L.A.WOMAN (9 page)

“Anything?” I cried.

“Well, Mort was a good musician and everybody was a little afraid of him because he was so smart and sarcastic,” she recalled, “but after he came back from Nevada, he was a lot better.”

“Nevada?”

“To stay with your mother before she got divorced,” Goldie said.

“My parents went to Reno together?” I asked. “Is that legal?”

“Didn't anyone ever tell you that?” Goldie asked.

“Why didn't Sam ever pounce on you?” I said. “I mean he pounced on everyone, didn't he?”

“I never knew,” Goldie said. “You know, it worried me. I asked Helen to see if she could find out when she lived with him, so one day she asked him.”

“She did?”

“And you know what he said?” Goldie said. “He said, ‘Oh, I couldn't do that to Goldie!' ”

“That bastard!” I cried, comfortingly, since Goldie looked very depressed, and then, trying to think of something to cheer her up, I added, “He meant you were too good for him, you were too great an artist, you know? After all, when he first met you, hadn't you just come back from New York where they said you were so great?”

“Maybe that was it,” Goldie agreed, looking relieved, “I
was
too good for him, wasn't I?”

“Reno? My parents?” I sighed.

“You know,” Goldie said, “I introduced Lola to Sam.”

“No kidding,” I said. “What was she like?”

“She had a great body,” Goldie said, “and she didn't mind showing it.”

It must have been in 1939 or so, the year Lola met Sam, when she had been in the dance troupe about two years, and had been living in New York (where the troupe went that year) with an especially cute dress manufacturer who was German (and probably spoke German to Lola) who Lola always called “the bigshot” (and Goldie always called “the Fascist”). (Goldie and Lola lived in the same cold-water flat in New York where Ophelia remembers nothing except cockroaches.)

Lola took the train to Hollywood again, because the summers and winters on the East Coast were not what she meant by those words. She was almost twenty-eight and she had so far indulged herself almost entirely in wrestlers, Hindus, and bigshots. Whenever I asked her why she gave Sam the time of day, she always said, “He was a genius, you know, everybody said so.”

“A genius at what?” I wondered.

“Photographs.”

Sam spent the thirties living on twenty-three dollars a week that the WPA gave artists and photographers during the Depression, and in Santa Monica where he lived this was enough to afford to live in a bungalow court on Strand, a few blocks from the beach. In fact, during the Depression in Santa Monica, a lady who lived there told me you could get a house with a living room, four bedrooms, a kitchen, a breakfast room, three bathrooms, a dining room, a sewing room, a front yard and a backyard for forty dollars a month (the guy who taught dance then was Marge Champion's
father in Santa Monica, he had a studio, the lady who told me said, where she took lessons as a child).

Goldie, the only one he didn't do in (besides my mother), seemed to be the only one who ever knew what Sam actually was like, for she's the one who said, “He always dressed better than any of the other guys. They were all a bunch of bums. Not your father, but all the others.”

“It was just after I'd come back from New York where we were dancing that summer,” Lola said, “and I had nothing to do with myself, so I went to a movie, by myself, on Hollywood Boulevard—I should remember the movie, but I can't—it was with that one who steals clothes.”

“Oh, you mean, Hedy . . . ,” I said.

“. . . yes, and the usher in back of me kept saying ‘now it's going to get good, now it's going to get good . . .' ”

“Did it?”

“No,” she said, “when I got out, there was still nothing to do except I ran into Goldie, who was going over to this fellow's house who had a marvelous record collection, where your father and Sam and that friend of theirs—God, I can't remember his name either—anyway,” Lola said, “we went to the house of this record collector, and that was when I met Sam. He and the other two fellows were almost fighting to take me home.”

“But why did you pick Sam?” I asked.

“Because he was a genius,” she said.

“But everybody in those days was a genius,” I said.

“But Sam loved my feet,” Lola added.

“Oh,” I said. “Knew how to show a girl a good time, right?”

“But I didn't love him,” she insisted, “we were just living together, but Mother asked me one day when she was going to see the announcement of our marriage in the paper. We had the nicest house, too, overlooking the Hollywood Bowl—we could hear the concerts.”

“You did? I thought Sam lived in Santa Monica,” I said.

“Hein bought us a house,” she said.

“Oh,” I said.

“I had to get married, or Hein never would have sailed to Honolulu on the
Luralai
the next week,” she said.

“Oh,” I said.

“And I had nothing else to do,” she went on. “I guess I used Sam because he was so mad about me, and I was lonely.” And she looked guilty, adding, “Besides, the man I left in New York—not the bigshot, but another dancer who I was with the time I toured when Sam and I were together and he stayed home—was interesting in bed, but no place else. And you know Sam had those eyes of course. . . .”

“And Sam was terrific in bed too, right?” I said.

“Sam? I should say not,” Lola indignantly protested. “There were three or four lovers in my life who
really
understood what they were doing—but Sam, my heavens! No! But he did have a nice little body, except for his lower legs.”

“His lower legs?”

“From his calves down, but above that, he really looked like a naked prince on a horse in a Maxfield Parrish print. In fact, your Aunt Helen had the same print in her bedroom. The same one! So I knew I was right, because why would she hang it up if it didn't look like Sam.”

“Oh,” I said.

When I asked Lola what color Sam's eyes were, she said, “It wasn't only his eyes, it was his eyebrows—they went straight across the bridge of his nose. They made him look terribly . . . terribly . . . I don't know . . . exotic.”

My mother, when I asked her, said, “Well he had that look, you know, green eyes, but he was myopic like your father. They both had that look.”

“How come you didn't get impaled by Sam?” I asked. “Or did you just meet him on your honeymoon?”

“Well, for one thing, I was in love with the best one—your
father,” she said, “he was just as salty, but he had more class. Besides, he wore a tuxedo.”

“Oh,” I said. “By the way, what was Daddy doing with you in Reno?”

“It's none of your business,” she said.

· · ·

When Lola first went to live in San Francisco with Sam, she married into a time and place which had nothing to do with her. It was WWII and she had to completely abstain from speaking German—any German at all—since the whole country including herself couldn't hear it without boiling over, and though she was used to occasionally dropping German flourishes into her everyday speech, she no longer dared even for fun. Plus, in San Francisco, a woman from L.A. had to resign herself to hats and gloves and stockings because no woman could go out wearing a belly dancer outfit for fun. Women were respectable.

Perhaps the real reason Lola married Sam wasn't to be polite or to oblige her mother, but really because she thought she ought to do something that wasn't fun—to strengthen her character—something womanly like sacrificing her life. But then I still couldn't see why anyone would marry Sam just to get character.

“Everything had been just fine until the first week we went up there,” Lola explained. “The first week we were married I got sick. I had a temperature of 103 degrees and
he
was very proud of me, by the way, the first day or week—
he
anyway went out, that day when I was sick, to a party. A big party!”

“Oh?”

“And before he went out, two girls from the class he taught came to pick him up and take him, and I said, ‘Well, what do I do while you're gone?'

“And he said, ‘Anything you wish.'

“And you know, what? He left his new bride.”

It sounded to me like a case of misunderstanding. Lola misunderstood Sam, thinking he ought to have stayed home with his new bride
(her!
—everybody always thinks in terms of mythic figures when they're involved: “the new bride,” “the faithful lover”), and Sam misunderstood Lola, figuring that since she'd never cared that much before and had always taken off for New York on a passing dance whim that surely now that he was in his first glory—his first professional employment that wasn't WPA-funded or in a plastics factory like my father and all their friends for the War Effort—she would realize that he was just taking off on a passing party whim.

It's funny how when people get married, they suddenly get mythic about love. Even when they don't care about who the myth is starring.

T
HE SUMMER THE
C
RAVENS MOVED
in, I was only five but I still remember feeling outraged that anyone as beautiful as Molly Craven could have been was absolutely determined not to do it. There she was with the most perfect smile and this nice wavy light brown hair and a pretty figure (which, according to Lola, had been even prettier when they danced together in Teretsky's troupe for the short time Molly, who was once Molly van Horn, put up with all that feet arousal stuff) and she utterly refused to wear lipstick, let her hair fall down to her shoulders, or put on a dress any color but gray.

Until years later when I found out what Connecticut was and who preppies were, which suddenly made so many things clear to me (like
The New Yorker
and people on the East Coast who weren't Jewish), Molly seemed to me totally devoid of taste. All the quaint New Englandy wallpaper, her preoccupation with Shelly's schoolwork (when everyone
else in L.A. merely hoped their daughters wouldn't get too done in by the movie business), and her inability to stand anything glamorous, including chocolate, seemed at the time to be the result of no taste at all, and not—as I saw afterward—of a definite object in mind for how things should be.

I guess when she left Teretsky (after he went ape when she refused to wear toenail polish), she only stayed in Hollywood because she met someone who was even more of a Yale product than her brothers—Mitchell, for even though Mitchell was already getting small parts in movies and was an actor, his roles were in such good taste it was hard to remember he was in Hollywood at all and hardly anyone went to see him.

When we were children, all Molly ever tried to do was organize everything, and all I ever tried to do was disorganize them. The thing was, my mother let me and Bonnie stay out past sunset in our bare feet wearing underpants during the summer (and nothing else), roaming around anywhere we wanted to, whereas Molly had her timetables and schedules planned for Shelly and her brother Toby every minute of every decade. And so when a friend of my father's died and left a treasure chest of pipecleaners and glitter (which he had used to make figurines of musicians playing instruments) and I used it to make an underwater peepshow with mermaids using blue cellophane for the sky, Molly was so incensed she sent me home, saying, “Your mother lets you do anything you want,” and added, “no wonder you're too creative!”

(Every time Bonnie or I made a peepshow, Shelly and Toby got another bike.)

To me, growing up and watching Molly shove back every lock of hair which dared to fall across her brow and come home with more gray outfits and never go to San Francisco for summer vacation—just Yosemite—the refusal perpetually in her soul to acknowledge the goodness of beauty was
a ghastly crime. A crime, though, which I felt somehow I could alleviate in her, so year after year I tried. But no peep-show, no mermaid, nothing ever convinced the Cravens to let L.A. into their hearts.

When I was only five though, I thought Shelly's mother was simply no good because she was somebody else's mother, I suppose, and not mine. But after that I began hating the lady who was to look with haughty preoccupation on almost every good idea I came up with in my entire childhood. The competition between her daughter and me might have really been insane except that I was half a semester behind Shelly because I was a few months younger and besides, I was no good at anything.

I was unable to read school books, just bumbled through, while Shelly if she couldn't get an A in something had to have a tutor like the ignoramuses and morons who got F's always did. I got special permission by the second grade to be allowed to leave the school grounds and go home for lunch because we lived within a couple of blocks, but Shelly, who lived nearer than I did, was forced to stay with the mad scramble throughout lunch “facing reality” her mother called it. So it was no wonder when I somehow also managed by the fourth grade to go home for “nutrition,” which nobody had ever gotten to do before, that when Shelly turned green with envy till she caved into hysterical sobs her mother would naturally wish I were dead. Or deader.

The idea that school was anything but an unnecessary evil that a child should be encouraged and abetted to get out of was my mother's specialty.

“What do they know, they're only the teacher” was my mother's usual instinct about the entire place.

Naturally not even the wife of a radical Stalinist, like Shelly's mother, could go along with my mother and it was lucky my mother was a saint or she might have driven normal mothers crazy.

The trouble with Shelly's mother, I suppose, was that she was a person who believed in ideas like they were any good at all and like you could instill a sense of discipline and good posture and an ability to concentrate when such things were not worth instilling unless you lived on the East Coast or someplace so awful a person might need to sit up straight.