Everything and More (25 page)

After an endless minute he said, “It’s okay.”

*   *   *

The next afternoon on the drive to Belvedere, neither referred to the previous night’s contretemps.

Firelli and Roy played gin while Althea and Dwight floated close together on inflated blue rafts.

The following day was Firelli’s last.

They celebrated his departure with a
bon voyage
supper in the poolhouse. The huge orange moon that magically lit Belvedere’s domain was twinned in the oil-slick blackness of the pool.

After the lemon mousse, Althea said, “Firelli, we really should play some of your records—a swan song.”

“Let’s, let’s!” cried Roy, who was slightly tiddly from her glass of champagne.

“For my young American friends I’ll choose my best loves,” said the old Englishman.

“We’ll have a Firelli concert in the music room,” Althea said. “You go ahead and pick. I have to get these dishes together—Luther’s already furious about serving us down here.”

“I’ll help you straighten up,” said Dwight.

“Great,” Althea replied.

Firelli started up the brick steps.

Althea said, “Roy, you go with him. Otherwise we’ll be in for total heavy stuff.”

Roy’s bubbly mood broke, and her throat clogged with a nasty tightness that she recognized as jealousy. “It’s not fair leaving you two with the mess,” she said thinly.

“We’ll be up in jig time,” said Althea. “Shoo! Scat!”

Roy stood in a moment of wretched indecision, unable to look at either Althea or Dwight. Blinking with shame at her disloyal jealousy, she ran after the maestro.

Firelli bounced up through the moonlit grounds, vigorous as a rubber ball. Other than his naps and early bedtime, he exuded boundless energy. Suddenly he said, “She’s very unhappy.”

“Althea?”

“Yes. I wish I knew the whys and wherefores.” His English voice was gruff with sadness. “Poor child. However much she laughs and tries to hide her misery, it’s always there, like a recurring theme. She can’t escape it.”

“She does have moods.”

“I’d give anything to be able to help her,” said Firelli. “But she’ll have none of it—she equates kindness with pity.”

Roy sighed.

“Can you accept, Roy, that life is harder on her than on you?”

I guess.

“You won’t let this business hurt your friendship?”

“Firelli, whatever are you talking about?”

“Althea and the boy.”

“You just don’t understand American kids.” Roy gave a fraudulent little titter. “We’re all three on the same wavelength.”

He reached out and took her hand. “That gallantry, that loyal courage, Roy—don’t ever grow out of it.”

In the music room, Firelli browsed around the shelves, taking his time as he selected the heavy albums that he considered his triumphs—the first movement of Brahms’s First Symphony, the final movement of Beethoven’s Ninth, Selections from
St. Matthew Passion.

Dwight and Althea did not appear.

Roy’s hands fumbled as she took out Ravel’s
Boléro
and the popular movement of the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto Number 2, both albums slashed diagonally with
FIRELLI
in crimson.

“Maybe Althea meant us to bring them down to the poolhouse,” she said.

Firelli shook his big, sparsely haired head. “The machine up here is truer by far.”

“I’m going back down to make sure,” Roy said.

“No,” he said with a force she hadn’t heard from him before.

But Roy ran outside into the moon-drenched night.

The stout old man bounced after her.

When Roy came to the terrace above the pool, she saw the lights of the poolhouse were out.

Firelli, who had caught up with her, gripped her arm with surprisingly youthful strength. “Don’t go down there.”

For a moment she struggled; then he released her.

Reaching the deck, she stumbled over a soft mound. It was, she realized immediately, one of the thick towels. Yet her heart pounded as if she had trod on a corpse. The small, downy hairs on her arms standing up like multiple warning antennae, she moved, stealthy as an Indian brave, to the windows.

Peering inside, she could see nothing in the darkness. They’re not here, she thought, her breath clouding the pane. Then her eyes caught a movement. She rubbed at the moist glass. She could make out the shadowy outline of a slim, upraised leg and bare foot moving in some rhythmic dance that touched not the earth.

Anesthetized by unreality, Roy watched the foot hold absolutely still, clench into an arch, wave frantically, and disappear, becoming part of the big, lumpy shadow that writhed in a violent tempo.

Firelli pulled her away from the window.

  
22
  

The chauffeur drove her home.

In her room, she opened the window, resting her cheek against the screen, which had an unpleasant, rusty aroma, thinking words like
“alone,” “forlorn,” “betrayed” without assigning meaning to them. She kept seeing the rolling shadow that was Althea and Dwight, the spasmodic jerk of the high-arched feminine foot. What had happened in the poolhouse no longer surprised or shocked her. The past few days, Althea and Dwight had drawn inexorably closer. Why should she be astounded that Althea had gone the limit? Althea has the courage to show Dwight that she loves him, Roy thought with the dull heaviness that stems from a feeling of inferiority.

That night she tossed, turned, and honestly believed she did not sleep. Yet there she was, jerking awake to bright morning light.

“Roy!” NolaBee stood over her bed. “Wake up, Althea’s here.”

Althea stood in her doorway. “You left this,” she said, raising Roy’s white raffia purse.

“I’ll be in the kitchen,” said NolaBee. “Marylin’s new sundress needs pressing for the USO show.”

The door closed. Althea dropped the purse on the bed and sat at the vanity raising her chin in what NolaBee referred to as a Lady-Vere-de-Vere expression. “Why don’t you pin the scarlet letter on me? What else are friends for?”

“All right, so you did it,” Roy said listlessly.

“And not for the first time, dear heart.”

Roy, in a shocked reflex, sat up, staring at Althea. Althea, her reflection wretchedly disdainful, gazed back at her in the mirror.

“But you’re really gone on Dwight, aren’t you?”

“I haven’t altered my opinion one iota.”

“You mean you do it with . . . anybody?” Aghast, Roy groped for words. “. . . in the station wagon?”

“You’d be surprised at how unimportant an act it is.”

Roy’s stunned shock mingled with the dismay of being a gullible jerk. She blurted the first words that came into her mind. “But don’t you worry about, well, a baby?”

Althea gave a low, indulgent laugh. “What do you think I am? A dumb hillbilly?”

Was this a dig at poor Marylin? Suddenly Roy remembered her sister’s beautiful, tormented white face, her protesting sobs.

Jumping from the bed, she raised her arm, putting full force behind her slap to Althea’s smoothly tanned cheek. The blow resounded in the small, shabby bedroom.

“I don’t want to be friends with you anymore!” Roy shouted.

Althea lifted her hand to the reddening mark. “Because of
him?”
She used the same baiting humor, but there was an odd flicker, like fear, behind her eyes. “All
he
wanted from either of us, I can assure you, was a quick lay.”

“You knew I really
liked
him.”

“Well, now you’re cured,” Althea said.

Roy, panting and furious, glared at her, then slowly sat on the bed. “It’s not just Dwight,” she said after a long silence. “It’s us.”

“What’s wrong with us?”

“Everything. The way we shut out the others. The way we sneer at people. The way everybody snickers at us—God, how I loathe our reputations!”

“What’s the dif
what
those Beverly High clods think?”

“You care as much as I do,” Roy said.

“That’s your opinion.”

“I’m going to change.”

“Do tell.”

“For one thing,” Roy said, “I’m not going to spend an hour every morning plastering on makeup. For another, I’m not going to make sophisticated little asides about things I don’t understand. I’m going to be like the other girls. I’m going to be ordinary.”

“Ordinary?”

“Average-ordinary.”

Althea blinked more rapidly. “The reason we’re friends is, you aren’t.”

“I can sure try to be.” Roy’s head had a funny hollow feeling, and her eyes were gritty from lack of sleep. “I can sure try.”

“You need a little time to escape the green-eyed monster. Believe me, there’s no reason to be jealous. I don’t intend to see that 4-F gimp again.”

“Oh, you inhuman
creep!”

Althea, with a narrow smile, ran from the room.

*   *   *

The Big Two patched it up. You don’t cut off three intense years with one knock-down-drag-out fight. Yet everything was different. Roy could not define the change. The best explanation was that an invisible curtain had rolled down, separating them.

Oh, Althea picked her up and drove her home from school, they chose adjacent desks in the two classes they took together, and they shared a table on the crowded patio. But at the beginning of the semester Roy joined SPQR and the Verse Choir, and more often than not she invited other girls to eat lunch with them. Althea responded to Roy’s new friends with either silence or quick, nervous humor. She was often absent.

Neither saw Dwight again.

But every time Roy glimpsed a billboard with Van Johnson’s face or heard a moony song, she would experience a seeping kind of hurt,
as if an internal wound had reopened. She never considered blaming Dwight—or even Althea. The episode had reinforced her unshakable conviction that Roy Elizabeth Wace had been born with some freak genetic defect that made her impossible to love.

Yet once she got into the social swim, she became popular among the lesser lights of the senior class, kids who either did not know about her rep or were willing to overlook it.

One blowy Friday afternoon in November, as Althea drove Roy home, she announced, “I’m getting a private tutor.”

“You? Althea G-for-Genius Cunningham?” Althea, unlike Roy, invariably had capital A’s neatly printed down her report card. “Why?”

Althea stared at the traffic light. “I’m departing the hallowed halls of Beverly.”

“Leaving school? Are you allowed to?”

“If not, then Mother’s arranged an illegality.”

“Althea, you only have a bit of your last semester left.”

“It’s all decided.”

“We’ll still see each other, won’t we?”

“Why not?” said Althea.

After Roy got out of the car, she stood in front of her house, her skirt whipping around her as she watched the station wagon with “Big Two” emblazoned on the front doors disappear up Crescent Drive. An inconsolable sadness overwhelmed her, a haunting sense of loss, as if some living thing—a plant, a kitten—entrusted to her care had died.

She had let their friendship die.

*   *   *

On an overcast December night, Marylin, BJ, Roy, and NolaBee, wearing formals, drove with Joshua in a Paramount limousine to Grauman’s Chinese Theater.

Police linked arms, struggling to hold back the excited fans who surged toward every arriving car. In the courtyard with cement impressions of famous hands and feet, Marylin was asked to speak a few words for the radio public. She whispered into the microphone, “The story was everything. I wouldn’t have been anything without Lincoln Fernauld’s magnificent novel.”

The announcer for once was silent, a long valedictory pause while Marylin stood absolutely still in her shimmery white strapless, a gown that every reader of gossip columns would soon know had been made by Adrian from a parachute donated by a downed naval pilot.

Then she put her hand on Joshua’s arm, and he escorted her into
the lobby. Marylin Wace entered Grauman’s Chinese a beautiful girl with an inordinate amount of newspaper coverage in a hard-eyed business where a hefty press push meant nothing—unless the customers laid down hard cash to see your image.

She emerged Rain Fairburn, a star of the same box-office magnitude as those other young luminaries, Lauren Bacall, Jennifer Jones, Jeanne Crain, June Allyson.