Make Believe (15 page)
But then Sol shifted his eyes. Another long silence, his head bent to the side as though listening to some inner voice, his hand rubbing the side of his jaw, his body trembling. He looked out over the few of us. “He shouldn’t have died like
that
.”
We all tensed up, waiting. Alice sucked in her breath, a rasp that made everyone look her way.
“You know, Max helped hundreds of careers, but that’s not important. What was important was that he was a friend to hundreds, and they turned their backs on him. Such a good, good man, a mensch, let me tell you. So where are they?” He stopped, pointed around the nearly empty chamber. For some reason, probably nerves, the aged organist inadvertently touched a key of the organ and the discordant note, powerful as a gunshot, made us jump. Sol glanced at her but then went on. “There’s something wrong here today. Small-minded people, narrow and mean-spirited people…they use innuendo…they say they speak for America…but…they…” He trailed off, helpless, now weeping.
Lorena looked at me, despairing.
Then he gazed at us. No, he looked at the vast number of unoccupied seats, the ghosts of Max’s friends and acquaintances oddly there—at least to him. “Old friends,” he muttered. Then, almost incoherent, “The three musketeers.” And I knew—I supposed we all did at that moment—he was talking about the absence of Larry Calhoun.
Sol’s voice became thunderous now. “Belly-crawlers,” he yelled out. “Turning in their friends for a few pieces of silver. Judas.” He faltered and let out a teary gasp. “The Talmud says…the man who turns in his brother, the one who betrays…” Then, loudly: “
Akhal Kurtza
.” Hebrew, I assumed. “The man who ravishes the flesh of a brother…gnaws on the marrow of his brother…”
It was an awful moment, raw as dripping blood. Sol, confused now, stood there, unable to move. Quietly, in an act of utter beauty, Alice went to him, wrapped an arm about his waist, and led the weeping man back to his seat.
Dizzy, spent, I bent over in the seat, my eyes closed.
Nothing happened. Reverend Smithson sat on the side, the lost Lamb of God himself.
The creak of a stage door at the side, behind a tattered curtain.
Ava Gardner walked out of the back shadows. A collective intake of breath, as I turned to glance at Desmond Peake, sitting behind us. A stony face, though the knuckles gripping the back of the seat in front of him were white and tight.
Ava, the forbidden congregant.
Her eyes downcast, she stood silently before that microphone. Dressed in a simple black dress, with decorous black ruffles at the neck, elbow-length black cotton gloves, a single strand of pearls around her neck, a black scarf draped on her head like a mantilla, she looked the modest mourner, though that would be impossible for her: she stunned us, this woman. She glanced at the Reverend Smithson, who smiled at her and nodded.
She cleared her throat. Immediately the organist hit some keys. Ava glanced her way, shook her head, and said in a throaty voice, “No. But thank you.”
Then, a cappella, she sang a slow, bluesy version of “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man,” Julie’s haunting lament from
Show Boat
. A perfect voice, compelling, thrilling. It was the doomed mulatto’s hymn to a loved one, the inevitability of a passion that takes over one’s life.
Fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly
…and, for one woman, for both Ava and for Julie, there could only be one man till they died. A lament for a lover, true, but now, transmogrified by Ava’s dirge-like piano-bar rendering, it was reinvented as a testament to her love for her friend Max.
And just like that it was over. She stopped, backed up, and disappeared into the back room. We sat there, all of us a little drunk with the moment. I started crying, big sloppy tears that rose unexpectedly, and I couldn’t stop. This was for Max, this special moment. It was, I told myself, a melodramatic moment from a nineteenth-century showboat revue, some climactic sweep of tears and drama.
Tempest and Sunshine
.
The Parson’s Bride
. The hero and heroine on the stage of the
Cotton Blossom
, a chorus swelling behind them, as the heroine emoted before a clamoring audience. This was the wondrous melodrama that made life on a showboat so important to the river towns and hamlets along the Mississippi River. It was right, it was sublime. It was theater, yes, and sentimental; but it was the life we all wanted to believe in, that moment when we feel so exquisitely alive and true and good.
Everyone wept.
Well, not everyone.
I turned to look back at Desmond Peake. I stopped sobbing. A ridiculous smile was plastered on his long, gaunt face. Rattled, I had no idea what it meant. Was he pleased that he’d caught the rebellious Ava in some Metro violation, the insubordinate actress playing fast and loose with her contract? Or was he pleased that she’d done the right thing? Or…or was Desmond more than the simplistic troglodyte or villain—let’s hiss and boo the showboat heavy—that I’d easily categorized?
With echoes of Ava’s bravado performance ringing in my ears, I stood to leave the room. But Desmond had gone before me. I wondered now: what manner of man was this Desmond Peake?
I’d been jotting notes on a yellow pad, concise biographies of the folks who’d touched or, frankly, bruised Max in his final days. Sooner or later, I knew, some kernel of discovery—what did Sol call it? a “black pearl”?—would assert itself. And then I’d know. A pot of tea and an untouched watercress sandwich on the table. When Alice called, she spoke so rapidly that at first I had no idea what she wanted, though her strangled voice alarmed me, her words running together.
“Slow down, Alice,” I pleaded. “For God’s sake, what?”
“I can’t reach Sol.”
“What happened?”
A deep breath, a whistling sound from the back of her throat. “I was sitting here going through some letters when Sol called me.” Her voice broke. “He wasn’t making much sense, Edna. He rattled on and on and I kept saying, What? What? Those gagging sounds, senseless.”
“Tell me. Did anything happen?”
“I don’t know. He said he needed to go for a ride. Out of the city. I heard that clearly. ‘My head hurts.’ I heard that. ‘I gotta drive around.’” Alice’s voice rose. “Why does everyone out here have to drive around so much? Everybody is always driving out into the desert or up into the hills. Driving, driving.”
That made little sense to me, yet I let it go. People had their own ways of dealing with the junk that fell on them. In New York when I was rattled—though I rarely allowed myself such a weakness, considering it a frailty best given to some of my heroines—or when I was getting ready to do battle with someone, a more common occurrence given the bumbling souls I encountered in my workaday world—well, I
walked
. Up Park Avenue, over to Lexington, back home, down and over, one mile, sometimes two. Early morning. Late afternoon. In rain and snow, faithful to my regimen. It cleared the soul and calmed the digestion. It made people…bearable. People shuffled out of my barreling way, instinctively aware of the termagant in their hapless path. Back in my penthouse, purged and spent, I’d stare down at the tops of trees in Central Park below me and feel back in control.
Here, in this godless paradise, this land of vulgarity, people drove into the desert, often in darkest night when lizards slithered under a chalk moon, when night creatures bayed and hissed. Not for me. I’d take the helter-skelter barbarism of Manhattan any day. A city with gusto.
“Well,” I said now, “let him get whatever it is out of his system.”
“You don’t understand, Edna. Sol is falling apart.”
I waited. “Do you want me to stop in, Alice?”
A pleading in her voice, tremulous. “Will you, Edna?”
“Of course.”
By the time the taxi dropped me off in front of her bungalow, Alice had put on a pot of coffee. Her expression grim, she placed a cup before me, sat down opposite me, and quietly slid a copy of
Variety
across the table. “This arrived minutes ago.”
I glanced at the trade magazine. “What are you trying to tell me, Alice?”
She started to drink some coffee, but stopped, replaced the cup on the saucer. “It’s the first thing I spotted. I don’t know why, but I knew I had to look inside.” She took the magazine and flipped it open. Her fingers tapped on a small news item. “Sol never told me. Yes, he mentioned rumors of trouble, but maybe he didn’t know it until today.”
“What?” I demanded.
“General Foods, you know, Sanka coffee, the sponsor of
The Goldbergs
, has dropped the show from its listings. Because, supposedly, some actors are Communists. Or, maybe, they have a tinge of pinko coloring their marked-up scripts. The veteran character actor Philip Loeb is out, the man who plays Molly’s husband Jake and…and…”
“Sol,” I mumbled.
“Sol,” she echoed. “He’s not these things, you know. All right, he’s joined some leftist groups. He’s signed petitions. We all have. All of the good folks in Hollywood have. Katherine Hepburn. Groucho Marx. Judy Garland.” She stopped. “Sol is a man who despises Communists, Edna. God, his family fled Russia to find freedom in America.” She fell back on the sofa, her hands fluttering.
“That explains his bizarre phone call to you.”
“Well, he’s out of a job.
Variety
says Philip Loeb has left. Now Sol has to go. He saw this coming, you know. So many times Sol talked to Max about it. He said Gertrude Berg was worried—she’d been warned. General Foods warned her. Him, some others. Philip Loeb is fine gentleman, funny. Sol, the primetime comic as Commie? Who’s gonna turn on their Admiral televisions and watch him crack Cousin Irving jokes?”
“Could he have known already? I mean—if it’s in
Variety
today?”
“Who knows? He’s away from New York for the summer. Maybe he was hoping…Maybe the black and white of it hit him. Maybe…I don’t know.”
“What’s left for him?”
Exasperation in her voice. “Nothing. No work. He has a studio on Hollywood Boulevard for the summer. He’s got a tiny room in New York on Fifth Avenue most of the year when he has to be there. So little money saved—I know that. Thank God his parents are dead, and recently—he took care of them. They hardly spoke English, he told me, laughing about it; but they turned on the television he bought them to laugh at Cousin Irving, their pride and joy. And”—almost a smile—“he told me they didn’t get any of the jokes but they laughed like crazy. Cousin Irving, their boy, the Yiddisher bumbler with the wisecrack and the good heart.” Alice sobbed and, for some reason, picked up a pen and drew a large circle around the article in
Variety
.
“He has to come back home.”
“His phone call to me scared me, so I kept calling back. I don’t know what to do with myself, Edna. I bang around the house like a crazy lady. I worry about Sol, but my mind sails to…Max. Max is everywhere. I can
smell
him here when I touch a book. It’s as if he just handed it to me. A piece of paper. A kitchen plate reminds me. I look at his side of the bed and I’m afraid I’ll forget the way he slept, the way he sighed in his sleep, the way he curled his fingers around the pillow. And now I’m alone here. I can’t get back to the quiet life I loved.”
“Alice.” I didn’t know what to say.
She tilted back her head, a longing gesture. “I married Lenny when I was a girl, a foolish girl, and he kept me away from his world of syndicates and showgirls and mobsters and men who knocked on the doors late at night with wads of cash. I hid in my kitchen. After a while, though, I felt on edge, like any minute I was going to be slapped awake. A cop knocking on the door. Some goon with a pistol. An empty-headed showgirl showing me his love letters. When he died, I was
glad
.” She smiled. “I didn’t kill him, but I was glad.” She paused. “Edna, I will confess something to you.”
Dear Lord, I thought: No. When people confess things to me, invariably I have sleepless nights and need a late-night run to the drugstore for bicarbonate of soda. Emotional confessions only give pain to the listener.
“Of course, Alice. Tell me.” I closed my eyes.
“That night we fought out on the balcony. I was sitting out there when he came home. He was drunk, nearly tottering over the railing. Something had gone wrong with some deal, I guess. The FBI was breathing down his neck. I don’t know. He slapped me. I wanted him to fall, Edna. When I rushed back inside, he screamed, ‘Get back out here, you whore,’ and I slammed the glass door as he rushed at me, fist raised. He ran into it, reeling, then staggered back and toppled over the railing. I watched him fall.”
There was nothing I could say. The clock on the mantel was too loud now, the minute hand barely moving.
She stared into my face. “He was dead. And Max was the one who allowed me to
breathe
again, to look out a window and see
nothing
and enjoy that
nothing
so much. He filled up my life with…a good
nothing
. You know what I mean, Edna? The nothing that is peace and serenity and…” She stopped. “My God, Edna, I can’t stop talking.”
“It’s all right.” I patted her wrist. “Of course, it’s all right.”
She pointed to the workroom. “I’m afraid of that room.”
I peered through the open door at a desk covered with folders and books and accordion files. Leaning against it were tall wobbly stacks of papers and newspapers and cardboard boxes. The Hollywood agent as hoarder of every scrap of the industry, as though when he closed his office downtown he simply emptied that world into this small, impossible space.
“Tell me about Max’s agency,” I said suddenly. Tell me, and maybe I can begin to understand what happened.
“Why?”
“I’m curious. You know, he never discussed his clients with me. We talked musical scores, openings, closings, tryouts. The nitty gritty work of an agent—he said it was too tedious for conversation with friends.”
She smiled. “That sounds like Max. He’d tap dance to a Golddiggers routine, but forget to file his tax return.” She glanced at the room. “I had some money squirreled away from Lenny’s accounts after he died—not the fortune his brothers still dream of and blame me for—so we did all right.”
I smiled. “So you’re not as rich as the Pannis brothers insist?”
“The government took nearly everything when the dust cleared.” She waved her hand around the room. “Look where we’re living, Edna. Lenny Pannis had a huge home in Beverly Hills, right near Pickfair. He was into lavish spending, vulgar clothes, flashy jewelry. He treated his little brothers like princelings, feeding them dreams and bits of cash. They got besotted with the idea of wealth. ‘We’re all family,’ he told them. ‘If I’m filthy rich, you will be, too.’ Only Tony bought that line.”
“Not Ethan?”
“Tony is the romantic. Ethan counts the pennies in his loafers. What happened is that the IRS tapped into this account, that one. The house. The pool. The cars.” She grinned. “That damn spiral staircase. Gone, all of it. And I said thank God.”
“Talk to me some more about the agency, Alice.”
She looked at me, puzzled, then considered her words carefully. “Well, let’s see. Many small fish, you know. People you’ve never heard of. Juggling acts for television, ventriloquist acts for Ed Sullivan or Milton Berle. No big acts. He didn’t want that kind of responsibility. The performers were all like the ones you’ve met, Edna. Tony or Tiny, whatever he calls himself. At one time a fresh comic with some promise. I went to a couple of his shows—with Max. Early on. He had an innocence that warred with a slightly sardonic tongue. Very funny. I mean, Max always insisted Tony didn’t understand
how
his humor worked—it just did. But ruined now by drink and gluttony. After Lenny died, he forgot who he was. And Ethan reinvented him as an insult comic.”
“Ethan?”
“Ethan got tired of having him hang around, moody and bitter. ‘Go on stage with that attitude.’ So…the reinvention of the failed comic…comical no more.”
“I’m interested in Liz Grable. How does she fit into all this?”
“Tony’s sometime girlfriend. Liz Grable was a favor, bit parts, but she got to be a nuisance. She was a pest, knocking on our door because his office is here now. Calling all hours of the night. Tony fed her the idea that she was an undiscovered talent, some sort of chubby Clara Bow with a cutesy giggle and an intense stare. A couple parts, and then Max couldn’t place her.”
“So Max had to deal with these…small-time egos…”
“He even read Ethan’s script when he first got here from New Jersey. Max told me it was painfully sophomoric, stale. Ethan thought that Hollywood was waiting for him to show up. He already had a spot on his mantel for the Oscar for Best Screenplay. Ethan was drinking then, filled with hubris by way of Lenny. Lorena told me he was angry that he failed at something, but then, you know, she said he read parts to her—they used to act out skits together—and they ended up laughing about it.”
“I remember their impromptu moment from
Othello
.”
“How they amused themselves, I guess.” She shrugged. “Those were the kind of clients Max had. He supplied the extras in
Sunset Boulevard
, for example. The one-line actors. Small fry, people needed in this vast dream factory out here, bit players never destined to shine up the night sky.”
“Yet he represented Sol and not Larry.”
She nodded. “With his looks, Larry thought he had a chance for big time, so he got a bigger name agent. Max didn’t
want
to deal with him—he knew Larry would burn out. Directors always ended up hating Larry. Sol turned out to be his really important client, I suppose, who stayed with Max out of loyalty. Sol was small-time before
The Goldbergs
. Sol piddled around with bits on radio, played some old vaudeville dates, lots of grade B movies out here. Gertrude Berg had seen him at the Yiddish theater on Second Avenue, loved him, and talked to him—and Cousin Irving was born. A success story.”
I needed to move around…to grapple with the questions that buzzed in my head. I stepped toward the workroom, stopped in the entrance. “May I go in?”
“Of course.” She looked uncertain, though.
Inside I glanced at Max’s stack of clippings on the blacklist, a chronicle of his fall from grace, on cronies like John Howard Lawson and Doc Trumbo. A pile of old scripts, one for Trumbo’s
Kitty Foyle
, inscribed to Max with affection. An open loose-leaf notebook, with Max’s scribbled notations, lines drawn, marginal flourishes. It seemed madness, this room. Yet, standing there, my fingers rifling through the mess, I felt that here, perhaps, might be some clue to Max’s murder. I ached to tackle the stacks of papers, to delve into them.
There had to be something here. But what? What madman—a Commie hater, a disgruntled lounge singer, a failed music man, a two-bit actress—wreaked vengeance on the quiet man? Who harbored a hatred so keen it led to murder? Suddenly it seemed impossible—the stakes were too small, too petty, too parochial. The bit player who possessed a huge and terrible anger. Most likely not. How could we possibly ever know? But I
had
to know. The ghost of Max tapped me on the shoulder.
Who knocked on Max’s front door that night as Lorena, Alice, and I sat in the Paradise Bar & Grill? Max said…come in…follow me to the workroom…Who?