In the Beauty of the Lilies (40 page)

“Goodness, Daddy, it’s your life. If you want to quit, do. Money shouldn’t be a problem any more.” She was conscious, as she said this, of the light from the front parlor defining the good side of her face, so she looked, her chin demurely down and her eyes lifted with a composed filial ardor—like Olivia de Havilland as an heiress.

“Oh now,” he said, and looked sad and wise, though his pale-brown hair was hardly touched by gray and his daily buffeting by the weather had kept his face young and full and undefined, “money’s never not a problem,” and that was true. The more she made, the bigger Arnie’s slice became, the more the government took to pay people like Danny to fight
their Cold War, and the more people in general expected her to spend. To house her first marriage four years ago—to a director’s assistant who yearned to become a director but lacked the balls as well as the touch, that brash and clever European touch the Jews had brought to it when the industry was young and pliant—Alma had bought a house in Beverly Hills, north of Sunset Boulevard in Coldwater Canyon, on a high winding road called Montevideo Drive. The house was old for California and, in a neighborhood of mock-Tudor timbering and sprawling wings roofed in Spanish tile, unusual in looking Victorian, with a slated mansard roof and spindly wrought-iron pinnacles ornamenting an off-center six-sided cupola; it was a heightened version, she slowly realized, of the big old house on Willow Street where her great-aunt Esther had lived, and where her father had come to live and then brought his bride, until Uncle Horace like a movie villain had moved back and ousted them. Little Essie had never ventured inside, though from the sidewalk she had often admired the place, her childish eyes drawn to the white-painted backyard gazebo. The first marriage had lasted little more than a year, but she still owned the house, with its taxes and falling slates and leaking old-style concrete swimming pool.

Irritated by thoughts of money, she turned on her brother. “What are you going to
do
with all those Slavic languages?” she asked him. His presence in her life had always seemed a kind of babyish squawking. If she was as perfect as Momma said, why had he been called into the family, too?

But he had grown suave, in a gray-suited anonymous Washington way, and smiled like a man who keeps many secrets. “Do? I’ll speak with the Slavs, Sis, and make friends for America. I’ll help the U.S. keep a presence, even in countries
presently disposed to be unsympathetic. You think this is silly, your tone of voice implies. Sillier than making movies?”

“Well, Danny darling, the movies have never pretended to be anything except entertainment. But what you’re doing pretends to be a good deal more.”

“It pretends to be history,” he said quickly. “It
is
history. Cast of billions. The future of the globe at stake. I kid you not.” He looked around at the others of the family gathered here in the kitchen. No one budged a tongue to interfere; was Alma paranoid, or were they watching to see how much this kid brother could chop her down to size?

“Oh,” Alma replied, with a languid and ladylike gesture, “I’m sure you’re right, dear Danny, but it seems so much like boys’ games. Two big bald boys, now that Khrushchev has foiled his little coup.”

“It wasn’t so little, actually,” Danny said, with an insider’s authority. “It was back to Stalinism, is what it was. I guess even you Hollywood reds don’t want that.” He leaned toward her earnestly, his glasses flashing: “Sis, how can you be so blithe, after what those bastards did last year in Hungary? They’re bar
bar
ians.”

Alma said, wishing to wave this awkward political heat away, “This country wouldn’t be so high and mighty if it weren’t for Stalin and Stalingrad.”

Now Jefferson and Ira Pulsifer, who had been watching television with Danny in the front parlor and had ransacked the channels in his absence, followed him into the stiflingly hot kitchen. Their older brother, Peter Junior, was bumming around Europe this summer, the way young people did now, as if the Atlantic were no wider than the Delaware. The boys had Peter’s preppy bounce but something of their mother’s papery white skin and wised-up way of talking. “Aunt Alma,”
fifteen-year-old Ira called, “when are you going to come on television?”

“I was on television when it was young,” she told him. “It was a rat race, my dears.” Interview mode came naturally to her by now.

“Television’s where it’s at,” Jefferson, called Jeff, chimed in. “Lucille Ball is making out like a bandit.”

“Dinah Shore’s on television,” Ira added, his voice rising and cracking as he picked up on the curious atmosphere in the room, the celebrity electricity. “Jack Benny, Alfred Hitchcock.”

“Some people sell out, Jeffie,” she said, tapping the ash of her cigarette—a charcoal-filtered Herbert Tareyton—into a saucer, with a pattern imitating sampler stitches, that had been a Tuesday-night giveaway at the Roxie twenty years ago, “and others try to make enduring art.”

The boys decided this was meant to be funny and laughed. Their adolescent hunger had injected a fresh heat into the kitchen. Daddy had got up to help Momma lift the turkey out of the oven and ease it onto its platter, and to take the pot of mashed sweet potatoes off the stove. Though they had bought one of the new tinted refrigerators, an enamelled lime-green, and an electric stove to match, and the plywood counter had been covered with Con-Tact paper patterned in hollow boomerangs, it remained an old-fashioned kitchen, with geraniums on the windowsill above the sink and a wainscoting of stained tongue-and-groove boards and a host of agitated flies. They still tacked up flypaper here in Delaware—amber helixes some of whose captives showed a spark of buzzing, slow-dying life. Alma had forgotten how muggy and buggy Delaware was in August. This humid heat used to be her element, in which her skinny brown limbs waded to the playground and back, to the greenhouse and beyond, to where
the marsh, with its furtive citizenry of turtles and minnows and egrets, stretched miles toward the broadening river. She found she was homesick for the dry desert heat of southern California—the nights so cool a light sweater comforts your shoulders and arms, the gaudy stars close overhead, the giant lit grid stretching south from the Santa Monica foothills. When you climb up from the pool a rainbow like an oil-glimmer is caught in your lashes, and as you arrange yourself on the chaise of plastic ribbons you shiver with the speed of evaporation and hear the sound of Spanish being spoken by the gardeners and the maids, the murmur of traffic from Doheny Road and Coldwater Canyon Drive; you hear the accent of action, of deals among beautiful people being transparently done, in the air, the bare blue desert air getting ready for its winter role, as indigo background, soft as velour, for the grassy hills’ winter dress of flammable gold.

She had allotted three days before Labor Day for Basingstoke, between an appointment in New York—Arnie found less and less strength for the flight to L.A., though the new jets cut the flying time in half—and a party in Bel Air where her escort would be a young curly-haired scriptwriter who, like Ama, knew how to make her laugh. But even three days seemed long. Her parents were a bit frightened of her, she realized, and not entirely approving. Her name had been bandied about by the gossip industry (ridiculous supposed liaisons—Rock Hudson, for God’s sake!), and too many journalists, piqued by a mailman’s being a movie star’s father, had intruded on the truce Daddy had arranged with the world. When the reporters came, Momma would hop upstairs and hide, just like her own reclusive mother.

Ama had her lucid and energetic intervals and then spells of what Dr. Jessup called “sundowning.” On the third day,
she felt too tired to come downstairs and had asked Essie to sit by her bed a little. She rested a dry claw, still warm, in her granddaughter’s moist, shapely, long-nailed hand and gazed at her with a pleasure that pierced the rheumy veil across her plum-black eyes. Her eyes had been so strained by a lifetime of fine sewing that their black skiddingly flooded the thick lenses of her glasses; without her glasses, her eyes seemed pathetically small. “You are a miracle,” she pronounced at last, having gazed her fill. “Though I don’t know why they had to make your hair darker than it was. And change your perfectly good American name. I always knew it would happen. Oh, I always knew. When Clarence—when he—fell,” she brought out, “it was so sudden and uncalled-for, there had to be something to—you know, I
do
believe it was the Devil himself, there’s no other explanation, it was pure temptation, though you may take me for a fool when I say it—”

“No, no. But you were saying, ‘There had to be something to’—”

“To make it come right in the end.”

“Like in the movies,” Alma smiled.

“Like a movie, dearest. Oh, exactly. Give us a kiss from those gorgeous lips.”

Alma aimed for the dry old cheek but Ama turned her face to be kissed on the lips. When Alma backed away, a dulling veil had returned to the old woman’s eyes. “I’ll try to be here when you come again,” she said, fumbling like a blind woman for the other’s hand, “but I can’t make any promises. You know,” she added, in quite another, rather aggrieved tone, “—this is something I can say to you now that you’re no longer a Wilmot—the Wilmots, well, they have a trait, if I can bring myself to name it—”

“Yes, Ama? What? A trait?”

The old lady had turned a bit pink. “They’re, well,
self
ish. It comes out in different ways, but that’s what they are. Your grandfather could have gone on in the ministry—a lot of us have doubts, but we just brush them under the table and get on with the job. My goodness, yes.”

Papa Sifford, pottering around in the great glass prism that a visitor stepped down into and that was floored with mossy dirt, less directly extended his blessing. His mode was silence, and letting Nature take her course. The fat had leaked from his creased jowls and they fell like hound flaps. “It gave me a start,” he admitted, “when you came in, you have such a likeness to Tabitha the first time I saw her. They were picking squash, over toward Cheswold, and here this smallest of the field girls was carrying the biggest load in her bushel basket. Now, Essie, since you’re around, I could use a strong back. The cyclamen have been getting too much heat at night, and I thought to put them under the tables over on the north side. The boy who waters for me won’t take the trouble to keep the water off the leaves, he just turns the hose on spray and daydreams. They don’t follow orders any more, they do everything their way. Now he’s off, would you believe, at practice for the high-school football team. This is the first year the squad’s to be—what’s the word?”

“Integrated?” For more than an hour Alma performed with her grandfather the old ritual, which to little Essie had seemed to take endless patience, of moving the flats holding six potted plants from one table with its rusty grid and white-painted wood over to another in another portion of the greenhouse, where the sun’s rays fell with a slightly different intensity and the circulating air caressed the mute green leaves somehow more encouragingly. A few customers came in and out of the greenhouse, but with her hair up in a bandana and her lips and
face innocent of make-up, they did not recognize her. Perhaps they were strangers brought to live in Basingstoke by the new refinery and holding tanks built along the river, in the saltwater marshes, just north of where the Avon used to find the sea through a maze of tidal channels and a set of rocks that boys could fish from. There was no fishing now; just an eight-foot electrified fence, and several new tracts of ranch houses between here and there. Or perhaps they were townspeople who, inching through their own lives in that molelike small-town way, assumed that Essie Wilmot had never left.

She carried plants back and forth—potted yellow and orange mums into the direct sun on the south side, checking under the leaves for spider mites; red and pink rosebud impatiens grown in hanging pots; some garish flats of
Kalanchoe blossfeldiana
, which the old man called Flaming Katie, pinching back the flowers to give better fall blooms—and imagined herself one of them, lifted up and set down in a place where she would be happier and could better grow. Her arms ached when she was done. He took her down into the bulb cellar, beyond the giant disused old coal-burner, converted after the war to oil with an automatic feed, though there was still a broad wooden bench beside it, and a grimy mattress. “That bench would get mighty hard after a solid week of tending,” he allowed. In the dim cool light of the dirt-floored cellar, freesia and hyacinth, daffodil and lily bulbs were laid out in plastic trays of potting soil like so many tidy gravesites certain of resurrection. When they got an inch or so high, with a good root system, they would be suspended in the dark at forty degrees until it was time to take them up into the greenhouse heat and light and force them for the Christmas trade. Participating in the old man’s numb, silent pride as he surveyed this buried wealth, Alma was aware of, for a second or two, forgetting herself.

“What a lovely time we had together, Grandpa,” she said in parting. Tears, since she had learned to cry on cue, rarely came to her eyes spontaneously.

“It kept us out of mischief,” he allowed, with a twitch of one of his dewlaps, hinting his private opinion that mischief was what her life now mostly consisted of.

In Essie’s experience, her prayers were generally answered, if not always as promptly as she wished. She did get her wish to make a musical comedy—a Warner remake of
The Strawberry Blonde
, resplendent in Vistarama, co-starring Bing Crosby, with Dick Van Dyke in the Jack Carson role and Janet Leigh as Olivia de Havilland. Crosby did not let the nearly thirty years’ difference between himself and his leading lady show onscreen; he had recently married the even younger actress Kathryn Grant, who had been with Essie in the making of
The Last Time We Saw Topeka
, and who now visited the Warner lot in a majestic state of pregnancy. The child, Harry Lillis Crosby, Jr., was born a month after the film wrapped. The film couple—Alma in a henna-rinsed pompadour, and the senior Harry Lillis Crosby in a toupee that had its own red tinge—weightlessly waltzed from one side of the curved screen to the other, and entwined voices for a gentle duet that amazed the musical insiders by going platinum. “And they wanted me dubbed,” said Alma at the 1959 Grammy awards, as the audience roared with laughter. The Hollywood crowd had softened toward her, as she had grown from a challenging, willful ingenue to a seasoned, adaptable screen veteran.