Everything and More (4 page)

The important thing was that in the past two years, acting had become her salvation.

Marylin, dutifully obeying her mother, had kept those two deducted years a secret. She walked the broad corridors of Beverly High and sat in its well-lit classrooms feeling a fake, a phony, a liar. Each time a messenger brought a note for the teacher, fear clutched her. Had Mr. Mitchell, the ascetic-faced principal, uncovered the truth? Was this a summons prior to public expulsion?

Yet could she honestly label her years here as unhappy?

How was unhappiness possible at Beverly High?

The citizens of Beverly Hills spared no expense in educating their young. Few parents, even the world-famous and the vastly wealthy, considered sending their offspring to private schools. Why should they? Beverly High was a lovingly constructed temple to the goddess
of learning. Cream-painted wings welcomed the students. Each morning as they trooped up the rolling green lawns, they saw carved on the lintel above the main doorway the gracious Sanskrit quotation: “Today well lived makes every yesterday a vision of loveliness, every tomorrow a vision of hope.” The campus was lavished with patios, vine-covered pergolas, a square bell tower, tennis courts, playing fields; the school had an elaborate auditorium, professionally equipped shops and sewing and cooking classrooms. Its unique feature was an indoor swimming pool over whose chlorinated surface an electrically controlled parquet floor rolled out for dances or CIF basketball games: the cost of this was defrayed by an oil rig that pumped steadily in a discreet corner of the football field. The teachers, selected with more care than most university professors, presided over a campus that pulsated and jumped with energetic, mostly affluent, beautifully dressed, decently polite kids.

Marylin would have welcomed their friendship. Before this, she had reached out helplessly, gregariously to her schoolmates, but the secret permeated her like a dread disease, and she feared letting anyone close to her. In the crowded halls boys shuffled along worshipfully at her side; they hovered around her lunch table; a few of the most courageous asked for dates. To succor NolaBee’s belief that she was the belle of belles, Marylin accepted bids to proms and hops. The other invitations she rejected: “What a shame . . . I’m busy that night.” In the inescapable affinities of Drama and Radio Speech, she formed tenuous wisps of friendships that she cut the instant she crossed school boundaries. If anyone, male or female, with a car offered her a ride home, she had a standard excuse: “Thanks, but I promised to pick up some things for Mother.”

The Waces lived on Charleville in an illegally converted apartment above a garage, and when Marylin got home she would stand on the rickety, paint-peeling steps, inhaling long, slow belly breaths until her shoulder and neck muscles unclenched. She could never let herself respond naturally—and told herself she should be glad of the challenge: she was immersed in a perpetual role, wasn’t she?

“. . . and now where is that shovel?” asked Tommy Wolfe.

Marylin replied, “In your hand, loverboy.”

“End of act one,” said BJ. “Curtain to tumultuous applause.”

Suddenly from the shadow-lashed darkness under the balcony burst the enthusiastic clapping of one pair of hands. “Bravo, bravo!” called a pleasantly timbred masculine voice. “Is this tumultuous enough?”

The group squinted in astonishment toward their unseen audience.

“Linc?” BJ jumped to her feet, raising a hand over her eyes to peer. “Ye gods, it can’t be!”

“No, it’s Douglas MacArthur in the flesh. I just flew in. BJ, that’s a pretty fair play, even if I do detect Big Joshua’s fine hand.”

“How long have you been here?”

“About twenty minutes.”

“I mean, in Beverly Hills.”

“About thirty minutes. Nobody was home but Coraleen. She suggested you might be here.”

“Oh, you creep, you rotten creep. Sitting up there and not letting me know! Mother and Daddy’ll kill you for not writing that you’ve got a leave.’ BJ ran down the steps and up the aisle toward a tall young man dressed in a pale blue sweater and gray slacks. They hugged, continuing to talk. From the stage their bantering insults weren’t fully audible, only the ripe affection in their voices. Though the intruder wasn’t in a Navy officer’s uniform, it was obvious who he was. BJ’s older brother. She bragged constantly about Lieutenant (junior grade) Lincoln Fernauld, Beverly High class of ’37, a Navy pilot aboard the
Enterprise.

Arms around each other’s waists, brother and sister strolled in step through the gloom toward the stage, and Marylin, looking at Lincoln Fernauld defined obscurely against the shadows, could see that his was a slender, basketball player’s build with long legs and broad, graceful shoulders. As the duo moved up the steps to stage left, she saw the strong sibling resemblance: the same thick black hair (his was crew-cut) and heavy black eyebrows and craggy nose. It was strange, though, how much more agreeably the features translated onto his long masculine face. His mouth went down on the left side as he smiled at them.

“Everybody, my brother. Lieutenant Abraham Lincoln Fernauld, born on the twelfth of February. Stinkin’ Lincoln—or Linc.”

She introduced them in turn. When she reached Marylin, Linc Fernauld’s grin faded momentarily. “Maybe I’ve been stuck away from civilization too long,” he said. “But you were pretty fantastic, Mare.”

She winced. This abbreviation of her name always made her wince. “Thank you,” she said, adding with a tinge of aggression, “It’s Marylin. M-a-r-y-l-i-n.”

He raised one eyebrow wryly. “Interesting spelling. Should go over big on the marquee.”

“It’s a family name,” she said.

“One thing. Unless you want ’em shuffling and coughing in the
balcony, you’ll have to project a bit more.” This last remark was said with a thoughtful frown, and she sensed he spoke not to put her in her teenage place but to give his impression of her performance.

“My
bête noire,
a small voice.”

Everyone was gathering up coats, sweaters, books. In a chattering tangle they clumped up the aisle to the door that was left unlocked for them.

Linc, Marylin, and BJ lingered in the vestibule, where the late-afternoon sun filtered through the windows to cast a golden tarnish on Beverly High’s cased silver trophies.

“Come on, Beej,” Linc said. “Treat you to a hot-fudge sundae at Chapman’s.”

“Chapman’s?” BJ said hopefully, then groaned. “I’m on a diet.”

“Still? Well, we have Marylin along. She can eat it for you.”

“I’m sorry, but . . .” Marylin’s routine refusal faltered. Linc was watching her. His dark brown eyes held an eloquently complex message: awe, lust, admiration, and another quality, indecipherable and compelling. She tried to look away and failed.

“Omigawd!” BJ hit her head. “I can’t do anything. This is Tuesday. Mrs. de Roche will be there in twenty minutes.”

“Still pounding away on the Steinway?”

“My lesson’s at five.”

“I’ll drop you off at home,” Linc said, still looking at Marylin. “Somebody has to eat your sundae.”

Marylin nodded.

*   *   *

Simon’s, the big round drive-in on Wilshire Boulevard, served as official hangout for the Beverly High elite and those desirous of emulating them. Chapman’s, an ice-cream parlor on Santa Monica Boulevard about a half-mile from school, drew only youthful gourmets interested in rich and delicious ice cream. At five the place was empty except for an older woman waiting at the cash register for her pint of chocolate to be mashed down into a cardboard container.

Marylin and Linc sat in the rear booth, facing one another. His glass was empty except for a residue of fudge in that indented pit where the spoon cannot reach. She was still conveying tiny coffee-flavored spoonfuls to her mouth. Ice cream, Marylin’s favorite food, was a rare luxury in the impoverished Wace household, and her habitual method of savoring any treat was to string it out as long as possible.

“You’re a remarkably slow eater,” he said.

“Things I enjoy I do slowly.”

“I’ll have to remember that,” he said, his voice slightly rougher, as if it came from a different part of his throat.

The tone shivered a strange, dauntless pleasure throughout Marylin’s body. She smiled at him, then looked down, twirling her spoon in the last, softened dregs of pale brown.

“Have a steady?” he asked.

“Nobody.”

“Are you a Senior?”

“A Junior.”

“BJ’s play is the
junior
play—how could I forget?” he said, hitting the side of his head. “So then you’re sweet sixteen?”

She could feel the flush travel up her face. “Not quite so sweet,” she murmured.

“None of those salacious innuendos, Marylin Wace. They can drive a man ape, if he’s been in the Pacific for six months.”

“Sorry.”

“I’m twenty-three. Think being here with you makes me a dirty old man or a cradle robber?”

“Neither.”

“Do your parents let you go out with servicemen?”

“My father is dead,” she said, swallowing sharply. No matter how many times she uttered the words, they hurt to say.

“The war?” he asked quietly.

She shook her head. “He was working—in a haberdashery shop—and a burglar shot him.”

He nodded and touched her hand sympathetically. Under the light pressure of his fingertips, a wanton tingling blossomed, traveling up her arm, drawing a sigh from her lips. If only
this
could go on forever. . . . Crazy, crazy Marylin, she thought.

He moved his hand. “I’ve heard about you. BJ, bless her, writes endless letters, and there’s been much ink used on this exquisite, talented creature in her drama class—”

“She does have a tendency to exaggerate.”

“Not in this case. Has she mentioned me?”

“Often. She’s very proud. You fly an Avenger, a torpedo plane, and you’ve won the Distinguished Flying Cross—”

“She talks too much.”

Marylin smiled. “Before the war, you were going to . . . Stanford?”

“Right.”

“What were you going to be?”

“The same as I am now. A man.”

“I meant, what were you majoring in? Medicine? Law? Or do you want to be a screenwriter like your father?”

“Oh, yes. Sure. Absolutely.” His face darkened into an expression of bitter unhappiness; she had to control herself from reaching over to touch
his
hand. He said, “All right, I’ll ’fess up. There’s something I’ve always wanted to emulate. Publish two good, meaningful novels then sell out to do Hollywood garbage.”

She knew many who professed to despise or disdain their parents as parents, but to dismiss Joshua Fernauld (about whom there hovered the aura of sinful glamour invariably tethered to high-living men of vast talent in show business) as a hack shocked her to the core. “He’s a fabulous writer! He’s got an Oscar to prove it.”

“From a jury of his peers,” Linc said acidly.

“His dialogue jumps to life.”

“I can see that one semester in high-school drama has turned you into a fine critic.”

“This snobbishness about the movies really gets me!” Marylin cried. Her outspoken anger completely bewildered her. What had catapulted her, Marylin Wace who avoided every unpleasantness, into this brouhaha? “Why must people assume it’s slumming to write a fine movie script, while writing crummy books or a trashy play is something sacred?”

He jerked as if she had probed a raw nerve. “Would you admit,” he asked with heavy vitriol, “that your lack of understanding might emanate from a certain . . . shall we call it immaturity? Oh, hell! I should know better than to talk seriously to a high-school kid!”

Marylin’s heart was galloping, sending a wild charge through her body. “Millions of people see his work,” she heard herself say. “He has a chance to influence them, to make them better or kinder. I’ve gone to
After the Fall
and
Lava Flow
four times each, and they always leave a kind of glow.”

“Why not take Fleischmann’s yeast? That gives the same results.” His sarcasm was loud, brutal.

The counter girl and soda jerk were staring at them.

Marylin knew she must stop. She could not stop. “Whether you want to admit it or not, if Shakespeare were writing today, he would be under contract to MGM or Paramount.”

“Thank you for that surprising insight.”

“He’d be like your father, earning Oscars, and I don’t think this idea is coming as any surprise to you.”

His tanned hands clenched into fists on the tabletop, and there were lines on either side of his mouth. “Listen, you movie-struck bobby-soxer,
don’t try to psychoanalyze
me.
Don’t think you can figure out what’s in
my
mind. Just because you’re a gorgeous, gorgeous eyeful with a fantastic little body doesn’t mean you’re Sigmund Freud. Stick to the stuff below the beltline, that’s more in your line. All you know about me is that I’m hot to make you.”

To her horror, Marylin felt tears welling in her eyes. If she were an actress with the least modicum of talent or technique, wouldn’t she be able to hide these idiotic tears? He’s only out to make me—that is the hidden complexity in his eyes, she thought, and put her shaking hand over her forehead.

“Hey,” he said quietly.

She took out a handkerchief, bending her head, and under the pretext of blowing her nose, dabbed surreptitiously at her eyes. She glimpsed his tanned fingers clenching and unclenching, and guessed suddenly that shouting matches like this were as alien to him as to her.

“Allergy,” she mumbled.

Money clinked on the table. Marylin hurried outside ahead of him and saw that dusk was turning the sky purple.

Linc put the key in the ignition of the big Packard, but did not turn on the engine. After a minute he said, “I’ve been away too long. Forgotten the polite art of male-female conversation.”

“It’s okay,” she said listlessly.

“I didn’t mean to crumple you with my rhetoric.”

“I egged you on.”

He gazed into the twilight. “You’re right, of course. I have always known that Dad’s a tremendous talent. There’s not much triumph in being a perpetual spindly sapling dwarfed by a tremendous oak.”