Swan Song

by Kelleigh Greenberg-Jephcott

  ‘Mrs. Bogart, bon courage! If there’s anything else I can do for you while you’re in Paris, please don’t hesitate. We Extra Women must stick together.’

  ‘Thank you, but I leave for London tomorrow.’

  ‘Ah! Business or pleasure?’

  ‘Filming.’

  ‘My, how glamorous.’

  ‘A gal’s gotta work.’

  ‘Pity we won’t see more of one another,’ said Pam.

  ‘Next time,’ Betty vowed, though Slim knew her well enough to know there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell. With that, Pam fixed her eager gaze on Slim, taking her arm in a conspiratorial manner, leading her into the foyer. ‘And you, Mrs. Hayward? Can I do anything for you?’

  Slim shied ever so slightly from her grasp, though not enough for Pam to notice. ‘No, thank you. Very thoughtful, but Leland arrives tomorrow.’

  Pam nodded, accepting the information as a given. ‘Yes, of course he does. I hope you won’t mind, but I’ve taken the liberty of preparing a little dinner in your and Leland’s honor… I do so hope you’ll let me. Just a few close friends. Very intimate.’

  Slim willed the edges of her mouth upward, the corners rising into a polite grin as if being pulled by invisible strings. But while the grin cooperated, the words refused to follow.

  ‘And afterwards, I have tickets to a play that I thought might be amusing for Leland to see.’ Before Slim could respond, Pam quickly added—‘In return for his generosity in New York. I’m still dreaming of South Pacific!’ She proceeded to hum a few off-key bars of ‘Some Enchanted Evening’ while Slim stared, speechless.

  ‘I’ll have to check with Leland of course.’

  ‘Of course. I am so indebted to Leland—and Bill… and Babe,’ she added, almost as an afterthought. ‘And to you of course, for loaning me your husband.’

  ‘Yes. Well. It was our pleasure,’ Slim said as she and Betty inched toward the exit.

  The solicitous Madame Churchill fetched their coats, all but helping them into them.

  It was not until they’d said their goodnights that Slim noticed it, resting on a table just to the side of the door…

  A single Little Gem magnolia, floating in a bowl, wet and fragrant as Truman had promised Leland it would be, almost a decade before.

  ‘GODDAMN LYING BASTARD Hay… Two-timing goddamn bastard!’ In the taxi Slim erupted into a profanity-soaked diatribe, a red-hot stream of fears and insults combined. Betty laughed outright.

  ‘Leland? With that frump of a hausfrau?! When he has you?’

  ‘But the fucking magnolia—!’ Slim sputtered.

  ‘Coincidence.’

  ‘Really?’

  Betty considered, then dismissed a more sinister explanation. ‘Absolutely. If anything, she was trying to impress you. She tailored a whole goddamn evening to your tastes! White flowers, white candles…’

  ‘But not white plates,’ Slim couldn’t resist. ‘God, was that china not repellent?’

  ‘Tasteless.’

  ‘Put me off the whole goddamn meal!’

  ‘As if the meal needed any help.’ They laughed at the awful-ness of bland vichyssoise, not quite chilled enough. Of salmon not quite warm enough, despite having spent ample time in a pan, yielding desiccated balsawood flakes. ‘God, how Leland would have loathed that!’

  ‘Precisely. He’d loathe her—her whole fussy, frumpy, fading-English-rose routine! New York must’ve been hell, schlepping that around.’

  ‘You really think?’

  ‘Leland’s a gent. A man of taste—of drama. In you he has the whole package. The razzle-dazzle.’

  Slim smiled at her appreciatively.

  ‘Pam Churchill,’ Betty continued, ‘wouldn’t know dazzle if it knocked her out of her loafers!’

  They snickered at the notion, and for the first time in hours Slim breathed easier.

  WHEN LELAND ARRIVED The next Morning, an hour after Betty had departed for her flight, Slim was relieved to find he was his old gorgeous self. So adorable, in fact, she banished any lingering doubts about Little Gem magnolias from her mind.

  The laughing eyes, clear and blue as a summer sky. The tributaries of lines at their edges. The collegiate crew cut, rendered no less boyish by the salt and pepper flecked throughout. Wearing a wide grin, arms filled with three dozen paper-white roses—his other floral staple.

  Not just any roses… Bourbon Boule de Neige, their special varietal.

  After they had set up housekeeping in Manhasset on the North Shore of Long Island, they planted beds of them outside every window. They took pleasure watching them grow beyond their playful, tinted edges, bursting into unlikely white snowballs in the thick of the August heat. Two blooms linked by a single stem, flourishing together.

  ‘Oh, Hay!’ Slim’s eyes welled with tears.

  She pressed against him, crushing the roses between them, bringing her lips to his.

  ‘Don’t tell me my Nan’s getting sentimental on me’—his voice graveled and warmed from countless cigarettes. He kissed the wet patches on her cheeks, then the droplets that clung to her lashes. ‘What’s with the waterworks?’

  Slim laughed through her tears, at the unadulterated joy of his presence. His arms felt like home—as if the walls of the hotel suite had vanished, and with them the months (the years, if she was honest) of fretting. Gone were the asylums in which Billy and Bridget Hayward atrophied, their childhoods lost in a never-ending round of pills and shocks and seizures. Gone were the hospital wards that had become a fixture of their marriage, where Slim spent years grieving half-formed offspring, an endless hemorrhaging of blood and tissue and hope.

  What a toll it had taken. Slim had weathered these heartbreaks alone, while Leland faced his own. Beneath his unflappable veteran’s exterior insecurity festered. As Leland had entered his fifties, he had confronted a rare thing in his career: failure.

  Before the recent string of successes there’d been an equal run of flops, followed by a spell as dry as a drought in the Mojave.

  ‘You’re only as good as your last hit, Nan,’ he’d say when she attempted to bolster his flagging ego. She had tried to be there for him, but Leland’s instinct was to retreat into his cave and lick his wounds in solitude, for which Slim, by her own admission, had little patience. She had taken care of him in a superficial sense… But if she was honest, she’d resented it. Hence her weekend with Frank… and maybe a few more like it. She hadn’t always been ‘dazzling,’ as Betty so generously put it. Being away from Leland for nearly six months—first with Tru in freezing Russian waste-lands, then with Betty in Paris and Madrid—had made Slim think. What would she be without her Hay? Hadn’t they weathered the worst of the tempests and survived them? Were they not still hanging on by the same stem, worse for wear, dormant even, but poised to blossom again and again? There was nothing but Leland. They’d have a second act now, after the unfortunate interval—if luck decreed, a third.

  She raised her tear-stained face to his, beaming.

  ‘I’m just so happy to see you.’

  She kissed him as they tumbled onto the sofa, sweeping white blooms and stems aside, all hands and limbs and mouths, consuming each other as they had when they were ten years younger and ten years hungrier.

  AFTERWARDS THEY LOUNGED together, limbs entwined, matching Ritz bathrobes wrapped around their nakedness. Leland laughed as Slim told him, over a pair of Scotches, about her odd encounter with the attentive Madame Churchill. As ever, Slim provided a bang-up impersonation of her overzealous hostess and when she informed him of the encore invite, she was mildly surprised when his objection wasn’t more fulsome. By a second round, he actually posited that it might prove ‘entertaining’ to turn up.

  ‘Entertaining in what way… ?’

  ‘Oh, you know. She’ll put on a show, at the very least.’

  ‘What did you make of her, in New York?’

  ‘Well, she’s a character,’ Leland answered, as if sharing a joke only they could appreciat
e. Slim breathed an exhalation of something like relief. She laid her head on his broad, bare chest, her fingers smoothing the graying hairs that peppered its surface.

  ‘Was it awful, my darling… ?’

  ‘Utter hell.’ Leland reached beyond her for his tumbler. She added a handful of ice from the bucket and took a sip after him. Their lips met again, sharing the sting of the cold Scotch between them. He brushed a strand of hair from her face, tucking it gently behind her ear. ‘You know I only did it for you.’

  ‘I know. You’re a prince.’

  She curled deeper into his embrace, inhaling his scent, with its top notes of bay rum and tobacco—more intoxicating to Slim than a thousand Boule de Neige roses and Little Gem magnolias combined.

  THAT EVENING AS They arrived at LA Churchill’s pied-à-terre, Slim was surprised to find that Pam’s ‘intimate supper’ was actually anything but. There were twenty guests waiting just to meet the famous Haywards, arranged at tables of ten, set with the garish Rothschild china, place cards stuck in the bills of gold-plate mallards at each setting.

  As Slim followed her husband to the hostess table, Pam stepped in, playfully steering her toward the other.

  ‘Now Slim, as much as I’d love to keep you to myself, I cannot deny my friends the pleasure of your company. Would you mind presiding over our second table?’

  What could Slim do but accept? She was introduced to French poet after French painter after French politician, each with French wives, who appeared to be Frenchified versions of Madame Churchill. As she later slogged through a stodgy soufflé course, moving from bad to worse with tournedos of grayish, well-done beef, Slim—marionette grin lifted high—did her best to blame the language barrier for the unspeakably dull conversation.

  ‘So, Madame’ Aaaaay-ward…’ began the poet who, Slim noted, lacked the H-in-Hay to an even greater degree than your average Frenchman, ‘Pamela tells us you are,’ ow shall we say… une femme indépendante.’

  Slim, catching the gist, replied, ‘Well, yes… I suppose I am.’

  A boucléd politician’s wife, sporting a neater version of Pamela’s cream-puff coif, all but sneered, ‘But what does Monsieur’ Ayward think of this? Il dois se sentir seul, n’estce pas?’

  Again, Slim grasped enough to smile politely as she sawed through her wodge of meat.

  ‘Mister’ Ayward is très heureux… He’s simply elated.’ She leaned in close to the politician, and the painter beyond him. ‘Je suce sa queue,’ she informed them sweetly.

  As the Mesdames Pâte-à-Choux gasped with horror, Slim chuckled to herself, having memorized such an off-color phrase in every language precisely for such moments. She’d learned from dearest Truheart—if she hadn’t known it already—the handiness of shock value.

  ‘Big Mama,’ Truman had told her on more than one occasion, ‘you should know how to “suck a cock” in every tongue. French and German and Spanish and Italian… Trust me, honey. It’s a very useful phrase! Now let’s review them again. Repeat after me: Je suce sa queue… Ich seinen Schwanz lutschen… Me chupan la polla…’

  As the French matrons recovered from her bombshell, Slim looked across the room, hoping to catch Leland’s eye with their I’ve-got-a-tale-for-you-later look.

  But Leland seemed absorbed in whatever story Madame Churchill was regaling the male faction of her table with, while their wives picked sullenly at their over-steamed vegetables.

  LATER SLIM WOULD Claim She’d dealt nobly with the dinner.

  She certainly prevented further discussion of the’ Ayward marriage, yet she couldn’t escape the feeling that her dinner companions knew more about her domestic affairs than she cared to contemplate. After a chocolate mousse possessing all the lightness of a Zeppelin, the company departed for the theater. To Slim’s dismay, it wasn’t just the Haywards and Madame Churchill attending the performance at the Théâtre Hébertot…

  It was the whole goddamn bunch. All twenty close, personal friends. Vingt amis. Naturally, Pam explained apologetically, their party would have to splinter into smaller pairings, as ‘it was impossible to secure tickets in such a large block.’

  Large block is right, thought Slim. Not such an ‘intimate party’ now, is it, Madame Rat?

  As they entered the lobby, Slim saw, to her horror, what they were in for: A Long Day’s Journey into Night. En français.

  Sweet Jesus on a stick, it had been painful enough in English!

  She steeled herself for quatre heures of tedium, taking comfort that she might at least slip off her shoes and run her stockinged toes up Leland’s leg. Grasp his hand beneath the playbill and feel his long fingers stroking her palm in the darkness—

  ‘Now Slim, you’ll certainly need a translator, and Pierre has insisted that he do the honors.’

  The journalist at her table—the one diner who had looked upon her with new-found appreciation after her ‘queue’ bombshell—smiled at her, baring a row of smoke-stained teeth.

  ‘… And I’ll interpret for Leland,’ Pam decreed. ‘It will be fascinating for you to see how it translates, Leland.’ She took his arm (practically seized it) as Pierre offered Slim his. She managed to meet Leland’s gaze as he was led away by Mrs. Churchill. He gave Slim a shrug, followed by a wink. Small consolation for four hours of O’Neill under enforced separation, but she’d take what she could get.

  The house lights flickered. Usherettes steered patrons to their seats with flashlights. As Slim was escorted to her row, she noted a parallel beam indicating Mrs. Churchill and Mr.’ Ayward’s seats, exactly three rows behind her. As Slim sat waiting for the lights to dim, she could hear Pam’s laughter hanging in the air, a stale, ringing echo, like a siren’s wail. She was a siren all right, La Churchill—Slim was now sure of it. Half woman, half vulture, luring unsuspecting impresarios to their doom with slightly off-key renditions of ‘Some Enchanted Evening’ with the very purpose of flattering the fragile egos of the men who produced the ditties in question.

  Now that she’d identified the precise beast she was dealing with, Slim vowed she wouldn’t let her guard down again. She willed herself to look ahead, staring numbly at the space before her. Aware, with every breath, of the theft taking place just three rows behind her back.

  PULITZER OR NO, the Journey Certainly took it outta one.

  Slim had hoped to make a hasty exit as soon as she was reunited with Leland, but when their hostess proposed the briefest trip to a nightclub, Leland pressed Slim’s hand in commiseration, yet politely accepted the offer. In the taxi en route, Pam squeezed herself in between them, insisting that they each have a window from which to watch the lights of Paris fly past. Slim was starting to see how she played things, the canny Mrs. Churchill.

  She noted how thoughtfully Pam touched Leland’s elbow, pointing out marquees winking offerings of interest. Voice an even drone of English finishing-school polish, punctuated—with startling regularity—by tinkling gales of laughter. Enough to strike a man as musical, yet ring false to a woman.

  For her part, Slim couldn’t tear her eyes from Pam’s upper lip, tripping over that truly unfortunate line of cuspids, concerned that it risked sticking permanently to the enamel. Yet with each phrase, the tenacious lip managed to hitch itself free, just in time for the next. Between all this and those ingratiating smiles, the poor woman must have been exhausted by the end of an evening. You had to hand it to her, she did make you look. Perhaps that was Mrs. Churchill’s trick—get them fixated on the mouth, then gobble them up whole.

  LELAND AND SLIM Nuzzled at a corner ss in the nightclub, watching a burlesque dancer. She relished his strong fingers gripping hers, feeling his breath on her neck as he whispered in her ear—commenting, predictably, more on production values than the titillating nature of the performance. The buzz of the alcohol and Leland’s nearness made Slim feel generous toward her French drinking compagnons. That was before the floor show cleared and the dance floor opened—where, by the third hour, Slim began to grow testy. She craved the co
mfort of silk sheets at the Ritz, missed the pleasure of crawling into them avec Leland, feeling his bare toes tickling hers, slurring their way through an evening’s recap as they drifted off to sleep. Waking the next morning to room service trays, resuming where they’d left off.

  At Leland’s cajoling she joined him for a cha-cha, then retired to the bar. The O’Neill was catching up with her, and if denied bed she at the very least intended to get as loaded as the tippling Tyrones. The French amis possessed boundless reserves of enthusiasm for sambas and rumbas alike. When Leland offered Slim his hand for yet another cha-cha, she shook her head.

  ‘Sorry, kid. I’m out.’ She kicked off her heels and propped her feet on the chair opposite, wiggling her toes to restore feeling. ‘Can we not just get a taxi for Chrissakes?!’

  ‘Sweetheart, we wouldn’t want to seem ungrateful.’

  Slim muttered in a low voice, ‘How fucking grateful do we need to be… ?’

  As if on cue, Madame Churchill made her solicitous approach, bearing yet another pair of martinis. In a seamlessly choreographed movement, Pam deposited the drinks on Slim’s table with one hand, offering the other to Leland. ‘Mr. Hayward, as your wife is taking a breather, perhaps I could tempt you onto the floor?’ she inquired with an encouraging little tug. Leland pecked Slim’s cheek before following Pam into the sea of bodies.

  Oh sure, Slim thought. What can he do with that but oblige? She had a sudden, vodka-blurred memory of something Truman had told her, after lunching with Pamela at La Côte Basque the previous spring. He said he’d asked Pam her secret—was she especially brilliant in the sack?

  ‘Precious,’ Tru reported he had squealed, ‘what are you doing to all these men? Do you know something I don’t… ?’ He said Pam had shaken her head, sagely.

  ‘It’s nothing like that,’ she’d assured him. ‘Look, I meet a man. I sit next to him. I listen to him. And the next day, if I feel that he’s game, I go to Cartier and have a cigarette case engraved with a personal note inside, based on our conversation. I send it around, and what can he do? He has to respond.’