Bride of the Rat God (3 page)

As Mr. Mindelbaum helped her into the cab amid much tangling of leashes and a good deal of “
Down,
Chang!
Sit,
Jazz!
Off,
Chang!
No,
Chang!
Down,
Jazz!” something caused Norah to look back at the theater.

The ancient Chinese gentleman had halted there despite the tugging of his grandson and now gazed worriedly back into the lobby, as if debating the possibility of returning for another bout with the ushers.

On both sides of the entry, Sandringham and Chrysanda gazed and smoldered; the poster artist had flattered the actor by a good fifteen years and had made Chrysanda’s gown far more revealing than it was in the actual final sequences of the film, though God knew, Norah reflected, it was scanty enough. The old man gestured at the poster again, saying something; then he made a quick and universal sign, slashing his hand across his throat.

The grandson shook his head as if to say,
There is nothing to be done.

As her cab pulled from the curb, Norah saw the pair of them cross through the lights and crowds around the Pantages before they vanished into the dark of Fergusson Alley.

The working together of opposites—two

women dwelling together of opposite temperaments,

or a man and a woman...

Regrets disappear—do not chase a lost horse,

it will return. No danger in seeing an evil person...

Alone and abandoned, you will meet friends...

Alone and abandoned, you see pigs wallowing

in mud and demons riding in carts.

“I
WILL SAY
this for her, Christine’s a trooper.” Alec Mindelbaum removed his glasses and polished them with a paper napkin from the cheap tin holder at one end of the much-stained and cigarette-burned pine table. “I must have shot fourteen takes of her running across the golf course that night while Campbell tried to figure out which way he wanted to light the ground fog. If it hadn’t been for the fog, he could have just shot day for night with a red filter and tinted the stock blue, though you have to be careful about shadows.”

“It was a beautiful sequence,” said Norah, meaning it. “The sense of isolation was stunning.”

“Considering we had Doc LaRousse and his portable generator just outside the frame line, and Gus Campbell tripping over the cables on the ground, and Mary DeNoux tearing the wardrobe tent apart looking for the spare copies of the dress, and the musicians trying to drown it all out with Mussorgsky,” Alec said, “I was pretty proud of how isolated it
did
look. But Gus is a genius at setting shots. It’s a shame Chris can’t act.”

Norah whooped, and he looked stricken.

“I’m sorry. I forgot—”

“Don’t be, because of course it’s quite true.”

He still looked like a flustered teddy bear, and Norah had to smile. He was, she judged, twenty-seven or twenty-eight, the age her husband would have been now if he and a hundred other men had not tried to charge a machine-gun nest in Belgium five years earlier with nothing but rifles in their hands. His dilapidated tweed jacket was on economic par with her too-long frock of black crepe, unfashionable without quite bordering on the antique. Evidently cameramen didn’t earn anything near the salary of a leading lady. Nor, she reflected, did they have the option of sleeping with the head of the studio. Not at Colossus Pictures International, anyway.

Enyart’s Grille, on La Brea Avenue a few blocks south of Chaplin Studios’ row of toy box bungalows, was a simple wooden building with an open kitchen and an L-shaped counter with a polished brass foot rail that hinted trenchantly at what the place had been before Prohibition. It appeared to be the gathering place of cameramen, of men with paint and plaster daubed on rough work clothes, of scenarists with sheaves of paper under their arms—and it seemed to Norah that an awful lot of those people bypassed the makeshift tables and went straight through to a discreet door in the back. A far cry, she thought, from the papier-mâché palms and stuffed monkeys of the Cocoanut Grove or the Baroque Spanish splendors of the Biltmore.

“I forgot you were Christine’s... sister?” He regarded her doubtfully, clearly comparing her height and Irish complexion—not to mention her accent—with the raven-haired pocket Venus who had thus far sent a dozen desperate cinematic fools to love-struck graves.

“Sister-in-law.” Norah looked up as the waiter appeared, a shirtsleeved individual who looked as if he’d been strung together from random lengths of bamboo. “Tea, if you please.” Chang Ming and Black Jasmine emerged from beneath the table to sniff the waiter’s shoes. Buttercreme retreated still farther, as far back as her leash would permit.

“You have to have tea in the place somewhere, Jack,” pointed out the cameraman. “The usual for me. They make an apple cobbler here that brings tears to strong men’s eyes.”

“Well, I haven’t had a good cry in—” The words tripped her as she recalled the circumstances of the last time she had shed tears. She went on quickly. “—in at least a year and a half. Cobbler for me, too.”

Jack winked a bright green eye at her and vanished in the direction of the kitchen.

A year and a half?
Norah had made up the number. She couldn’t remember how long ago she’d stopped crying. There had been a long period—years—of numbness, a feeling of having something broken inside that hurt her beyond bearing every time she moved. She had drawn quiet around her as she would have padded herself in quilts, not moving or wanting to move, waiting stoically to heal. Perhaps that was why it had been so easy to remain in Mrs. Pendergast’s house in spite of the old lady’s tyranny, in spite of Lawrence Pendergast and his boorish friends. She might have had to clean up slop jars and fend off the attentions of men who felt that a woman in service was fair game, but at least she didn’t have to look for a way to live on her own. For a reason to live at all. The pain had eroded her until she wasn’t sure she
could
be or do anything else.

That was when she’d found herself thinking about suicide on her birthday. She didn’t know what she would have done if Christine had not flounced through the door trailing a confusion of mink, cigarette ash, and beads.

She raised her head with a start as the waiter set a white, thick-handled mug in front of her with the air of one disowning all responsibility. The tea was nearly the same color as Mr. Mindelbaum’s coffee. Across the table he was looking at her with concerned eyes.

“Sorry.” She reached for the milk.

He pushed it to her. “That bad?”

“Not really.” She shook her head. “I married Christine’s brother when he was in England on his way to the front. He was killed eight months later. Of course, my family were horrified, but my parents at least didn’t disown me. My grandparents did after my parents and brother died of flu the following year. I nearly died myself. At the time I thought it would have saved me and everyone else a lot of trouble.”

His thick red brows bent together. “They were that set against you marrying an American?”

“They were that set against me marrying a Jew,” Norah replied calmly. “Blackstone started out as, I think, Blechstein.” Her jaw tightened as she remembered what Jim’s parents had called her in the letter she’d received when, in desperation, she’d written to them for help. True, she thought, they were still grieving over his death. But it no longer surprised her that Christine had changed her name from Chava and left home at fifteen years of age.

“Some of my aunts might have helped me—the Anglo-Irish side of the family was all suffragists and socialists and didn’t mind Jim so much—but all but one of them died as well. Our part of London was hit very hard. Mother was desperately overworked—we didn’t have servants by that time—and we simply couldn’t afford a doctor. Father’s money had been invested in Russia, and when their government collapsed, we lost, quite literally, everything. There was no question of my going back to Oxford. I had worked as a VAD, but that was over, too, and I ended up as a companion-cum-maid to a woman in Manchester named Cecily Pendergast: rich, ill, and demanding. I just... shut down.”

She held her hands over the steaming tea, turning them over for warmth. It was a habit she’d acquired in those years, though the yellow-lit restaurant was warm and friendly compared to the cold of the servants’ kitchen where she’d sat all those nights with nothing but tea for either heat or company.

“It’s easy to do when you can’t see a way out.” He carefully turned his coffee cup so that the handle lined up with the grain of the table. “The three years I spent working in a paint factory, I don’t think I said more than ‘Hi, how are you?’ to anybody for months at a time. I had to talk myself into not quitting every night, because what the hell were my mother and sister going to do if I tried to make a living taking pictures?”

The corner of Norah’s lips tugged slightly. “And what
did
they do?”

Mindelbaum blushed at how easily she’d read him. “Well, I had a sort of deus ex machina.”

“As did I. What was yours?”

He shook his head, hesitated a long time, and then said, “The war.”

All those fresh-faced boys wandering in uniform around the London streets, staring at the soot-black Georgian shops and twisting alleyways as if they’d never seen anything so old before... A tall young man with curly black hair gazing around an expensive lingerie shop in the Burlington Arcade as she came through its doors:
Could you maybe help me find something for my sister?

“You enlisted?”

“I left New York so I wouldn’t be drafted.” He pushed his glasses more firmly onto the bridge of his nose. “Friend of ours who ran a tailoring business married my sister for the same reason and took Mama into his household to make double sure they wouldn’t get him. I felt like a heel, but damned if I was going to die at twenty-two because the Kaiser wanted to see if his army could beat the French.”

The brown eyes met hers with a kind of calm defiance, as if he expected her to slap him with her gloves or pull a white feather out of her handbag and give it to him. Instead she poured a dollop of cream into her tea and an even larger dollop over the steaming plate of caramelized fruit that had appeared in front of her at some point during her narrative. “What did you do? I mean, did the draft board trace you?”

Alec shook his head, and his shoulders relaxed. He went back to turning his cup. “I was just one name, and I never stayed in one place very long. I took pictures. Portraits of kids, wedding pictures, church groups, that kind of thing—and, in my spare time, pictures of the things I wanted to take. Old buildings. Dead trees. Empty towns. People’s dogs. I spent months in Louisiana taking pictures of old plantation houses—the ones that got burned out by the Yankees—and what happened to the ones that were left, crumbling back into weeds and ruin. Just seeing what time will do to wood and brick and people’s faces.” He looked up at her again. “What was your deus ex?”

“Dea, in my case,” Norah said, toying with the cobbler. “This past September Christine was vacationing in the south of France and came to England to buy dogs, of all things.” She leaned her head around to look beneath the table. The dogs returned her gaze with big, round, solemn eyes. Five eyes, to be precise—Black Jasmine, like many Pekes, had suffered eye damage as a puppy and had had one eye removed. Indeed, Christine’s willingness to take in a half-blind dog was one of the first signs of kindness Norah had seen in her sister-in-law. When they saw Norah looking down at them, their ostrich-plume tails curled up a little tighter over their backs and they licked their flat noses in anticipation.

“Forget it, children.” She returned her attention to the pie. “I will
not
have Christine feed them from the table, by the way; it makes them into completely intolerable pests, besides being not at all good for them. She bought them in England, you know. She’s a fiend for anything Chinese.”

Mindelbaum grinned and leaned down to ruffle Chang Ming’s lion-colored mane. “Oh, yes. I’ve watched her trying to out-Chinese Flindy McColl for eighteen months now. Flindy got some kind of antique mah-jongg set just before Chris left for France—in retaliation, I think, for the ‘ancient Chinese necklace from the Forbidden City’ that Frank Brown gave Chris. Which read surprisingly well on film, I thought. I wasn’t surprised to see Chris come back with Pekingese.”

Norah rolled her eyes. “I thought there was something behind that. Anyway, the woman who bred these dogs lives outside of Birmingham. Someone told Christine I was in Manchester, but not under what circumstances. Mrs. Pendergast called her a ‘film person’ and insisted that she only be admitted into the kitchen, and the servants’ kitchen at that.”

“Why?” He leaned his chin on his hands, fascinated. “I would have thought a respectable Midlands matron would have fallen all over herself to have a film star in her living room.”

“Not Mrs. Pendergast.” Norah smiled. “She said that Christine was no better than she should be and would probably steal the furniture. She and Christine had a quarrel you could have heard in Blackpool, and the upshot was that Christine said she was taking me out of there. I suspect the fact that the breeder wasn’t about to let her dogs go to someone who hadn’t made provisions for feeding and brushing and caring for them played a part. It occurred to Christine that I would be ideal. Prior to that afternoon,” Norah added with a kind of wonder, “I would no more have considered living in Hollywood than I would have considered relocating to the South Pole. Then, the next morning, I was getting on a boat. It was...very odd.”

Under the table Buttercreme stood on her hind legs and put delicate forepaws on Norah’s shin, gazing up at her with melting eyes. Norah sighed. “All right, princess, up you come. But don’t presume on it.” She hoisted the ivory-pale bitch to her lap.

“You glad you did?”

She thought for a moment.
God, am I!
seemed the appropriate reply. Yet she remembered the nights of anxiety in her tiny servant-class stateroom, her exhaustion and misery as she rebelled against the never-ending stench of Christine’s cigarettes in her clothes and hair, the other woman’s nonstop brainless blithering, and those occasions when she’d had to help her—incapably drunk or giggling helplessly on cocaine—to bed. How many nights, she wondered, had she sat on the floor with Black Jasmine or Buttercreme in her arms, wishing with all her heart she was back in her dreary but familiar attic in Manchester?