Cheat and Charmer (27 page)

Dinah lies on her stomach on a towel. The sun beats down on her back as she listens to Cliff Boatwright describe his meetings with a Russian writer during a recent trip to Moscow.

“Spoilsport. Loser. Malcontent,” breaks in Anatole Klein with a contemptuous snort. In his bathing trunks he has long hairy legs and arms, a simian jaw, and hungry black eyes. “What’s his name, anyway? Believe me, he knows you’re from Hollywood. A counterrevolutionary saboteur. Wants you to hide him in his suitcase and bring him over here for the moola.”

“I think it was Yuri Kaminetsky. Does that sound right?”

“Screenwriter. Stinks,” says Klein.

“A no-talent hack. A lousy petit-bourgeois wrecker and opportunist if you ask me,” chimes in Guy Bergman, who is bald and has a mustache and speaks in a deep voice tinged with contempt. Veevi barely turns her head.

Curious how they always make fun of those words until they get mad, and then they use them against one another, Dinah thinks.

“Didn’t seem that way to me,” says Boatwright, who, with three good screenwriting credits to his name, has also recently published a novel. “Seemed to me he was scared shitless.” Dinah has seen him impish and mischievous with Veevi, and so overcome with adoration for her that it has sometimes seemed as if his taut face would dissolve in tenderness like melted wax, but now he fixes Bergman and Klein with a cold stare. Dinah notes the way Veevi is looking at him, waiting for him to unlock his eyes from his adversaries and find hers so that she can single him out for a private understanding that, when they detect it, will unnerve the other two men.

“He’s played out. Has nothing left to say. End of story,” says Bergman.

“Speaking of stories, gentlemen,” says Boatwright, glancing rapidly from Bergman and Klein to Veevi and back. “I got your letter the other day.”

“Not here, Boatie,” says Klein. “This isn’t the place …”

“Why isn’t it the place? Why can’t I talk about it now?”

“Not now, Clifford,” says Bergman.

“Oh for Christ’s sake,” Veevi says, shading her eyes with her hand. “Stop acting like commissars. Just say whatever you have to say and then go play volleyball or something.”

“Who the hell are you guys anyway to say anything to me about my book?” says Boatwright. “I’m not going to sit around and wait for a goddamn summons from you guys. You got a problem with what I’ve written, go write a review.”

“Not so fast, Boatie. We’ve got some questions about class-angling in your book,” says Bergman. He’s a stocky fellow, Dinah notices, and from where she’s lying she can see the toes of his sandy right foot jiggling in the shadow of the umbrella.

“What kind of questions?”

“Well, you say you’ve read the letter. We’ve invited you to come and talk about it.”

“ ‘Invited’? I wouldn’t call that an invitation. That’s a summons! A subpoena! I don’t recognize your right to issue it. I’m not answerable to you—not when it comes to my work. You heard the lady. If you have questions, ask me now. Right here.”

“We’ve told you when and we’ve told you where. Show up and we’ll ask. Stay away and face the consequences.”

“ ‘Face the consequences’? What’re you gonna do? Excommunicate me? Hold an auto-da-fé in the Hollywood Bowl? What is it you think you can do to me?”

“It’s a question of discipline, Boatwright. Party discipline,” says Klein.

“Sorry, fellas. Ask me now or forget it. I’m busy. I’m in screenplay. I don’t have time for a goddamn inquisition.”

“Remember this,” says Klein. “ ‘Social weapon.’ ”

“Good God,” says Veevi, with a sardonic laugh. “The two of you sound like street-corner bullies.” She looks at Klein and Bergman in imperious disbelief, while she and Boatwright exchange glances that Dinah characterizes to herself as adoring. The two commissars seem to collapse, visibly, like punctured beach balls. Their ribs sink in, their bellies roll over the tops of their swimming trunks. Boatwright gets up and walks away; Veevi lies back, closes her eyes, and extends her legs, which are not as long as Dinah’s but are just as shapely. Dinah is sure now that something is going on between Veevi and Boatwright, but she doesn’t want to think about it. Instead, she heads toward the kitchen to see if she can help out with the care and feeding of the new crop of refugees from Europe.

Working in Everett’s parents’ restaurant had given Dinah kitchen skills and good serving technique, and she often found herself traveling back and forth between living room and kitchen, carrying trays piled with thick sandwiches of salami and cheese on pumpernickel and rye, followed by
slices of cake as big as bricks and slathered with whipped cream, which people devoured from the fine old English china Tal Engel had given Veevi. They drank tea and coffee and smoked cigarettes and talked. When they ate fruit, they took their time, wielding a small knife in the most artful way, cutting apples and pears into lovely slices rather than sinking their jaws into them as the Americans did. A ripe pear or a plate of apricots and nuts and a glass of wine after dinner was a perfect dessert for Stefan, Dinah saw, much to her surprise, for she had never dreamed of combining fruit and wine.

Hearing German spoken confounded her. If ever a language seemed to bark rejection at a stutterer, it was German. Yet she gradually began to have the strange feeling that she could understand what was being said, even though she didn’t get individual words. She could sense when someone was complaining or arguing or gossiping or telling a story. And sometimes one of them would look away, and then she knew that things more terrible than she had ever seen or imagined were being remembered. Sitting on the veranda once with Stefan and a handsome, recently arrived, shabbily dressed middle-aged couple, she heard the story (which Stefan translated for her) of how they had gotten out of Austria by hiding in an industrial-size coffee urn in the supply car of a passenger train bound for Strasbourg. The clothes they were wearing now were the clothes they had worn then; they had no others. That night they would sleep in the so-called maid’s room—it was for overflow guests; Veevi and Stefan didn’t have a maid—and soon, with Dorshka’s help, would find an apartment and work, perhaps at UCLA, where the man, a scientist, hoped to get something in the chemistry department. There was also a young woman, athletic and pretty, who spoke very correct English and had a slight lisp. She came to the screen door one afternoon and asked Dinah if there was a place to rinse her feet, since she had just come out of the ocean—“So refreshing!” she said—but she didn’t want to trek sand into the house. “Oh, come in, come in, there’s s-s-s-sand all over the place,” Dinah said, liking her at once. Later, the young woman came into the kitchen and volunteered to help. In this way Dinah learned that Nelly Rosenzweig had been an art student in Berlin and then moved to London with her mother, a widow who had sunk deeper and deeper into depression, and finally hanged herself from the chandelier in the room of the boardinghouse where they’d lived in Golders Green. On what was left of the money from her mother’s jewelry, Nelly had sailed to New York and then taken the train to Los Angeles, where she had just landed a job as an
assistant in the art department at Marathon. Years later, Dinah would meet Nelly again, at Groucho Marx’s, with her husband, Manny Steiner, and they became fast friends.

At night, exhausted from the studio, Dorshka would sit down at the typewriter to write letters and fill out forms for the refugees. Dinah would bring her coffee to help her stay awake. “They’re going to kill all the Jews,” she would say matter-of-factly. “How am I going to get everyone out?” Sometimes she held her head in her hands and cried. “We need our friends,” she said again and again to Veevi and Stefan, and it took Dinah a long time to figure out that she didn’t mean friends in a general sense but rather special people in the Party—and not just in America, either, but everywhere—especially in Mexico and France.

After months of listening to and watching the refugees, however, Dinah began to see that not everything they talked about had to do with the situation in Europe. Some of the loudest conversations that took place in the comfortable living room, with its chintz-covered sofas and braided rugs, had nothing to do with Hitler and the Nazis and desperate attempts to survive, or even about movie studios and the absurdities of Los Angeles life. Some of them were intrigues and quarrels as old as the Holy Roman Empire (about which Stefan had given Dinah a brief and useful history). A conductor with a lurching gait and an eye patch quarreled one Sunday afternoon with a tall, unsmiling composer until the conductor, in a rage, picked up a large pewter plate, spilling its load of fruit on the floor, and brought it down on the head of the composer—or would have, except that the composer calmly ducked, as if he were used to assaults from his enraged compatriot, who wouldn’t stop shrieking at him until Dorshka rushed in and, with a torrent of Yiddish, dragged him back to the kitchen for a bawling out that could be heard all the way to Santa Barbara.

Once in a while, one of the refugees spoke to Dinah directly. A handsome blond actor who had been in two of Stefan’s Berlin movies showed up one Sunday with an old man dressed in a frayed double-breasted brown suit. The old man said nothing, but Dinah noticed that when he tried to eat his piece of Sacher torte his hand trembled so fiercely that crumbs fell all over the rug. The actor took a linen napkin and tried to pick up the crumbs, embarrassed but uncertain what to do. Dinah went and sat down between them and, putting her hand on the old man’s, with its transparent blue-veined skin and age spots, steadied it as he lifted the fork to his mouth. He smiled, abashed, grateful. She could see that he was enjoying the cake,
that he wanted to eat it. “My mother and father wait for weeks for the Portuguese visas,” the handsome actor said, startling her with his English.
“Aber es gab so schrecklich wenig zu essen,”
he continued in German to Stefan.
“Meine Eltern waren alt und schwach—kurz gesagt, meine Mutter starb.”
“His parents were old and weak,” Stefan translated for her as she put the old man’s hand down and simply lifted the cake-loaded fork to his mouth, which he now opened and shut like a baby bird. “And his mother died.”
“Aber mein Vater—es ist ein Wunder, dass er es ueberlebt hat. Ich gehe jeden Tag mit ihm in Santa Monica spazieren, und dann schaut er mich immer an und fragt: ‘Sag mir, lebe ich? Bin ich noch am Leben?’ ”
“He says,” Stefan explained to her, “that every day he takes his father for a walk in Santa Monica. And the father looks at him and says, ‘Tell me, am I alive? Am I still alive?’ ”

While his father sat back and dozed, engulfed by the comfortable sofa, the handsome actor, whom Stefan had introduced to Dinah as Heinz Kirschner (after the war he would have a very successful Hollywood career playing Nazi officers), took her aside and asked her if she would like to change jobs. She looked into his square-jawed, blue-eyed, apparently Aryan face, so like those of the Nazis in the newsreels, and wondered how the Nazis could always be so sure about who was or wasn’t Jewish, while he explained to her that he needed a companion-housekeeper for his father while he was on the set of the movie he’d soon be starting at MGM. To put him into a home for old people would kill him, the actor said, and Dinah said, “Of course you couldn’t p-p-p-possibly do that.” But she, too, had to be away all day at her job, she explained. He pleaded with her: she looked after everyone so well here. Dinah smiled and said, “Oh, no, I don’t work here; I’m Veevi Ventura’s s-s-s-sister.” He blushed and apologized profusely, took her hand and kissed it, and for the rest of the afternoon Dinah sleepwalked—once again—in a febrile dream of instant romance, until everyone left and Veevi invited her to keep her company while she took a bath. Then Dinah asked Veevi about the handsome actor. “Forget it,” Veevi said, reaching toward the faucet to replenish the supply of hot water. “He’s a fairy. Couldn’t you tell?”

“Hell no!” Dinah said, not caring if she appeared naïve to her sister. “Damn it, Vee, there isn’t anybody for me.”

Unlike their mother, who always managed to say something deliciously banal and comforting to Dinah when she complained that there weren’t any men out there, Veevi said nothing.