The Memoir of Johnny Devine (6 page)

“
Right here, Mr. John.”
The old woman stood at the end of the buffet, gnarled hands
clasped, lips turned up slightly at the ends.

Inhaling the savory aromas of caramelized
onions and juicy beef seared to perfection made Eliza dizzy. Her
mouth watered as ribbons of steam curled up from the plate. Her
stomach rumbled. She swallowed hard and took up her utensils.

“
Gracious God,” John said,
voice solemn.

Eliza halted and studied him.

John’s eyes were closed, his head bowed.

She put her utensils down and stared at her
lunch, salivating.

“
We thank You for this
meal and for Your amazing grace and mercy. Forgive us, guide us,
and empower us to follow Your way. May we be ever grateful. In
Christ’s name, amen.”

Eliza had never heard such a prayer, and
steak, onions, and buttered green beans had never tasted so good.
Several times, Eliza had to remind herself to eat slowly,
especially when she found John watching her. Why on earth had she
agreed to eat in here? Couldn’t she have insisted on taking her
lunch in the library?

Millie brought in a small dish and set it
beside Eliza’s plate.

Eliza breathed in the fragrant scent of
apple and spices, warm and sweet. The cobbler had been topped by a
dollop of vanilla ice cream that drizzled tiny rivers of cream over
golden streusel and pooled around the edges of the dish. Smiling,
she took a bite. Amazing, heavenly, far more delicious than she
could have imagined. Millie was some kind of saint—she had to
be.

Millie came near with a silver coffee pot.
“Coffee?”

“
Oh! Yes,
please
,
” Eliza
mumbled, barely getting intelligible words out around a mouthful of
cobbler. She covered her mouth and glanced at John.

With a deep frown, he took a bite of his
dessert.

Her face burned. Could she be any more
uncouth? John was probably accustomed to dining in upper class
circles with celebrities and wealthy types. Eliza could almost feel
the kick from Betty’s shoe beneath the table.

As Eliza sipped her coffee and willed
herself to stop blushing, John took his napkin, wiped his mouth,
and reached for the page Eliza had brought to him.

She stilled. The tranquilizing effect of a
full stomach had lulled her into a stupor, making her temporarily
forget her dreaded mission. She swallowed her coffee wrong and
lapsed into a coughing fit.

“
Are you all right?” John
asked, face tense. “Millie, some water for Mrs. Saunderson
please
.”

Eliza put up a hand. “No, I’m okay. Just
went down the wrong way.” She coughed one more time, poked her
glasses back into place, and cleared her throat. “So sorry. I’m
fine.”

“
Good.” He glanced at the
page, then looked up and caught Eliza in a probing
stare.

She braced herself. Time for another gentle,
diplomatic explanation about the writing. Time to try to help him
understand—

“
What does Mr. Saunderson
do for work, if you don’t mind my asking?”

At the unexpected question, Eliza dropped
her gaze to her lap, where she folded her napkin into a crisp
square. “He was killed in the war,” she said quietly. “In the
Philippines.” She reached for her coffee and sipped, carefully this
time.

“
Oh. I’m so sorry to hear
…” John stared out the window with a distant look, as if
remembering something. Then he rose. For a moment, all he did was
stand there beside his chair, eyes closed, with a grip on his cane
that turned his knuckles white.

Eliza set her coffee cup down. Had he
changed his mind? Maybe his mind had gone entirely elsewhere.

John limped to the window and stood with his
back to her.

An old man crossed the lawn, bent nearly
double and straining to push a rotary mower.

“
So your husband is one of
the fallen,” John said quietly. “A hero.”

Hero
. Eliza would never deny that Ralph was a hero for giving his
life to his country. It was just that his heroism began and ended
with his military service. Somehow that heroism never managed to
materialize in his personal life.

John unlatched the window and swung it open,
drawing in the scent of cut grass. “Of course you’re widowed. I
should have known.” He muttered something she couldn’t quite hear,
something about how war robbed families of good men.

No, he wasn’t muttering. He was praying.

As he stood at the window,
Eliza pressed a palm to her full belly.
Remember what you came to do before you caved in and
ate
the better part of a
steak
. The deed still needed doing, and
the more time she wasted, the more difficult her job would be.
“When you’re ready to look at this page, there is a passage we need
to revise.”

“
Of course.” He eased out
a sigh. “What mountain of mangled metaphors are we tackling now,
Mrs. Saunderson?”

She cleared her throat. Bringing these
issues to his attention wasn’t easy, but it would be even harder on
John in the end if his publisher sent the manuscript back,
dissatisfied. “This page … I’m afraid it’s just not quite clear.”
She rose and took the sheet to him, then poked at her glasses,
which were already as high as they could go.

He took the page and read the marked
passage, the furrow of his brow deepening. He read it again and
handed the paper back. Slowly, he paced across the room. “I don’t
know. I suppose what I meant to say was how ironic it is that at
the height of my career, with top billing and my name in lights all
across the country, I was terrified.”

“
Terrified?
Why?”

“
My greatest fear was that
one day, when it no longer had use for me, the camera would turn on
me without warning. At any moment, the shot would fade to black,
then come back into focus from backstage and zoom in with
unforgiving clarity—behind the bright lights and makeup and
brilliant lines.”

Eliza stared at him, the meaning of his
muddled passage about the camera suddenly clearing. She hurried to
the table, turned the page over, and jotted in shorthand.

John returned to the window. “Then the
camera would pan in on the skilled professionals buzzing around
me,” he said. “The clever set designers, the expert makeup artists,
the talented cameramen, the swooning co-stars, the brilliant
directors—and the camera would reveal the disappointing truth. It
would finally expose the masterfully built mirage, the empty
illusion that was Johnny Devine.”

She took down every word, working her pencil
as fast as she could, and then looked up, waiting for more.

He shook his head. “That was the fear I
lived with every minute of every day. At any moment, I would be
exposed as the fraud that I knew I was.”

When she finished jotting, she stood with
paper in hand and read over what she had written. “Yes, that’s much
clearer.” She turned to him. “It’s quite good, actually.”

Millie cleared her throat.

John turned to the woman. “Did you … have
something to add, Millie?”

“
Oh no.
You
the storyteller, Mr.
John, not me.” She cocked her gray head. “But I
was
thinking …”

Brows raised, John waited. “Yes?”

“
Maybe instead of
you
writin’ it and then
Miz Eliza runnin’ all over creation tryin’ to straighten it out,
maybe you could just
tell
her your story and let her write it. Proper like.
Then she can type it up clean as a whistle.”

“
You mean have him dictate
the story to me.” A dozen thoughts vied for Eliza’s attention at
once.

Millie nodded. “Yes, ma’am.” She turned to
John. “You dictate your story to Miz Eliza, and she help it come
out right the first time. Just makes sense to me, that’s all.”

John shook his head, his gaze aimed toward
the entryway and the library beyond. “It wasn’t my intention to …
work that way.”

“
Actually, it
is
a good idea,” Eliza
said, energized by the hope of making better progress. Millie was
correct; dictation made far more sense than the way they were doing
it now. It would solve much of the needless difficulty of the task
and also get the book back on schedule. “I could take shorthand
while you tell me what you want to say, and if I need any
clarification, I can ask as we go. Then I can type what we’ve
composed at the end of each day. It would certainly speed things
up.”

John’s gaze alternated
from Eliza to Millie. “The book
has
fallen behind schedule,” he said. “Perhaps
dictating would make up for lost time.”

Millie and Eliza nodded in unison.

He stared at Eliza. “You realize this means
working together.”

“
Yes,” she said, her
cheeks instantly on fire. They both knew what he referred to, but
she saw no need to address the issue again. She’d made herself
quite clear at the interview. “But I’m afraid there’s one thing I
need to warn you of.”

He tightened his grip on his cane, as if
bracing himself. “Yes?”

“
This kind of editorial
work would be considered collaboration, and for that, the
employment agency may charge extra.”

“
Ah.” John relaxed. He
peered at her with a long look. “I see. And exactly how much
extra
are we talking
about?”

Eliza’s chest tightened. “I have to check
with the agency to be sure, but I believe it would be twenty-five
cents more per hour.”

John scratched his clean-shaven chin, deep
in thought.

Now what had she done? What if he thought
she was just using his pressing situation for her personal gain? He
could decide to get someone else. Itchy sweat popped out along her
brow.

“
All right, I’ll agree to
that. I’ll have Duncan move a desk into the library for me. Millie,
if you wouldn’t mind …”

“
Yes, Mr. John.” Millie
glanced at Eliza with a knowing nod. “I know just what to
do.”

“
Swell,” he said. “It
looks like we’ve just solved our problem.”

“
Yes. Very good,”
Eliza said. She wasn’t about to tell either of
them that they may have only exchanged one problem for a whole set
of new ones.

If there was a God, I
didn’t want to
know Him. There were
already enough people trying to control my life.

~
The Devine Truth: A Memoir

After lunch, John surprised Eliza by coming
into the library carrying a stack of handwritten pages. Pencil
poised above the paragraph she was revising, she turned and watched
him amble around the room, cane in one hand, pages in the other. He
seemed a bit lost.

Did he mean to begin
dictating now, even though she wasn’t finished retyping his first
chapters? “Did you have something you need me to type?”
Mr. …?

How could she call him John? The man was a
famous film star with an Oscar and two Golden Globes, for pity’s
sake.

“
No, I’m working in here
now so you can tell me if—I mean
when
—you need me.”

Apparently, he was making himself available
to assist with the pages she still needed to retype. “That should
be very helpful, thank you.”

He turned and continued his stroll, pacing
the length of the room while reading back over his newest
pages.

Eliza also returned to her task, forcing
herself to concentrate on the passage she was revising. The man was
clearly unaware of how distracting his presence was, and even more,
his aimless movement. If only he would sit down.

But he didn’t, so she did her best to ignore
him.

While Eliza worked and
John strolled, Millie came in
,
followed by the leathery old man Eliza had seen
earlier. She presumed he was Duncan, the handyman. He was no bigger
than Millie, but since he stood with a fixed stoop, it was hard to
know how tall he really was.

Eliza turned her attention back to her work,
but couldn’t help wondering why John kept two such elderly
workers.

“
Mr. John need
this
table in front
of
that
chair
over there,” Millie said in a loud whisper.

Eliza glanced over her shoulder.

Millie was pointing at the upholstered chair
near the fireplace where John had sat during her interview.

“
So it’s just the one
table then, Millie?” the man said.

“
Yes, just the one,”
Millie said over her shoulder as she shuffled toward the
kitchen.

Duncan lifted the bill of his stained cap
and scratched his forehead. “Sure, and the minute I’m up to my
elbows in compost again, you won’t be calling me back to rearrange
the rest of the room?”

Millie turned back and
gave him a tight-lipped look. She pointed at a small round table in
the corner. “Like I said,
this
table in front of
that
chair.”

Biting back a smile, Eliza resumed her
task.

Duncan lugged the table over to the chair,
but instead of sitting down, John seemed more inclined to wear long
ruts in the carpets.

In spite of the ongoing distractions, and
thanks to John’s availability, Eliza edited and retyped far more
pages than she had the day before, to her relief. Yet she still
felt uneasy. Though he didn’t hesitate to help when she asked, John
still seemed put out when she needed him. But at least he was
willing.