Laura Lamont's Life In Pictures (16 page)

Irving sent John and Mary home after the awards, and had another car take him and Laura to the Gardner Brothers’ party, where everyone pretended to be overjoyed for Laura, whether or not it was true. Susie, who had never won an Oscar, marched straight up to Laura and grabbed her by the wrist. “I’m so
happy
for you,” she said, her mouth a tight, cold dash of red without a hint of a smile, and then turned straight back around and walked away. When they got home late that evening, Laura woke up the girls to show them the golden man with her name on it. Florence wanted to sleep with it next to her, and Laura promised that she could win another one, maybe next year, so that she and her sister could each have one, and it would be fair. That seemed good enough for Florence, who
promptly fell back asleep with her mouth wide open, as nonplussed as if her mother had won a Cracker Jack prize out of a cardboard box. Instead of tucking the golden statue in with Florence, Laura took it to her own bed and placed it on the pillow between her head and Irving’s, so that they could both see it until they fell asleep. That night, Laura dreamed of the ceremony taking place in her parents’ barn, with both her sisters at the next table, laughing and toasting one another again and again, and when Laura awoke, the sound of Hildy’s laugh was still in her ears, so, so delighted. It was only a few minutes later that she remembered her mother’s consternation, and wished that she didn’t have to get out of bed.

T
he morning after the ceremony, the house woke slowly, with everyone wanting not to be the first. Harriet, back in her usual clothes, made coffee for herself and breakfast for the girls, who clung to sleep more fiercely than usual, as if their bodies had absorbed the monumental shift in their mother’s world, their eyelids still heavy when they lumbered out of bed and into the kitchen. Josephine had woken early and left the house on her own for a walk, which no one in Beverly Hills did unless they had a dog. Laura could feel the house beginning to move—whether or not it was real, she felt that she could hear all the familiar noises her parents had made when she was a child, but echoing now through her own walls and hallways. Her father grunted as he rose from the bed; her mother blew her nose once, and then again, with force. Laura held Irving’s waist as he tried to get up.

“Don’t leave me,” she said, burying her face into his back.

“I’m not leaving you, I’m going to be polite to your parents.” Irving
had won awards before, for the studio, and didn’t need the morning to recover. Laura reluctantly released Irving, who then turned around and kissed her on the forehead. “You won,” he said, as if she could have forgotten. Laura watched him close the door behind him, and thought that he was wrong: Had she been a failure, this new creation, Mary would have reacted less harshly. Had she married another young actor with a less ethnic surname, Mary might even have been happy. And so Laura hardly felt that she’d won at all.

O
nce everyone was awake and accounted for, and Josephine returned from her predawn stroll, it was decided that a family outing was in order. The Emersons wanted to see the ocean, which Laura thought was because they didn’t actually believe it was any bigger than Lake Michigan. Mary thought it sounded far away, and didn’t want to put anyone out, but John insisted. They drove two cars: Irving at the wheel of his black Cadillac, and Laura in her maroon convertible. The children went with Irving, and the Emersons all climbed in with Laura, which made the zippiness she usually felt when driving the car vanish completely. Her mother and sister both insisted on climbing into the back, which was barely big enough for Clara and Florence, and her father’s knees hit the dashboard when he sat down in front. Laura thought about calling out to Irving about swapping some passengers, but then the car started and pulled away. John ran his hand over his side of the dashboard.

“Nice-looking automobile, Elsa,” he said, and caught himself. “Laura.”

“You can still call me Elsa, Dad,” she said. “You can call me whatever you like.”

In the back, Mary released a small groan, an involuntary noise like being walloped in the gut, but shook her head when Laura turned around to face her.

“To the beach!” John said, urging the car to move with a raised fist. They rode the rest of the way in silence, Josephine’s and Mary’s heads hitting against the cloth top whenever the car went over a bump.

F
lorence and Clara were already out of the car and dancing around the parking lot when they arrived at the beach, doing interpretive movements of the sea and the wind, their sandals clopping gently against the concrete. Laura loved when they were together and speaking their own little bodily language, two feral cats with no need for speech. The girls were wonderful sisters, truly a pair. Neither girl had worn her bathing suit, as it was too cold for swimming, but Florence was eager to play in the sand, and Clara was ready for a snack.

“Mother, I’d like an ice-cream cone, please,” Clara said.

Mary shook her head, as though she’d never given her daughters a treat in their life. Laura wondered when it was that her mother has gotten so cold—when Laura was a child, her mother had seemed no-nonsense but still a mostly kind presence in the house. But then Laura identified the moment—
of course
—and moved on.

“When we get home, sweetie,” Laura said, tucking Clara against her body, as if that would keep her from saying anything else that her mother would find distasteful. Irving leaned against his car and squinted out at the water. He was the only man Laura knew who liked the beach even less than she did; Irving had never been permitted to swim as a child because the chances of his taking ill were too
great. She doubted he’d ever even seen a swimming pool before he moved to California. He’d probably never been in anything bigger than a bathtub. Seeing her husband so close to the sand, salty air whipping around his head, made her wish for a moment that her family had already gone home.

It hadn’t occurred to Laura before that Irving reminded her of her father, but she saw it now. John was in charge of the Cherry County Playhouse just as Irving was in charge of Gardner Brothers studio, each one selecting scripts or plays from an endless stream of words and then putting those words into the mouths of their chosen actors. They chose women with bird-boned frames, or women with bodies that filled their dresses; they chose men with wide eyes or squinty eyes, men with shoulders the size of a mountain range. They knew who could deliver which line, whose lips were made to proclaim the words as if they were the truth. When she was a child, Laura—no,
Elsa
—would sit at her father’s feet while he auditioned actors for the summer’s productions, and she would scratch her own notes into the floor with her fingertip, invisible ink scrawled across the uneven floorboards. Was that really so different from what she did at home, when Irving would come to her and tell her he was choosing between Peggy Bates and Betty Lafayette for the second female lead in the new J. J. Rush movie, deciding whether to go quirky or sexy? The only difference was dollars in a bank account.

The money was tricky. Laura wondered whether her father saw it as clearly as she did, or whether he was blinded by the golden sheen of the light in Hollywood, the way every surface seemed to glisten more brightly than the last. She looked down at her clothes—even what she wore to bed was expensive. Her silk pajama pants were tied tight around her hips, and the wind blew them against her skin. She should have put on proper clothes, something more modest.

Laura watched her father stare at the waves crashing against
the sand, some large and rough and some small, tightly curled as lips ready for a kiss. When she was a little girl, Laura too had imagined that no body of water could be larger than Lake Michigan, which seemed impossibly vast, the other shore well beyond her line of vision. Some days she still felt that way, that the ocean couldn’t be that much larger, no matter what anyone said. How did they know; had they been? Gordon might have known, she supposed—he might have flown in a plane across the Pacific, looking out the window all the while. She didn’t think of him often, but when she did, Laura felt a sharp pain in her stomach, as if that was where her conscience lived. It was her fault that he was gone, and whatever happened to him was, in some way, on her head. Irving didn’t seem to believe in guilt, or in duty—he was a proper businessman, as straight as they came. The wind was picking up, and Irving moved toward Florence, who had sunk to her knees in the sand about ten feet away from the parking lot, her dark hair a nest behind her, going every which way. Sometimes Irving and Florence seemed so much alike, so much a pair, that Laura forgot that he wasn’t her biological father. Irving had never once backed away from the girls, never once given them any less than a father should. They were his, and he was theirs. It was that simple.

“Mother,” Laura said. She closed the gap between herself and her mother’s back. Mary had wrapped a scarf around her head, and Laura mimicked her, so that the two of them were shielded together, as if that would help. Laura clutched the silk corners of the scarf under her chin, and repeated herself. “Mother.”

Mary tucked her chin in toward her throat.

“I understand why this is all so distasteful to you,” Laura said. Her mother still didn’t turn, and so Laura stared at the side of her face, her flat profile. “But this is all for her, you know. All of it.”

At this, Mary pivoted on her heels. “And to whom are you referring?” Her eyes were tight brown slits.

“My sister.”

“I don’t see what that has to do with anything,” Mary said into her shoulder. “We all make choices, Elsa. We all make choices.”

“And you think I’ve made the wrong ones. I get it.” Laura let the scarf blow off her head. She watched it sail down the beach. Florence started to run after it, but Irving called after her, and like a good daughter she stopped, silently agreeing to let it go. “And I don’t appreciate the way you’re treating my husband. In case you haven’t noticed, the rest of us happen to love him.”

“I remember the last one you said you loved too. At least then it seemed like you might come back someday.” Mary hadn’t always been so cruel: Laura tried to remember what her mother had been like when she was a child, when Hildy was still loafing around the house, every one of them so in love with her they could hardly speak.

“Mother,” Laura said, reaching out to touch her on the arm. Now that she had Clara and Florence, she thought less about leaving and more about being left. It wasn’t as easy as she’d imagined, getting away. There were roadblocks at every turn, always forcing you to circle back the way you came.

A wood-paneled wagon pulled up beside Irving’s car, and a noisy bunch of teenagers spilled out into the parking lot. Mary moved a step closer to John. There were three girls and two boys, one too many for them to pair off and snuggle in the sand. Laura watched them paw at one another like a litter of puppies, and it was only when one of the girls looked up at her, eyes wide, that Laura realized she should have turned her face away. Sometimes Laura forgot that from the outside, other people couldn’t tell the difference between Laura Lamont and Elsa Emerson, when she was so clearly feeling one way or the other. She’d been Elsa all morning.