Land of Dreams: A Novel (21 page)

Each person was more interesting than the next, but by far my favorite was a makeup artist called Suri. She was the wife of one of the musicians and a stunningly beautiful woman of around my age. We bonded instantly, an occurrence I could not remember since my schooldays, and when we began to talk, the rest of the group melted away and we sat sharing our life stories for almost two hours. Despite being from the other side of the world, we had so much in common. Suri’s first husband, an American-born architect of Japanese parents, had died of a heart attack when they were both in their thirties. She had no children of her own, but one stepson whom she loved dearly, of around Leo’s age, from her second marriage to a much older oboe player who was a close friend of Stan’s. She told me about her life. Her father was an American engineer who had met and fallen for her mother while on a work assignment in Japan, where Suri had been born. They returned to California when she was an infant, and shortly afterward Suri’s mother died in a tragic car accident. Her father remarried an American nurse, whom Suri considered her mother—but her half-Japanese heritage explained her striking good looks and her choice of first husband. It also explained her fascination with the internment of the Japanese population of California. The year before, in the wake of Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt had passed an order to evacuate all of the Japanese population living along the Pacific coast. I had read about it in the papers, of course, and I knew that the Japanese as a race were, unsurprisingly, unpopular in America at the moment. I supposed that was only natural—just as the Germans were
persona non grata
in Europe—for we were at war. Yet here I was, talking to a woman who was half Japanese, and I became slightly embarrassed by my ignorance of the bad feelings toward American-born Japanese. Only a few days beforehand I had read an article in
Life
magazine showing how one could differentiate a Japanese person from a Chinese, presuming that you suspected they were involved in political subterfuge or a criminal act and wanted to report them for internment. However, it was not until I began to talk to Suri that I realized it was not just suspected spies being interned, but the entire Japanese-American population, including women and children.

“My parents-in-law had to leave their beautiful house—they are both such proud people, the upheaval was terribly traumatic for them. They are both in their seventies and had lived in that same house for fifty years. They were only allowed to take what they could carry to the camp, and do not know when they’ll be back, so they tried to sell as much as they could. I was there when a dealer came to the house, interested in some of their Japanese artifacts—they had such beautiful things. He offered my mother-in-law fifteen dollars for a set of dishes she knew was worth a small fortune. ‘This is worth at least two hundred dollars!’ she told him. He thought about it and said, ‘I will offer you eighteen dollars. No more.’ She was so disgusted that she unwrapped each valuable plate and smashed it to the floor as the dealer shouted, ‘No—no. Stop! They are valuable! I’ll give you one hundred dollars!’ She smashed them all anyway. ‘What use are they to me now?’ she said. ‘What was the point of all this—they have taken it all away, for nothing.’ ”

Suri went on to horrify me with stories of the camps themselves. Her mother- and father-in-law were the only Japanese people she knew, and they had written to Suri begging her to try and reason with the authorities to get them out. Her father-in-law was in ill health and neither of them could understand what they were doing there. “We are not Japanese—we are Americans,” they insisted. “They are wealthy people,” Suri told me, “private, civilized people—and now they are living communally, with strangers in a slum. It is like they have been put in prison to be punished for the crime of a country they left behind years ago.”

I agreed that it was an unfathomable injustice and was about to tell her of Charles’s work with the unions in Hawaii, and how this was the very type of injustice he would have fought against, when Stan and Suri’s husband, Jackson, came over and interrupted our conversation. He was a similar age to Stan—a good deal older than Suri, who, I had now decided, was probably only in her early thirties. I could tell from the gentle manner in which her husband treated her that my new friend had this older man spellbound with love. I flinched with envy as the brief memory of being loved like that passed through me, and for an even briefer moment I wondered how it would be to have Stan look at me in that way. I blinked the idea away immediately as being fanciful and foolish.

Jackson tenderly touched his wife’s face while addressing me and saying, “Suri and all her serious talking. Is she boring you?”

I thought it rather a rude thing to say, but before I had the chance to answer Stan grabbed my hand.

“Enough talking—you must drink and dance now.” And the two men dragged us over to the piano, where a rowdy gang of musicians was ferociously attacking their instruments in a vivacious set of swing music.

Stan bowed comically. “M’lady, I am now drunk enough to dance,” he said and, holding out his hand asked, “May I?”

I laughed and for a fleeting moment I felt as young and beautiful and free as I had ever felt in my life.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY

Throughout February and March Leo was filming every day, so we saw very little of him at home. As it was a big film, the studio had provided trailers with some sleeping accommodation for the young actors, so Leo often chose to stay overnight. He was getting more grown up and assertive every day and enjoying his independence. He discouraged me strongly from meeting him at the studio. “It’s embarrassing,” he said, “none of the other mothers come.” I doubted that was true, but I bent to his wishes nonetheless. I did not like it when he was ill-mannered, but at least it reminded me that he was still a child. It was too early for him to be working, walking around in men’s clothes, talking about his “career.”

When he did come home he talked of nothing else but his prospects of becoming a “star.” Any day now he was going to be plucked out of the crowd of young extras and actors in his group and put on the path to stardom, he was convinced of it. It was tiresome talk, even for his mother, but Leo became irritable if anyone interrupted his flow of self-fascination—even Tom.

“Jesus Christ, child!” he shouted at his boisterous younger brother one day in the kitchen, when Tom knocked over a cup and some milk almost caught the hem of Leo’s trousers, “why are you
so
clumsy!”

I was shocked—both at his cursing and at his cruelty.

“Leo,” I said firmly, “don’t speak to your brother like that!”

He threw me a mean sideways glance, as if I were something from the bottom of his shoe, and left the room without answering.

Raging, I went to follow him, but Bridie held me back.

“Leave him,” she said, dabbing at the counter with a rag and adding, with rather more humor than I was in the mood for, “no point crying over . . .”

“. . . spilled milk!” Tom piped in. Neither of them seemed bothered by Leo’s behavior, yet I found it completely unacceptable—on all our behalves.

“I can’t let him get away with that,” I said. Then, struggling to pierce Bridie’s indifference, I added, “He used the Lord’s name in vain.”

“I’m horrified by that,” she said, “but don’t you pretend to be, you godless hussy—besides, he’s only young.”

“That’s no excuse for being mean to his brother,” I replied, although Tom had already skipped outside. “Tom is a good boy.”

Bridie put the rag down and looked at me straight.

“So is Leo. He is just caught up with himself, Ellie—like all young people are.”

“He has to learn it’s not all right to talk to people like that.”

“And you’re going to teach him that, are you?”

She picked up the knife and carried on with the carrots that she’d been slicing before Tom’s accident.

“Leave him be, Ellie. Let him enjoy being the big ‘I am,’ for goodness’ sake. It’ll not be too long before life knocks it out of him. You were the same, when you came to New York, with your lipstick and your dresses and your gallivanting about the place listening to jazz and drinking . . .”

“I had a tough life before I came to America,” I said. “I had a crippled husband and I knew what it was to be hungry.”

“And he’s not had a tough life?” Bridie asked, looking at me.

I felt terrible. Leo had been abandoned by his mother and had lost his father just over a year ago.

“Who else can teach him what he needs to know, Bridie, if it’s not me? Who else is going to look after him and make sure he’s not steered wrongly in life?”

She shrugged.

“He himself,” she said. “That’ll be the only person he’ll listen to, anyway—or maybe that fool Freddie.”

Although neither of us ever said it out loud, I felt that both of us had a sense that perhaps this young man Freddie might fill the gap left by Charles, which we two women were proving ill-equipped for.

Bridie was right: there was no point in me chasing after him trying to lay down the law. In any case, I was expecting Stan to arrive at any moment.

The composer and I had started to spend a lot of time together. We had become good friends. I had been friends with men before, but it had always led to a romantic involvement, and I could sense that Stan was falling for me. When I was younger, I never took men falling in love with me too seriously. Being loved was a selfish benefit of youth and beauty: admiration and the blind, desirous love of men being the fuel that kept one confident and amused. Then, after John died, I had allowed a good man to fall in love with me and had let him down. I gained nothing from the experience, except for the shame of knowing I had deeply hurt another human being. Charles had been a different proposition in his arrogant acquisition of my hand, although, in my own way, I had let him down too. Stan was different from them all: there was no awkwardness, none of the tension that one finds when a man and a woman are left alone together. In fact there seemed to be no element at play, other than a firm liking of one another—and a thorough enjoyment of each other’s company.

In the months since the party I had been to his house a few times for social occasions. Stan threw a small party every other week, at which his musician friends would gather, get drunk and—without the restrictions of studio commissions—play their own and each other’s compositions for pure recreation. Much of what they played was beyond my understanding.

That was particularly true of the evening when he invited a rather serious old Austrian composer called Arnold Schoenberg and his wife, Gertrud, over to his house for dinner. I agreed to cook, on the proviso that he also invite Suri and Jackson. There were also twelve musicians whom Stan had invited to play some of the great composer’s new work.

Early in the evening Suri and I continued our conversation about the Japanese internment camps. Our last conversation had stayed with me; I had become somewhat haunted by the plight of all those people—a whole community—being rounded up and imprisoned for no reason, under our very noses. Surely there was something to be done about it? Suri’s story about the old couple had struck a chord with me, and I was anxious to see if there was anything I could do to help their cause. Jackson rather rudely, I thought, cut off our conversation, saying, “Ladies, don’t get all worked up about things that are none of your business—we are here to enjoy ourselves.”

His patronizing tone infuriated me, so I said, “Surely the plight of American citizens is the business of all of us during a time of war?”

Stan stepped in artfully, asking some trite question of his guest of honor, and I realized this was not the time or the place and backed down. However, it colored my opinion of Suri’s husband—clearly a weak man who lacked his wife’s compassion—and I resolved to pursue our friendship with her as an individual, rather than socialize as a couple again, which was probably sending the wrong message to Stan anyway.

Arnold Schoenberg had a long face, made longer by a prominent nose and a bald head that throbbed at the temples with a moving, wormy vein that only seemed to herald his genius. He was a lovely man and, as he was also a painter and knew a lot about contemporary art, we had much to talk about. He knew Hilla and, in fact, it transpired that his work had been exhibited alongside that of Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky.

However, when the musicians started to play his work it was not like anything I had heard before—not one bit melodic or tuneful. I thought it a grim, disjointed racket, an insult to the ears, and, I confess, it colored my view of him. “He should stick to the painting,” I told Stan after they had gone.

“He is a genius,” Stan said simply, “and genius is often misunderstood.”

My host picked up glasses from the table and moved to the kitchen with his back still to me. I could tell he was disappointed in me for not appreciating “The Great” Schoenberg’s music. However, I did not balk at the idea of his disapproval and perhaps that was the greatest testament to our friendship: that I liked and respected him greatly, and yet did not have the compulsion to either attract or impress him.

“You’re a better composer,” I said, and I meant it. “Your music has far more . . .”—I knew “tune” would be the wrong word—“soul.”

Stan shrugged. “Schoenberg is an intellectual, Ellie. His work will change music forever. I am just a hired hand, a tradesman, a prostitute to money—a nobody.”

“No, no, Stan,” I said, “that’s not true!”

“It’s the case,” he said, his hands sweeping across the grand room. “All this—it means nothing. You think I make music for films? No, no, I make music for
money
, Ellie.
Money
, that is all. Schoenberg is a penniless teacher now; he will not work for money alone—he cannot, he is not able. Yet his work will change the history of music. I am nothing next to him.”

He looked momentarily so dejected that I walked across to him, grabbed both his hands in mine and, holding them firmly, said, “I won’t have you talk like that, Stan—you are a
marvelous
musician.”