Laura Lamont's Life In Pictures (18 page)

“This one’s written by a doctor,” Ginger said, rolling her eyes. She had new sunglasses with pinky-brown lenses. The pink clashed with the red of her hair, which Laura knew had to be the point. The Gardner Brothers had made a string of screwball comedies starring Ginger as an eccentric widow who solved crimes, always with her tiny dog in tow. The role suited Ginger, and she’d taken to dressing the part even off the set. The dog, fortunately, was a professional, and lived at the animal trainer’s house. While Irving had been grooming Laura to be a serious actress, he’d put Ginger on a different track. Her comedies were now Gardner Brothers’ most successful property, always beating Susie and Johnny at the box office. Laura liked to think that it was the film that they made together that had done it, which was true, because before that Ginger had been only an extra, someone pacing back and forth, pretending to walk down the street, or a lone face in a crowded market. It wasn’t that Laura wanted to take credit for Ginger’s success, not precisely, though she did like to think that her own acting chops had brought something out of Ginger that Gardner Brothers hadn’t seen before. “Really, Lore, how different can it be?”

“I don’t know about you,” Laura said, lowering her voice, “but I didn’t even
see
a penis until I was seventeen.”

Ginger loved it when Laura talked dirty. She said it was like hearing a librarian shout. “Ha! Oh, you poor thing. Okay then. Page one…” Then she opened the book and pretended to read. Despite her claims to the contrary, Laura knew that Ginger felt as strongly about being an actress as she did, that she lived for moments like this, when she could feed off the breath and hush and warmth of her audience, even when it was just one person.

If the child was indeed a boy, Laura would teach her son to be chivalrous, like his father. She would teach him manners, and the power of stoicism. She would teach him that frozen custard was better than ice cream, even if no one in all of Los Angeles made it. Together they would explore Griffith Park and look at the stars from the observatory. That seemed like something a boy would like, didn’t it? She didn’t know. Clara and Florence were easy children, most of the time—Laura knew they couldn’t all be polite, so good.

“Mom, look, Mom, look!” Clara was running at top speed along the slick wet concrete lip of the pool, which Laura had told her not to do a thousand times. Florence bobbed in the pool, clapping her hands with delight as Clara pushed off. She flung her thick little body off the ground, and then crashed through the surface of the pool, sending great plumes of water into the air.

“Bravo!” Laura said. She laid the open book against her stomach, as though her unborn child could read it himself through all the layers of tissue and blood. Clara was missing two teeth, right in front. She climbed back out of the pool and did a little shimmy for her mother and Ginger, her hands gripping her waist like a showgirl, her wet hair sticking to her swimsuit in thick clumps. If Laura had stayed in Wisconsin, if she’d never become Laura at all, Clara might have been just the same, sashaying across the creaking boards of the playhouse. Florence looked more and more like Gordon as she got older: the small frame, the dark circles under her eyes, as if her daily troubles were already wearing her down. She could sit alone and read a book for hours, until after the sun set and the room was dark, never getting up to switch the light on. Laura wasn’t sure what to make of her, but as long as Clara was there to help, they were fine. What couldn’t some bows and ribbons fix, for a girl? Laura always felt happy when there was a box to open, some shiny paper to tear. Her girls were the same way. It wasn’t that they were spoiled: They were
lucky to have her, just as she was lucky to have them. Laura was sure they knew the difference. When she went back to work, Laura thought she’d like to do something funny again, maybe with kids. Ginger wasn’t the only one who was a cutup. She rubbed the space where her belly button used to be, now flush against the rest of her skin. Laura would talk to Irving about it when he got home.

T
he boy was born on a Thursday morning in February, and despite the fact that it was bad luck in the Jewish faith to name a child after a living relative, Laura and Irving named him Irving Green Junior. Irving loved gallows humor, and claimed he’d die young, and the name wouldn’t be taboo for long. At Laura’s request, the doctors gave her half as much pain medication, and Irving was allowed to stand in the hallway just outside the delivery room. Junior—that was the nickname they’d chosen—was a small baby, only five pounds, and his father could hold him with one hand, though Laura insisted he use two. The baby looked so fragile, his arms like plucked chicken wings, that Laura was afraid he would stop breathing. The nurses insisted the boy was fine, but Laura threw a fit anyway, and extra tests were run. Later she thought that her anxiety was the flip side of the relief of having the baby outside her body, where she would no longer be the only one responsible for his well-being.

Being a father suited Irving—being a father to a son. He dressed Junior in miniature baseball uniforms and toted him around Gardner Brothers on his hip. It occurred to Laura that her husband had suffered the lack of men in his house as she had in hers—with no brothers or sons of his own, Irving was as surrounded by women as Laura had been. He worked at a studio named for imaginary brothers, for God’s sake! Laura would have left the baby at home with Harriet, but
Irving insisted he come along whenever she made the trip in for dance classes and the like. She’d tie a handkerchief around her head and hold the baby on her lap in the Cadillac while a Gardner Brothers’ driver drove the six miles to the studio at a whopping top speed of twenty miles an hour, as per Irving’s strict instructions.

Ginger cried when she saw Junior for the first time. She and Laura were sitting outside the commissary, enormous sunglasses blocking the winter sun. Junior was asleep in his custom-built Gardner Brothers pram, which had almost certainly been bought as a prop and then painted quickly after his birth. On one side, it read, G
ARDNER
B
ROTHERS
P
RESENTS
…and on the other side, I
RVING
“J
UNIOR
” G
REEN
, J
R
.! Laura found it all downright silly, if not frankly embarrassing, but Irving loved it, and she couldn’t argue with that. Ginger had recently gotten engaged to a man she’d met on a ranch in Colorado, a rodeo rider named Bill Balsam, and she’d been crying even more than usual.

“It’s just that he’s so perfect,” Ginger said, tugging a hankie out of her bra. But Junior wasn’t perfect; he remained small for his age, and spent most of his waking hours wailing at the top of his lungs. Laura thought that Florence was becoming a tricky child, what with her cloudy moods, but Junior seemed content only when he was asleep. She worried about him more than she’d worried about the girls, who’d both been born when she was too young to realize anything could go wrong.

“You think so?” Laura asked. Everything about Junior made her nervous—if it was the girls who had come between her and Gordon, what if Junior drove Irving away? It seemed unlikely, what with the fanfare and the endless stream of coos that came out of Irving’s mouth, but she could never be sure.

“Perfect,” Ginger said. She reached into the pram and spread her palm across Junior’s chest. Both her thumb and her pinkie touched the padding beneath him. Ginger wanted babies; she’d told Laura
so. There had been a first marriage, in her twenties, to a guy back home. They’d tried and tried to have kids, but every time, something inside went wrong, and Ginger would miscarry. Laura had never known anyone whom it had happened to before: At home, no one ever talked about things like that. But Ginger told her all the details. The sore breasts and missed menses that marked the pregnancy’s arrival, the first sign of blood a few weeks later, then the horrible days of cramps and bleeding that took it all away. It took only a week, Ginger said, for her body to go back to normal, but only if you were counting in actual human days. In certain ways, that week never ended, but just kept getting longer and longer, the week that her body decided what was best. Moving to Hollywood was supposed to change all that—not the fact that her body wouldn’t cooperate, but the fact that she cared. Ginger said that being an actress was something people did when their ordinary lives weren’t good enough. Laura had told her about Hildy; she couldn’t disagree. Now Ginger was getting too old to have kids of her own, but Bill didn’t mind. Laura had seen them together. Bill wore denim tuxedos, blue jeans and a matching jacket, like he was always on a horse, with a wide-brimmed cowboy hat and, sometimes, leather chaps with his name stitched down the leg in a loopy script. He looked at Ginger like she was a giant slice of strawberry shortcake. Laura approved. As soon as their engagement was announced, Irving decided he was going to put Ginger and Bill on television, give them their own half-hour show once a week, in which they would play themselves, more or less. Ginger would be a lovable goof, and Bill would rein her in, lasso and all. The audience was going to love them, Irving was sure, and he’d given both Ginger and Bill bigger dressing rooms to prove it, plus one for Bill’s horse, Clementine.

“I couldn’t have one now anyway,” Ginger said, as if she could hear Laura’s silent cataloging in her head. “Not with the show. My
schedule is packed already. I couldn’t take the time off.” She looked up at Laura, her big eyes hidden behind her sunglasses.

“Well, it’s not a question of
could
,” Laura said, now annoyed in spite of herself. “Of course I should still be working. It’s just that when you’re a mother, you have to prioritize. Some things are more important than others.” Laura missed working; she didn’t mean to be cruel. There were certain territories she hadn’t figured out yet with girlfriends. They weren’t quite the same as sisters, not exactly, with hurt feelings always threatening a schism. She regretted the words as soon as they were out of her mouth.

“You’re right,” Ginger said, and got up and walked out the door. Laura wanted to follow her, but Junior would have awoken if she’d picked him up, and her ears weren’t ready for his next hungry wail. Instead, she watched Ginger’s bright red pile of hair get smaller and smaller as she walked down the alley between the soundstages toward the cities that didn’t exist.

G
inger didn’t stay upset for long—that was part of her professional appeal. Sometimes it would take as long as a few days for her to regain her cool, but when she came back around, it was as if nothing had happened. Laura thought that Ginger would have done excellently well in Wisconsin, where no one ever talked about anything unpleasant, at least not in the Emerson house.

When Ginger and Bill got married, they moved to a horse farm in the canyons, up in Calabasas, which was light-years away from Beverly Hills in spirit, and about forty-five minutes in the car. The girls loved Clementine, and Laura liked the idea of getting out into nature for the day. Irving had never liked the outdoors particularly, but he liked seeing the girls happy, and so off they went, Irving behind
the wheel, with Florence twiddling the radio knobs, and Laura, Clara, and Junior in the backseat, all playing “I Spy” out the window.

The farm was called Balsam Acres, though Ginger had paid for it. Bill was waiting for them atop Clementine at the gate to the property, and the girls squealed with glee. The house was back from the road a good distance, and down a bit of a slope, so that it was totally hidden from view, with fruit trees ringing the porch like Christmas decorations.

“This reminds me of where I grew up,” Laura said to Junior’s soft scalp, already so close to her lips.

“Mom, look, more horses!” Clara said. Both the girls were wearing cowboy boots, earlier presents from Ginger that somehow still fit.

“Yes, I know, but be careful, remember? They’re bigger than you are. And watch out for your sister.” The girls scrambled out of the car and hurried up to the horse, who, as a trained professional, didn’t flinch.