The LeBaron Secret (22 page)

Mrs. Bonkowski looked glum. “Well, that's the way of it, isn't it?” she said. “You get some good p.g.'s, and they up and leave on you. Just like that. Now I'll have to find somebody to fill that room. That's the life I have to live, taking in p.g.'s. I wouldn't of had to of lived this kind of life if Bonkowski hadn't of up and died on me.”

Much later, after Sari had gone to bed and turned off the light, and he had still not come back, she finally heard him letting himself into the room and heard him taking off his clothes, as he always did, in the dark, and change into his nightshirt.

“Gabe?”

At first he said nothing, and from the other side of the closed burlap curtain she could hear the springs sag as he got into bed, and the rustle of the bedclothes as he pulled the sheet and blankets over him, heard him settle his head against the pillow.

“Gabe? You're not angry at me for something, are you?”

“In San Francisco, we'll have two rooms,” he said finally, in a strangely gruff voice from the darkness. “In San Francisco, we'll each have our own room. We'll be able to afford that, on thirty dollars a week.”

She didn't answer him, and after a while she turned on her side, away from him, facing the wall, listening to the steady rhythm of his breathing. She knew that she was all at once terribly unhappy, and the room seemed to fill with the sour smell of her mother's red scarf burning, its gold fringe twisting into ugly black worms. I want, she thought, someone to love me, someone to sing to me, but who can that someone be? All I wanted was arms to hold me, and if they can't be Gabe's, then whose? Everything seemed to have changed, to have turned upside down, and would never be the same again.

And she knew that she no longer thought of Gabe Pollack as her father, and had not thought of him as her father for a long time, and would not think of him that way again. Beneath the bedclothes she touched her body with her fingertips, and felt herself hurt there, and there, and there.

Gabe had told her that San Francisco was a big city, but she was unprepared for the city's busyness and scale. The biggest building in Terre Haute had been City Hall, but the huge gabled and turreted Ferry Building in San Francisco would have swallowed that. Buildings taller than any she had ever seen pierced the skyline, and the streets were noisy with trolleys and cable cars that were pulled along by invisible hawsers underneath the streets. At intersections, where two cables crossed at right angles, there was a stomach-wrenching moment when the grip man was required to pick up speed, then release his grip in order to pass over the intersecting cable, then grip his cable again when the crossing was passed. Terre Haute had been flat for as far as the eye could see, but San Francisco was a city of tall, steep hills—so steep that, on some of them, the sidewalks rose in steps. From the tops of the hills—Nob Hill, Telegraph Hill, Russian Hill were some of their names—there were views of the great blue bay filled with traffic of ships from foreign ports and the ferry boats that plied their way continuously back and forth between San Francisco and the Oakland Mole, which was the westernmost terminus of the east-west railroads. At the mouth of the bay was the Golden Gate, and the Pacific Ocean beyond, and, on clear days, a glimpse of the distant Farallon Islands. But what impressed her most about San Francisco was its sense of newness and cleanliness. In 1906, much of the city had been destroyed by a great earthquake and fire. But the city had quickly and enthusiastically rebuilt itself, and if the entire city appeared to have been constructed at the same time it was because it had been. San Francisco struck her as being all of one piece.

Of course Gabe's new job, as a general-assignment reporter for the
Chronicle
, kept him out long hours, and kept him moving about the city. He was forever being called to the courthouse, or to investigate a burglary in the suburbs, or to go to the scene of a barroom fight or murder on the waterfront, or a tong war in Chinatown. But that was all right. She tended to feel shy and uncomfortable in Gabe's presence now. The old easiness between them seemed to have been replaced with—what? An excessive politeness seemed to be what it was. At first, this new distance had distressed and confused her, but now that was all right, too.

She had decided to do something that would make him very angry.

He had found rooms for them both in a boardinghouse on Howard Street, but their new landlady was a far cry from the loquacious Mrs. Bonkowski. She was a Mrs. Tristram Dodge, a thin and mousy woman whose principal interest was her cat, a big tiger tom named Pussy, who draped himself across Mrs. Dodge's shoulders while she sat in her front parlor with her mending basket. Ignored by her landlady, Sari had all the freedom she needed to work on her plan. Gabe seldom came home for supper now, and often did not come home until after Sari had gone to bed. And in the mornings he was usually up and out of the house before it was time for Sari to rise and dress for school. On weekends, he often shut himself in his room, where Sari could hear him—he had a typewriter now—working on his stories. She missed their late-evening talks, but she knew that his work came first. Besides, she herself had not been idle.

She had waited for a week to tell him her news, wanting to surprise him with the solid proof of it. Then she had tapped on his door, and, when he opened it, she had handed him ten dollars.

“What's this?” he asked her suspiciously. “Where did you get this?”

“I have a job,” she said. “And that's my first week's wages.”

“A job? What kind of a job?”

“I'm an usherette at the Odeon movie theatre on Market Street. Ten dollars a week.”

“You're too young. There are laws—”

“I lied about my age,” she said triumphantly. “I told them I was fourteen, and they believed me. They gave me a uniform with a blue jacket and a white shirtwaist, and a little flashlight. I help show people to their seats.”

“But what about your schoolwork?”

“The job is after school. Afternoons from three o'clock till seven, and Saturdays from noon to eight.”

“Your homework—”

“That's easy. After I've shown the people in, I find a seat in the back row and do my homework with my flashlight.”

“That's bad for your eyes!”

“Nonsense. I can read as well—even better—with my flashlight than I can with my bedroom lamp!”

Standing in the doorway, staring at the money in his hand, he said. “I don't want you to do this. I can't take this money from you.”

“I just want to pay my share of the room and board,” she said. “Why should you do it all when I can help? Isn't this what you're always saying about America? If a person works hard, he can get ahead? I just want to work hard and get ahead—just like you!”

He kept staring at the money, shaking his head.

“Besides,” she said, “I get to see all the movies free!”

“No,” he said. “You'll neglect your schoolwork, watching movies.”

“But you only have to watch the movie once. When it comes on again, you already know the story. That's when I do my homework.”

“No,” he said finally. “I'm not going to let you do this.”

“What?” she cried. “What do you mean? How can you not let me do it? I'm doing it already!”

“I'm your guardian. You're to do as I say.”

“Well, I won't!” she said angrily. “I've spent six years doing what you wanted me to do. Now I'm going to do what I want to do for a change!”

“And if I forbid you?”

“Then I'll run away. I'll run away, quit school, find a full-time job, and you'll never find me, Gabe Pollack!”

“Job? What kind of job can you get—a girl of thirteen?”

“I'll become a prostitute, that's what I'll do!”

His hand, clutching the money, went up, as though he were about to strike her. “Where are you learning gutter talk like that?” he said. “At school? At the movies?”

“And I'll tell you something else,” she said. “I won't just become a prostitute! I'll become the best damned prostitute in the world!” Then she had slammed the door in his face, run down the hall to her own room, let herself in, and bolted the door behind her.

Alone, she pulled the ribbons out of her hair, unbuttoned the top buttons of her blouse and, in front of her dressing-table mirror assumed the languid, smoldering pose of Blanche Sweet in
Anna Christie
, which had been playing just that week at the Odeon.

Presently there was a tap at her door, and his voice said, “I'm sorry, Sari. I don't want you to run away. Please don't run away.”

But she was giggling so hard at her image as a prostitute that she couldn't answer him.

And so, every afternoon, she would run—run the twelve blocks from her school to the Odeon to save the nickel carfare—and change into her usherette's uniform to be ready to be at work with her flashlight by three o'clock. And, once a week, she would slip ten dollars under Gabe's door without comment.

These were some of the movies that she saw:
The Three Musketeers
, with Douglas Fairbanks; the
Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
and
The Sheik
, both with the dashingly exotic Rudolph Valentino, the new film sensation;
Way Down East
, with Lillian Gish, whose wide-eyed, pinch-lipped look of injured innocence Sari also tried to imitate in her mirror;
Peck's Bad Boy
, with Jackie Coogan;
Where the Pavement Ends
, with Ramon Novarro and Alice Terry; and
A Woman of Paris
, with Adolphe Menjou and Edna Purviance …

These are only a few of the titles and performances that Sari remembers.

And of course she had lied to Gabe Pollack, at least a little bit, because some of her favorite films she watched two, three, or as many as half a dozen times.

“Only a B in history?” Gabe Pollack would say to her. “You're watching too many movies.”

“History bores me. It's nothing but memorizing the dates of wars and the names of generals. Everything else is an A—and an A-plus in math.”

The movies and the people who made them were very much on the public's mind in those days. Around that time, as some of you may remember, there had been a dreadful scandal involving a movie personality, and it had happened right there in San Francisco, in a fancy suite at the St. Francis Hotel. A popular movie comedian named Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle had been arrested in connection with the death of a young woman during a wild orgy at the hotel. The woman was said to have been a local prostitute, and there were other, darker implications of misdeeds involving illicit narcotics, illegal alcohol, and bizarre sexual practices. Apparently, the actual details of what had gone on were so shocking and ghoulish that even the most lurid of Mr. William Randolph Hearst's newspapers would not print them, and there was only whispered speculation about what might really have happened. The only consensus seemed to be to the effect that the girl's death had somehow been caused by Fatty Arbuckle's great weight. At Assaria Latham's school, her schoolmates, knowing that she worked at a theatre where Arbuckle's films had been shown—though no more, since all his films were now banned—naturally assumed that Sari must somehow know all the sordid facts. Of course she knew no more about the affair than anyone else. But it pleased her to think that the other girls suspected that she knew more than she was telling.

Meanwhile, during those years of the early 1920s, a new phrase had entered the American lexicon: “movie star.” To be a movie star, Sari had read, it helped if a girl happened to be small. Somehow, small women seemed to fit better into the celluloid frames and, despite their appearances on the big screen, she read, many of the actresses she admired the most—the Gish sisters, Nita Naldi, Mary Pickford—were slightly built women. And Sari herself, as her fourteenth birthday approached, could see that she was going to be small, barely five feet three inches tall. Studying herself in front of her mirror in those days, practicing the mannerisms and expressions and gestures of the silent-film stars she had watched on the screen, Assaria Latham was able to see herself maturing into a tiny, almond-eyed, olive-skinned, almost Oriental-looking beauty with extraordinary thick, dark red hair, which she caught back with ribbons at the nape of her neck. She had not worked at the Odeon for long before she had decided that, with luck, becoming a movie star might be something that she could reasonably aspire to.

All over America, it seemed, pretty girls were being plucked from beauty contests and from amateur theatrical productions to be screen-tested and offered movie contracts. And it was all happening just a few hundred miles away, in Hollywood, California.

Naturally, she did not confide any of these ambitions to Gabe Pollack at the time. She knew he would thoroughly disapprove.

But Mr. Moskowitz, the Odeon's manager, she decided might prove a useful ally. He dealt directly with the men who distributed the films, as well as with the men who owned the theatre, who, in turn, were the same men who produced the movies. The theatre's full name in those days, in fact, was Loew's Odeon, and it was owned by Marcus Loew, Adolph Zukor, and Louis B. Mayer—producers all.

Mr. Moskowitz had told her that most usherettes did not last in the position long. They found the routine tedious, and the wages low. But Sari, always punctual, appeared to be a different sort. At the end of six months, he raised her pay by a dollar a week. After a year, he presented her with another, two-dollar raise, and suggested that the two of them might have dinner some evening. To this latter invitation—knowing that there was a Mrs. Moskowitz—Sari had responded with a polite demurral.

But it was with all these things in mind that Sari, who was by then sixteen and in her last year of high school in early 1926, spotted a small item in the afternoon paper and read it with interest.