Everything and More (3 page)

Roy felt as if she were suspended too high in a swing so that her stomach was eternally dropping away from her. Pa, oh Pa, you must get well, you must. Horrible itches erupted on her freckled arms and legs.

NolaBee reproved in a strangely pitched voice, “You’re not a monkey, Roy.”

Roy stopped scratching herself. Another itch became excruciating: unconsciously, she flayed it with her nails.

The big clock over the door ticked with agonizing slowness to eleven-forty-eight.

Then the same short, fat nurse emerged through the doors.

The Waces rose, facing her.

“Dr. Winfield asked me to tell you that Mr. Wace never regained consciousness,” she said without inflection. “He expired a few minutes ago.”

The widow and two orphans burst into spasms of grief that are natural in moments of disaster. NolaBee sank into Marylin’s arms.

Roy flung herself onto the chill, comfortless couch, her sobs quickly ceasing. She was shivering with a chill more intense than she had ever experienced. Pa, oh Pa, how could you leave me utterly alone forever?

*   *   *

Mr. Roth came over that afternoon, bearing a large, almond-filled coffee ring. He wept real tears when he passed on the little information he possessed. He had quit work around midnight, leaving Chilton to finish counting the Levi’s coveralls—“Our biggest-selling item, we stock every size,” he explained. This morning he had returned to find his shop ransacked and his employee bleeding and unconscious in a heap of denim. Until now, he apologized, he’d been stuck down at the police station. “I’ll find out for you about the workmen’s comp,” he promised as he left.

That Friday he returned with the forms. The Wace family would get $500 in cash, and $50 a month—$25 for the widow and $12.50 each for children below the age of eighteen.

After Mr. Roth left, NolaBee lit her last Camel with tremulous hands. “Five hundred dollars—that’s more money than I’ve ever seen. But I reckon it won’t go much further than paying off what we owe at the hospital and the mortuary.” Her voice cracked on the final word, but she continued resolutely. “That fifty a month is half what your pa made, and we weren’t livin’ right lavish on
that.”

“What about Greenward?” asked Marylin. Tears turned her huge, beautiful eyes greener. “Will we go back?”

“Back?” Roy burst out with the combativeness that even in her worst hours she was unable to quench. “I’ve never been there. And neither have you.”

“Your people live there,” said NolaBee, puffing smoke.

“Swell,” Roy said. “Let’s go where we can personally kiss their pinkies when they donate their smelly old clothes.”

“Lord, Lord, how I hate those hand-me-downs.” NolaBee sighed.

Both daughters turned to her in surprise.

“Well, that’s news,” Roy said.

“What would you have had me do, little Miss Smart Mouth?” said NolaBee, affectionately tousling the reddish-brown curls. Then she coughed. “I couldn’t let your pa know how much I hated those old things. He felt bad enough as it was, not bein’ a millionaire financier.”

Roy sniffed back a sob.

NolaBee handed her a handkerchief. “We’re not going home until it’s a triumph,” she said. As punctuation, she tapped the long ash into her empty coffee cup.

“Mama, we’re poorer than ever,” Marylin sighed.

“I reckon we’re never going to let the family think your pa didn’t take real good care of us. I don’t want to hear a one of ’em ever saying, ‘Poor Chilton, he left his family poorly fixed,’”

“What’ll we do?” Marylin asked.

“Maybe win the Irish Sweepstakes,” said Roy.

“I’ll think on it,” said NolaBee.

*   *   *

Two mornings later the sisters woke to find their mother sitting on Marylin’s cot. The air smelled smoky, as if she had been there a long time.

“You look right young, Marylin,” she said.

“Everybody says nineteen.” Marylin’s soft voice held a rare hint of testiness.

“Like this, no more than fourteen,” NolaBee pronounced. “That’s what your age is now.”

“I’ll be seventeen in August,” said Marylin.

“You’ll be fifteen then. We’re moving to Beverly Hills.”

“Beverly Hills!” Iron springs twanged as Roy jumped from the cot. “On what? The big loot from workmen’s comp?”

“I’ll find work. We’ll manage.”

“Why Beverly Hills?” asked Marylin apprehensively.

“The movie people all live there. They have children in the high school.”

“And the town’s sent out an SOS to recruit impoverished students?”

“All right, Roy. I’ve had enough of your mouth.” NolaBee spoke tartly, but her hand rested gently on Roy’s pudgy waist. She understood
how much the child was devastated by her father’s death. “When Beverly Hills High puts on a play, I reckon there’s scads of important studio folk there.”

“Mama . . .” Marylin sank back into the mended pillowcase, her eyes glazed with horror.

“Every place we’ve been, you’ve had the lead.”

“I try hard, I don’t mind memorizing, but—”

“You’re
good.”

“Not in a place like Beverly Hills. Anyway, I’m nearly a senior—”

“You’re fourteen,” NolaBee said inexorably.

“No, Mama. Please—”

“You need a right long time to let those big producers see you. Two extra years.”

Marylin began to sob softly.

Roy stared at the lovely bent head. And like an electric light suddenly going on, she understood a fact that had hitherto eluded her. Marylin paid a high price for her closeness with their mother. NolaBee, for all her vivid energy, lived by and through her beautiful daughter, vicariously sharing Marylin’s triumphs, accepting her accolades, weeping her tears, intruding into her soul. And Marylin was tender enough to permit the invasion.

Roy jerked away from her mother’s grasp. “Mama, the whole idea’s dum-dum. That’s what comes from reading too many fan magazines.”

“I reckon they do write a lot of hooey about how stars get discovered, but there’s a lot of truth, too. Actresses have to come from somewhere.”

“You can’t really mean me to pretend I’m two years younger and keep getting up in front of those big shots?” Marylin said, raising her tear-streaked face.

“You’ve always got the most applause,” NolaBee said, for once adamant with Marylin.

“And it’s not exactly because she’s Katharine Cornell,” Roy said.

“I reckon the studio talent scouts know where to find Katharine Cornell, but they aren’t looking. They don’t want Broadway actresses, they want beautiful girls.”

“Mama, it’s crazy, there’s no chance,” wept Marylin.

“I reckon you’re a Roy, a Wace, a Fairburn. You’ll make a chance,” said NolaBee. Drawn and pale, she looked like a gambler placing his last chip.

This year, because of the war, the Board of Education has been busier than ever. Immediately after the entrance of the United States into the war, the Board ordered air-raid drills to be put into practice. In cooperation with the Civilian Defense, essential supplies were purchased.

—
Beverly Hills High School
Watchtower,
1942

Beverly Hills High School presented its annual Shakespearean Festival on April 23 and 24 for students and for the PTA mothers’ tea. The sensation of the festival was Marylin Wace in the role of Juliet from
Romeo and Juliet.

—Ibid.

Fernauld, Joshua R.: Writer, director. B. Bronx, New York, Jan. 20, 1896: ed., New York public sch. m. Ann Lottman, two children, Barbara Jane and Lincoln. Newspaper writer, novels
Victims
and
Journey.
Began assoc. with screen in 1921, writing
Victims
(Columbia). Other films include
Lava Flow,
1938, Academy Award. Directed
Vigilance
(Paramount), 1939.

Pictures include:
That Lost Love, Princess Pat, Mr. Kelbo Goes to Berlin, After the Fall, Spring Laughter.

—International Motion Picture Almanac,
1942–43

There is an unspeakable clamor as the planes warm up before attack. When the last planes have left the deck, the commander’s specially marked plane appears suddenly on the flight deck, brought up by an incredibly fast elevator.

—Life
article about Navy pilots, April 2, 1943

  
3
  

Marylin sat holding a script on her lap, part of the semicircle on the dusty, shadowy stage of the Beverly Hills High School auditorium. Like the other girls, she wore a pleated skirt and a pastel sweater that matched her Bonnie Doone ankle socks—the uniform for any girl uninterested in courting a reputation as a freak. The boys onstage wore the de rigueur cords and white shirts with the two top buttons open, and the sleeves rolled to just above the elbow. None of them could afford to look different. As it was, they were already considered weirdos or exhibitionists for taking Radio Speech or working on the Shakespearean Festival or bounding around the stage like
cucarachas
in the Voice Choir’s production of a home-grown musical,
Fiesta.
They were the Juniors talented and devoted enough to drama to stay after school for these preliminary rehearsals of the class play.

They fidgeted tolerantly while BJ Fernauld, an overweight, round-faced girl with a large red bow pinned behind her teetering black pompadour, scribbled down the margin of a smudged mimeograph sheet. BJ’s father was Joshua Fernauld, the famous Oscar-winning screenwriter, and doubtless Miss Nathans, the drama teacher, when selecting BJ’s comedy as the class play, had fallen under the influence of what BJ—in vaguely boastful secrecy—had admitted to her classmates was her father’s “light polish job.”

“Egads, I’m a genius,” BJ chortled, then pitched her tone a couple of decibels deeper into what she considered a stage voice, booming, “I can’t find any evidence in my grade book to give you a B, Vera.”

“But Miss Brighton . . .” Marylin, playing Vera, groaned winsomely. “Without the B, I’ll flunk out of school.”

BJ: Precisely what you deserve.

Marylin: But why?

BJ: For just one example, you slept through class while I read
Romeo and Juliet.

Marylin: I always did wonder how it turned out.

Marylin read the last line with arch yet adorable innocence, and the little group’s laughter rustled through the dusty wings.

“Every time you say that, it cracks me up,” chuckled Tommy Wolfe, who pulled his chair slightly forward, a ploy enabling him to gaze unobstructedly at Marylin.

“Perfect comic timing,” BJ said. Her messy pompadour bobbled as she nodded admiringly.

“Aw, shucks, thanks,” said Marylin, miming diffidence by scraping the toe of one saddle shoe on the dusty boards.

The next half-hour she submerged her being into that of a flirtatious scatterbrain.

Marylin was jarringly superior to her fellow players. Though she modestly accepted this, she had no real comprehension of her own talent. The truth was, she viewed herself as a rather wishy-washy type. So how come on the stage she could turn into a fiery sexpot, a gawky brain, a vulnerably grief-stricken older woman in her twenties, a coldly intelligent bitch, a wise-cracking flirt, an ignorant peasant girl? She empathized with people, of course, but a lot of kids had an ability to fit themselves into another’s shoes. She worked indefatigably, but that wasn’t the entire answer, either. The closest she had come to summing up her abilities was to visualize herself as a clear glass pitcher into which every coloration of a role could be poured.