Dreams Are Not Enough (60 page)

The lease on the villa was up on March first. They both wept, clung together, and went their separate ways.

He traveled on a series of trains and buses to Bergen. He had always felt at home in Norway: Norwegians were civilized, fluent in English, the country strove to banish social inequity, and besides, his grandmother, Hjordis Harvard, who had left Maxim and him the trust funds they’d put into Wandering On, was of Norwegian descent. He found a temporary job in the Hanseatic Museum, a draft-haunted, fifteenth-century merchant’s house. Other than colleagues, his venerable, bent-over landlady and the waitresses who served him at the inexpensive fish place on Bryggen, he spoke to nobody. He and Alice had agreed phone calls or letters exchanged between Beverly Hills and Bergen might arouse curiosity, so he read the American newspapers for word of her.

Alyssia del Mar returns home. Shown here on her arrival at LAX.

—Caption under a photograph in the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, March

2, 1981

Maxim Cordiner, his open tuxedo jacket flapping behind him to show its crimson lining, jogged up to the stage.

“Thank you, everyone out there in Academyland,” he said, then halted, clearly unable to continue his speech. Raising the statuette above his head, he muttered shakenly into the microphone, “This would have meant a lot to my brother.”

—Washington Post, March 27, 1981

Though Alyssia del Mar was in Los Angeles, she was a no-show at the Oscars. Hollywood watchers say she was worried she might lose, which as everyone knows, proved correct.

—Women’s Wear Daily, March 27, 1981

That the Oscars are an emotional issue has been proven over and over, but nowhere is it more evident than in the case of Alyssia del Mar not winning this year’s award for Best Actress. Though she is magnificent as Mellie in The Baobab Tree, reports of her absences and habitual tardiness during filming of Harvard Cordiner’s final masterpiece lost her the Academy’s sympathy.

—Charles Champlin in the Los Angeles Times, April 8, 1981

When the no-fault Cordiner/del Mar divorce was granted. Time called her “Alyssia del Mar, superannuated sex kitten.” In the same Milestone, Barry was identified as “best selling author” although the sales of Spy had proved a disappointment and the book had appeared on no lists whatsoever.

In May, when Oslo’s many fruit trees blossomed and sailboats scudded across the blue fjord, Adam Stevens and the recently divorced Alice Hollister arrived in the spring-happy Norwegian capital from different directions. Their presence went unnoticed.

Three days later, while Juanita clasped Alice’s fragrant bridal bouquet of hyacinth, the couple were married in the home of a retired Anglican priest. There was a spectacular view of the fjord from the open window, which admitted a crisp, salty breeze. The pink-cheeked, forgetful old minister called the bride Edith and the groom Alan, but his flat-voweled English accent was loud and vigorous as he intoned the vows, which they repeated shakenly: “With this ring I thee wed, with my body I thee worship, and with my worldly goods I thee endow.”

The rings in question didn’t match, but both were several centuries old, with the workings of the heavy gold worn equally smooth—the couple had discovered them at Kaare Bentsen, Oslo’s best-known antiques shop.

After they were pronounced husband and wife, they turned, gazing at one another until the breeze whipped a strand of her hair against his lips as a sort of reminder, then he pulled it aside to kiss her lightly, tenderly.

“Alyssia, Alyssia, Alyssia!” cried her loyal French fans when she emerged from the Carlton Hotel to attend the out-of-competition screening of The Baobab Tree at the Cannes Film Festival.

After returning from Cannes, she and Juanita packed an enormous quantity of clothes and furs while Hap crated the pieces of painted antique Scandinavian furniture they had bought in Oslo. After shipping their possessions by rail, the trio, in a new Volvo, drove leisurely across Norway and Sweden to Stockholm. They rented a spacious nineteenth-century apartment overlooking Lake Malar. Following their plan, in January they moved again, this time to Copenhagen. They found a narrow, four-story house near the Tivoli Gardens—this being winter, the famous amusement park was closed.

Hap’s second marriage had made him more content than he’d ever been, yet paradoxically he felt claustrophobic at being trapped in the identity of Adam Stevens, the invention of a passport forger.

Nevertheless, he was seldom out of sorts, his equability serving as a buffer between the sisters, who despite their abiding affection, had a tendency to bicker. His restlessness he worked off by limping for hours through the snow-covered brick city.

In February, Alice Stevens, the name printed in her newly issued, dark-blue United States passport, Hew to New York, where Alyssia del Mar was to take part in a PBS fundraiser called The Night of Stars.

The day after Hap saw her off at Kastrup Airport, a Saturday, was bitterly cold, but Juanita ignored the weather. A swap-meet buff, she seldom missed the weekly flea market held at Israel Plads. As she buttoned her heavy brown coat, Hap came into the hall, knotting his muffler—he was on his way to the class in English he gave gratis for the neighborhood children.

“There’s something I been meaning to ask,” Juanita said in a low, diffident voice.

“You’re teaching them kids to read English. Is it hopeless with somebody as old as me?”

“You’re really interested, Nita?” he asked, surprised.

“If I don’t catch on,” she muttered, concentrating on the top button, “I’ll just drop it.”

“We’ll start this afternoon,” he promised.

A superlative teacher—patient, tolerantly firm, enthusiastic—he succeeded in dissolving Juanita’s lifelong humiliation about her illiteracy. Freed of tensions, she caught on rapidly, and was devouring English and American paperback romances long before Alice left for the Yugoslavian Film Festival in Dubrovnik.

Alyssia del Mar surfaced not only for showbiz events, but also for occasional society functions, and wherever she appeared her progress was diligently recorded by the press. English newspapers showed Princess Anne saying something in her ear at the Royal Enclosure at

Ascot, Vogue printed a photograph of her in a blue Egyptian wig as Cleopatra at the Gambaras’ annual costume ball in Puerto Vallarta.

Cameras kept zooming in on the low-cut decolletage of her ice-blue satin Valentine as she sat in the audience of a televised recital at the White House—she was there by personal invitation of President and Mrs. Reagan.

As Vincent Canby wrote in the New York Times, “The public’s fascination with Alyssia del Mar is rooted in the same ground as its enduring interest in Marilyn Monroe. Both stars made exits clouded in enigma. Why did Monroe take those pills? Why has del Mar abdicated her career at its peak?”

“You haven’t had an attack since we got married,” Hap said. The two of them were reading in bed.

“And you’re letting up on the nightmares. What a good sex life will do for people.” She gave a chuckle, then her expression changed and she bit her lip thoughtfully.

“I’m not positive, but I’m pretty sure we’re going to have a baby.”

“I’ve been counting, too, love, but I didn’t want to get my hopes up.

You sometimes used to skip a month. “

“There’s other symptoms,” she said.

“Yes?”

“I always have a spot of indigestion; I can’t ever seem to get enough sleep. That’s how it was before.” Her voice clogged.

He took her novel, putting his arms around her.

“If it’s true, I’m glad,” he said against her ear.

“So very glad.”

The pregnancy proved a watershed in the way they viewed their nomadic life.

Alice, having spent her own childhood without roots, became obsessed about a permanent home. Hap saw his idleness with a new intolerant eye, and privately longed for his child to be American-born, a hope he was afraid to voice lest it bring about a recurrence of Alice’s attacks.

One night at dinner as they discussed whether or not their next move should be to Helsinki, Juanita, who seldom intruded, said, “You could work, Hap, if we were back in America.”

“Go home?” Alice glared at her sister over the Royal Copenhagen soup tureen.

“There’s a brilliant idea.”

“Nobody’s hot on our trail, Alice,” Juanita said calmly.

“If they were, they’d have tracked you and Hap down ages ago.”

After a brief hesitation, Alice shrugged assent.

“Okay, Lang’s not actively looking for Hap—but if we jump out at him, he’ll sure find us.”

“Juanita knows that, love.” Hap set down his large, European-style soup spoon and looked questioningly at his sisterin-law.

“I been thinking a lot how quick you taught me to read,” she said.

“Hap, there’s a lot of kids who grow up believing they’re dumb because nobody took that kind of trouble with them.”

“You mean a school for farm workers?” he asked.

“Are the two of you insane?” Alice cried.

“We know a million people in California—and they know us!”

“There’s plenty of other states,” Juanita said. Hap’s expression of eagerness was not lost on his wife. By the following day it was no longer whether they would go back, but where.

They finally decided on the tobacco-growing eastern Piedmont part of North Carolina, a state where none of the three had set foot. Hap flew back to the States alone, scouting the area around Durham. That first weekend he found exactly what they wanted a few miles out of town. The fifty-year-old house had no particular style, but the rooms were large and there were three big screened porches. The upstairs they kept for themselves, using their Norwegian antiques and comfortable, inexpensive upholstery. The downstairs rooms, except for the big, square kitchen, which was dominated by their major extravagance, a restaurant-size Wolf stove, they gave over to floor pillows and bookshelves and reasonably indestructible toys and a pair of Radio Shack computers with reading-aid programs.

At first the quasi school remained empty; then Alice came up with the idea of offering a child-care program at a price so low it barely covered the cost of the hot meals.

Within a month they were attracting not only preschoolers—transient and local—but older children and adults, too.

Alice Stevens had a tendency to brag about her resemblance to Alyssia del Mar, keeping a boxful of clippings about the star, confessing that maybe this was dumb of her, but she had changed her first name to one more like her idol’s. Astonishingly, her identity was never questioned—but then again, Hap would think, maybe it wasn’t so strange. After all, who expected a world-class legend to be wearing a maternity smock from Sears as she stood in line next to you at the A&P, or ate a Big Mac, or held up the reading cards to a group of preschoolers, or huffed and puffed with the other pregnant mothers in her Lamaze class?

After a brief, completely un sedated labor, Ross was born. Strong, agile and quick, by the time he was three he knew the alphabet and insisted on playing with the older children, who more or less kept him in line.

*

On November 17, 1986, Hap sat at the breakfast table with the Durham paper propped on the milk carton in front of him. A paragraph on the obituary page caught his eyes.

“Robert Lang, Las Vegas businessman and owner of the Fabulador Hotel in that city, died yesterday after a lengthy bout with cancer. His father was the underworld figure Bartolomeo ” Bart’ Lanzoni. Though Lang shunned the limelight, he had a keen interest in the film industry. His corporation, Meadstar, produced several films including the classic The Baobab Tree, Harvard Cordiner’s last directorial stint. “

Ross was mashing his grits around the plate, and rather than risk a spate of unanswerable questions, Hap handed the paper to Alice, holding his thumb at the obituary. She read, then looked up.

“Think it’s okay to go back?” he asked.

He understood, of course, that without Lang they would be in no physical danger. What he wanted to know was her reaction. Clammy sweat broke out on her torso as she re-experienced the grief and terror-struck bravado of that awful morning in PD’s office. How could she face Our Own Gang, who had cast her as scapegoat and eternal outsider?

The gray eyes remained fixed questioningly on her. She knew how intensely he yearned to make contact with what remained of his family.

(When Desmond Cordiner had died in the summer of 1983, and Rosalynd had suffered a fatal heart attack on Thanksgiving night in 1984, Hap’s long mourning periods had been exacerbated by his inability to attend the funerals. ) /// go back, maybe I’ll lose him again. Maybe I’ll lose Ross, like I lost my other baby. That her fears were absurdly irrational did not make them any the less real, and pains twinged through her chest.

Yet, after only the briefest hesitation, she proved that Alyssia del Mar still lived.

“Sure it’s okay,” she bubbled excitedly.

BEVERLY HILLS.

Maxim continued to bang urgently against the glass door.

“Let me in!”

he shouted.

The glass slab to his left moved. Alyssia stood there with a very young, jeans-clad boy whose tow-white hair flopped across his eyebrows. Maxim ignored both the woman and the child. His attention was riveted on the large man whose gray eyes were fixed on his.

Maxim took off his dark glasses. In his life he had never before experienced so profound a disbelief in his own witness. This bearded man with long legs in beige cords, the sleeves of his cotton shirt rolled up to show strong forearms, his blond hair darker underneath, this man could not be the incorruptibly just older brother who had ruled over his childhood. His brother was bleached bones under a marble cross in the garden of the wide-verandaed little house that was the relief center. He himself had selected the marble, had arranged for the simple engraving:

HARVARD CORDINER

BORN LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA, 1938 DIED ZAIRE, 1980

As an act of love—and contrition—he had made the long, difficult journey with the tombstone to personally see it set in the mulch-rich African earth.