Hollywood (3 page)

Jess shivered in the stuffy room. This was the real thing, all right. No doubt of that.

“I said, ‘Horace, I’m not partial to turkey, as you know. Just a boiled chicken will do.’ ” She exhaled. Jess inhaled and smelled boiled chicken, old sandalwood. “ ‘Why not splurge?’ he said. Then he was gone. He never,” Madame Marcia’s bloodshot eyes glared at Jess, “came back.”

“Killed?” Jess had always known that he himself would one day die violently. Roxy said he was mad as a hatter. But Jess
knew;
and so he was never alone in an empty street or alleyway or, for that matter, bed, if he could help it. When George did not sleep with him, one of the clerks from his emporium would oblige. In Washington he always shared a room with Daugherty, next to the room of the invalid Mrs. Daugherty. Whatever town Jess was in, he cultivated policemen. He read every detective story he could get his hands on to find out how to survive the city jungle with its wild killings, human swarm, dark alleys.

“Who knows? The son-of-a-bitch,” she added, suddenly soulful. “Anyway, I had had my call.” She indicated the Spiritualist Church diploma. “I don’t need
any
man, I’m happy to say, except when I feel we’ve known one another in an earlier life.” She smiled at Jess, who blushed and took off his thick glasses so that her face might blur; he adored women but, what with one thing and another—like his weight problem and diabetes—what was the point? as Roxy had said in the third month of their marriage. Jess had wept. She was firm, yet loving. Roxy would never go for a turkey and not return. She just
went for a divorce, and as Jess was worth even then a small fortune, more than one hundred thousand dollars, he could keep them both in high style. Today they were better friends than ever, each devoted to gossip; each able to remember almost to the week when a couple was married so that when the first baby was born they could—she without fingers, he with—work out the time of conception and whether or not it was blessed in the Lord’s eyes. Each delighted secretly in the fact that the Duchess’s son by her first husband was born six months after the wedding which was to end in divorce six years later. Roxy shared Jess’s high pleasure in this sort of knowledge, proving that there were, Jess decided, blessings yet to be counted, particularly if Roxy should end up in Hollywood as a photo-play star, their common dream—for her.

The Duchess was in the room. “I let myself in.” The voice was dry and nasal and whenever a word had an “r” in it the Duchess made that poor letter go through her thin dry lips, over and over again, as if she were French. But she was quintessentially a Midwesterner of German extraction, born Florence Kling. The head was large, the body small. The Duchess suffered from what Madame Marcia would call renal problems, and her ankles were often swollen while her sallow normal color was often dull gray with illness. She had only one kidney, which obliged her to drink quantities of water. Often bedded with a hot-water bottle on even the most stifling of summer days, she would try, sometimes in vain, to sweat. But today the small blue eyes were bright and there was even a suggestion of color in her cheeks due to the north wind, while the end of her somewhat thick nose was also rosy—moist, too. Like a trumpet, she blew her nose into a large handkerchief and said, “I hate incense. So foreign, so bad for the air.”

“
Chacun à son goût.
” Madame Marcia was gracious. “Let me take your wraps.” As the Duchess was divested, she turned to Jess. “We’re invited to Mrs. Bingham’s but …” The Duchess was about to name her husband; then saw the dark brown myopic eyes of Jess so unlike her own small gray far-sighted ones; remembered the rule of
omertà
. “… but I don’t want to go alone. So you can take me, can’t you?”

“Sure thing, Duchess.”

“Now, Madame Marcia,” the Duchess made the priestess sound like the patroness of a disorderly house, “I’ve been hearing so much the last couple of years about you and I’m really glad to meet up with you though I can’t say I’m all that much a believer in all this.” The Duchess’s face set in what
Jess was convinced she believed was a jovial expression but the long sheep-like upper lip and thin mouth produced an effect more alarming than not.

“Dear lady,” Marcia sighed and blinked her eyes. “We are such stuff as dreams are made on.…”

“I don’t like Shakespeare.” Jess was always surprised by how much the Duchess knew and, usually, disliked. But then she had had a hard life which was probably not going to get any easier. She could hear storm warnings more clearly than anyone else he knew, like those animals that were able to anticipate earthquakes, much good it ever did them. “I saw the Frank Deshon Opera Company once.” The Duchess did a complete reversal; she was also a perfect politician when she chose to be. “They played Cincinnati. I went with my … brother. That was way before your time, of course.…”

“Oh, my
dear
lady!” Madame Marcia was properly hooked.

“Now what do I do? I feel like I’m at the dentist’s.” Madame Marcia took her client’s arm and steered her into the back room. “It will be painless, I promise you.”

“Now, don’t you listen, Jess.” The Duchess touched the beads.

“I never listen when I’m not supposed to.”

“Says you! Those big ears of yours flap like nothing I ever saw outside the circus.”

Jess resolved not to listen; and heard everything. “The subject,” as the Duchess’s husband was referred to, “was born November 2, 1865, at two
P.M
. in the Midwest of the United States. Jupiter.” Then something, something. Then, “Sign of Sagittarius in the tenth hour.” Jess stared into the small coal fire set back in an iron grate. Washington was just like Ohio, nothing big city at all about these R Street brick houses. But then everyone liked to say that Washington was just a big village which happened to be full of big people of the sort Jess was naturally attracted to as they were to him.

Lately, Jess had started to keep a notebook in which he recorded the name of every important person he met in the course of a day. In Washington his fingers soon got tired, adding up the day’s score. Even so, he was looking forward to Mrs. Bingham’s reception. A wealthy widow, Mrs. Bingham conducted what Jess had first thought was a political “saloon” like a bar and grill until it was explained to him what a salon was. Mrs. Bingham was also the mother-in-law of the publisher of the Washington
Tribune
, a paper most friendly to Ohio Republicans, unlike the Washington
Post
, whose owner, John R. McLean, an Ohio Democrat, had died the previous summer, leaving his son Ned to do right by the Duchess and her husband. Ned and his wife
Evalyn were now their close friends; and so, marvelously, was Jess, who had never dreamed that he would be taken up by a rich and glamorous couple of the highest society. Evalyn was especially magnificent, with the most diamonds of any one woman on earth, among them the Hope Diamond, a bluish chunk of old bottle to Jess’s eye, worn on a long chain about her neck and as full of evil, it was said, as Jess’s downstairs closet. But unlike Jess, Evalyn was unafraid.

“I feel extra-marital entanglements may cause grief.” Madame Marcia’s voice richly hummed through the beaded curtain. The Duchess’s nasal response was pitched high. “That’s somebody else’s husband you got there. But that’s all right. Go on.”

“The stars …” Madame Marcia’s voice dropped to a whisper and Jess sighed voluptuously as he thought of all the sin in the world, and so much of it of the flesh. The Duchess suffered because her husband was a ladies’ man and there was nothing she could do but turn a blind eye, as she did to their neighbor Carrie Phillips, wife of James, who, like Jess, was a dealer in dry goods, as well as fancy and staple notions and infants’ wear.

Carrie was handsome and golden and well-born—related to the Fulton of the steamboats, it was said. She was also part German, and that was cause for many a quarrel in the parlors of Washington Court House and of nearby Marion; worse, of many a quarrel between Carrie and her lover, who was obliged to placate both his pro-German and anti-German constituents. On this subject, Carrie could be fierce; otherwise, she made the great man happy, thought Jess, whistling softly to himself “My God, How the Money Rolls In!”

“That,” the Duchess’s voice rasped, “was all pretty interesting. I’ll say that. Food for thought.” As she strode into the sitting room, Jess thought of what her husband had once said about her: “She can’t see a band without wanting to be the drum-major.” She liked people to think she was her husband’s dynamo, but Jess doubted this if only because
he
liked people to think that she was his spur. Daugherty thought they were more of a team, like a pair of old-time oxen pulling a cart, with her bellowing the most and with him pulling the most. But thanks to Jess’s mother and to Roxy and to
her
mother, he knew more about women as people than anyone, and it was his view that the Duchess was a joyous slave to her apparently lazy, charming, lucky husband, who called the shots.

“Jess, you’ll settle up?” The Duchess was now safely inside her various wrappings. Madame Marcia’s smile was sweet and faraway.

“Okay, Duchess.” Jess was aware that the “D” of Duchess had produced
a sudden jet of saliva. Fortunately no one was drenched. He dried his lips with the back of his left sleeve; he would have to dry his thick moustache later, when unobserved.

“You’ll pick me up at Wyoming Avenue. Five o’clock sharp. Wear something spiffy.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

The two ladies parted, amid powerful assurances of mutual high esteem and deep—on Madame’s side—compassion.

“What’s the damage?” asked Jess, reaching for his wallet.

“The damage,” Madame Marcia gazed ethereally out the window at the black afternoon sky, “has been done.” Then she blinked her eyes, as if coming out of a dream. “Mr. Micajah’s paid already. The lady’s not very strong,” she added, probing, Jess could tell. “She has a renal complaint.”

That was on the nose. Impressed, Jess nodded. “She’s been sickly quite a lot lately.”

“Bright’s disease, I should guess, not having done her horoscope.
He’s
sickly, too.”

“The picture of health.” Again, she was on target. Jess was impressed for the first time. The subject’s fluctuating health was one of the few secrets in public life; private, too. When he went off to Battle Creek, Michigan, the town thought that he was just getting away from the Duchess and politics, but he was actually trying to bring down blood pressure, moderate his heartbeat, dry out his system. Jess had gone with him once and was amazed at how pale the ruddy face became once he’d stopped drinking, and how frail he was for all his highly visible not to mention remarkably handsome robustness.

“I think you should tell Mr. Micajah—as he is paying—what I did not tell the lady.” Madame Marcia drew the curtain against the February sky.

“Something bad?”

“These things are open to interpretation. If one were always right, I’d be living in a palace on Connecticut Avenue like Blaise Sanford. Of course, our occult gifts do not extend to ourselves. In that sense we’re a bit like doctors, who never take care of themselves.”

“Never take their own medicine either.” Jess had seldom been free for long of doctors—asthma, diabetes.

“There, they are wise. Mr. Micajah made it clear to me that if I found in the stars what he thought I would that I should impart it to—the Duchess, which I have done. I have seldom seen so glorious a chart or one so brief.
I can see why
he
is melancholy and moody and wants all of life that he can seize before he rises to the heights.…” She stopped.

Jess’s heart was beating faster. This was it. Clever Daugherty. Clairvoyant Madame? “Will he be president?”

Madame Marcia nodded solemnly; then she turned to gaze with bemusement at herself in a dust-streaked mirror.

“Yes. With those stars and that rampant lion, he cannot fail. I told her that. I told her everything, except …” For a moment she seemed to have lost her train of thought. What
was
she thinking of? The turkey that never was, or … ? She turned away from the mirror; crossed to a table where amongst numerous beautiful objects a small porcelain cup held a number of toothpicks; she selected one and most deliberately went to work on her lower teeth. “I did not tell her what I want you to tell Mr. Micajah. After glory in the House of Preferment, the sun and Mars are conjoined in the eighth house of the Zodiac. This is the House of Death. Sudden death.”

“He’ll die?”

“We all do that. No. I see something far more terrible than mere death.” Madame Marcia discarded her toothpick like an empress letting go the sceptre. “President Harding—of course I know now exactly who he is—will be murdered.”

From the beginning Caroline Sanford Sanford and Eleanor Roosevelt Roosevelt were friends. For one thing, there was the ridiculous redundancy of their names: each had married a cousin with the same family name; for another, each had gone to school in England with Mlle. Souvestre. As Caroline, now forty, was seven years older than Eleanor, they had not known each other at school. But each had been molded—even hewn—by the formidable Mademoiselle, a square-jawed spinster of extraordinary intellect and character and a freedom from all superstition, particularly the Christian one—which had alarmed Eleanor’s Uncle Theodore, the President. But as Theodore’s favorite sister had survived the same school uncorrupted, he had decided that his tall gawky fatherless—and motherless—niece might “find herself” abroad in a way that she could not at home in Tivoli, New York, close to the Hudson River, less close to the edge of the great world—
her
world, because she could not have Hudson Valley friends to the house for fear that her alcoholic brother, stationed in his second-floor window, might open fire on them with
a hunting rifle. Although he had, thus far, always missed, one could not rely forever on an alcoholic tremor to preserve life.

It had been an inspired notion to get Eleanor out of Tivoli, out of America. In fact, Caroline liked to take some credit for having helped persuade—or was it her half-brother Blaise?—the then Governor Roosevelt to let his niece go out into the world of free-thinkers. After two years, Eleanor had returned to America better educated than anyone of her class except, perhaps, Caroline herself, but then Caroline had been brought up in France, the country to which her American father had gone into eccentric exile after the Civil War.