Everything and More (10 page)

NolaBee, though, chuckled indulgently, delighted that Roy at last had a friend.

There were certain strange aspects to the friendship. Althea never spoke about her parents and had never once invited Roy to her home. If either Marylin or NolaBee said a word, Roy loyally shouted them down: “So what? We live closer to school. And who cares about families?”

Althea had gone to private school, so the Waces guessed she must come from one of those classy houses north of Santa Monica Boulevard—or possibly even a north-of-Sunset mansion. Rich she certainly was. There was no question about that. Every afternoon at five, a heavyset elderly colored woman, obviously a servant, would honk the horn of a Chevy coupe with an A gas-ration sticker on the windshield. Althea would run down. After a few minutes the phone would ring, and Roy would pick it up and chatter away for another forty-five or fifty minutes. “I declare, I don’t know what all those two find to talk about,” NolaBee would say to Marylin, laughing.

Althea’s clothes were peculiar. Finely tucked blouses made of creamy crepe de chine rather than the usual white cotton; sweaters handknit in an out-of-date way with patterns; very long and narrow Oxford shoes. “No snap,” was NolaBee’s opinion. “I reckon without
Roy that Althea Cunningham’s an unhappy little thing.” Another remark that Roy vehemently denied.

A nearby table crowded with freshman boys erupted into laughter, and a short boy stood, nodding his sandy crewcut toward Roy before departing with a self-conscious strut.

Althea said, “Noticed by Mr. Big Time himself!”

“Oh, hug me!” cried Roy.

“Not until we meet thereafter.”

“You can say that again.”

They talked about boys in a language of catch phrases all their own.

A brunette had come over to the table. “Hi, Roy,” she said, her smile displaying elaborate braces. Squeezing her looseleaf to her breasts, she inquired, “How did you do on the English quiz?”

Roy grinned cheerfully. “Flunked, most likely. You?”

Althea stared down toward the gym buildings. Her joyous expression was replaced by remote hauteur. She sat next to Roy in the English class, and it was humiliating not to be greeted or questioned—but then it seemed to Althea that her classmates always either ignored her or tormented her. She wanted to viciously batter the intruder while at the same time she wished fervently that
she
had been asked about her quiz results.

“Roy, what about that Tri-Y meeting?” the girl was asking.

Idiot, jerk, Althea thought, her fingers clenching. Nobody.

Suddenly she was overwhelmed by the desire to be home at Belvedere, alone in her airy room that overlooked the Italian gardens. People drained her spirit and made her miserable. Had it always been like this? Or had she begun to feel an outcast only after
it
had happened? . . . Althea squeezed her eyes shut, banning the dreaded memory.

The girl left.

“Is it animal, vegetable, or mineral?” Althea drawled.

“Oh, Betty’s a good kid,” Roy said.

“The correct answer is all three— if you consider the salad caught in her braces,” Althea said. “I for one wouldn’t be caught dead with those Tri-Y drips!”

Marylin glanced up from the papers on her lap. Like NolaBee, she was glad that Roy had a friend, yet she had reservations: Althea seemed to have some sort of complex that made her belittle the other kids.

After a moment Roy said, “If you don’t want to go to the meeting, neither do I.”

At that moment a crowd of sophomore boys began an elaborate horseplay on the other side of the patio: the two friends watched, then leaned toward one another giggling and whispering.

Marylin reached for her thermos and poured cocoa into the cup. The flavored milk seemed to have picked up a metallic taint.

But what did taste right to her now?

Though Marylin’s ignorance of certain reproductive information was near total, a truth had been known to her subconscious for weeks now: the cause of this faint, omnipresent nausea.

She was pregnant.

She was utterly alone, terrified, and certainly unable to confide this shame to anyone. Was it possible that until a few months ago her innermost thoughts and dreams had been innocent enough to expose to her mother? Twice she had started to write to Linc, only to have her fingers cramp perilously when she attempted to form the words “I think I’m having a baby.” Prudery was appallingly inane at this point, yet she could not put her disgrace on V-Mail.

She had no idea of what to do, none.

Her one prayer, and she repeated it on a never-ending prayer wheel, was that the
Enterprise
would return to San Diego.

Sighing, she looked down at Linc’s large spiky handwriting on yellow legal paper.

This was “Island,” the sheets with the story had arrived yesterday. At home in a box she had twenty or so other stories: some were only a single page, others were long—one had fifty pages. In these tales of different men aboard an aircraft carrier, the main character of one story might play a minor part in another, or an omnipotent
I
might insert a description—Linc had written that this narrator was a fictive device, yet she intuitively accepted
I
as Linc. Each character rang so utterly true to her that she wondered if he had crawled under his shipmates’ skins.

A few stories were based on her and Linc. “Island” was one of them.

“Marylin.” Tommy Wolfe was leaning on their table.

“Hi, Tommy,” she replied.

“You have gym next, don’t you?” He was red about the ears.

“Sure thing.”

“Me too. I’ll walk you down. Uhh . . . I mean, it’s a chance to go over our new lines.”

Roy and Althea were staring. They knew that Tommy, who was in the Junior Play and hung around at lunchtime, had a big fat case on Marylin.

“I already learned mine,” she said.

Tommy hung his big, carefully combed head in embarrassment. Roy and Althea tittered.

“It’s a good idea to try the scene together, Tommy.” Marylin tucked “Island” carefully into her notebook. “That way we’ll be ready in drama class.”

*   *   *

Miss Nathans, the drama teacher, a recent graduate of USC, a tall young woman with the full figure of a Viking boat prow, sat at her desk in the center of the dais-cum-stage. Normally she called out cheerful greetings, but today her face was somber as she watched her students stroll to their desks and start to chatter. Marylin, who sat in the front row, took out a blue V-Mail sheet and began to scribble her profuse, heartfelt admiration of “Island”—contradictorily, when she was writing to Linc, her problem was most remote. The buzzer sounded.

Miss Nathans rose to her feet. Normally she took roll with perfunctory
swiftness before getting down to the work she enjoyed, but today her modulated contralto reverberated lingeringly over each name. Thirty-one pairs of eyes gazed with expectant curiosity at her.

“As some of you may have noticed,” she said with the same intense depth that she had taken roll, “the author of our class play, Barbara Jane Fernauld, is not with us this afternoon.”

There was a buzzing in the class, and everyone turned toward the empty desk-seat as though to ascertain the truth of this, although two minutes earlier BJ had not answered. Marylin alone held still, her frightened eyes fixed on Miss Nathans’s high-colored face.

“Barbara Jane was called home during third period. Her family received the sort of news dreaded by each of us who has a loved one serving our country. Her brother, Lincoln Fernauld, Beverly Hills High School, summer class of ’37, is missing in action. . . .” She paused.

She’s a liar, a liar, a liar, Marylin thought, shivering. A rotten, lousy, hateful liar.

“At Beverly,” Miss Nathans intoned, “Lincoln was on the Bee and Varsity basketball squad, he was a Squire, a Knight, a four-year Palladian, he was city editor on the
Highlights
and head editor on the
Watchtower.”
Miss Nathans paused again, a longer pause. “Will the class join me in a minute of silent prayer for the safety of Lieutenant Lincoln Fernauld.” She bowed her head.

In the worst of revelations sometimes there is a moment of benumbed grace before horror takes over. Missing in action?

Linc?

It couldn’t be. “Island” had arrived in yesterday’s mail.

Missing in action?

Then the truth encompassed Marylin with preternatural vividness. From one of the longer stories she knew in full, ineradicable detail what it was like to be shot down. In this ghastly, distorted instant the immolation was hers.

She cringed backward in the burning cockpit, seeing the fire spread from the gasoline filler pipe, her ears heard the engine of the spinning plane shrill like a woman, her body felt the bone-consuming heat, flames seared her hands as she yanked off the heavy gloves, her fingers struggled helplessly with the recalcitrant buckle of the safety belt, her desperate lungs gasped in the asphyxiating smoke, she was standing up in her seat frantically attempting to force her way out of the burning plane while the solid wind wall of slipstream trapped her. . . .

She did not realize that she was clutching her books and purse to her breasts, stumbling toward the glass-inset door.

“Marylin,” Miss Nathans called after her. “You are not dismissed.”

Marylin pushed into the cool, empty hall. She was still trapped in the incendiary hell of the TBM cockpit.

“Marylin.” Miss Nathans had followed her. “You know as well as I that it’s against school rules for you to leave in the middle of class.”

Marylin gazed wildly at this apparition amidst her torment.

“Whatever is it? You’re white as a sheet . . .” The drama teacher’s voice, worried and no longer theatrical, came from far away.

Marylin’s books and purse slipped from her grasp.

A great, hollow silence opened up.

  
9
  

Marylin swam back to consciousness.

She lay on something hard, a starched white cap atop a wrinkled visage hanging over her, while at a distance blurred the anxious faces of Miss Nathans and Tommy Wolfe.

I fainted. . . . Why? As memory spoke, her body convulsed feebly.

“Wait a minute before you try to get up,” said the school nurse’s New England twang.

Marylin became aware that something soakingly warm wrapped her lower body, and there was an ammoniac smell. Moaning, she closed her eyes.

“Don’t be embarrassed, that happens,” said the nurse briskly. She glanced over her shoulder, and Tommy disappeared.

“Marylin, dear,” Miss Nathans said, “I’ll see how you are later.” She went back into the classroom.

After a minute or so the nurse helped Marylin to her feet: with one
assisting arm around the slight waist, she led the girl slowly down the stairs and along the main corridor to the brightly sunlit nurse’s office. NolaBee was on the day shift at Hughes, so there was no point in calling home.