Everything and More (51 page)

. . . 
Horak and his huge, enigmatic paintings at Langley Gallery.

—
“People Are Talking About,”
Vogue,
November 1958

  
47
  

Late one morning in November of 1958, Althea stood at her bedroom window deciding what to wear. Those cirrus clouds were ominously dark, yet in Central Park far below her she could see the last russet leaves scudding from branches, so what should it be, raincoat or fur?

Her warm bedroom with its glowing fire was a charming mélange of color and furniture styles. The gilded Louis XIV bed was saved from overmagnificence by a diagonal placement, boxy contemporary armchairs stood in a close conversational grouping, the curtains were made of the white linen that had been used during long-ago summers to shroud her late grandmother’s Fifth Avenue palace, an ultramodern Lucite desk chair suggested the same graceful form as the eighteenth-century lacquered desk.

Charles was at Groton now, so there was no need to keep the Geneva house open, and Althea considered this ten-room Manhattan apartment, furnished without the aid of an interior decorator, her home.

She desperately needed a home—a truce place.

Her two anchor relationships had been her son and Firelli. Then, last March, as the maestro was recording Stravinsky’s
Firebird
in Milan, his spherical head had suddenly turned crimson and he had crumpled on the podium, his dead fingers still gripping his baton. Althea began to suffer intermittent periods of depression. She recognized that the old man with his undeviating adoration had kept at bay her fiercest panics. (Aubrey Wimborne, a cultivated Londoner, had
never seemed quite a human being to her, but rather one of the chic, clever accoutrements of an enviably handsome life that she had constructed.) Without the old maestro’s platonic, unquestioning devotion, she was once again prey to that ineradicable sense of wrongness, that self-loathing, that terrifying lack of power.

In order to give a sort of spine to her racked, lonely spirit, she entertained relentlessly, using her grandmother’s heavy Georgian sterling and priceless, soft-glinting, Napoleonic Baccarat crystal. She sallied forth to big bashes where the men wore white tie and tails and
soignée
women’s jewels shone flawlessly. In this exquisitely paneled, signed antique bed she sated her passion with men of unquestionable social background.

Now, though, standing in her delightful bedroom, for no reason at all Althea thought of her old dream: the sea-swept boulders of Big Sur, a weathered cabin whose unplastered log walls blazed with the work of Althea Cunningham, artist. She hadn’t picked up a brush since leaving the Henry Lissauer Art Institute. What a queer, lonely child I was, she thought, and turned brusquely from the window.

Wearing Russian sable, she emerged onto Fifth Avenue, striding into the wind. In less than ten minutes she had reached the General Motors Building.

“Althea!” a man’s voice called behind her.
“Althea!”

Believing the shout had come from the building’s huge sunken plaza, she wheeled around, peering down at the men in topcoats emerging for the lunch hour along with clusters of laughing, bundled-up secretaries.

“Althea.”

A few feet away, panting as if he had been running, stood Gerry Horak.

In that first moment, as she looked into the broad, attractively coarse face glowing with the wind, an instinctive, purifying calm swept through her, and she felt as she once had in his arms. Utterly, irrefutably secure in herself. Then remembrance took over. And she burned with fury.

Assuming an expression of puzzled hauteur that she would give an accosting stranger, she then permitted slow recognition to dawn. “Larry!” she exclaimed. “It
is
Larry Hovak, isn’t it?”

His eyes narrowed, the flesh over his broad, high cheeks went taut with anger. “Bull, Althea, bull,” he said. “You damn well knew me right off the bat.”

They were jostled by the stream of hurrying pedestrians.

“Hardly,” she said, forming a patronizing smile. “It’s been years.”

“Cut it out, baby.” It was that old truculent, challenging tone.
“I’m the one who ought to be swinging at you, not the reverse.”

Remembering the brown children playing war in a vacant lot, the endless rustle of Algerian ivy, that crummy blond, Althea spoke with drawling coolness. “I’m sorry if the truth hurts, but I really didn’t remember. And I can hardly stand here arguing about it. I should be at Lutèce—Senator André Ward is waiting for me.” A deeper inflection as she said the name indicated that André was her current paramour. She had, however, misjudged her reaction to Gerry’s uninhibiting presence. “Anyway, what makes you so positive no woman could forget you?” she heard herself demanding. “You always were too damn sure of yourself, you lousy bastard.”

He grinned. “It’s good to see you’re still the same tough, hard bitch.”

How strange that she, ultrasensitive to insult, should be excited by this unpleasantry. Gerry was still grinning. She gave him a springtime smile.

He took her arm. “You look great,” he said. “The classiest broad in New York City.”

Without further discussion, they made their way along the crowded pavement to the traffic light. She then said what was on her mind. “The last I heard of you, you were involved with Roy Wace. Did you skip out on her too?”

“What’s that supposed to mean, skip out
too?”

They were crossing Fifth Avenue. Outside the park, carriages were lined up, their docile, blanketed horses breathing clouds of steam. “You ran out on me,” she said.

“The hell I did,” he retorted, adding bitterly, “I should have known they wouldn’t level with you.”

“They? Level with me about what?”

“The MP’s were waiting when I got home. Statutory rape. Me. You. I hadn’t been discharged. It was the perfect setup for your parents. The Japanese hadn’t signed the surrender papers yet, and the press isn’t admitted to wartime courts-martial. So as far as they were concerned, I could be filed away without a trace. I’d have done my twenty years to life in the stockade if it hadn’t been for Captain Waldheim. A damn fine lawyer, Waldheim. He got me off on grounds of insanity due to combat fatigue. All that happened to me was that I spent one swell year in the military nut dish.”

His embittered grimace touched seldom-used nerves in Althea, and she winced in sympathy for the injustice done to Gerry Horak. Yet, walking with him into the park, she thought exultantly: He didn’t leave me, he didn’t desert me.

“Not that I should complain,” Gerry said. “I don’t know the kind
of chokehold they had on poor old Henry, but it must have been hell.”

For a moment her footsteps slowed with the guilt of memory. Henry Lissauer was at her door. But how, as a distraught child of seventeen, could she have known that the German refugee was suicidal?

Ahead of them an old woman in a man’s topcoat tended a brazier emitting a small, whirling tornado of smoke. Gerry bought a bagful of roasted chestnuts, peeled one and blew on it before he popped it into Althea’s mouth.

They walked along hunched into the icy, buffeting wind, eating chestnuts, not talking.

Gerry crushed the empty bag into a wire-mesh trash barrel. “How come,” he asked, “you were so positive I’d done you the dirty?”

“I went to your place and waited and waited. Finally a blonde drove up. She told me you’d left town.”

“What blonde?”

“You weren’t staying with a friend’s wife?”

“Burt was away for a week, and he never had a wife. How could you figure me for screwing around? Althea, I was so nuts about you I wouldn’t have looked at Rita Hayworth if she’d taken her clothes off and done the slow grinds in front of me.”

“But the woman walked right up onto the porch with her groceries.”

“I can’t help that. She didn’t live there.”

“She certainly seemed at home. Besides, how could she know all about you?”

“Beats me.” He dodged a red-cheeked, snowsuited child furiously pedaling a tricycle. “Think your parents hired some Hollywood type?”

“An actress to throw me off the scent?”

“There’s no other way to figure it.”

“. . . They might have done something along those lines,” she said, nodding.

“When I was released, you were married to Toscanini—”

“Firelli.”

Althea’s correction was absentminded. Forcibly struck by the reason for her April-December marriage—this man’s child embedded in her womb—she drew a little apart from him. An undefinable menace lay in anyone—even Gerry—learning Charles’s paternity. Charles was sacrosanct unto her. Her child alone.

I won’t tell Gerry, ever, she thought.

A gust of wind rippled her warm fur, giving a chill, unalterable inflexibility to the decision.

“Ahh, what’s the use of hashing all this over?” Gerry asked. “What’s past is past.”

He put his arm around her, a shortish, muscular man in a black leather jacket and faded jeans, hugging a slender, elegantly shod woman wearing a fortune in Russian fur. Althea leaned toward him, and the wind lashed strands of her perfumed hair against his face. Linking his arm in hers, Gerry strode more swiftly.

Althea matched her step to his.

They came to a fork and she took the narrower right path. “This is the way to my place,” she said.

“Jesus, it’s a relief to be with you. You’re the only woman I ever knew who doesn’t yakkety-yak everything to death,” he said. “You’re living in New York?”

“I have an apartment. You?”

“L.A. I’m here because Langley Gallery’s putting on a one-man show of my stuff.”

“Langley’s?” She pulled a knowing face. “Impressive.”

As they entered the lobby, the warm air stung Althea’s cheeks. Glancing in the oval mirror to see her unusual high color, she remembered Roy’s shy, flushed reflections in Patricia’s as she talked about Gerry.

“You never told me what happened with you and Roy Wace,” she said. “Do you still see her?”

“We’re married,” he said.

An inferno ignited inside her skull. “That’s one for the books,” she said lightly. “You and Roy.”

The doorman was buzzing for the elevator.

“Althea,” Gerry said quietly, “there’ve been quite a few extracurriculars.”

“No need for confessions. I’m not your priest.”

“So my being hitched to Roy does make a difference,” he said.

She’d slept with many married men, experiencing no envy toward or guilt about the deceived wives. So what if she and Roy had shared a few inextricable years at Beverly High? Why should she feel this rush of hot jealousy, this panicky shame, this hurt?

The bronze-and-Lalique-crystal elevator doors slid open.

As they ascended swiftly, noiselessly, she put her arms around Gerry’s waist, pressing her wind-flushed cheek to his stubbled cheek. “Yes, it matters,” she whispered. “But there’s not a damn thing I can do about it.”

On the other side of the drawn white linen curtains, wind drummed hailstones on glass, but the room was warm, and a log fire sent its rosy glow across the dimness. Althea moved closer to Gerry, curling her naked leg over his. It was six o’clock, and they had been in the gilded bed for five hours.

Gerry stubbed out his cigarette, turning to put both arms around her. “Would you think I was laying it on too thick if I said nothing in my life has been as right as being with you this afternoon?”

“I believe you,” she said. The boundless confidence he had always given her allowed her to admit: “I’m glad it’s not as good for you with Roy.”

“Want me to tell you about her?”

“We should get it over with, yes.”

“It was a mistake, marrying her.” He sighed. “She’s a good kid, decent, loyal as they come, and I’m a complete shit to her. I can’t help it. She’s always so damn humble, know what I mean? Looking at me in this simpy, adoring way, asking my opinion about her work, her clothes. ‘You’re so much smarter than me,’ she keeps saying. ‘You have such a wonderful eye.’”

“That sort of inferiority thing drives me up a wall.”

“Yeah, right. And then there’s the house—we bought one in a tract just south of Beverly Hills.”

“You? A tract? You mean like Levittown?”

“That’s it. Really Roy bought it. She used her own dough. Tracts have sprung up all over the city. This one has pretensions. Not Beverly Hills, but trying to be. Beverlywood it’s called. She picked the model with the attached garage, and before we moved in she hired some joker to fix it up with a skylight and windows. A studio for me. The only damn problem is, I can’t work there. I can’t breathe in there.”