Girl of My Dreams (16 page)

“Race and I have to get back to town,” Teresa said before I could alter my course, and the two melted away.

Reading the script Dunster Clapp had sent while I swam guiltily, Pammy sat on a lounge chair under an umbrella. She had put on reading glasses but didn't look all that interested, skipping pages, doubling back, chuckling a couple of times though altogether her focus was desultory. “They want to make fun of the Depression and rich people at the same time,” she said as I dried off. “Mr. Capra and Mr. Riskin know how to do that, but Benges and Spighorr shouldn't be left in the same room with typewriters.”

“I'll take it right back with me,” I offered, “and give it to Dunster in the morning.

“That would be nice, Owen. I'll have to skim the rest I guess.”

I kept silent but looked at her, the legendary thirty-ish woman (thirty-two to be exact) of experience with the kid who would have tripped over his shoelaces any minute except he was barefoot. I did not look at Palmyra Millevoix with lust, only awe.

“You're basically an interrogator aren't you, Owen,” she said without looking up. “I trust you though.”

I stammered. “I-I haven't asked you anything, have I?”

“No, but it's all there. You're a pack rat with other people's lives. I remember you in my bungalow to do publicity. Your questions were not professional as much as they were constitutional. Curiosity is your natural posture, isn't it?”

“I always want to know more than I do, if that's what you mean.”

Without another word, Pammy moved off her chaise and was in the swimming pool before I could breathe again. She disappeared beneath the surface, invisible because of the sunlight flaring off the pool into my eyes. I supposed I wouldn't see her again. She'd never been more than a fantasy anyway, a figment of the collective imagination. When she reappeared at the deep end, she threw her head back and smiled. I didn't see her take a breath before she plunged again, but what was mere air to her? She swam back and forth a few more times, now submerged, now planing the surface. When she climbed out and wrapped herself in a towel, I felt I should have held it for her, but that would have been both too subservient and too familiar.

“We have to help Race,” Pammy said when she sat down again. “She's out of luck. If you have a chance to do something for her, do it. If it's a bit part, make it bigger. If you see her in the commissary trapped by some pig, butt in and be your awkward self until she can escape. We need to guard her a little.” She didn't say why; I didn't dare ask.

“Sure,” I said. Even if she was only using me, her saying We made my pulse skip.

“Sit down. Hollywood's even crazier than the rest of the world thinks, isn't it.”

It wasn't a question so I didn't answer.

“Not that the rest of the world is sane. Italy and Germany are two countries I love, and they're out of their minds.” Pammy had the morning paper in front of her, but she wasn't so much reading it as bouncing off it. “Oh, this is fine for Europeans, who have warfare and disputed borders in their veins, but hamburger Americans … what will happen to us—I'm almost one of us now—when we get vacuumed into all this?”

She seemed to have accepted my presence in a way, and in another way was talking to herself. Something had shifted when she looked at the newspaper.

I glanced at her and she was again famous to me. When she said she trusted me she meant that she knew I'd do her bidding. I was a capon, and I hoped it was only a disguise. Hardly auditioning for Prince Charming, I was an attendant the court had sent to badger her on her one day off. She was complaining about international affairs to me, but I could have been her hairdresser or Millie's nursemaid, Costanza. She had been so personal, so at home and at ease with Teresa and Race; now she was famous again, as she had been at Mossy's party.

“Play tag, Uncle Owen?” Finished with her nap, Millie had come down to the pool. She'd seen me a few times at the studio, where she resented my intrusions on her time with her mother, but on her own ground I was accorded the status of a familiar. Play tag was the last thing I wanted to do, but I began chasing the seven-year-old miniature of her mother around the pool. That was part of her mother's fame, too: you had to do what her kid wanted because she was Palmyra Millevoix. I was rescued from this chore by the announcement from Costanza that Bruce Sanders had dropped in.

“Help me,” Pammy said. “Stay right here, close.” Sanders had been a beau of Pammy's briefly during her Pamela Miles period. I didn't like the grasping fellow, a middling actor who worked sporadically in pictures about armies or athletes. With this new social assignment I understood I was still a capon, only now I was to be part of the shield Pammy held up to ward off the unwelcome swain. Costanza scooped up Millie.

Pammy pulled her lounge chair so close to me it appeared we were in an intense private conversation that would render any third party an intruder. If only.

Sanders was a cocky guy, his hair peroxided to help him play halfbacks and doughboys when he was a decade and a half too old for those parts. He made a jaunty approach under the wisteria canopy, yawing his head from side to side as he sailed toward us. When he padded across the flagstones, accompanied by a haughty salivating pointer, Pammy was leaning toward me with her throaty chuckle sharing a presumed intimacy though in fact what she had just said, looking at a headline, was that Mussolini was a pretty fair showman but he was in danger of forgetting he was only in a show.

Pammy did not rise to greet the visitor. His self-righteous pointer made things worse for Bruce Sanders by starting to drink out of the pool. “Unless your dog's stomach is made out of glass,” Pammy said, “the chlorine in there will eat right through it.”

“Heel, Brutus!” Sanders yelled, and after he repeated his order several times and swatted the dog, Brutus reluctantly gave up the pool. “He's not half the canine his father was,” Sanders said, and then, attempting a little historical familiarity, the actor added, “You remember Brutus's father, Pam?”

“I recall you had a big spiteful dog.” Pammy wrinkled her nose as she said this.

Brushing off the remark, Sanders squinted at me. “Jant, isn't it? Still doing heavy lifting for Zangwill?”

“Something like that.”

“Actually,” Pammy said, “he's too modest to say so, but Owen will be writing the next Garbo picture as soon as Mossy can spring her from Metro.”

“Oh, uh, LB will never let go of her.” Sanders had not stopped cocking his head from side to side as if this gave him both stature and credibility. “I'm starting at Warners myself in a couple of weeks. Dieterle wants me at eight hundred per.”

Which, even in the Thirties, was birdseed for a Hollywood actor, and Pammy tore right into it. “Wow,” she said, “no telling what you can do with that, Bruce.”

“After the first picture my agent tells me it can be tripled.”

Still birdseed to a star like Pammy. She raised her eyebrows so they formed little arcs above her reading glasses, which she had kept on. She affected a kind of thoughtful calculation. “That would be wonderful, Bruce. Of course, with twenty-five hundred a week your hands are sort of tied, aren't they?”

“What do you mean?” Sanders stumbled gullibly onward.

“Well, you can do some things, but you can't do others. I mean, you could have a little plane, or you could have a big boat, but not both, right?”

Sanders was miserable. He didn't yet have the eight hundred a week, maybe he was blowing smoke anyway about Bill Dieterle, and here was his former girlfriend, now a movie star, telling him that even if he makes three times what he does not yet make, he's still below the level of her eyesight. Not quite defeated, he tried advancing again into the historical familiar. “Speaking of boats, we had one helluva sweet time going over to Catalina on that Coast Guard launch, didn't we? How about doing that again, Pam?”

Pammy winced at the memory and thrust back her own historical unfamiliar. “Bruce, you went around for a short while with a bland studio creation named Pamela Miles, someone invented to feed candy to audiences with a sweet tooth for the unreal. You did not go out with, or even know, Palmyra Millevoix. Let's leave it at that.”

“I, uh, guess I shouldn't have dropped in. We were on our way to Alta Loma, Brutus and I, female show dog there ready to be bred, and we thought, or I mean I—”

“Take care of yourself, Bruce.”

The belittled actor and his slobbering dog slunk away to do their reproducing in a more hospitable meadow.

Pammy took off her reading glasses. “I know I was awful to him, I'll get Mossy or Harry Cohn or someone to give him a couple of weeks' work.”

“Pretty nervy of him, coming by without—”

“You know, it was the publicists at Warners who not only hung the name Miles around my neck but also concocted the glorious tale of my father dying heroically in the World War, my mother moving to America in search of democracy.”

“I thought your family was … I don't know … your career in Paris—”

“Oh that was later, darling, and anyway don't believe everything you hear, even if it's from me. Well, I got my name back and I kept my pokey nose.” She laughed, recalling her nose had been called too conspicuous and was a candidate for cute-button surgery until she'd declared her name and her nose were who she was and that would be that. “Miss Millevoix,” she went on in quotational mode, “who acted for a time under the studio soubriquet of Pamela Miles, was briefly squired by the consummate boor and untalented gentleman caller Bruce Sanders before she came to her senses.”

“But if you knew that about Sanders, why—”

“A slow week, darling, and I'd never been to San Simeon.”

She laughed again while I, unable to shed solemnity, pondered her double identity, her use of “darling,” her many voices. “Well anyway,” I said, “here you are at your beloved Red Woods.”

“I should never have called it that, should I? Another target for the reactionaries.” Pammy put down the script, stood up and began to walk me around the acreage of Red Woods, where she had managed a cornucopia of trees, flowers, fruit and vegetables. From the wisteria arbor that led to the pool, we crossed beneath huge cork oaks that appeared as parasols to the shrubs beneath them, and then we were in a lane of tall cypresses, followed by a small field with a dozen or so rows of corn. A file of persimmon bushes abutted the cornfield, and on the other side of the persimmons were rows of all kinds of berries. A patch of strawberries nestled by staked vines of loganberries, raspberries, blackberries, elderberries, and on the far side of the berries tomato vines were hanging from trellises. A small orange grove occupied perhaps half an acre. The ranch house itself, rambling and unpretentious, was set off by a semicircle of lawn and protected from the road by a line of alternating date palms and camphor trees. On the seven acres surrounding the house, Red Woods featured a creek running through an unexpected stand of bamboo, low cedar hedges arranged in a maze of gravel paths around a gazebo, two coops for chickens and pheasants, and the inevitable wild growth of California redwoods. It was an endlessly provocative reach for a child to be a child. “Millie's in her Eden here,” Pammy said as we reached the bamboo.

“I've stayed hiddenly religious all my life,” she said. “I was brought up with the Gospel, rejected it, yet who can avoid feeling evangelical as a Red? And I still believe Jesus feels your sin, you know.”

As she paused, my heart sank into my shoes. I'm dealing with a nut here, just like all actors, what a letdown, a zealot after all. She smiled and I saw she read me, was laughing at me. I made the further mistake of thinking she didn't believe, not really, what she had just said. We were making our way along the creek that led to the larger redwoods. It was hardly a forest—we could see the road in one direction, the pool-house in another—yet it served, as did all her acreage, as sanctuary.

“No,” she went on, “I'm neither in a state of faith nor joking about it. I'm noting it, that's all. Jesus: he remains. All of us knew from the time we were in trees and swamps that when we've done wrong we can be redeemed only by a Jesus who dies for us. You get out of Catholicism, but it refuses to get out of you.”

“How did you get out of it?”

She eyed me. Her tone became confidential, not confessional. “The convent in Ghent. Eleven or twelve I guess I was. It's the Church that lets you out of the Church. When the nuns were holding me down, rather when one of them held me so the other could do what she did, and then they traded places, I still knew Jesus was with me even if the Church wasn't. When I went to the priest, Father Montaillou, and he told me he'd hear no more of this, even then I knew Jesus was in me. I somehow conceived the notion that Sister Jeanmaire and Sister Maria Christina and Father Montaillou were Antichrists. The Church was full of Antichrists. About Sister Jacqueline I felt different because she was younger and didn't force me as much and had a sugary mouth, but they all of them made me feel like a piece of clothing, a chemise, that is being worn too much and needs laundering. I began to see myself at the age of twelve as Saint Joan, a martyr, only unlike her I had to keep quiet so no one would burn me. I was a martyr to sex. At the time I didn't even know that it was sex, it was being touched and touched very unpleasantly by these two malodorous monster nuns. But I still had Jesus. I prayed to him and to God I could be left alone, and when I wasn't left alone I thought I am not praying correctly so I prayed many different ways. Nothing worked. I began to wonder if I could still believe.”

“How could you stay a believer after that convent?” I asked.

“The war. I helped out, you know, in a blood bank. We were told to pray continually for God's help. Sometimes it seemed to work. Boys recovered who looked as though everything had been shot away. Perhaps Jesus was in the blood we poured into the wounded. One sees unbelievable things. I remember thinking how could both sides pray to the same God and then kill each other? But still, I came out of it only confused.