated leaves.

  There were no cages, just one large cage that enclosed the entire garden (except for the tiny songbirds that had an individual cage to protect them from the other birds). There was an elaborate netting 40 feet into the sky that enclosed the entire space. There we
re toucans and flamingos and cockatiels that flew from branch to branch, peacocks, lots of them, that ran around wildly, screeching and spreading their tails like rainbow fans, and there were tiny songbirds: wrens, warblers, canaries, and kiskadees, the bright neon colors of the pastel chalk I’d left on the sidewalk across the street.

  There was never any attempt to get them to fly onto your shoulder or eat a piece of apple from your hand, and I confess to being a little frightened of birds (or at least, having a healthy respect for them) and I stayed close to their Japanese caretaker every time I visited the garden. “Mr. Clemens” had created for the birds a world that was their own. And we were very much visitors in their “secret garden.”

  I told my mother about my adventure that night. I never told anyone else. I don’t know why. I never brought a friend. Maybe there was something special about being invited to a place that no one else was allowed to go, like a backstage pass to a secret world.

  Over the summer, I would visit “Mr. Clemens” once or twice a week. I would never stay long, half an hour, an hour at most, as he always seemed quite frail to me. He had this extraordinary quality where whatever he was doing at the time commanded his complete attention, and in the hour or so that I visited, that attention was turned towards me. He wasn’t like the usual Hollywood types I knew; he didn’t have that kind of ego where he felt inclined to tell you about his latest endeavor. He never talked about himself—leading me to come up with the even more bizarre conclusion that not only had he been a diplomat but also a spy, and that was why he told me so little. He had in his library an extraordinary collection of children’s fairy tales, Fairy Tales from India, Fairy Tales from China, Rudyard Kipling. Either he would read to me or I would read to him from the beautifully illustrated editions. He also had an amazing collection of art books, Impressionism, Modernism, Ancient Greek Art, European Masters, that would make their way to the coffee table as well. He would ask me what I liked, and if he was amused by my answers, it never showed. Miró, Monet, Seurat, Le Corbusier, Klee. He was teaching me about style and design and art. He was teaching me to see the world the way that he did.

  School started and I saw him less. I stopped by one afternoon and Marion took an inordinately long time to open the front door and then, only a crack. She spoke softly as she told me he wasn’t feeling well and perhaps I should come back in a day or two.

  The next day, a large white panel truck pulled up outside his house. I watched as men in gray uniforms carried some of the birds out in cages, flamingos and peacocks and cockatiels, squawking wildly and helplessly as they were loaded into the back of the truck. The door to the truck came down with a resounding bang, sealing them in, and the truck drove away.

  The following day, another white panel truck arrived. And I watched as the parrots and macaws were taken from the house, screeching a parrot/macaw cry of grief, a searing sound that I still remember, as they, too, were loaded onto a truck. Once again, the back door to the truck was shut, closing them in, and the truck drove away, leaving the street oddly empty and silent.

  A few days later, a “For Sale” went up on the lawn and the house seemed to go dead quiet.

  I was about to walk across the street and inquire when an unfamiliar tan sedan pulled into his driveway. A man got out wearing a suit that was, curiously, almost the same color as the car. Something stopped me. I didn’t want to know if the house was empty. I didn’t want to know if he was gone. I didn’t want to hear the quiet in the house, now that the birds were gone.

  Mommy and I thought he’d died, and I grieved for him as if he had. But I’d always known that my visits there were like a secret door had opened and let me into a magical world and that by its very nature, my time there was limited. I always wished I’d had a chance to say good-bye.

  I’ve tried a number of times to find out more about him. I asked my parents’ friends if any of them had known him. I went to the library and looked him up. And, occasionally, in the last few years, I would Google him: “Samuel Clemens.” But I always came up empty. And then, I recently told the story at dinner to a friend who is a much better Googler than I am. Later that night, an email arrived with a subject line that said “Aviary Linden Drive.”

  I clicked the link and found an entry on a website that was devoted to him. I had mangled the name. His name wasn’t Samuel Clemens, it was Stiles O. Clements, actually, Stiles Oliver Clements. He had studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He was a world-renowned architect and had defined much of what Los Angeles looked like at the time. He had designed the streamlined architecture of the Miracle Mile; Hearst Castle; the historic Adamson House in Malibu, the ’30s Spanish beachside villa now maintained as a museum; the El Capitan Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard; Hollywood Park (I now understood something I’d puzzled about as a child at the races with my parents, why there was a pool with flamingos in the middle of the racetrack at Hollywood Park and beautiful tropical gardens with Japanese bridges leading to the Turf Club); Max Palevsky’s modern glass masterpiece in Malibu; and, notably and hysterically, the Beverly Hills High School Swim Gym with a professional-size basketball court in which, when you push a button in the wall, the floor recedes onto either side, revealing an Olympic-size swimming pool.

  He was famous for integrating the exterior location with the interior design, the use of concrete and steel and glass in the inner city, the sweeping, cineramic views of the beach and ocean from the windows of the cliffside houses in Malibu, the elaborate Spanish Colonial façade of the El Capitan, as if elegantly waiting for a red-carpet moment, the romantic feel of Hollywood Park—all places you were meant to stay for a while. He had a practice that, knowing him, doesn’t surprise me at all—when a project was completed, he would insist on going on site alone for the final inspection, like a private tour of a magical world, but I suspect, also, it was his way of saying good-bye.

  Three

  Expensive Shoes

  I remember my shoes, the red patent leather Mary Janes I talked my mother into buying when I started preschool at that stuffy private place called Isabelle Buckley’s (now The Buckley School), which had a dress code. It was the shoes that got me thrown out of school the first time, for breaking the dress code, which called for a black, navy-blue, or gray skirt or jumper with a regulation white shirt and navy-blue or black shoes with laces. Okay, the first time I was thrown out of school I was four. In all fairness, I waited 11 years to get thrown out again.

  That was also the year of my first crush—on Lenny Footlick—who, I discovered when I went to his birthday party, was some kind of piano prodigy or else he was just precocious and well-trained as even to my untrained ear, he sounded proficient but wildly untalented. Okay, I was a little precocious, too. Midway through that forced recital, I lost my crush. He wore a suit to his birthday party so he clearly belonged at the Isabelle Buckley School, unlike some of us who were just attending preschool and moving on. I wore my red patent leather Mary Janes to Lenny Footlick’s birthday party.

  They remind me of the Maud Frizon pink lizard-skin Mary Janes I had no business buying 15 years later, as they were ridiculously expensive for flats, although no one had yet declared that you ought not to be buying lizard. I don’t remember who I had a crush on then.

  But I blame my mother because in one of her more contradictory moments (as she insisted we take typing and shorthand so we had something to fall back on), she had somehow impressed on me that you must always buy expensive shoes. Implicit in this, which she repeated more than once, was a threat that somehow your feet would suffer if you didn’t. I don’t know what that means, that your arches would fall or the ridiculously high instep (which made buying anything but expensive shoes fairly impractical to begin with) would somehow disappear. Or if it was just another superstition, like putting a hat on the bed, which meant, in the theater, that you’d have a flop, or if a spoon falls, someone’s about to arrive, or if a knife falls, trouble’s coming.


  Trouble was coming but it was hard to see it when I was five.

  As opposed to a year later when it was evident, at least to those of us inside, that my mother’s complex (albeit fragile) but until then reliable response system was about to become unstable. Did it turn on a dime? I don’t know. Was there a defining moment—like an incident that causes post-traumatic stress disorder—or just a series of events that collected: an affair of my father’s, a play that wasn’t a hit, the loss of a loved one?

  It ran counter to everything she’d told us, those kind of upbeat missives about being strong and pulling yourself up after a fall—“Everything’s copy,” “Learn to cope.” Good advice, though, as events aren’t always controllable.

  On the surface everything seemed fine. Soft-boiled eggs were served in egg cups. Mommy’s saccharine still stored on the lazy Susan in a slim silver Tiffany’s box that I still have. The Wedgwood china still showed up at dinner along with sterling silver flatware on which their initials were engraved. The fresh and always in abundance Belgian chocolates in a covered Baccarat crystal dish on the coffee table in the living room were available at any time. The condiments, jam, ketchup, mustard, all displayed in an appropriate china dish. No store-bought cartons were allowed on her table.

  It wasn’t a disorder (at least, I didn’t think so at the time), it was Mommy’s sense of elegance and style. But I wonder, now, if it was the last façade of appearances as the fashionable suits and high heels were gradually replaced by red stretch pants and strange sparkly harlequin slippers and prone became her position of choice.

  I remember walking up Third Avenue when I was 17 and seeing someone who looked like my mom ducking into a somewhat seedy bar alone. I no longer lived at home and I hadn’t seen her for a week or so. It couldn’t be her? Could it? It was just someone who looked like her. But I realized when I looked in the window and saw her sitting at the bar, as she lit a cigarette and ordered a drink, that it was my mother in a place where her shoes had no business being, at all.