The Property of a Lady (50 page)

Fighting back her tears, she turned and ran down the stairs, nauseated by the scene and the familiar reek of rotting vegetables and fish. Outside, she stopped and looked around at Rivington Street: The vendors were still loudly hawking their wares and the women were still
proudly striking their bargains; dogs and cats and small children still lurked underfoot among the pushcart wheels. Nothing was different—and yet everything was changed. Sofia was gone, and O’Hara; Zev, and now Rosa. She knew she no longer belonged there.

After stopping to buy an enormous bunch of flowers, she walked quickly to St. Savior’s, where she went inside and lighted a candle for Sofia. Then she placed the flowers on her grave and sat for a long time, remembering. Finally she thought about her future. She could hardly go to O’Hara and ask him to help her, not after she had gone and married someone else. And now Zev had disappeared too. She must just go to Hollywood and find Rosa.

After hurrying from the cemetery, she took the el back up to Second Avenue and hailed a cab. On an impulse she asked the cabbie to drive past the New Amsterdam Theater, peering from the window at the marquee blazing with familiar names. Only now there was a new “featured” Ziegfeld girl. Verity Byron’s brief spurt of fame was already forgotten and she was yesterday’s news, the one who had married the millionaire and gone to live in Europe.

She had two thousand four hundred dollars in her purse, no small sum if used carefully, and she had certainly learned how to do that. She would have to find a new way to make her living, for now she had two enemies to hide from, because Eddie Arnhaldt was as ruthless a foe as the Cheka. But Hollywood was a place where everybody gave themselves a brand-new name and a new family history and became someone else for the benefit of the silver screen. It seemed to her to be as good a place as any to find anonymity.

Hollywood

Rosa’s Hollywood living quarters were very little different from New York; a single room instead of two, a few sticks of furniture, an old bed where the four of them slept top and tail, a kitchen shared with the other boarders, and a bathroom down the hall. The only change was that this was on the ground floor of a weatherboarded house with a porch tacked onto the front, a square of rusty grass beyond, and a view over the Hollywood Cemetery. And it was on the wrong corner of a street called Gower, where Sunset met Santa Monica.

Its disadvantages were that it was dismal, cramped, and hot as hell in the long summer and dismal, cold, and damp when it rained in winter—which it did occasionally and more heavily than she had been led to expect. Its advantages were that the view of the flowery Hollywood Hills with their backdrop of purple-bronze mountains offered a daily changing feast for her eyes, sometimes tipped with the pale blush-gold of daybreak when the air sparkled like crystal, sometimes broiling to a brown noonday crisp, and sometimes glazed with a roseate varnish as the giant red sun shifted westward over Santa Monica like some epic D. W. Griffith movie set in the sky.

Rosa was in love with Hollywood, only she wasn’t so sure Hollywood was in love with her. She loved the palm trees and the pepper trees, the yucca and oleander and hibiscus; their colors made her feel like a tropical flower
herself, ripening and unfolding her yearning petals in the sun—though what she yearned for she did not know. She loved the make-believe she saw enacted daily on the streets where “thieves” fled with swag bags while black-eyed “damsels” in yellow makeup screamed in distress as the cameraman turned his reels frantically to keep pace with the action. She loved seeing faces familiar from magazines at the corner drugstore in Hollywood where she worked, laughing and drinking sodas just like regular people, or stepping into their luxury automobiles, swanky imported Rolls-Royces and Bugattis and de Courmonts. Once she had even served the personal maid of the Nation’s Sweetheart herself, who had come by to pick up the special cream Miss Pickford used to keep her skin beautiful for the benefit of her fans. But most of all, she liked the way her three kids were able to play outdoors in the sunshine, away from the grime and filth and dangerous traffic of the Lower East Side. Poor they might still be but they were healthier and happier, not least because Meyer was finally out of their lives. Yes, there was no doubt about it, Rosa told herself, smiling as she sat on the porch in the cool of the evening, she felt like a woman again, a young girl even. Finally. After all these years and three kids.

And her kids were something else again. Sonia loved Hollywood High and was already determined to be a teacher, though where she would find the money for college she didn’t know. Hannah and Rachel were as movie-crazy as their mother and wanted to be in pictures, and Rosa was as ambitious for them as any true stage mother. She would do the rounds of the casting offices at the nearby studios, a neatly brushed and furbished child on each hand, starting with National on the opposite corner from the house and progressing through Metro at Romaine and Wilcox, Famous Players-Lasky on Selma, Chaplin at La Brea, and Griffith on Sunset. They were all
within easy walking distance—the rest were out because they would have meant trolley-car fares.

The girls were pretty like her, with merry dark eyes and tumbling dark curls, and their plump, smiling innocent faces had already gained them several small roles as “walk-ons”—just one step up from extras really, but at least it meant the casting directors knew them by name, and there was always the chance they would think of them when the perfect role came along. That’s the only way it was in Hollywood, they had told her: One day you’re nothing, the next a star! And Rosa believed it.

Meanwhile, she worked at the drugstore and earned her own money. Of course it wasn’t enough, but under this wonderful California blue sky and warm sunshine, good fortune was always just around the next corner. Hollywood bred hope in a thousand hearts, and Rosa’s was one of them.

She rocked slowly on the porch, enjoying the peace. Occasionally an automobile would stutter past but mostly there were only the bird songs and cicadas to disturb her. Sonia was studying and the other two were playing with the kids from next door, probably racing illicitly around the gravestones in Hollywood Cemetery’s four acres. The sun dropped low in the sky, sending a dusty golden light through her closed lids as she drifted contentedly, feeling a million miles away from Meyer and the Lower East Side. And from Missie, whom she missed like crazy. But she was thousands of miles away now—as far away as the stars. Her own life might not be the fairy tale Missie’s was, but she had found a sort of peace.

She barely heard the sound of footsteps approaching, and she thought she must be dreaming when Missie’s voice said, “There you are, Rosa. At last!”

But it wasn’t a dream and Missie wasn’t as far away as the stars. She was right there, with her back to the sun so she couldn’t see her face properly, but she knew she was smiling.

“Missie!” she cried, leaping up and holding out her arms. “Such a surprise! Oh, am I glad to see you!”

They hugged each other tightly, tears of joy mingling as they stumbled through their stories….

“You first,” Rosa said, laughing. “Tell me all about your wonderful new life. And what are you doing here?”

“But it’s not wonderful,” Missie exclaimed. “It was a nightmare! I’ve run away, and that’s why I came to find you. The woman at Meyer’s place told me you had come to Hollywood. I knew the children would be in school so I went to each one and asked if they had any Perelmans on their student roster.” She grinned. “I’m getting quite good at detective work.”

“Then you know what happened to me,” Rosa said bitterly. “So? Tell me all.”

Missie nodded. “But first, what news of Zev? Is he here in Hollywood?”

“No one seems to have heard of him.” She shrugged. “No news is bad news, they say. Maybe he went back to New York and pawnbroking.”

“I would have liked to have seen him,” Missie said wistfully, surprised how disappointed she felt. Zev had been part of her life, like O’Hara, and now it seemed she had lost them both.

“Very well,” she said, “now I’ll tell you what happened. But this time I’ll tell you everything from the beginning. No more secrets.”

Rosa listened in silence and then she said practically, “Okay, so now what?”

Missie eyed her doubtfully. “I don’t know. All I knew was I must find you. I have just over two thousand dollars left—I thought I could get a job.”

“Two thousand dollars!
Why, you could buy this house for a lot less than that!” A thoughtful expression crossed her face as she considered what she had just said. “Missie,” she exclaimed excitedly, “I think I have just found us an answer.”

The Rosemont Rooming House was on Fountain Avenue between La Brea and Seward. They had chosen it because there were a dozen movie studios nearby, and therefore it was handy for aspiring actors and actresses to do their daily rounds. The ramshackle weatherboarded house had been patched up and given a coat of paint with green trim at the windows and doors, and it now offered half a dozen freshly decorated double rooms and two singles, with board extra for those who wanted it.

Missie and Rosa had worked hard to make it the sort of clean, airy place they wished they could have found when they had needed a room, and the big central hall had been turned into a sitting room filled with comfortable secondhand chairs, a card table, a tea table, a piano, and a Victrola. The chairs spilled out onto the wooden porch overlooking the white and pink stucco houses opposite, and the tree-lined street was as peaceful as a country lane.

The bungalow in the back garden became their own living quarters, where the girls slept two to a room and Rosa and Missie each had their own small rooms. Beulah had refused Missie’s offer to pay her fare back east plus three months’ wages and had decided to stay. She had her own room behind the kitchen at Rosemont, where she was now officially housekeeper, though for the moment unpaid. And Viktor, the dog, was master of the choicest shady spot on the front porch.

The only trouble was, they didn’t yet have any boarders and the money had almost run out.

“We must advertise,” Missie said as they glanced worriedly at each other across the dinner table. “We shall get the girls to hand-letter some leaflets and distribute them to the studios.”

They trudged around Hollywood dropping their leaflets in every waiting room at every casting office, and two days later they got their first boarder, a bright fair-haired young man with a pleasant round face and thick glasses.
His name was Dick Nevern and he was an aspiring director. He took the smallest single room and paid one month’s cash in advance, peeled, Rosa noted as he handed it to her, from a very small roll of bills.

Because he was their only boarder they decided he might as well eat with the family, and he kept them entertained with stories of his home out on the vast wheat plains of Oklahoma, where life drifted slowly and inevitably from the old red schoolhouse to teenage square dances, to work on the family farm and marriage to the girl next door, to a rocking chair on the porch and dungarees, a wide-brimmed hat, and a straw in the corner of your mouth as you dozed the time away and swatted flies.

“So what makes you think you can be a movie director?” Missie asked.

Dick took off his thick glasses and polished them, peering at her with myopic red-rimmed eyes. “Y’jest learn how to really see things out there on the plains. There’s sumpin’ about all that space, those broad horizons, that stretches the eye, puts everything into perspective, every tree and every object into its rightful place. I’ve rearranged that landscape so many times I reckon it’d be child’s play to do what Mr. Griffith does. It’s characters I’m not too sure about. I haven’t had much truck with strangers….”

“You’ll do just fine,” Missie reassured him. “You’re having no trouble with us.”

“And how long do you give yourself before you become this big director like Mr. Griffith?” Rosa asked, thinking worriedly about her rent.

“Ah’ve given myself exactly three months, that’s ‘bout as long as my money will last.” He finished polishing his glasses, put them back on his blunt nose, and beamed at them. “That’s time enough, don’t y’think?”