Cheat and Charmer (43 page)

“Oh my God!” Dinah exclaimed. “Vee, look. Remember this?
Sunset Song
? And”—she took two more books from Jake—“look at this!
Cloud Howe
and
Grey Gr-Gr-Granite
! God, how we loved these.”

“We were so sure they’d be classics,” Veevi said, taking the books from Dinah. “Now, who on earth has ever heard of poor old Lewis Grassic Gibbon?”

“Just tell me one thing,” said Jake. “Is there a movie in it?”

Dinah and Veevi looked at each other and pondered this great question. “I don’t know,” said Veevi. “It’s a little on the
Grapes of Wrath
side—noble peasants in the Scottish moors and all that.”

“Yeah,” said Dinah. “The people endure forever.”

“We ate it up, though, didn’t we, Ina?” Veevi patted the books affectionately as they lay in a stack beside her, and Dinah was happy to see her sister taking such pleasure in having them again.

“Well, read ’em again,” said Jake to Veevi. “That’s an order.”

Veevi actually looked pleased.

Jake pulled out a large tome in an engraved apple-green leather binding. It turned out to be the
Histories
of Herodotus. “Jesus, this weighs a ton,” he said, handing it to Veevi.

“Look,” she said. “Stefan inscribed it to me: ‘To my most beautiful and beloved wife, Genevieve—here is the world I promised you.’ ” There was a pause, and she added,
“ ‘Je t’aime.’ ”

They fell silent. The fire crackled, and they sipped their brandy, and the sisters lit cigarettes. “He wanted to educate me,” Veevi said matter-of-factly. “So he said I had to begin at the beginning.”

“Forgive my ignorance,” said Jake, “but why was this fellow the beginning?” She began to explain, but he wasn’t listening so much as just enjoying that feeling of consummate well-being he’d experienced in London and Paris. To be in this room with his wife, whom he loved, and Veevi, whose company he enjoyed and whose life fascinated and impressed him, to have conversations like this with these two attractive women, to breathe the air of all their reciprocal references and allusions, and to listen to their memories, gave him a feeling of intense pleasure he would easily have called happiness. His den, his house, his wife, and Veevi now seemed to him part of the larger world—the literary world, the world of talk and stories, and, of course, of Europe and the war, which he had missed, and the whole tumultuous century to which he felt he absolutely belonged. These hours with his wife and sister-in-law, he believed, despite Veevi’s sad situation and Dinah’s recent grief, could do nothing but good for his work. He, too, was sad about the lost child, but it was a relief—and he could never confess this to Dinah—that he would have to pay for only two, not three (or more!), college educations.

The taste of brandy suddenly gave him an intense desire to smoke a cigar, so he went into the bar, found one, and lit it, listening closely to what Dinah and Veevi were saying. It seemed to him that they spent the days in endless talk, and he wished he could hear all of it, because he was convinced that Veevi had stories he might be able to use one day.

For this reason, he was in no hurry to have Veevi move into a place of
her own. The convivial time they spent together in the evenings, the anecdotes they told each other: it was all “material.”

“You know,” said Dinah, “I think about Stefan all the time.” She searched for words. “He was such a mensch, and I was so fond of him.” (She felt quite certain that he had never told Veevi about that afternoon on the beach.)

“He was crazy about you, too,” Veevi said.

Dinah knew that “crazy about” in Veevi’s sense had nothing in common with the “crazy about” she herself had felt for Stefan. “Was he?” she said. All she remembered was Veevi’s telling her so many years ago: “He thinks you have a long way to go. Educationally, that is.”

Now she said, “I sure as hell felt d-d-d-dumb around him.”

“If I think to myself, If only we hadn’t gone to France, I sort of start to feel insane,” Veevi added matter-of-factly.

Dinah couldn’t help thinking, Uh-huh, you were already monkeying around with Mike when Stefan decided to leave.

“How did he ever become a director, coming out of Bulgaria?” Jake asked. “I didn’t know they had movies in Bulgaria. I mean, where is Bulgaria?”

“In the Balkans,” said Veevi. “You
do
know where they are, don’t you? Speaking of which, where’s
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
? Let me know the minute you find it.”

“Is there a movie in it?” asked Jake.

“No,”
she said with a laugh. “Unless you’re interested in old bridges in Yugoslavia. Now, listen, of course they had movies in Bulgaria. Stefan saw them and knew he wanted to make them, and he went to Berlin in 1917 to work for a director named Robert Wiene—remember
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
? Well, that’s how he got his start. After that he went to Moscow, came back to Berlin, and then in 1933 dear old Willie Weil—a friend from Berlin who also wanted to leave—got him a job in Paris, so he left—with Weil and Dorshka, because, of course, they were all Jews. Everyone in the film world in Paris knew who he was, which is one reason it made sense to go back when we did.”

“But what about Moscow?” Jake asked. “What was in Moscow?”

“Think, Jake.” She smiled at him.

“What? Who?” he said with an edge, irritated at the way she always had to seize the advantage.

“Eisenstein, to begin with.”

Dinah couldn’t help thinking that Veevi was trying to make Jake feel like an American bumpkin. She reached for a pile of books Jake had absently placed on the table. “Plays,” she announced. “These are almost all plays. From the thirties. You want to keep them out or put ’em b-b-b-back?”

Veevi took the books and began scrutinizing them. “Remember how we were always reading these, stuck in godforsaken Southern California and wishing we could be in New York? Look at this.
Winterset
. Maxwell Anderson. I don’t even remember whether I ever read it.
The Women
. Oh God, that awful Clare Booth Luce.” Then, before Dinah or Jake could answer, she said in a rush, “Christ, look at this! Odets! Jesus.”

“Which one?” Jake said, holding out his hand for the book. He looked transfigured, as if someone were holding a bright candle flame up to his face. “I’ll never forget the night I saw
Awake and Sing!
I was still living in Chicago. Gee, I think it must have been ’35 or ’36. In my whole life, I’ve never had a night like that in the theater. I’d been so discouraged—selling advertising for the
Jewish Sentinel
, trying to work on a play, my folks yammering at me all the time and telling me how I could work for my uncles in the wholesale meat business. I’d try to write at night, and then I’d read it over in the morning and hate it. Then I saw that play, and I knew I had to keep writing.”

His eyes were glistening, and he opened the book to the play and tenderly turned its pages.

“Oh, Uncle J.,” Veevi said. “You’re a panic. Crying over that thirties crap. You don’t really think it’s any good, do you?”

Dinah had never seen Jake humiliated—until now. He turned red, and his eyes widened with surprise at the ridicule and contempt in Veevi’s voice. He’s been struck dumb, Dinah thought, and she remembered those Saturdays, so many years ago, at the Venturas’ house in Malibu, when Veevi, with her stunning face and her perfect figure, reclined in the sun in a two-piece bathing suit, and, listening to the young Communist writers trying to outdo one another in clever literary and political talk, kept them all at heel with her barbed remarks. The young men would flush and shut up, nonplussed by this beautiful, sharp-tongued woman in her twenties, who hadn’t gone beyond the ninth grade, and who often, when she cut them, did so in slow and languid tones, her flawless face held up to the burning sun as if to a handmaiden.

“You can think what you like about it, Veevi,” Jake answered in a tone of injured dignity Dinah had never heard from him before. “But the evening I saw that play was and always will be one of the most important nights of my life. I reread it recently and it’s magnificent. I only hope one day I can put the life and passion into my work that Odets put into his.”

Not once, Dinah thought, had any of those men—men with novels and screenplays to their credit—not once had any of them answered Veevi as Jake just had. And she was glad, with a swift and deep satisfaction, that Jake had stood up to her sister.

“You can’t be serious,” Veevi said with a sneering laugh. “It was so corny! What the English call ‘too much of a muchness.’ Well, perhaps I should reread it,” she said with a shrug, taking the book and putting it on top of one of the piles. “I heard,” she said, quietly, “that he squealed.”

“Yes,” Dinah said. “We heard it, t-t-t-too. But I don’t remember whether it was before or after I did.”

She reached over and put out her cigarette and sat back on the sofa, folding her arms in front of her. There was silence as Jake quickly slashed through another cardboard box, but his expression had become grim and preoccupied, and he put the letter opener on the table. “Gonna hit the sack,” he said, getting up and leaving the sisters to themselves.

If Veevi noticed that the mood had changed, she didn’t comment. She was going through the small stacks of books in the den, making a new, special pile that consisted, she said, of books Stefan had made her read and that she now wanted to reread. She lovingly stroked the covers. “Look, Ina,” she said, reading the names of the authors: “Mann, Joyce, Kafka, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Proust, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides.” She picked up another apple-green leather-bound volume. “Oh, look,” she said. “Thucydides.”

“Who?” said Dinah.

“Another Greek. Historian, that is. He gave me this one after we had an argument about the Party, which he said I took too seriously.”

“I didn’t know you argued with him.”

“Well, it wasn’t a real argument.” Veevi picked up the book and thumbed through it. “He told me I had to read it because it showed how everything always falls apart. He thought Hitler was going to destroy everybody, and he was right. ‘We Communists can’t stop this,’ ” he said.

“But that means”—Dinah struggled to put her thoughts into words—“that he must have felt that going back to Fr-Fr-France wouldn’t help.”

“Well, there was nothing for him to do here,” said Veevi. “Not after he blew it with old man Engel.”

“ ‘Blew it’?” Dinah said.

“Oh, come on, he blew it.”

“How can you say that? How did he blow it?”

“His kind of integrity always has something suicidal about it,” Veevi said.

“And yours?”

“Mine?”

“Yes. About HUAC.”

“Oh, that’s nothing,” Veevi said dismissively. “Stefan knew if he went back to Europe he could get killed. I can’t get work, but nobody’s pointing a gun at me. I don’t think my integrity’s so great, and I don’t think your snitching’s so terrible.”

“You don’t?” Dinah said. “What about that letter from Mike?”

“That letter,” Veevi said bitterly, “was written by a man who was feeling guilty as hell about having an affair with a younger woman. ‘The Knight of the Burning Pestle’—that’s who wrote that letter. It wasn’t principle. It was his prick—his goddamn guilty prick.”

“Jesus Christ, Vee,” Dinah said, a look of horror on her face. She thought of the letter she’d found in her father’s trailer, the days she waited to hear from Veevi, the feeling, when Mike’s letter had come, of being socked in the gut. But she mentioned none of this.

“He didn’t give a shit about me or anything else at the time except Odile Boisvert,” Veevi said. “And that’s still true. By God, she’s got some kind of hold on him, that’s for sure.”

The two sisters sat looking at each other in silence, but it wasn’t an uncomfortable silence. Well, she’s really back now, Dinah thought. Now I can do something for her.

“Tell me,” Dinah said. “Why did you go with him? Stefan, I mean. Why did you go to Europe with him? Nobody in their right mind would have gone to Europe at that point. Talk about s-s-s-suicidal.”

Veevi shifted her weight and pulled her right leg up onto the sofa. “I don’t know, Ina,” she answered. “Did I really understand how dangerous it was? He kept saying we’d be safe, there were people, he would always look after me. Listen, Ina, I wanted to get out of L.A. I wanted to go to Europe.”

And, Dinah thought, you were pregnant with Claire, and you wanted to make sure that Stefan thought it was his child.

“Anyway,” Veevi added, slipping the Thucydides back in the storage box, “Stefan had friends there.”

“Friends?” Dinah said. “You mean the Party, don’t you?”

“Mmm,” Veevi murmured. “I do mean the Party. Remember those people in Mexico who came up to hear Malraux?”

Dinah nodded.

“They had connections in France. They had people meet us when we got off the boat. There was an apartment for us. Stefan got back into the swing of things there, started working on a movie. Everything was more or less normal for a while. We felt safe. Still, all the time we were getting ready. He kept wanting me to go to London, but I didn’t want to leave France. Then, in the summer of ’41, it got dicey.” She yawned.

A little later, when the two sisters were upstairs, Veevi made what Dinah would have called “an apologetic bubby face.” “Do you think I hurt Uncle J.’s feelings? I mean, about that silly Odets business?”

“Yes,” Dinah said. “You did. You know, Vee,” she said, “it would be great if Jake woke up tomorrow morning and suddenly discovered he was Marcel Proust. But he isn’t. He’s Jake Lasker, he writes comedy, and he has three dependents to support, and a mortgage. So if reading Odets helps him be Jake Lasker, then it’s kind of, you know, unfair to make him feel he should be somebody else.”

She had never spoken to her sister in that way.

“Sorry,” Veevi said.

Dinah shrugged and leaned forward to kiss Veevi on the cheek, but Veevi stepped backward toward her room, so that Dinah was left with her head thrust forward, like a great awkward bird bobbing its beak in the air.

“Sleep well, Vee,” she said. “Don’t set the house on f-f-f-fire, okay?”