Cheat and Charmer (15 page)

Dorshka put the letter down on the coffee table and snorted. “Thanks to those bastards at HUAC, my devoted son has enjoyed complete immunity over the past four years from the slightest threat of a visit from me. All this about missing me and wanting me to live there with them is complete nonsense. If they miss me so much, what’s to stop them from coming here, after all?”

“Well, for one thing they hate it here. They’re card-carrying expatriates and have taken an oath to despise everything ‘made in the U.S.A.’ ”

“Ha! Do you know what they want? They want to be left alone. What couple as wrapped up in each other as they are could stand to have anyone else around—least of all a mother-in-law? Oh, they have their friends, but their friends are all alike—romantic, living for love and experience.”

“As you did?”

“Yes, as I did. And I’m damn glad of it too, now that
that’s
all finished.”

She smiled triumphantly at Dinah.

“She’s pregnant,” Dinah murmured. She felt suddenly tired and, glancing again at her watch, decided that she really must go. Yet she made no move to get up and instead sank back in her chair.

Dorshka mistook this for concern. “You know, my dear,” she said gently,
“I think for now you don’t have to worry about them. They are fine. And since you make this bargain with the Devil—you name names and in exchange your perfect happiness continues undisturbed—you should now enjoy life to the fullest. That, you owe yourself. To tell you the truth”—and her eyes filled with tears that sparkled and brimmed but did not spill over—“I envy you. You girls are still in the middle of your lives. You are so much in love with your husbands. So you owe it to someone like me to live fully, and live well, so that I can see once again before I die what life should be like.”

The tears fell, then, and Dorshka withdrew a handkerchief from her pocket and in silence wiped her eyes.

At that moment, Dinah knew without a doubt that she had finally seen what it was about Dorshka that had made her a legend for audiences in Berlin and Prague.

She leaned forward across the coffee table and took the older woman’s hands in her own. “I l-l-love you dearly, D-D-D-Dorshka. You were kind to me today, and you didn’t have to be.”

“I love you too, my dear. Only …”

They let go of each other’s grasp and got up at the same time.

“… you must be prepared if they decide—”

“Never to speak to me again?” Dinah said sharply.

“Yes.”

“But will you speak to me?”

“Haven’t I done so today?”

At the door, Dorshka sighed and Dinah’s heart sank. She’s wonderful, Dinah thought, but she can never leave anything unsaid. Everything has to come out somehow. It was Dorshka’s great strength, she would have admitted at once, but it could also be trying. “You know,” Dorshka began. And Dinah moved imperceptibly closer to the door, even though she knew she would not be able to leave without one more dose of moral instruction. “It’s a pity, really, because always I have liked Jake. He’s a charming boy. And he has so much talent.”

“Do you think so? I thought you didn’t like his pictures.”

“Oh, but I do.”

“But…?”

Dinah could have been out the door in an instant, but she stayed rooted, waiting for the needle, reminding herself that Dorshka, who had
been able to get so many people out in time, had not managed to save her own family. Her mother, her two sisters, her three brothers, and their families had all been murdered in Auschwitz. And then she had lost Stefan, learning of his death through her son, Mike, who had tracked down Ventura’s surviving comrades in M.O.I. and listened to their stories. Out of this, Mike’s second novel,
The Confession
, had been written. It was about a German-born and German-speaking naturalized American soldier’s attempt to track down the Gestapo officers who had tortured and killed his father, a Resistance fighter in France. Dinah had interpreted the book to mean that Mike believed that Stefan Ventura was his father—though no one, not even Dorshka, knew it for sure.

“They win,” said Dorshka. “These terrible HUACkers win when they turn people who should stand together against each other. They split them into good guys and bad guys. I myself wouldn’t testify, but I won’t stop talking to you—because I don’t want them to win. I don’t want to let them cut us off from each other. But at the same time, since I, too, must listen to my guts, I suppose that I wouldn’t so much like to talk to Jake. He has influence over you, and he could have told you not to do it.”

Dinah nodded, her lips pressed tightly together. There was nothing she could say. She kissed Dorshka again and then stepped soundlessly out into the hazy afternoon and began walking toward her car.

She waited until she had reached the stoplight at Veteran and Sunset to light a cigarette and release her own tears.
Pregnant
. Veevi was pregnant again. And Dinah, with her two children, felt that she herself would never again conceive. The old envy, the oldest feeling she had ever known, turned the warm Los Angeles afternoon into a dreary Pittsburgh landscape—heavy, deadening, and gray. For the second time in two days, she felt desolate and bereft.

It was Veevi and Mike’s love that assaulted her now. That passionate mutual adoring love, as Veevi described it in her letters, in which they were the entire world to each other. It wasn’t, Dinah acknowledged sickeningly, what Jake had ever felt for her or ever would feel. She had eagerly accepted him last night, and responded to him with every muscle and nerve, and believed with all her heart in his passion, as if, finally, he had given her the truest, deepest part of himself. Yet something about it was wrong, and false. It wasn’t the Jake she knew. He just wasn’t that considerate, that slow and patient, that generous, by nature or by habit. It had been a performance.
He’d been
thanking
her. She hadn’t wanted to see it then, but she couldn’t avoid seeing it now. Oh, he loved her, all right, in his own way, but it wasn’t the wild, consuming adoration Mike felt for Veevi. It never would be that, either. And with this realization the thought snaked through her and began twisting itself around her: Mike would never have let Veevi testify for him. Never. Never.
Never
.

I
t was a late summer evening some weeks later. Although Dinah had just devoured three morsels of rumaki, the euphoria created by the combined tastes of chicken liver, water chestnuts, and bacon had lasted for only a moment, not nearly long enough to assuage either her hunger pangs or the edgy feeling that had been plaguing her all day. Not simply all day—for the whole of the past week. “Aren’t we going to Mort Berman’s next Thursday?” Jake had asked. He had been heavily in screenplay, and it would be their first big party since she had testified. This one wasn’t to be missed. It was a hundred-dollar-a-plate luau for the Democratic Party, with the guest of honor Adlai Stevenson, governor of Illinois, due to arrive later that evening. Rumor had it that he might run for president next year.

Searching the patio for familiar faces, Dinah moved toward a cluster of people who had gathered around Mel Gordon. She was just in time to hear him deliver the punch line, in a Yiddish accent: “Doctor, I too miscalculated. I only
thought
I had to fart.”

She was fond of Mel and his wife, Annie, and liked everyone else in the group, too—Marv and Ruthie Weiskopf, Dolly and Phil Levinson, Irwin and Bea Katzenbach, Hy and Esther Rosen—and now her laughter mingled happily with theirs. Though Mort, an entrenched Hollywood bachelor, usually went around with a faster, sportier crowd than the Laskers, he had invited some of the couples from their set as well, and Dinah relaxed, feeling safe with them. She looked for Jake and caught him in profile, head
tilted slightly forward, drink in his right hand, the other cupping his deaf left ear. He was listening to Joe Schlossberg, who had called the day Jake’s Marathon deal was announced in the trades and offered to represent him, saying he could get Jake ten times what Reggie Pertwee or anybody else in Hollywood could promise.

“I’m famished,” Dinah murmured to Ruthie Weiskopf.

“Me, too, but I don’t see a crumb of food. Do you?”

Her own stomach growling, Dinah scanned the crowded patio for the waiter with the hors d’oeuvres tray, only to encounter Sid Plotkin’s lascivious stare.
I want you
, he mouthed at her. She shot him a broad smile and mouthed back:
Sor-ry
. Sid was the kind of person you’d expect to see at a Mort Berman party—any kind of Mort Berman party, whether it was for the Democrats or for the guys who spent the day at the track (after they’d written that day’s quota of jokes for George Joy—some of them had worked for him since the Stone Age). Sid was and would always be a George Joy writer: divorced, a Santa Anita habitué, often found in Palm Springs and Vegas, never with the same girl twice.

From the moment in 1941 when Jake had first taken her to NBC to watch a Crystaldent broadcast and introduced her to Joy’s stable of writers, Sid had faithfully made a pass at Dinah every time they’d met. It had been going on for so long now that it was simply a reflexive gag—not funny, not unfunny either, although Dinah never doubted that Sid’s lust was real and that a response from her would have meant real trouble. She found him what she called “seriously unattractive,” unlike Art Squires, she thought, blushing uneasily, as she remembered their encounter the day she gave her testimony to the Committee. Sid Plotkin was no Art Squires, though. He was trim and compact in a self-regarding, tennis-playing, neither-short-nor-tall sort of way, but had a repellent, fishlike face, with round eyes that were too close together. Jake called him, in private, the Human Salmon. “Watch out for him. He’s just another horny Jewish comedy writer lusting for shiksa legs,” Jake had testily warned her years ago when she reported Plotkin’s pass-making to him.

Undeterred, Sid held up his hands in mock prayer. Dinah shook her head again, and he let his fall limply to the side in a parody of disappointment. All right, she told herself, enough of that. Turning toward the buffet table, she noticed that it was piled with food at last. “Look, Ruthie,” she said, grabbing Ruthie Weiskopf’s elbow.

“Let’s go,” said Ruthie, a warm, freckled woman whose husband had
written and produced a hit television comedy series about a private secretary.

The two women were headed toward the cold roast beef when a woman with upswept hair and a perfectly round, rouged face, resembling a pink pom-pom, suddenly loomed ahead and stopped them cold. “Now, you come right over here with me,” she commanded, dragging Dinah away from Ruthie. “Talk to me, Dinah,” she said. “Joe and I read it in the paper. Aren’t you relieved it’s
over
?”

On the way to the party Jake had warned her: “For Christ’s sake, if you see her, just be nice. Don’t get huffy or noble. We don’t know for a fact that she’s the one who nailed you. And don’t forget, whatever you do, it’s an elemental fact of the motion picture industry that among professional agents there are a handful whose names carry more prestige than all the rest put together, and Joe and Renna Schlossberg are the two halves of one of those names.”

“I know that,” she had said. “And if you think I went through the whole goddamn business of t-t-t-testifying only to blow up at the person who I’m ninety-nine and forty-four one-hundredths percent sure named me, you must think I’m a real h-h-h-horse’s ass.”

“Yes, I’m glad it’s over,” she said to Renna Schlossberg, who, as she squeezed Dinah’s hand, made a sound somewhere between a yelp and a squeal. “Though, frankly, I think I would rather have had a tooth pulled. Without novocaine.”

“Really? They were very nice to me.”

Well, you sure as hell were nice to them
, she didn’t say.

Dinah smiled. Where had Renna picked up that god-awful squeal?

“But that Kingman. God. A real American type, don’t you think? Now, Marlow—he’s interesting. He’s got that—that kind of redneck purity about him. You know what I mean? Skinny. Craggy.
Very
Carradine.”

“Got him in mind for
The Grapes of HUAC
?”