Dreams Bigger Than the Night (30 page)

“Come right over,” she insisted.

“Jean’s not well,” said the older woman, clearly annoyed.

“Geez, Mom, leave Jean to run her own life.”

Not wishing to get caught in the middle of a family spat, Jay said that he would drop by and leave if Jean did not feel well enough to receive guests. Picking up some flowers from a stand on Sunset Boulevard, he drove to her house and was met at the door by her redoubtable mother, who immediately made it clear that his presence was an imposition. When Jean materialized, they retreated to the upstairs sitting room and, as before, played poker.

Jean did seem ill. Shadows under her eyes and a lack of animation made her look not like Jean Harlow but like a washed-out peroxided blonde who had spent too many hours on the town the previous night. A certain heaviness in her manner belied the dynamic woman he knew and admired. A year later, she would be dead of uremic poisoning from malfunctioning kidneys impaired by a childhood illness. That last day Jay saw her, with her mother hovering nearby, he asked about the mysterious death of her husband, studio executive Paul Bern. Her mother tried to interrupt, but Jean asked her to leave.

“The Nazis would like to pin it on Longie,” Jay said.

“Not a chance. Paul blew out his brains.”

“The circumstances
were
suspicious.”

“You tellin’ Jean?” She looked around and whispered, “He passed himself off as a lover, but, in fact, he was impotent! Couldn’t get it up.”

Jay decided that with her mother in the next room, now was not the time to pursue such a delicate subject. Excusing himself, he kissed her on the forehead, thanked her for rescuing him at the front door, and said “Cheery-o” to her mom and fluttered his fingers.

Sunday he drove to Santa Barbara and hiked up to the mission. As a way of remembering T-Bone, he looked past the foam-fringed coastline to the breathtaking ocean, turning his back on the celebrants fingering their beads and crossing themselves, the faithful who had trekked to the mission to celebrate—what?—and murmured a few lines from a Milton poem,

And now the sun had stretched out all the hills,

And now was dropped into the western bay;

At last he rose, and twitched his mantle blue:

Tomorrow to fresh woods, and pastures new.

For several minutes, he stood on the hill admiring the waves breaking on the shore below and the sails fluttering in the distance; he stood as if the winds from that first spinning place had carried him across the centuries to this high holy mount. And he looked upon his youthful life and wondered what it weighed: the college education, the marathon dance contests, the journalism, the law breaking, the love he felt for T and Arietta. What mattered any of it, unless he could say that his life before would meaningfully affect what came after?

Returning to L.A., he encountered a blistering sun baking the valley, which rarely enjoyed the ocean breezes that sometimes relieved the city. In the heavy air, he found it hard to breathe, a frightening sensation that brought back memories of his friends and him as children seeing how long they could hold their breath and thankfully gasping air at the end of their foolishness. The same car that he had seen on Friday, three days before, stood in the driveway, but not Mr. Magliocco’s truck. He walked to the front door, shaded by an overhanging roof, rang the bell, and refrained from peeking in the curtained windows. A middle-aged woman greeted him at the door. She wore a nurse’s uniform, and her gray hair was fixed behind her head in a bun. Her face vaguely resembled Arietta’s.

“Is Arietta Magliocco at home? I’m an old friend.”

The woman looked at him incredulously, as if he had just said something hugely stupid. After she readjusted her expression, she asked, “Your name?”

“Jay Klug.”

She closed the door and left him standing on the ceramic-tiled walkway, which, he noticed, had decorative floral designs. Even if the woman denied him entry, he had established one fact: Arietta was, or had been, here. But no, that was inference; the woman might have gone merely to ask her mistress if she had ever heard of the name that he had given her. At her return, she introduced herself as Amalie Holz, Arietta’s aunt. Her nurse’s frock led him to entertain a thousand doleful thoughts. Aunt Amalie led him through a handsome living room containing four white upholstered chairs and two couches and several end tables and stately lamps with fringed shades, all of which looked as if they had just come from the furniture store, and into a spacious paneled den with a large picture window facing a pool. She asked him to wait a minute, disappeared, and then motioned for him to follow her. The bedrooms stood off to the side of the house, and Arietta occupied the back one. Aunt Amalie opened the door—and Jay nearly collapsed. Arietta lay in an iron lung, entombed to her neck, dependent on a mirror, mounted above her head, to see. Amalie explained that Arietta had bulbar and anterior polio, which inhibited swallowing and breathing. Aunt Amalie closed the door silently and left them. An easy chair rested next to the lung, no doubt for her aunt and, when she was absent, Mr. Magliocco. The only other furniture in the room was a bookcase topped by some framed photos, a stuffed giraffe, and a kachina doll.

Jay knew a little about iron lungs because a Newark friend had contracted polio, and he would occasionally see him at the hospital. Before the advent of the iron lung, patients drowned in their own secretions or choked to death. Some Harvard engineer, building on earlier designs, constructed an airtight tank that used electrically driven bellows to create alternate negative and positive pressures to contract and expand the person’s diaphragm with an even rhythm. Jay wondered: What if the current failed? Perhaps that was why a battery-driven auxiliary pump stood nearby.

Arietta forced a smile and a breathy hello. The absence of despair in her face and voice caused Jay to break down and cry uncontrollably. He sobbed for several minutes and stopped only when he started to cover her face with kisses.

“My face is . . . all wet now,” she said playfully.

Snorting back further sobs, he found a towel in an adjacent bathroom and mopped up his tears.

“Where . . . are you . . . living?” she inquired.

“The Franklin Arms off Wilshire. But I don’t want to talk about me, I want to hear about you. Tell me everything.” It took a moment before he realized that talking did not come easily to her, and added, “If you have the breath for it.”

She asked him to spoon some water from a glass into her mouth, an action that took some deftness to avoid her choking. She frequently paused to save breath and nodded when she wanted more water.

“End of June . . . on a Saturday . . . swimming . . . the North Hollywood public pool . . . the next day . . . woke up . . . achy. Blamed it on . . . swimming forty laps. But as the day . . . went on . . . more and more tired. My neck stiff. I figured . . . probably strained it . . . swimming . . . and there was . . . nothing . . . seriously wrong. By evening . . . a fever . . . ten o’clock . . . that night . . . father . . . alarmed . . . called a doctor.”

Her ordeal, which she disclosed laboriously, all the while gulping air, Jay subsequently rendered in her words but in his cadences for his unfinished novel:

The doctor examined me thoroughly, diagnosed a virus, and tried to allay my dad’s fears. I passed a miserable night, getting up with great difficulty to use the bathroom, and by morning felt terribly dizzy. My father decided to take me to the hospital for tests and called an ambulance. I insisted on walking to the driveway. I haven’t walked . . . since.

They did a spinal tap, which made my dizziness worse. The doctor said I had meningitis. In the evening they moved me to a makeshift room on the second floor, a sun parlor, where I had no buzzer to call for a nurse. I spent the most horrible night of my life, so dizzy that I thought at any moment I would fall out of bed.

The following day, the doctor did another spinal tap, in order to relieve the acute pressure on the brain and to check the diagnosis again. And again the verdict came back meningitis. My father hired a private nurse to stay with me because I was obviously not improving.

The next morning, Dad sat with me for several hours and managed to understand my mumblings: ‘My legs are heavy. I can’t move them.’ He looked terrified because polio had been rampant. In fact, three weeks before, a neighbor’s daughter had come down with it.

Another spinal tap convinced the doctors I too had polio. By that afternoon, my intercostal muscles were becoming involved and my breathing was deteriorating. The doctors frantically tried to find an iron lung because the hospital I had been brought to didn’t have one.

An ambulance came, and as the orderlies carried me into it, my father’s face appeared at the window. I heard him say, as the tears ran down his cheeks, “Why my lovely Arietta? God is punishing me.” I felt certain I would die.

I barely remembered my trip to the other hospital. The minute I arrived, the staff put me into the iron lung and a priest gave me the last rites.

The next few days were a blur. I constantly ran a high fever, which meant the polio virus was still very active and doing more damage. I cried all the time. Can you possibly imagine finding yourself suddenly unable to move a muscle or breathe without a machine, and to think you have a whole life of this in front of you? The horrible doctors complained to my father I would never recover because my morale was so low. But they did absolutely nothing to help. I never had hot packs, which would have relieved the excruciating muscle spasms, because they could not be applied inside the lung. I was never given pain pills because the hospital felt I would become addicted. I don’t even remember being washed. They never combed my long hair, which had become completely matted with the cotton batting around my neck.

At first, when they opened the lung to wash me, I couldn’t even bear the weight of a sheet on my body. Fortunately, it was warm, so I wasn’t cold. I lay on a wool blanket to prevent bed sores. How I itched! The nurses spent most of their time trying to scratch my back with back scratchers pushed through the portholes. After days of this misery, the doctors thought that my intercostal muscles were flickering, a good sign. Maybe, I would eventually be able to breathe on my own.

But I was receiving no treatment, so father spoke to his employer, the movie star Mary Astor. It was she who had found this house for my Aunt Amalie to rent. The next day, I was moved to a new hospital, with my dad at my bedside trying to raise my spirits and constantly repeating, “Arietta, one day you will never even think of this terrible time.”

I was then moved to a ward in the company of other polio patients, ranging in age from five years to fifty, twenty-five men and twenty-five women. To my astonishment, they laughed. Overnight, I stopped crying, and I have not cried again because of the polio. To make up for the life I once had, I now live in memory. Although I feel certain that my store will never run out, I grieve that I cannot add to it with dances and boyfriends and . . .

She cast a lovely smile over Jay. “Lovemaking in the woods.”

Rather than communicate through the mirror, Jay sat facing her and frequently stood to stroke her hair, or kiss her forehead or nose or cheeks, but not her mouth. It wouldn’t be long before her father returned. His presence would make it harder to talk. But before he could ask her about the murders, she made the oddest request.

“Please dance . . . and pretend . . . you’re dancing with me.”

Positioning himself behind the iron lung in view of the mirror, he slowly broke into one step and then another, all the while extending his arms as if holding Arietta. And as he whirled his imaginary partner around, leading her by one hand and then the other, he actually began to believe that he and Arietta were dancing and that when she rested her hand on his shoulder, he would pull her close and kiss her mouth.

Fearful that his twists and turns would remind her of her paralysis, he began to slow down, but she sputtered:

“No, no . . . continue. After the fox-trot . . . the tango. Then the Charleston . . . and the black bottom.”

And so he danced, wishing for a miracle to cast off the iron lung and lift Arietta to her feet to join him in a celebration of movement. While she laughed with joy, tears ran down his face.

At last he quit and sat beside this bodiless beauty, stroking her cheek. For the longest time they said nothing, providing a restorative peace. When he finally asked why she and Mr. M. had run away, she grew pensive. Even now he feared she wouldn’t disclose the secrets that she and her father had taken such pains to hide. Her silence began to torment him, and he told her that she had to dispel the dread darkening his life.

“Come back tomorrow, and I will tell you everything.”

Now free of the fear that she’d again run away, he neglected to anticipate even worse.

As he pulled into the Magliocco driveway, next to Aunt Amalie’s car, he noticed in the rearview mirror a black coupe parked two doors away across the street, and, at the corner, a yellow car. All the other visible autos on Hesby were parked in driveways. He reached under the front seat and removed his pistol. Aunt Amalie took him directly to Arietta’s room. Lest he tax her, he did most of the talking, reminding her that she had promised to tell him why she was lamming it.