In the Beauty of the Lilies (39 page)

“Loretta,” Alma said decisively. “Filming a romantic scene isn’t fooling around. It’s
work
, hard work. Sometimes it takes several days of shooting to get footage from all the angles, to do all they’ll need for the montage. Your main emotion gets to be a feeling of protectiveness toward the guy stuck there with you under all those lights, especially if he’s old enough to be your father. It’s supposed to simulate fucking but you don’t fuck around.” In Hollywood “fuck” didn’t hide in the shadows of the language but named a fundamental process, a common coin of the realm.

Loretta couldn’t be derailed, any more than she could be dissuaded twenty years ago from telling Essie the entire story of
One Hundred Men and a Girl
. “I mean, what happens if, while you’re stimulating, the guy—?”

“You work around it,” Alma said, grateful to see in the corner of her vision an autograph-seeker approach, with that characteristic hesitant yet inexorable gait.

“Miss DeMott, I don’t mean to intrude into your privacy—”

“Oh, shit, come right ahead,” Alma said, irritated to the point of screaming by thoughts of Audrey Hepburn and Natalie Wood.

“—but I know your folks so well, your father’s been our mailman as long as I can—”

“He’s everybody’s mailman,” Alma told the young man. “He even used to be my mailman.” The interloper held out an old fountain pen. She scrawled her signature, which got bigger every day, over a grubby newspaper clipping from the Wilmington
News-Journal
he had brought up to her, a ridiculously exaggerated account of the local furor caused by those few seconds of exposure in
Safe at Your Peril
, something he had saved as a dog saves a grubby slobbered-upon bone; yet she took care to cross the two “t”s. She believed in not letting standards slip—you saw it again and again in Hollywood, a little drinking habit leading to a weight problem and memory gaps, one little pop at lunch leading to a couple and a wasted afternoon on the set for a crew of fifty, an occasional sleeping pill turning into a continual daze, one hack job taken purely for the money starting a director on the skids, one less-than-professional performance tainting an actress’s name throughout the industry. She kept herself professional, trim, sober, taut. Not for nothing was Alma a Calvinist minister’s granddaughter. She looked at her index finger; as she had suspected would happen, the creep’s fountain pen had leaked.

“Jesus, I just
loved
you in
Colored Entrance
, but
Safe at Your Peril
, wow, I think I must have seen it a dozen times—” This was so excessive, even for an enamored fan, that she at last tried to focus on him—he was tall and pale and wet-lipped and made to look even more cretinous by the green plastic sun visor and the plaid Bermuda shorts. You never used to see a grown-up wearing shorts on Rodney Street. The man was
young but old enough to know better. His shoulders and arms were sunburned pink, his eyes were pale and apologetic, and she recognized something in him, some fallen distinction: he had a sheepish stale scent of downscaled expectations, of genetic washout. Yes: he looked, only taller and duller and less self-disciplined, like whey-faced Mr. Phillips, who used to own the Basingstoke Savings Bank and was the superintendent of the Sunday school. This must be his son, Wayne Junior, whom Essie had last noticed when he was a lumpish thirteen or so and she was in her senior year, going back and forth to New York. The bank had been absorbed by First Delaware and the son had become an Alma DeMott fan.

“A dozen times?” she said. “Didn’t you get bored?”

“No, Jesus, Alma, never—every time through, I see something new. The way, for instance, in the scene with the gun, with just that little flicker of your eyes, hardly even a flicker, more like a blip in your pupils, I can see you thinking,
Well, death wouldn’t be so bad
. And then he plugs you, right in the gut.” She had a lot of queers and misfits in her fan club—the same types as were morbidly fascinated by Garland—and at times they irritated her.

“It was very nice to meet you,” she said, in the level tone that sent all but the most deranged stalker packing, and turned her shoulder on him, and again had that sensation of invisible rays from her body sweeping like a scythe across the sky.

Wayne Junior retreated down Elm Street, clutching his carefully scribbled-upon piece of newspaper, but Loretta was still there, demanding her prerogative as one who knew her when—as, indeed, her best friend, insofar as fanatically dreaming Essie had had friends. Standing ignored in the hot sun on the corner across from Pursey’s Notions and Variety
Store, her boys in their stroller beginning to whine and quarrel, Loretta had felt snubbed and become spiteful in turn. “And you know, of course,” she told Alma, “about Jamie Ingraham—how he’s married this lovely blonde girl from Brandywine, her father’s very high up in one of the Du Pont divisions. They have a little baby girl already.”

And yes, shrewd stringy-haired overweight Loretta was right, this did hurt, the image of Jamie impregnating a lovely well-born blonde, not in the back seat of his father’s blue Chrysler but in a wide bed blessed by all the powers of church and corporation.

At home, when Alma described, with omissions, her encounters downtown, Momma said, “Yes, poor Wayne is a little impaired. I remember his mother carrying him, Danny was already toddling so you must have been five or so, and there was a scare that Basingstoke Savings would go under to the Depression, and I wonder if that didn’t pinch off the fetus.”

“Mother! What a ridiculous theory!”

“Well,” Momma said, swinging with her infuriating hopping gait around the kitchen table (her limp was getting worse with age) to check on the turkey roasting in the oven, “you haven’t had the experience yet of carrying a child, and believe me there
is
communication, from about the fifth month. The little thing is listening to your thoughts, and letting you know about it.”

Ama, sitting idle at the table, said in a shaky voice, “Clarence used to say, if the baby cried while being baptized, it meant the parents had a good love life.” Ama had turned ninety in May. Alma had wanted to come to the birthday party, but she was on location in England, doing a tearjerker,
But Now Is Forever
, set in the American Midwest. Shooting in
foreign studios, with smaller foreign crews working at less than Hollywood union scale, had become the latest maneuver in an industry desperate over its dwindling audiences and blockbuster flops. But the outdoor scenes in
But Now Is Forever
had been plagued by rain, and in any weather the sky was wrong, loaded with hurrying British clouds, and the highways were miscast as American roads, even when all traffic had been blocked off so the rented American automobiles could drive on the right; after the cost of constructing an American-style roadside café and a piece of a spacious Midwestern Main Street had been calculated in, it would have been cheaper to stay on a Burbank sound stage, with a week’s worth of location work in Kansas. Like a gambler growing desperate, the industry was making silly mistakes. Aside from the dismal English weather, Alma had found Frank Capra, aged twenty years since the glory days of Mr. Deeds and
Lost Horizon
, capricious and corny-minded; the kind of moral ambiguity and wary, wounded pessimism that Alma DeMott represented had no place in his sentimental concept of America. He directed her to lighten up. “Let the audience know you love the bastard, down deep. When sparks fly, that’s love.” Old-hat folk psychology. Alma was tired, in any case, of playing “gutsy,” suffering women; she knew she could do a musical sexier than any that poor dazed Judy or one-dimensional Doris could whip up. Feeling guilty, Alma had run into Harrods and sent off to her ancient grandmother for her birthday present a sumptuous black cashmere greatcoat with wide sleeves, stand-up collar, and slashed pockets. Seeing Ama now, she realized the coat had been not only too stylish but too big; her, remembered as enormous, ancestor had shrunk, and even her head of hair, gray with a few pallid streaks of chestnut, had become skimpier,
so the old lady’s scalp showed through in the harsh overhead kitchen light.

Yet she still made Alma laugh. “Why, Ama, what a racy thing for Grandfather Wilmot to say!”

“Oh, yes,” Ama said, in a voice that if Alma closed her eyes sounded through its quavers like the voice in which Ama used to read little Essie and Mr. Bear their bedtime stories, “he was a normal man. At those church socials back in Jackson Bluffs he had to fight the ladies off, and not all of them unmarried either. He wouldn’t have been one of those who preached against my own sweet granddaughter for showing the whole world what it knew she had anyway, a cute little backside.”

Was this going to be what Alma was remembered for, that fleeting nude scene in
Safe at Your Peril
? It had roused protests and cost bookings throughout the Bible Belt, though not as many as the interracial kiss in
Colored Entrance
. It made the star impatient and weary to hear her films mentioned in this her old home; they had been made so far away, in another climate and time zone, and their challenges and triumphs were so hard to grasp without the technical background, and without understanding how embattled and ingeniously self-regarding the art of the cinema was, that she would rather her family would pretend they didn’t exist. It was bad enough for Daddy and Momma to show up dutifully at the Roxie, where they said the heads of the audience these days were sometimes few enough to count, but it carried family piety to an obscene length for them to drag dear shrunken Ama down there, subjecting the ancient lady to two hours of simulated love-frenzy and of the increasingly graphic male violence that was another aspect of Hollywood’s attempt to update its product, to shave away at the Production Code, to offer the
public something, besides distorting width and flashy color and blaring stereophonic sound, that they couldn’t get on the cozy little screen at home. Internationally public as it was, Alma’s film career embarrassed her here in Basingstoke—her instinct was to hide it, as something private and shameful and impossible to explain, just as her daydreams in childhood, and her masturbation and then her experiments with the opposite sex, had been. Mentioning her movies at this kitchen table was, she irrationally felt, poor taste on her family’s part.

Aunt Esther, clutching a Kent in one hand and in the other an orange-juice glass full of neat whiskey, volunteered, “Disgusting hypocrites. They should have been around in the Twenties—some of those dives in Harlem and the East Village Jare used to take us to had shows after midnight that would make your hair curl. Prohibition took the lid off. Breaking one law, you might as well break ’em all. People got so upset at Josephine Baker over in Paris, but at least she wore a bunch of bananas.” Her voice was slurred; she slid her slivery blue eyes across their faces, uncertain of who her audience was.

Uncle Peter said, to back her up, “Not to mention some of the tent shows in country fairs right around Basingstoke—Basingstoke that’s supposed to be so innocent.” That social shunning, the loss of clients, back then still rankled. Holding his own tumbler of whiskey, he rested the other hand on his wife’s shoulder. He had made her, his gesture said; they had made each other.

Alma didn’t like being grouped with the performers in tent shows and Harlem dives, but when she inhaled to protest she knew she would stutter if she tried it; her father, always alert to others’ pain, saw her famously voluptuous mouth open and close in this pathetic way, and said, “Essie, we’re all just
dumbfounded at what you’ve accomplished. I don’t think any of us can actually comprehend it. Isn’t that right, Mother?”

“It is,” Momma said simply, and produced the familiar shadow of her dimple. “But I was never surprised. She was perfection from Day One.”

Danny, as if hearing himself slighted, came into the kitchen from the living room, where he had been watching the six o’clock news on television. “Well, the Soviets have successfully tested their intercontinental ballistic missile,” he announced aggressively. “So they have one, and we don’t. First Rudolf Abel, now this. A master spy sitting right there in Brooklyn for nine years, with a radio transmitter!” He sounded the way he did when Essie had been allowed to do something that he wasn’t. Though, being a boy, he eventually got to do a lot of things she hadn’t. Since she had been in Hollywood, Danny had grown awkwardly tall, with the round Sifford head on the skinny Wilmot frame, and had graduated from Rutgers and, rather than go on to business school or one of the professions (though Alma had offered to finance him), had accepted some kind of job with the State Department, who were sending him to school to learn Slavic languages, eight hours a day. He wore thick glasses, with flesh-tinted plastic rims. “And oh yeah, Sis—this would interest you. The Southerners in the Senate are giving up the filibuster so it looks like the voting-rights bill will get to Ike’s desk.”

“Well, good,” she said, taken aback. “I don’t know why you think that would especially interest me. I would think it would please any American. It’s about a hundred years late.”
You nigger-kissing cunt
, one of her fan letters had begun, and went on, getting worse. But she didn’t like being seen as a wild Hollywood liberal here in Basingstoke. She felt besieged;
family holidays had always been like this, everybody crowding into the kitchen and getting in the cook’s way, with the smells of the meal getting warmer and riper and a little sickening. Now her infrequent homecomings had become a kind of holiday, with townspeople walking slowly by the house and peering in, and every jerk who ever went to Basingstoke High claiming to be a classmate of hers, and her own parents acting a little uncertain and shy and deferential. Only Ama, and Alma’s other surviving grandparent, Daniel Sifford, made her feel like a child again—safe and casually cherished. They were both absent-minded enough to forget who she had become. Arthritis and dropsy had so slowed the old farmer, with just Momma and a few increasingly insolent Negro boys to help him, that there was talk of Daddy giving up being a mailman so he and Momma could take over the greenhouse. “If I retire at fifty-five,” he had explained to his daughter, “I’ll get two-thirds of the pension, and now that you were good enough to pay off our mortgage there isn’t the need for steady income there was. But Mother and I want your say-so before we do anything.”