An Inconvenient Woman (41 page)

Rose called Dudley.

“Is Mrs. Mendelson’s plane in yet, Dudley?”

“It’s due in at eight, Mrs. Cliveden.”

“Do you think she knows?”

“I’m sorry?” Dudley did not understand Rose’s question. He knew everything about the Mendelsons, he thought.

“Do you think she’s heard the news?”

“What news? About the storms in Maine?”

“You mean you haven’t heard?” asked Rose. She was full of importance with her knowledge.

“Heard what?”

“About Mr. Mendelson?”

“What’s happened?” asked Dudley.

“He’s had a heart attack. They’ve taken him to Cedars. I just heard it on the news.”

“Oh, no.” There was a silence for a minute. “I can’t understand why Miss Maple wouldn’t have called here,” he said.

“Perhaps she doesn’t know yet either.”

“How could she not know?”

“It didn’t happen in the office, apparently. The report said he was visiting a friend.”

“Why?” asked Dudley.

“I don’t know. They didn’t say on the news. Who’s going to meet Mrs. Mendelson’s plane?”

“Jim, the chauffeur, is going out to the airport at seven. Mr. Mendelson wanted him to be there a half hour ahead of time,” said Dudley.

Rose began to give orders, as if she were in charge. “Have Jim pick me up first, Dudley. I think I should be there when she lands. She should hear the news from a friend, and I suppose I’m her best friend. And I’ll go on to the hospital with her.”

“Yes, Mrs. Cliveden,” said Dudley.

When Dudley hung up, he yelled upstairs for Blondell, Pauline’s maid, to come downstairs, and for Gertie, the cook, to come out from the kitchen, and for Smitty, the guard, to come in from the kennels, where he was feeding the dogs, and for Jim, the chauffeur, to come in from the garage, where he was polishing the cars.

“Mr. M. has had a heart attack,” Dudley said, when the servants were gathered together in the main hallway of Clouds. There was a feeling of silent dismay among them, as if their lives were being threatened. Dudley had been with the family longest, and was known to have a close relationship with Jules Mendelson. Blondell thought he was crying. Then the telephone rang. It was Miss Maple.

Miss Maple heard the news from her sister in Long Beach, who had heard it on her car radio and pulled in to a Mobil station to call her from a pay phone. She immediately called Clouds to tell Dudley, but Dudley said that he already knew and that he had been about to call her, as he had just heard the news from Mrs. Cliveden, who had heard it on the radio. Dudley told Miss Maple that Mrs. Cliveden was going to the airport with Jim and would break the news to Mrs. Mendelson.

“Just what she’s not going to need at such a time is Rose Cliveden,” said Miss Maple.

“That’s what I was thinking,” said Dudley.

“I wonder if I should call the pilot and tell him to tell Mrs. Mendelson,” said Miss Maple.

“I’d wait,” said Dudley. “There’s nothing she can do while she’s in the air.”

While Rose was waiting for Pauline’s chauffeur to pick her up, she called Camilla Ebury to tell her the news.

“I can’t believe it,” said Camilla.

“It’s true, all right. It’s on the news,” said Rose.

“Poor Pauline,” said Camilla.

“I can’t stay on the phone talking,” said Rose. She was full of purpose. “Pauline’s chauffeur is going to pick me up and take me out to the airport so that I can break the news to her. She adores Jules.”

Camilla called Philip Quennell at the Chateau Marmont.

“Where did it happen?” asked Philip.

“Rose said the news said it happened at a friend’s house,” said Camilla.

Philip knew immediately, without being told, that it had
happened at Flo March’s house, but he did not tell that to Camilla. He had not told Camilla that the girl she had met and liked in his room at the Chateau Marmont was the mistress of Jules Mendelson.

Philip called Flo, and got the answering machine. At first he was going to hang up. Then he said, without leaving his name, “Flo, I’m at the Chateau, if you need me.”

Since the plane was late in arriving, Rose had several drinks at the bar in the lounge of the airport where the private planes landed. Jim, the chauffeur, twice stopped her from tripping over her crutches. By the time the plane finally arrived, an hour later than scheduled, she was sobbing incoherently over the news she had to break to her great and dear friend. When Pauline got off her plane and saw Rose in such a state, she knew that something dire had taken place. Her first thoughts were of Kippie. She was sure she was about to be told that Kippie was dead.

“Oh, my God,” she said, “Kippie? Is it Kippie?”

“Not Kippie.
Jules
,” said Rose, throwing her arms around Pauline.

Pauline turned ashen. “Jules?” she asked. She had decided to take her father’s advice and go back to Jules. During her last days at Northeast Harbor and on the plane ride home, she had further decided to wipe the slate clean and begin again with Jules. What husband had not had an indiscretion, she had reasoned. She thought of the many advantages of her life: her beautiful home, her flowers, her friends, the traveling she did, the thoughtfulness of her husband for all her comforts. She thought of the time ahead, when she would be spending a year in Brussels, and of all the entertaining that would entail. And, most important, she knew, despite his affair, that Jules needed her and even still loved her. She could not believe that he was dead.

Jim, the chauffeur, seeing the anguished look on Mrs. Mendelson’s face, understood immediately that Mrs. Cliveden had made her think that Mr. Mendelson was dead. “No, no, Mrs. Mendelson,” he said. “Mr. Mendelson has had a heart attack. It was on the news. He’s in Cedars-Sinai, and I’m going to take you there right now.”

“What is his condition?” asked Pauline.

“We don’t know,” said Jim.

“We don’t know,” repeated Rose, through her sobs.

At the hospital, Pauline would not allow Rose to come in with her. “Take Mrs. Cliveden home, Jim, and then come back, will you please.”

“But I want to be with you, Pauline,” said Rose. “You need me.”

“No, Rose. You must understand. I want to be alone with my husband. You have been so marvelous, darling. Thank you. Thank you. I can never thank you enough.”

“Do you need any of your bags, Mrs. Mendelson?” asked Jim.

“Just that small one, Jim. For God’s sake, get her out of here, and don’t let her talk you into bringing her back.”

“Yes, ma’am. And Mrs. Mendelson?”

“Yes?”

“Tell Mr. M. we’re all rooting for him.”

“That’s right, Pauline. Tell Jules we’re all rooting for him,” Rose called out of the window of the limousine.

The young red-haired woman with the ripped Chanel suit and the skinned and bleeding kneecaps raced into the emergency entrance of the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in a highly agitated state. She made her way over to the admitting desk, followed by a policeman who was writing out a ticket while reeling off the charges of driving sixty-five miles an hour in a thirty-mile-an-hour zone, going through a red light, malicious damage to public property, and reckless endangerment. She turned to her pursuer and asked, angrily, “I didn’t kill anybody, did I?”

The policeman continued to write his ticket.

“Or wound?” continued Flo.

“You could have,” said the policeman.

“Then that ticket that you are writing out is
not
an emergency. And the reason I drove so fast
is
an emergency. So I will take your ticket, if you ever finish writing it up, and I will handle it in the proper way, and appear in the necessary court, and pay the designated fine, or go to jail if I have to, all at some time in the future, as well as pay for the gate that I knocked down outside. But now I am here on another matter, involving a life-and-death situation, and I’m telling you, in as courteous a way as I know how, not to detain me one instant longer.”

“You tell him, sister,” shouted a woman with two small children, whose lover had been taken up to the emergency
room with multiple stab wounds, and others waiting on benches in the emergency entrance cheered.

The policeman looked at the beautiful young woman who had just read him off. She remained unflinching in her return of his gaze. Finally, he smiled at her and handed her the ticket.

“Listen, I can’t tear this up, miss. I still gotta give it to you,” he said.

“Sure,” said Flo, calming down.

“I hope whoever’s sick is going to be okay,” he said.

“Thanks.” She took the ticket and turned to the nurse on duty at the desk.

“Jules Mendelson,” she said.

The nurse, whose name, Mimosa Perez, was on a nameplate on her uniform, had watched Flo handle the policeman. “You must be Mr. Mendelson’s daughter, right?”

Flo looked surprised at the question. Jules would have hated it if anyone had mistaken her for his daughter. Then she remembered from the time her mother had been brought to this same emergency entrance, when she was burned in the fire in the welfare hotel, that only immediate family members were allowed upstairs to talk with the doctors.

“Have to ask,” said the nurse, apologetically. “Hospital rules.”

Flo, unsure how to answer, nodded.

“Only immediate families are allowed upstairs,” said the nurse. “Some of these reporters will stoop to any kind of low trick to get into the ICU when there’s a VIP or a celeb admitted to the hospital. You should have seen this place when Lucille Ball died. I mean, it was crawling with reporters.”

Flo could not bring herself to say that she was Jules’s daughter, and she would never have claimed to be his wife. The nurse, eager to help the distraught but expensively dressed young woman, said, “I’ll buzz you in, Miss Mendelson. Down that corridor. Turn right by the water fountain to the elevators. Take the elevator to the sixth floor. They’ll direct you from there.”

Flo looked at her nameplate. “Thanks, Mimosa,” she said.

Mimosa smiled. “You father’s still in the operating room, but not in the Jules Mendelson Wing. I’ll ring up and tell the nurse on duty that you’re on your way.”

On the bench next to the woman with two children
whose lover was being operated on sat Cyril Rathbone, witnessing the arrival at the hospital of the mistress of Jules Mendelson. He was beside himself with excitement at the turn of events in his life that day. “Dressed in Chanel. Skirt torn. Pretended she was his daughter,” he wrote about Flo March in his spiral notebook.

Every doctor and nurse in the intensive care unit was aware that Jules Mendelson had given the hospital wing that bore his name. On two occasions, Dr. Petrie, who was in charge of the case, sent out an intern to give Flo a progress report, assuming that she was an immediate member of Jules Mendelson’s family.

“We are cautiously optimistic,” said the intern.

“That’s only telling me that he’s still alive,” said Flo.

“That is more than we had hoped for when he was first admitted,” said the doctor.

“Can I see him?”

“Not yet.”

“When?”

For several hours Flo waited in the lounge area outside the intensive care unit, drinking Diet Cokes from a vending machine and watching television. She tried to read magazines and newspapers that had been left there, but she found it impossible to fix her attention on anything other than the matter at hand. She felt the beginnings of fear, both for her and for Jules.

In the five years since Jules had walked into the Viceroy Coffee Shop and changed her life, Flo had often longed for a friend to confide in, over events of far lesser magnitude than the event that was now occurring around her. But never had she longed for a friend to be with more than she did in those hours she waited in the lounge of the intensive care unit to find out whether Jules Mendelson would live or die.

Since she had become so intimately involved with the billionaire, she had ceased to see Curly and Belle, her friends from the Viceroy, on his advice. “Mixing with people like that, it never works,” he had said to her. Only Glyceria, the maid from next door, and Philip Quennell, whom she had met at an AA meeting at the log cabin on Robertson Boulevard, had offered her the kind of friendship she craved. But she had been afraid to confide too much in Glyceria, because she knew Jules disapproved of her friendship with Faye Converse’s
maid. She had told everything to Philip Quennell during the two days she had stayed with him at the Chateau Marmont, when she meant to break off her relationship with Jules for good, but she was aware that Jules despised the handsome young man who had been kind to her, and she knew she could not call on him for solace.

Her attention became diverted from her thoughts by a news bulletin from anchorman Bernard Slatkin on the NBC Evening News.

“Jules Mendelson, the Beverly Hills billionaire, banker, art collector and patron, and presidential designate to head the American delegation in Brussels during the statehood of Europe, suffered a massive heart attack at a private home in Beverly Hills this afternoon. He was found unconscious and in full cardiac arrest on the floor of the house. Medical aides who rushed to the house administered cardiopulmonary resuscitation to revive him before taking him to the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. A hospital spokesperson declined to comment on Mendelson’s condition.”

Flo continued to stare at the television set after Bernie Slatkin had gone on to another story. She was aware that “the private home in Beverly Hills” that he spoke about was her house on Azelia Way. A chill ran through her as she realized that if Jules died, she was only a step away from being in the news herself.

“You may go in now, but you can only stay ten minutes,” said the intern. “Miss?”

“What?” asked Flo.

“I said you can go in now, but you can only stay for ten minutes.”

“Is he conscious?”

“In and out. You must not excite him or tire him.”

“Thank you.”

Arnie Zwillman looked up from his gin game in the card room of his Holmby Hills mansion, which had once belonged to Charles Boyer, and listened to Bernard Slatkin, the anchorman on the NBC Evening News.

“I said to Jules only recently when we were dining together at the home of Casper Stieglitz, I said, ‘Jules, you gotta lose some of that lard, or you’re going to have a heart attack.’ I swear to God, I said that. Hold on there, Dom, baby. It’s my deal, not your deal.”