All That Glitters (63 page)

Maude hurried to the fire and rubbed her palms together. “I expect the coffee’s gone cold. I think I’d like a fresh cup,” she said, “if you’ll be so kind. Charlie, coffee? Oh, what’s the matter with me, you don’t drink coffee at night, do you?”

Ling went out and I bent to poke up the fire. I added a couple of smallish logs, pumped the bellows, and when we had a merry flame to warm us, I joined Maude on the sofa. She looked utterly done in. I felt her shiver and asked if she was cold and would she like Ling to bring her her coffee in bed? She thanked me no, and in a moment she glanced again at the doors, then settled back against the cushions, hunching her shoulders and clasping and unclasping her hands.

I heard Ling’s step along the outside hallway, and in a second he appeared in the doorway with the coffee tray. At the instant he crossed the threshold his whole figure became illuminated by a glaring burst of light that shot in through all the windows and doors, and for a second he turned white and everything on that side of the room was bathed in an eerie violet light. This blinding flash was followed by a deafening explosion and the tray literally sprang from his hands. When I felt the impact, my first reaction was to snatch Maude to me and pull her to the floor, our bodies protected by the bulk of the sofa. She crouched in my arms, shaking and murmuring to herself. As soon as I felt reasonably sure there would be no second shock, I got up and rushed to the French doors, opened them, and ran out onto the terrace.

Through the trees I could see the Playhouse engulfed in flames, while burning pieces of debris fell back to earth, parting the branches of the trees. The explosion had made a lurid light and I remembered what had been said only minutes ago about the sleep of the dead and earthquakes waking them. I was running then, running hard, but even as I ran I realized how foolish it was to imagine anything inside that house having survived such a blast.

From the gaping hole that had been ripped from the roof clear down one wall, I could assume that the explosion had happened upstairs—in the bedroom. Helpless to do anything, I danced around the conflagration, and, finding no way inside, I ran back to the big house to call for help. But the fire department needed no alert; already I could hear the wailing siren as vehicles wound their way up the canyon road.

As I came into the Snuggery, the house lights blinked on and off several times, then stayed on. Maude stood by the open doors, staring wordlessly at the blaze. Before I could say anything she turned from the sight and dropped into her chair again. The clamor of the fire engines filled my ears as the trucks pulled into the drive and a voice began barking out orders over an amplifier. Two men came running toward us, and I opened the door, letting in a gust of smoke-filled air.

“Was anybody in there?” one man asked breathlessly. Maude looked at me before answering. “Yes,” she answered finally, “my granddaughter was in bed upstairs. I don’t believe she could have possibly gotten out alive.”

The firemen agreed and said they were sorry. They ran away with the news, and we watched while dark figures dragging hoses dashed across the wet lawn. My eyes kept going to Maude’s face as she watched impassively through the glass, as if she were witnessing some event entirely unrelated to her. What a cool customer, I thought.

“Missy Maw’,” said Ling from the doorway, “I will go make coffee, lots of coffee; the men will want it.”

“That’s a good idea, Ling, please do.”

He trotted from the room, calm and collected as ever, and at that moment it struck me that for neither Maude nor Ling had there been the slightest element of surprise concerning the explosion, and it dawned on me then that it must have been expected.

“The Swedish stove, of course,” I heard Maude say, peering out, while the tautened hoses began to quell the lurid flames. Outside, all was action and furor; inside, only the crackling snapping fire and the eloquent silence that lay between us. “I’ve been saying for years it ought to be fixed—fixed or done away with.”

“Like some other things,” I thought but did not say. “Done away with if they could not be fixed.” In this world there were some things that could never be fixed.

“Ought we to telephone Belinda, let her know?” I asked.

“At this hour? Gracious no,” she replied with her old asperity. “It’s late, and I don’t want to upset her before we must. Perhaps we should go out and see what the men are doing.” I reached to help her to her feet but she brushed my hand aside. “I can manage, thank you. I don’t need any assistance.”

Her brusque words spoke for themselves. I saw it all. I understood it all. Some things were best left to the Maudes of the world—if there
were
more Maudes,
other
Maudes, which I steadfastly believed there were not. Unique, indomitable, and, I suspected, now somehow at peace. Suddenly Sunnyside, her domain, had been made safe again. Now there was nothing to touch it or harm it, not any longer. And if Maude was safe and Sunnyside was safe, then Belinda, too, was safe; no one could hurt her anymore, either. I was seized by the urge to see her, to be with her and tell her she’d been made safe again. I wanted to reassure her that Charlie would see to everything.

I felt Maude’s hand steal into mine, our fingers entwined. In our hands lay a secret, almost certainly in Ling’s hands as well. Maybe I should have been ashamed of what I was feeling, but there it was: relief, pure and simple relief.

There would come a time, however, when these feelings would pass and I would be left with my thoughts, heavy thoughts of the thing that had happened that night, the accident in the Playhouse, the gas stove that had breathed the flames of the lamp that had been left for Faun in case she woke up and was frightened.

I persuaded Maude to remain inside while I went out to talk to the fire officers. Yes, they said, it certainly must have been the stove, that old Swedish porcelain job with the faulty jets. Escaping gas, the burning lantern, nature had taken its course—naturally.

To be sure—quite naturally.

I said that was how we too had guessed it had been—Mrs. Antrim and I.

“Is that her?” asked the captain. “Golly, I saw her a long long time ago—when I was just a kid. She was with Jackie Cooper—can’t remember the name—”

I said he must mean
Fanny and Kiddo.
“By gosh,” he said, “you’re right.” Sure I was. Dead right.

By now the men were rolling up their hoses, the captain was checking among the smoldering ruins for hot sparks. Others were poking around with flashlights, looking for human remains. Though they kept their voices down, I knew they were telling each other that there wouldn’t be much to find in that mess.

When this process came to naught, I took the captain over to speak with Maude in the Snuggery, and after a while the police arrived to deal with the situation. An officer took out his pad and respectfully wrote down our answers to his questions. Maude looked badly torn up, as if the loss of her beloved granddaughter were a great tragedy, which I supposed it was—to Faun. Maude’s display of emotion was acute and beautifully articulated.

When our guests had had their fill of questions, they all trooped out amid apologies and condolences. Maude stood gallant to the end, shaking hands and giving each a polite word of gratitude for services rendered. I closed the door behind them, threw another log on the fire while, slowly—even ceremoniously—she drew the curtains across the windows, shutting out sight and sound, and we stayed there in the Snuggery until dawn, talking, shoes and ships and sealing wax, just the way we’d begun on that other dark and stormy night; cabbages and kings.

When the sun rose behind the curtains, I drew the cord to open them. Turning, I saw that Maude had slipped from the room. I didn’t see her for the rest of the day. Ling said she was resting, and we agreed that was a good idea.

Later, nosing around in the Playhouse debris, I found the charred remains of a typewriter—the machine Faun had been writing her book on. But there was not a single page to be found.

In a later time we sat together, Maude and I, near the spot where the Playhouse had stood, now demolished, the blasted area now seeded into healthy green turf where the croquet court had been moved. It was evening, the air was warm, and there was a special mood to our being together there, something quiet and solemn, as well as a profound air of finality, for we each realized it would be one of the last times it would happen. And for good reason: Sunnyside was to be sold. It had been less than a month after the explosion, when workers were still cleaning up the charred debris, that Maude surprised me by saying she was going to put the place on the market. Sunnyside—her home for fifty-four years? I couldn’t believe she really meant it. How could she leave the place after so long, start life over in some apartment? But that’s exactly what she’d done, turned the whole estate over to Felix Pass to get rid of.

Now we lingered there, gazing out across the waist-high wall, watching the shadows lengthen, the dusk come on, while the darkening hills fell away beneath us. Along the landscape of flattened canyon peaks and knolls the glimmering lights of the neighboring houses gleamed for us, those grand old silent-movie mausoleums, Valentino, Lloyd, Pickfair, in their lofty grandeur, and, ah, the stories their stucco-and-brick walls could tell; ah, the laundry airing on the lines, sheets taken from the beds where the late great had loved and mated, movie gods who were no more gods than you or I, but only mortal creatures with feet of clay. Maude was a goddess, yes, though she’d abdicated now. Yet admirers like myself would keep her name enthroned. As for this place, this Sunnyside that Crispin had built and made his home—it had been his creation, was still his; Maude was merely its caretaker. Behind the mullioned windows of the Snuggery the flame burned; she was the keeper of that flame, and she had protected it in the only way she could.

Soon nuns of a cloistered order would stand where we now stood, gazing down on this same view, wandering the corridors of the house, whispering their litanies, their knobby devotional hands clasped in prayer, prayer for lost souls like ourselves. We were sinners; but we would not confess, either of us. We would keep our unholy secret; it would lie between us, silent and unspoken. The Inquisition tortures of a Torquemada couldn’t drag it from me, while she, she would carry it to her grave. As for a possible third party, when had Ling ever spilled a bean?

Here I stood, at the purple wall where the white clematis climbed, here with Maude Antrim, Hollywood’s great lady, its dowager queen, chatelaine of Sunnyside, the closest thing to Camelot that movie folk could boast. Soon the stone halls of her house would fail to echo her light step, the coigns above the musicians’ gallery would no longer reverberate with her champagne laughter. At Sunnyside the clock would stop, the Snuggery’s embers would die to cold ashes, and one day the last light would go out. It wouldn’t be just the end of an era, but the end of an age. In my heart I sorrowed for Maude, who had chosen to go, and also for the empty rooms, which had no choice but to stay—alas, without her.

The air drew on a hint of fog, a touch of chill, and we started in. As we walked along the gravel path, our eyes were inevitably drawn to the spot, there where the little wire wickets had been inserted into the earth. Maude paused; I beside her. The name we almost never spoke came to my lips. I said I thought she’d been a poor tormented soul.

“Perhaps.” Maude shook her head. Clearly, she didn’t want to discuss this subject. She gave my hand a squeeze, taking me along beside her. Ling was waiting in the doorway, behind him Suzi-Q.

“Sleep well,” I said to Maude as we got to the door, and I smiled and kissed first one cheek, then the other. Maude Antrim, who’d put a roof over my head and given me happy times. I loved her then, I love her still, I will always love her.
Then
, an afterthought: “Some people don’t really deserve to be born,” I said.

Maude came tiptoe and, as she kissed my cheek, in return she whispered some words in my ear, words that sent a chill down my back. Her smile remained unchanged as she waved me off and let Ling close the door.

I carried her words with me as I went along the path and down the steps to the Cottage, and I remembered them long afterward, when Sunnyside was no more and Maude only a memory.

“She wasn’t born, you know,” Maude said. “She was hatched from an egg laid in warm sand.”

And I agreed.

I
T WAS WELL AFTER
2:00
A.M.,
I had heartburn, a headache, and an annoying ringing in both ears. I was thirty-five thousand feet over the Mississippi River on a DC-10, usually referred to as the “redeye,” heading from Los Angeles to New York, where I was about to see a second play of mine be put on the boards.

Thus far our flight was a bumpy one, seatbelts were fastened, and my stomach remained as uneasy as my mind. I got up and went to the john, and on my way back, passing the magazine rack, I pulled out the latest issues of every periodical that looked interesting, all the way down to
Business Week
and
Parents Magazine.

Flipping through the pages of a fashion magazine, I happened across an ad—one for mink furs: “What a Legend Lives For”—and I spotted That Face. There it was, staring out at me, the too-familiar planes and angles airbrushed right down to the bone structure, swathed in gleaming mink pelts, giving the world that “old black magic” look.

Take a guess at how old she is. Hard to say, isn’t it? There were only the slightest traces of crepe around the eyes—those eyes, no longer as large as they once had been, but still Those Eyes. Compelling, demanding, wondering at a world she hadn’t made, with a wounded touch she couldn’t fully overcome. And the wide slash of the well-lipsticked mouth with its exaggerated lipline that for years had been the delight of caricaturists—now those lips that had kissed a thousand men through ten thousand nights showed the barest whisper of wrinkles that not even expert retouching could disguise, the little arroyos that drive a beauty mad with helpless frustration and horror at the creeping, implacable Specter. Time, age, sorrow, loneliness, and unhappiness may have bowed that lily neck, those shining orbs may have wept buckets on and off the screen, murder, pillage, and rapine may have dogged the wake of those size 5 feet encased in their ankle-strap shoes, but by God here she was again, popping up in this slick double-truck ad, the living legend herself. (Was it Dore Skirball who’d said you could kill Claire only by plunging a stake through the heart?)