Everything and More (12 page)

The front door opened. A man in a natty blazer emerged, and during the moment that the door remained open, the roar of voices blasted out.

A
party?
Marylin reacted with confusion and fear.

Her preconceptions had staged this scene between two players, her and Joshua Fernauld—Linc’s anxious father.

Though she had always been forced to conquer her fears, she had never viewed herself as a bona fide coward, and now she asked herself how—in the midst of her flaying cares—
how
could she be in such a panic about entering Linc’s house simply because for some crazy reason it was filled with owners of Cadillacs, Chryslers, and chauffeured Lincolns?

Think of what Mama wants to do, she told herself.

Racing up the path, she desperately clunked a polished brass door-knocker shaped like a mermaid.

The door was opened by a colored woman with reddish processed hair and a fine figure beneath her gray silk uniform. Hadn’t Linc—and BJ, too—spoken with warm affection of a black couple? Yes, Coraleen and Percy, who had been with the Fernaulds since BJ’s birth.

“Yes?” Coraleen inquired pointedly.

The sound of convivial voices blew about them, and Marylin could not speak.

The servant’s red-tinged eyes peered questioningly at her. “You’re a friend of BJ’s?”

“No . . . yes. Marylin Wace.”

“Come on in, honey. I’ll get her.”

The maid’s kind tone soothed Marylin a trifle, and she stood in the cathedrallike entry, gazing around. Other than on a movie screen, she had never seen such pure swank. Each detail was perfection from the intricate spoolwork on the massive curving staircase to the sparkling, handsize drops on an enormous chandelier surely imported from Versailles.

Through the archway to the dining room, she saw a man moving around a long oval table helping himself from various silver bowls and platters whose contents were works of art. Food that appeared a gorgeously different substance from the haphazard if tasty brown meals that NolaBee served up. Flowers made of bright radishes and carrots adorned thinly sliced, radiant pink meats—you’d never guess there was rationing. A monstrous crystal bowl refracted the jewel-hued balls of out-of-season melon. Loaves of every ethnic variety stood sliced yet left in their twisted or rounded or oval shapes. Marylin could only guess the delicacies in the twin chafing dishes, but even the humble potato salad lay beneath a glinty blackness that she accepted must be the first caviar she had ever seen. On the sideboard, an elaborately chased silver tea service was flanked by a rich variety of frosted cakes and cream pastries. Queasily Marylin turned away.

Across the hall, in a living room filled with bright chintz and
antiques, a pair of bald, gray-suited men gesticulated a conversation. The main orchestra of voices, however, came from behind the living room.

The general air of a large, jovial party, while unnerving to Marylin, roused a wacky hopefulness in her. The Fernaulds are celebrating, so that must mean Linc’s been found, she thought with a fast-beating heart.

The voices blared louder.

BJ, wearing a draped black date dress and ankle straps with spiky heels, had opened a door behind the stairwell and was coming toward her. Her pompadour wisping in black strands, her lipstick worn off except at the well-defined corners of her mouth, she looked completely herself. “How swell of you to come, Marylin,” she said warmly. “Did you cut school?”

“I heard yesterday,” Marylin said. “I tried to phone you.”

“We aren’t taking calls.”

“Your maid told me . . . BJ, this party—does it mean Linc’s been found?”

BJ’s eyes closed. Marylin could see the lashline was red and puffy. “He’s dead,” she said in a small voice.

“No!” Marylin denied with unaccustomed vehemence. “Missing in action.”

“At first it was only missing in action, so there was some hope. But Dad got on the horn, calling every top brass he knows in Washington, and we heard for sure last night. Linc was on a mission involving a big, well-armed Jap convoy—we don’t know where, of course. But it was fierce. Linc’s been credited with two direct hits. Evidently quite a few of our planes . . .” She made a spiral gesture downward. “Linc made it through the attack and started back with the survivors, but his plane was damaged. He couldn’t keep up. A whole group of Zeroes zoomed in, he couldn’t maneuver . . . Three of our planes saw his go down.”

“No parachute?” Marylin whispered.

“The TBM has a three-man crew. There were no chutes . . . none . . . Linc’s dead.”

Marylin’s heart slowed, her head felt weird and hollow, and she felt exactly as she had in the school corridor yesterday. I can’t faint again, she thought, clutching the box closer. She tensed her muscles, as if readying herself for physical combat, and with a tremendous effort thrust from her mind what BJ had just told her. She had the rest of her life to consider that ultimate obscenity, Linc’s death, and only the next few minutes to rescue his child.

“Word is we wrecked their convoy,” said BJ, vainglory pitiable in her thin voice.

Marylin began to cry.

BJ, though unaware of Marylin’s full relationship with Linc, had heard the confession of love coming from her friend’s beautiful lips, and because Marylin Wace was a Somebody at Beverly High, this stamped the crush with a validity lacking in other schoolgirl pashes.

She held out her round, black-crepe arms. The large-boned, plump girl and the delicately fragile small girl held each other in a mourners’ embrace.

They wept several moments, then pulled apart.

“What makes you think this is a party?” BJ blew her nose. “Behold a Class A Beverly Hills wake. The heads of three major studios have already passed this way. Come on in.”

Across the rear of the house stretched a paneled card room with four substantial, green-baize-topped tables surrounded by large velvet-upholstered armchairs. Behind an ornately carved bar, a maroon-jacketed colored manservant (Percy?) dispensed drinks to a group of men already boisterously drunk. Beyond this room was a sunporch bright with wicker and big pots of daffodils, and beyond the sliding glass doors, an aqua oval swimming pool. In both rooms, suntanned, resplendently attired men and women held glasses and chatted—Marylin wondered if that really could be Edward G. Robinson, and was that redhead in half-profile actually Greer Garson, or somebody who looked and sounded exactly like her? Could that big, handsome naval officer possibly be Clark Gable? BJ led her around conversational groupings (“. . . I’m using Van for the part . . .” “. . . buying the handmade sterling flatware from Porter Blanchard . . .” “. . . stationed in London, thank God . . .”) to a chair.

Here sat a diminutive woman whose dyed blond hair was carefully arranged around a face so thin that the small bones of her cheeks and jaw showed clearly.

“Mother,” BJ said, “I’d like you to meet a really good friend of mine, Marylin Wace.”

“Mrs. Fernauld,” Marylin said, swallowing, “I’m so very, very sorry. . . .”

“Thank you, dear,” Mrs. Fernauld said hastily, as if fearing that overt sympathy might endanger her fleshless composure. “How kind of you to come.”

“We’re
very
good friends,” said BJ.

“People are being so nice,” said Mrs. Fernauld. “Why don’t you get her something to drink, BJ, dear. A Coke? Ginger ale?”

A candle was burning in a glass with Hebrew letters around it. Seeing Marylin’s glance, BJ said with defiant truculence, “For the half-Jewish side.”

Marylin had never wearied of hearing Linc talk of his colorful Jewish relations, but BJ never mentioned them.

“The
yarzheit
candle comforts Grandma, I’m sure Emma understands,” said Mrs. Fernauld, her bony fingers twining with BJ’s large, plump ones. “BJ, dear, you remember Mrs. Harper?”

BJ was drawn into Mrs. Fernauld’s group. Marylin sat down, holding the box awkwardly on her lap.

On the couch next to her, a tiny, very wrinkled lady, also with bright blond hair, had turned to stare. “So, pretty little girl, you’re a friend of BJ’s?” she asked in a buoyant accent.

“Yes. . . .”

“So you’re the only one here who didn’t know Lincoln, so that means you can make with a few honest tears?”

Marylin had not realized she was crying.

The old lady handed her a wadded, moist handkerchief. “If you don’t mind a used one?”

“Not at all. Thank you. . . .”

“They grieve, you mustn’t think they don’t grieve. They show it different, that’s all.”

“I understand. . . .”

Tears welled into the old lady’s eyes. “You tell me what God means, letting a boy like that be killed. A Phi Beta Kappa, all the promise in the world. Such a decent, good boy, such a
mensch.”

At the word, BJ broke away from her mother’s group. “Oh, you met Gramma. Mrs. Lottman, Marylin Wace,” she said hastily. “Come along, Marylin, let’s get something to eat.”

“Eat?”

“It’s lunchtime. There’s tons of food.”

“I have to talk to your father.”

“Dad’s pretty stinko.”

“I’d wanted to tell him . . . how sorry I am. . . .” Marylin wiped at her eyes.

BJ accorded her friend Juliet-widow’s rights. “Come along,” she said, leading her back into the card room and toward the bar, where the drunken group was arguing with simultaneous obstreperousness about Roosevelt and the need for a second front.

BJ waited for a lull, then put her hand on the arm of the largest, loudest man.

Big-chested, he was dressed in a gaudy Hawaiian sport shirt and
white duck pants. His fatherhood could never be in doubt. Here, below deeply tanned forehead ridges, were the thick brows and bony promontory of a nose inherited by both his children. His long onyx eyes, also a genetic imprint, were bloodshot and angry.

“How’s my Beej?” he said. “You guys all know her?”

“Know her?” said a red-faced man, teetering back and forth alarmingly. “Jesus fucking Christ, Joshua! I’m her godfather.”

“Must be pretty far in my fucking cups to forget that,” said Joshua Fernauld. “Beej, what can I do for you?” His voice was unusual, reverberating deep and gravelly within that barrel chest.

“Can I talk to you a sec?”

“Sure thing.” He held up a hand to his friends. “Gotta talk to my Beej,” he said, and put his arm around her, opening the door to the left of the bar. Marylin followed them.

They were in a medium-size room that seemed larger because its sole furnishings were a maple captain’s chair, a battered maple desk topped with a very old typewriter, and a sagging shabby couch. The Spartan heart that pumped the lifeblood of cash through this exquisitely appointed Tudor mansion.

“Well?” said Mr. Fernauld.

“Dad, this is a special friend of mine, Marylin Wace.”

“Hello, Marylin.” Mr. Fernauld breathed liquor over her. “Has anyone ever told you that you are, to coina phrashe, one gorgeous little
shiksa?”

Marylin blinked.

BJ, with the floundering embarrassment that she had displayed about the candle and her grandmother’s unknown word, said loudly, “You’re not Jewish, Daddy.”

“Shush, lower your voice, Beej. You wanta ruin my brilliant career?” He gave a braying laugh.

Marylin’s mind had gone white with terror. When she had determined to come here, it had been with the idea of bearding a sensitive author, a dignified, thoughtful humanist alone in his grief. Certainly never in her worst terror could she have conjured up this awful, booming drunk in a flowered shirt. Linc was sensitive, fine, decent even in his edgy anger. How could
this
be his father? Well, he is, she thought.

“Mr. Fernauld,” she said in low breathiness, editing her rehearsed speech, “I have some things of Linc’s, and I want you to have them. . . .”

Before she could complete even this truncated preamble, the reddened eyes had gone blank.

She thrust the box toward him. Across the top she had red-crayoned: “For Joshua Fernauld. Please return to Marylin Wace, 8949 Charleville, Beverly Hills, Calif.”

As he squinted down at the box, his drunken features contorted. “How dare you come here at a time like this, you nashty little cunt!”

Marylin, who did not know this word either, could not mistake the distillation of pure animal fury. She stepped back, the box still extended.

“Daddy!” BJ cried. “Daddy!”

“You have some sweet friend, BJ, I have to inform you of that. Some sweet little friend. Push into the house at an hour like this, at thish particular hour, to try to get me to read her crap at thish hour, an hour like thish—”

“Daddy, Marylin’s in my play, she’s a friend, she’s—”

“All right, Beej, all right.” He patted BJ. Then he turned on Marylin with a look of anguished, venomous hatred, snatching the box roughly from her hands, shoving it into the top drawer of the scarred maple desk. “Don’t hold your breath!”

He staggered back to his friends, and through the open door she heard him bawl. “‘Nother damn shcript to look at. Jesus God almighty, now, even now they shove their fucking stupid shit at me. Oh God, God, my only begotten son dead . . . Even now . . .” He was sobbing. One of his group slammed a drink at him, and he gulped at it, spilling some down his Hawaiian shirt.

Marylin’s insides crawled sourly up her throat.

BJ was staring at her with reproachful eyes. “What made you do that? I didn’t know you were trying to write. You should have come at Dad some other time.”

“Bathroom?” Marylin gasped.

BJ led her back into the hall. “There’s the powder room,” she said, pointing.

The door was locked.

“Can you wait?” BJ asked without warmth.

Marylin shook her head.

BJ gestured up the stairs. “Mine’s the first on the left.”

On sunlit tiles, Marylin knelt in front of the john, vomiting in heaving, teary waves until only clear liquid came.

For a long time she remained in that attitude of prayer, and sometimes it happened that the windswept branches mercifully drowned out the party sounds.

Her body ached as if she had been whipped, the muscles quivering, the nerve endings raw. Never again in her life would Marylin so acutely experience the physical dimension of mental anguish.