Everything and More (5 page)

“You mean you write too?”

“It’s the Fernauld family disease. I’m not like BJ. She can go to him for help. Not me. Never! All I can do is snarl and skulk like a wounded cub. Let’s face it, the war came as a benison. On the
Enterprise
there’s no need for me to peck at the old Remington and inform myself that Joshua Fernauld is pouring out Pablum for the masses whereas Lincoln Fernauld is writing erudite, lyrical prose, the great American novel.”

“Linc—”

“Will you let me finish? Marylin, when this war is over, I’ll be a plumber, a ditchdigger, a bank robber, anything except a writer.”

“I shouldn’t have argued. It’s not like me. And I don’t know anything about literature or screenwriting.”

“You’re remarkably astute about both,” he said. “And another
thing. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want to make you, but that’s not all there is.”

“It’s not?”

“You’re one of nature’s masterpieces, Marylin Wace. Though I long to touch, I enjoy looking.” There was a huskiness in his voice. Something had crept into the big car, an electricity that made her quiver. She felt prized open, vulnerable, submissive, waiting.

You’ve known him all of one hour, she told herself.

“Friends?” he asked.

“Friends,” she murmured.

“My parents must be home by now, and they’ll expect to see me,” he said. “Marylin, where do you live?”

She gave him her address, and they drove through the mistshrouded twilight.

The Waces’ apartment had been added on, an afterthought that perched like an out-of-place mortarboard atop a detached two-car garage. This undistinguished part of Beverly Hills was R1, to rent out any part of the small bungalows constituted a zoning violation, but with the wartime housing shortage the city fathers bent their straight backs enough to turn slightly in the other direction, so no police came to question the apartment’s legality.

The blackout blinds were pulled every which way, and light blazed unevenly at the bottoms and through the rips at the sides. Climbing rickety wooden stairs, Marylin recollected their brief stop on North Hillcrest Road to let BJ out of the car. The Fernaulds lived in a commodious mansion that crouched like a placid Tudor lion on rolling, lovingly watered, expensive green real estate. She felt a shame that Linc was a witness to her poverty.

The smell of frying increased and NolaBee’s cheerful rendition of “Poinciana” grew louder at every step, and Linc, grasping Marylin’s hand, took her books.

As Linc and Marylin reached the top of the steps, NolaBee’s song halted abruptly. Linc peered down at Marylin, silently handing her back her books. Then, without a good-bye, he turned, loping down the steps. Marylin watched him go, the outline of a tall, lankily graceful man disappearing into the evening shadows.

  
4
  

The apartment was square except for the narrow bite given over to the bathroom, and was unobstructed by walls. Into this space the Waces had crowded their eccentric conglomeration of possessions: three dented metal folding chairs circled an heirloom mahogany gateleg table, two looming, overgarnished Victorian wardrobes jutted out from the walls, forming an alcove for NolaBee’s box springs and mattress, which was covered not with a normal bedspread but with a worn rubicund oriental carpet.

None of the Waces had any conception how to keep house, and personal possessions were strewn over every available surface.

A metal screen, haphazardly collaged by NolaBee with covers from fan magazines, leaned against the wall near the makeshift kitchen where she tended a hissing skillet full of chicken. A flowered apron swathed her black slacks, and her hair was concealed by the jaunty red turban that she wore to work.

For nearly a year now, NolaBee had been employed at Hughes Aircraft. The war, having scooped up ten million men, ravenously demanded armaments, and America’s Depression-racked industry had burst alive, revving up to three perpetual shifts, hiring workers of either sex, every age and color. Hughes’s employment office had taken on the inexperienced NolaBee without query or quibble. It tickled her funnybone to wonder what her Fairburn and Roy ancestors would think if they could see her riveting wings to B-19’s between two Negro women—the younger one the gold of brown sugar, the other a regular black mammy—and being right friendly with them both, too. Her ancestors and Chilton’s had owned slaves, and NolaBee, like the rest of the extended family, was without the least dreg of masochistic, retroactive guilt. Her people, she was positive, had been just in every dealing with their human possessions, had tenderly nursed each aged darkie—how could it be otherwise? Her people were Georgia gentlefolk.

Turning a drumstick, NolaBee flashed Marylin a welcoming smile. Roy raised her curly brown head from her homework—she sat on
the floor between the wardrobes, an area designated as her room because her iron cot formed an angle with the cherrywood bookcase whose bottom shelf held her joy and consolation, a secondhand tablemodel Radiola. “It’s nearly six,” she said. “What kept you?”

Marylin, who was the only one of them with any craving for order, smiled dazedly. Without thinking, she picked up her mother’s old jacket and Roy’s hand-me-down blue topper and hung them on the coatrack.

“Yes,” said NolaBee. “I was getting a mite worried.”

“The rehearsal—”

NolaBee interrupted, cocking her head. “Oh, that’s right. I forgot. You’re starting on the play the screenwriter’s little girl wrote.”

“BJ Fernauld.” Marylin spoke the patronym, her lips softening as for a kiss. “After we finished . . .” Her voice faded. Always exceptionally close to her mother, Marylin had never been afflicted with an adolescent’s stubborn secretiveness, yet as she started to explain her lateness, to tell Mama about Linc, her tongue went thick. She did not want to share any part of the last hour.

“It’s the Junior-Class play, isn’t it?” NolaBee asked, not waiting for an answer. “I reckon there’ll be a lot of people come to see it.”

“Probably just the kids, Mama. Anyway, it’s not until the end of next semester.”

“Well, I reckon he’ll be there, the screenwriter,” said NolaBee. “I’ll help you learn your lines after supper.” Fat spattered as she flipped a chicken thigh. “Honey, I do wish you’d call if you’re walking home after dark.”

“Somebody drove her,” said Roy. “I heard the car.”

“A beau?” NolaBee’s cigarette waggled as she smiled.

“Oh, Mama . . .” Marylin blushed.

“What’s his name?”

“Linc . . . Lincoln.”

“Look at you, red as a beet.” NolaBee chuckled as she fished out pieces of chicken. “I reckon this ole bird is done clear through. Girls, let’s get at him while he’s good and hot.”

*   *   *

After they finished eating, NolaBee shuffled the slick mimeograph paper, cuing Marylin in her lines. Smoke drifted lazily around the red turban and the gold-gleaming pageboy.

Roy stretched on her cot, listening to
Amos n’ Andy
with her head touching the cracked pink paint of her little radio. When Marylin was working on her roles, the volume had to be kept down. All pleasure and work revolved subserviently around that hoped-for, worked-for, yearned-for career of Marylin’s.

It was problematic for a girl entering Horace Mann Grammar School as late as seventh grade to carve a social niche, and though Roy had made a few acquaintances to chatter with at recess and lunch period, she had never been invited to a classmate’s home. She imagined all the other kids dwelling in aseptic households that were presided over by the bland, trimly garbed mothers whom she saw in shiny sedans outside the school and by fathers who departed in the morning and returned at night on a schedule as inviolable as a Swiss cuckoo clock. An existence so opposite from her own that she in turn had never invited anyone to the topsy-turvy apartment.

Roy was nothing if not constant, and in her loneliness she set her family on a high pedestal and clung closer to them: she revered her father as a slain god, she saw Marylin as an exquisite heroine faintly tinged by tragedy, and NolaBee as a fascinating, dashing woman of unequaled bravery.

During the commercial she surveyed her mother and sister.

Roy would not be mortal if she weren’t jealous of her exquisite older sibling. She did not resent the carefully hoarded, crumpled bills that were taken from NolaBee’s big fake alligator purse to pay for Marylin’s singing lessons, dancing lessons, her brand new clothes from Yorkshire’s and Nobby Knit. No, it was when her mother and sister sat engrossed like this, their heads close, their arms touching, that a hot, liquid mourning flooded through Roy and she felt unworthy, unloved, and unlovable.

“De fashion show was a financh success, Amos?

“Oh yes, it was great, all right. Made close to a hundred dollars fo de lodge—”

“Give me that line again, Mama?”

“Whatever’s the matter with you, Marylin? I declare, I never saw you like this, not paying an ounce of attention. Seems like you don’t care at all.”

The happiness suffusing Marylin’s lovely features dimmed. “I’m sorry, Mama,” she said placatingly.

NolaBee repeated the line. Marylin’s face assumed her role’s slightly foolish eagerness, and she read Vera’s lines. NolaBee watched, her long upper lip quivering as if she, not her daughter, were speaking.

Then the phone rang.

They all stared at the instrument that many days crouched atop the bookcase in black, abeyant silence.

On the second ring Roy picked it up. “Yes?”

A pleasant baritone drawled, “May I speak to Marylin Wace?”

“Who may I say is calling?”

“Linc.”

Roy held the instrument toward Marylin. “Must be a Neanderthal. The missing
link.”

Marylin jumped to her feet and ran across the room. She dragged the phone as far from Roy’s cot as the cord permitted, pressing the receiver to her ear.

“Hello,” she said in that soft tone that Roy thought of as angora. “Yes. . . . Me too. . . . Fine . . . Tonight? . . . No—yes. Yes, I’d like that. See you.” She hung up, and for a split second her eyes were out of focus, a newborn, blue-green look. Then she ran to the wardrobe with the chipped walnut veneer, flinging open the door. “Mama, I’m going out for a snack.”

“A good thing, too. You barely touched your chicken.”

NolaBee was beaming archly. With uncomplicated cheer she twitted Marylin about her admirers, and had no idea how much the two years she had snipped from her daughter’s life had distorted the girl’s relationships. Despite Marylin’s total lack of interest in her callow swains, NolaBee persisted in viewing the masculine telephone calls and prom orchids in the tiny, leaking Frigidaire as proof that her beauty whirled in breathless excitement between enraptured, wealthy admirers. “I reckon this must be the same Linc who drove you home. Tell me about him. Who is he?”

Marylin was snatching a handful of rayon underwear that she had ironed yesterday, her good high heels, the powder-blue date dress. “Oh, somebody’s brother.”

“A match made in heaven,” cracked Roy. “You’re somebody’s sister.”

Marylin didn’t hear her. She had shut the bathroom door.

“I reckon if Marylin’s new beau is coming,” said NolaBee with a wink, “we better stack the dishes.”

*   *   *

Marylin was still immersed in the rituals of the bathroom when the brisk masculine footsteps rang on the rickety staircase.

Roy opened the door anticipating the usual, a perspiration-glossed, nervous-tongued male wearing a dark blue letter sweater adorned with a big orange B.

Instead she confronted a tall naval officer whose butternut tan contrasted with his white uniform.

“Hi,” he said easily as he removed the cap with the gold insignia. “I’m Linc Fernauld.” He looked around.

“Some of us are getting fixed up,” Roy said in her best Cagney voice.

“The kid sister?”

“Actually her mother. A sad case of arrested development.”

He grinned. His smile tipped downward on the left.

“Oh, you, Roy!” NolaBee called good-naturedly. Freshly lipsticked, she sat on the sagging easy chair with the latest
Modern Screen
—“Linda Darnell Confides Her Five Greatest Passions.” “Come on in, Linc. I’m Mrs. Wace, and this little pest is Roy. You’d never know it from the way she acts, but she’ll be in high school next term.” NolaBee coquettishly bent her turbaned head. “My, my, you Navy boys certainly have the handsomest uniforms.” She squinted at the wings affixed to the white dress jacket. “A pilot, then? Would you like some coffee? Fruit?—we have apples.”