The Memoir of Johnny Devine (8 page)

Couldn’t Eliza work on getting her books
published and freelance in the meantime? Was it irresponsible to
want to make a way for herself that didn’t depend on someone else?
Were women really only good for helping men succeed with their
dreams and nothing more?

Maybe Betty was correct. Maybe it was
foolish to want to be a person in her own right, to entertain her
own hopes and dreams, to believe she could use her skills to make a
difference. Maybe she should do what Betty wanted and date Stan,
the Hotpoint Man.

But what about Eliza’s wants? Did they not
matter?

A tear slipped down her cheek. She brushed
it away, surprised at herself. Tears had never solved anything.

Joan was back with a pinky and thumb at her
ear and an apologetic smile.

Eliza wiped her cheek and held up a finger.
“Listen, Betty, I have to go. Let me think about it, okay? Tell Ed
hello and give the kids hugs and kisses for me.”

“
Well, all right,” Betty
said with a sigh. “Take care.”

“
You too, Betty. ’Bye
now.” Eliza headed up the stairs and back to her room.

Mr. Darcy was gone—no surprise.

She massaged her stiff
neck, then planted herself at the table and reread her
half-finished article. But words like
racial
and
sexes
and
oppression
only made her heart
heavy.

What did she want, really? Independence?
Well, that was obvious, since she was willing to go hungry rather
than ask a man to support her.

What about love?

She shrugged. What about it? Aside from her
parents, love had been a struggle to earn—as if what she and Ralph
had could even be called love. She’d never been pleasing enough.
Was there such a thing as love that wasn’t based on performance or
on a momentary whim of approval? Could she ever be loved simply for
who she was, without the constant pressure to be something
more?

Did such a love exist?

In the movies, maybe. But she lived in the
real world. Real world love, as she had found, was conditional. It
took constant work to earn it and kept her in constant fear of
losing it. The trade-off just wasn’t worth it. Not to her.

Eliza put a stick in the balcony door so she
could safely leave it open a crack to let in the cool night air.
She turned off the clanging fan, reached for the light, then
stopped when she saw the spines on her bookshelf and remembered
John’s quiet, parting words. She hunted through her bookshelves for
the secondhand Bible she’d bought for a class in college. She found
it, then leafed through it to the book of James and read until she
spotted the chapter and verse.

Pure religion and undefiled before God and
the Father is this, to visit the fatherless and widows in their
affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.

Wanting the exact definition, Eliza looked
up the word “affliction” in the dictionary.

An instance of grievous distress; a pain or
grief.

She frowned. Did John think she was a
grieving widow in distress?

Of course. He probably couldn’t help but
notice how she inhaled her lunch like a pig.

Eliza read the passage again. He had
insisted she take money she hadn’t yet earned. To which she
responded by suspecting his motives. To which he responded by
suggesting he was obeying a Bible verse about helping widows.

The peanut butter in her stomach turned to
sludge. Was the man simply being kind? At the beginning of his
book, he claimed to be a changed man. Eliza hadn’t given much
credence to those words. She’d become an
I’ll-believe-it-when-I-see-it kind of gal.

Was it possible that she had read him
wrong?

Maybe. But even if she had
been wrong, that didn’t change the fact that she needed to stay on
her guard. Johnny Devine was an award-winning actor. She’d seen him
on the silver screen and knew exactly how convincing
a liar he could be.

The camera lies like a flattering lover. I
should know—I’ve been both the pursuer and the pursued. No one can
spot ruthless flattery better than I can.

~
The Devine Truth: A Memoir

At noon on
Saturday
, Eliza gave up on Mr. Darcy.
She’d placed a bowl of water on the balcony and left the door open
all morning as she washed and hung her underthings, hoping the cat
would come back and make her studio a regular stop on his rounds.
Maybe even come to think of her place as home. But there were
probably other balconies where he fared better than peanut butter,
bread, and water.

Swell. Stood up by a cat.

She finished her article,
proofread it, then placed it in a large manila envelope. The
American Women’s Alliance had agreed to consider it for a paying
spot in their national magazine,
A.W.A.R.E
. There had also been some
discussion with Eliza of an opening for a regular column, for which
she intended to apply. The AWA had published a number of her
articles in their weekly newsletter, and though those had earned
only meager pay, she had the great satisfaction of reaching out to
oppressed women who needed to know they weren’t alone. The
newsletter’s readership wasn’t huge, but it was growing.

Unfortunately, Eliza
wouldn’t enjoy much in the way of publishing credits, because even
though she was writing primarily for women, the editor suggested
Eliza use a non-gender-specific pen name for protection. She had
decided on E.J. Peterson—the initials for
Eliza Jane
, and her maiden name. It
had a strong ring to it, like the name of someone who ought to be
taken seriously.

Eliza smiled as she sealed the envelope.
This article could be just the break E.J. Peterson needed.

She donned a red-floral chiffon scarf over
her hair and tied it beneath her chin, then grabbed her article and
handbag and set off for the post office.

Leaves lined the gutter at the curb like a
long orange-and-brown boa, shuddering with the passing traffic.
Autumn was dessert, in Eliza’s book. After the heat of summer,
autumn came with clean, fragrant breezes like a scoop of sorbet
after a spicy meal.

Passing the corner bus stop, she kept going.
Nothing sounded better than an invigorating walk and some fresh
air. The post office was an easy ten-block stroll, and she’d
planned for it by wearing her old saddle shoes.

She hurried past shop
windows with signs promising more kinds of automatic household
equipment than she’d ever seen. Everything was automatic now, even
dishwashers. Mama had taught Eliza and Betty to work hard, to never
spend a penny when one could make do with elbow grease, and not
just because times had been so lean. Although Eliza’s parents had
been fortunate to find work during the Great Depression, they
continued to do things the frugal, old-fashioned way, even after
the economy had improved. Mama had often hummed a little tune while
she scrubbed laundry in a tub, an old-world sort of tune that Eliza
had never heard anywhere else. Maybe it was something Mama had made
up. Or perhaps something Mama’s mother had taught her as a
girl—
somewhere
in
Europe. Somewhere too insignificant to show the curious young Eliza
on a globe or map.

By the time Eliza was in high school, she’d
finally given up asking her parents where they’d come from. Laura
and Wesley Peterson were just quiet, boring literature teachers
from some quiet, boring place. But when Eliza was a child, the
vague way Mama and Papa had referred to their younger years had
often sent her imagination running wild. She’d imagined they were
in a band of horse thieves and were hiding from the law. Or royalty
ousted by a coup and living in exile. She had always preferred that
fantasy, daydreaming about how, one day, a string of white
Rolls-Royces might stop at the door of their small Sacramento
bungalow and whisk the Peterson family away to a castle in another
land.

But after years of living
with the couple who spent more time with their noses in books than
anyone she’d ever known, Eliza finally accepted the fact that
something far less exciting was likely to account for her parents’
lack of interesting history and gave up asking. With such a dull
home life and
the prevalence of so many
books, it was no wonder Eliza had developed such an
imagination.

She greeted
folks
passing by on the
sidewalk, and as the Laurel Theater came into view across the
street, she smiled. Now she could afford to treat herself to a
nickel movie. The Laurel ran old, reissued films in a program they
called “Yesterday’s Favorites,” which was a growing trend with the
smaller movie houses.

Maybe she’d stop on the way back from
mailing her article, since Saturday matinees were a double feature
and still just a nickel. She’d missed most of the first picture.
That was fine. It was probably an old B western, which she wasn’t
over the moon about anyway.

As she neared the marquee,
she smiled again.
Empty
Saddles
—clearly a western. She might still
catch the tail end of that one, and then see the A picture which
was—

Nothing to Say but
Goodbye
, starring Marlow and
Devine.

Eliza halted, causing another pedestrian to
jostle her elbow.

Blonde bombshell Deborah Marlow and Johnny
Devine. What were the chances that “Yesterday’s Favorite” would be
one of John’s pictures?

She stepped off the
sidewalk to get out of the way of passersby and stared at the
marquee. On second thought, it wasn’t so surprising. The growing
popularity of television was causing a drop in box office sales, so
houses like the Laurel would run a popular older film for a few
days
,
then switch
to another. They went through a couple of old films a week that
way. And John had starred in many films. In fact, she’d seen his
name on the marquee before. Still, it
was
an odd coincidence.

She mailed her article and then walked back
to the theater, curiosity growing with each step. She’d seen a few
of Johnny Devine’s pictures when they released, but that was years
ago. At the time, she had no idea she would one day meet him. What
would it be like to see him on the big screen now?

With her ticket and soda in one hand and a
bag of popcorn in the other, she slipped through the curtain and
into the dark theater. Her eyes took a moment to adjust to the
dark. Scanning the rows, she saw an empty spot about midway down
the aisle, so she made her way to the wooden bench and ducked onto
the seat.

The lady beside her greeted Eliza with a
smile.

Minutes into the first
scene, Eliza stiffened. According to a close-up shot of a newspaper
headline, the story was set in 1938. Perhaps seeing a movie wasn’t
such a good idea after all. The less she remembered about the year
she turned eighteen, the better. But then, she hadn’t treated
herself to a movie in a while, and it wasn’t as if the worst year
of
her
life would
be on the screen. She could leave at any time, if she wanted to.
She focused on the rueful strains of saxophone in the opening
score.

The heroine was a cynical
young heiress with no one she could
trust.
Desperate
for a break from the boardroom, she set sail on a cruise ship
and disguised herself as a working-class girl, much like Eliza. But
the similarity began and ended with the girl’s work status. Even in
a plain overcoat and felt hat, the woman was gorgeous. Bold,
self-assured.
A
woman who knew her worth and would never let anyone tell her
otherwise. Was it the actress or the character exuding such
confidence, or both?

The heiress explored the ship but kept to
herself until she noticed a group of men playing cards in a
smoke-filled room off the lower deck. She asked to join them, but
none of the men looked happy about a woman interfering with their
game. Especially the handsome man with a cigar clamped between his
teeth—played by Johnny Devine.

“
No dames allowed,” he
said in that deep, trademark rumble.

Eliza’s breath caught.

“
Oh, I know what you mean,
he does the same thing to me every time,” the woman beside her
purred, gaze fixed on the screen. She sighed. “I could watch him
all day. Isn’t he positively divine?”

The heiress had somehow
talked the men into letting her play a round of poker. If the cigar
smoke and shots of whiskey bothered her, she didn’t show it. After
she won several hands, the heiress thanked the men and said she
needed to leave. Johnny’s character—Geoffrey—excused himself and
offered to escort her to her room. “After all,” he said in her ear,
“that’s
my
money
you’re carrying, and I want to be sure you still have it tomorrow
night so I can win it back.”

The blonde played it cool with a shrug and
let him escort her.

Eliza could see where the storyline was
going. It didn’t take long for the sparks to ignite between them,
and soon Geoffrey and the heiress were spending more and more time
together. One night, bathed in milky moonlight at the ship’s
railing, with waves churning in the background, Geoffrey lifted the
woman’s chin, looked deep into her eyes, and leaned in slowly for a
kiss, his eyes closing …