The Property of a Lady (61 page)

He turned slowly to look at her, hope in his eyes. “Then you will?”

She nodded. “Yes, I will marry you. I love you more than I’ve loved any man.” She touched her hand to Misha’s brooch and added, “In a different sort of way.”

He shook his head. “I don’t care about such different ways. All I know is you love me.” He scooped her joyously into his arms. “What I want to know is, when?”

“Give me a month,” she said, thinking of O’Hara and
their whirlwind marriage. “But just a small wedding, Zev. Just family.”

Zev got through the next four weeks in a state of nervous tension, half afraid she would change her mind. He buried himself in his work, refusing to allow his thoughts to stray to her, but secretly he was living for those precious evening hours when they were together.

Only Rosa, Rachel, Hannah, and Sonia were invited to the wedding, and Azaylee was to be bridesmaid. Dick Nevern, as Zev’s closest associate and friend, would give the bride away. The wedding was to be at Beverly Hills City Hall on Canon Drive with a reception afterward at Zev’s house.

Magic was in the middle of filming
Marietta in the Mountains
, starring Azaylee, a sequel to the successful
Marietta
, and Zev was loath to leave final approval in anyone’s hands but his own, so the honeymoon was postponed until it was finished. Meanwhile Azaylee would stay with Rosa.

But Missie realized something was wrong. Azaylee would set off for the studios each morning full of laughter and girlish chatter and return each evening limp and exhausted. She would eat her supper silently and, after complaining she was tired, go immediately to bed.

A week before the wedding, Missie decided she could stand it no longer and followed her up the stairs. Azaylee was lying fully dressed on the bed, clutching her favorite little French doll O’Hara had given her all those years ago on the trip to New Jersey. She thought guiltily, That’s what’s wrong. She loved O’Hara. He was her papa.

“Don’t you want me to marry Zev?” she asked, sitting on the bed and stroking Azaylee’s hair back from her hot forehead. “I thought you liked him.”

“But I do, and of course I want you to marry him. I want you to be happy, Missie, truly I do.”

Missie could tell she meant it, but there was that old fey look in her eyes that put her warning signals up. “Then
tell me what is wrong,
milochka,”
she said softly. “You know I’ll understand.”

“It’s nothing … except …” Azaylee sat up, her pansy eyes wide and staring. “Everyone has different names here. No one is who they really are. Isn’t that true, Missie? Even C. Z. is really Zev. And I’m Marietta as well as Ava Adair and Azaylee, and before that I was some other girl….”

“That’s the way it is in Hollywood,” Missie replied quickly. “Actors like to choose prettier names than the ones they were born with, and immigrants like Zev change their names to make them sound more American. It’s just easier, that’s all.”

“That’s not what I mean,” she cried despairingly, sinking back into the pillows and clutching her doll. “Sometimes it just makes me wonder who I am, Missie, as if there were two of me—a bad girl and a good girl—”

“A bad girl,” Missie echoed, shocked. “Why, Azaylee, you were always the most angelic child, everybody said so. And look at you now, working hard and behaving like a perfect lady on the set. You never give anybody the slightest trouble.”

Azaylee turned her face away again, staring out of the window vacantly. “I remember Papa,” she said in a faraway voice. “His chin was rough when he kissed me and he was very tall with a quiet voice. And I remember my big brother … so much bigger than me … but that was when I was someone else, wasn’t it, Missie?”

Missie hesitated and then she took her hand and said, “We changed your name to save you from being killed. Your real name was Xenia.”

“Xenia Ivanoff,” she said slowly, “now I remember. She was a fairy-tale child in a storybook land where everybody loved her, especially her papa. He’s not dead,” she added, looking at Missie strangely. “Truly he’s not. I know because I have seen him.”

“In your dreams, Azaylee. Only in your dreams,” Missie
murmured unhappily. “Your papa is with your mother and grandmother Sofia in heaven.”

Azaylee gave Missie a wistful little smile and said, “I guess I’m just tired, that’s all.”

“You’ll need another little holiday after
Marietta in the Mountains,”
Missie said, wanting to please her. “Maybe we all could go back to Agua Caliente. You liked it there.”

“No!” Azaylee shot up in bed, panicked. “I never want to go back there again,” she exclaimed passionately.

“Very well,” Missie agreed, surprised. “Now, why don’t you take your bath and I’ll bring you a glass of hot milk with cinnamon, the way Grandmother Sofia used to make it. You know you always like that.”

Azaylee took her bath and drank her milk obediently. When Missie tucked the girl in bed and kissed her good night, she thought that in her white cotton nightdress with her hair pulled back into a braid she looked like a sleepy, innocent child.

The wedding day was cloudy with a promise of rain, but that did not affect the radiance of the bride or the happiness of the groom as they stood before the judge and promised to love and care for each other forever. Missie looked lovely and elegant in an expensive aquamarine silk dress with a small matching hat and a corsage of lilies, and Zev Abramski looked a man of the world in a light-gray custom-tailored suit. A delicious wedding lunch was served by smiling servants to the strains of a string quartet playing Mozart and the champagne flowed.

When the guests finally left Missie kissed Azaylee goodbye but her eyes were anxious as she watched the girl go.

“You wish she were here with us?” Zev said.

She shook her head, smiling ruefully. “Oh, no, I don’t, Zev Abramski. I want you all to myself.”

He played the piano for her and she listened for a while, hearing the emotion he usually kept locked behind his cool, reserved façade. Later she prepared herself for bed, anointing herself with perfume and brushing her
smooth seal-brown hair until it shone like silk. After walking to the mirror she stared at her slender naked body, seeing it as he might, her small high breasts, the subtle curve of her hips, and her long shapely legs—and she wished she were eighteen again and inexperienced, young and unscarred by life so she might give herself to him wholly.

She slipped the soft lace-trimmed nightdress over her head, smoothed its cool satin folds against her body, and, after switching off the dressing-room lamp, walked barefoot across the soft carpet to the door. When she turned for one last glimpse in the mirror, she saw only a pale shadowy figure. In the half-light she might have been a young girl again, a bride going to her marriage bed.

A single lamp was lighted in the bedroom, and Zev was standing by the window, staring out into the night. He was wearing a claret silk robe. As he turned to smile at her, she thought how handsome he looked.

“Missie,” he said, holding out his arms as he came toward her, “do you know how beautiful you are?”

Flushed with happiness, she lay beside him on the bed. “I want to tell you how
much
I love you, how I’ve
always
loved you, but there are only these inadequate words,” he murmured, kissing her gently.

He knelt to kiss her feet, telling her how he had never felt worthy of more, and she took him in her arms and said he was worthy of better than her. They embraced passionately.

All their façades and defenses were down. They were two people deeply in love; they wanted to touch, to feel, to explore, to possess each other’s body. And when Zev Abramski finally entered her and they were one, all memories of Arnhaldt and O’Hara were expelled from Missie’s mind, and even Misha became just a dream. Zev made her his woman that night—as if her other loves had never existed. And much later, when she fell asleep in his arms,
it was as if it was the one place in the world she was meant to be.

Maryland

The first faint hint of dawn touched the sky with opal as Missie said wearily to Cal, “What happened next was my fault and I will never forgive myself. But you see, I was young too, and in love. I was selfish and all I wanted was to be with Zev. I thought that Magic was not just the name of his studio but something of which he was capable. He was thirty-five years old and he had transformed himself from an uneducated immigrant into a Hollywood legend. He had taken Magic from a quick one- and two-reeler operation into a powerful studio with a glittering roster of stars and directors, and he had done it because he knew instinctively what the public wanted.

“But it was more than just his business that made him a legend. He was a mystery man with a reputation for aloofness and for avoiding the splashy Hollywood lifestyle and its gaudy publicity. There was something about him that sent hotel managers and headwaiters running to offer him their grandest suites or their best tables. He was Hollywood royalty and now I was his queen, and we were so wrapped up in each other we barely had time for anyone else.

“When
Marietta in the Mountains
was finished, he had planned a sequel,
Marietta in Malibu
. It was scheduled for production a month later, so Zev and I decided to fit our belated honeymoon into the gap. We didn’t go far, just to Catalina Island. The Hotel St. Catherine was quiet, a retreat for movie people who wanted to escape from the glare of publicity for a while. And that’s just what we did.

“We were like teenagers, doing all the simple touristy things, taking the glass-bottomed boat, dancing at the casino to one of the great bands, strolling back to the hotel
around Avalon Bay. I remember the moon making a path across the water, silhouetting the palm trees and the music drifting across the bay from the pillared white casino on the point. It was all so beautiful and romantic. We had been there a week and I can’t tell you how happy we were—and then the telephone call came from Rosa. Azaylee had disappeared and she didn’t know what to do.

“Zev chartered a little plane and we flew back right away. Rosa was distraught and Rachel was in tears. Apparently Azaylee had just packed a few things and disappeared in the middle of the night. When she didn’t appear for breakfast Rosa thought she was sleeping late, and it wasn’t until hours later that she realized she was missing.

“Zev guessed that Rachel knew something, and he took her outside and asked her what was going on.”

Missie hesitated and Cal noticed how tightly her hands were gripped together, but he knew she was determined to tell her story so he didn’t interrupt her.

“She told him that Carlos del Villaloso had raped Azaylee, that she was pregnant and had gone to Agua Caliente to find him so they could get married. Of course I refused to believe it. I ranted up and down screaming it could not be true, that she was just an innocent child….

“Zev knew he couldn’t call in the police. The story would be sure to get out and the publicity would kill her. He called Burbank again and chartered another plane, only this time he wouldn’t let me go with him. Instead he took a couple of bodyguards they used at the studio to keep away the cranks and riffraff who always haunted the stars. They were big, brutal-looking men, and up until then I’d always thought they had been chosen because they looked the role. Now I knew different.

“We all spent a sleepless night. You’ll never know how many times I asked myself, ‘After all I had gone through to protect her, how could this have happened? What had I
done that left her so weak and vulnerable to a heel like Carlos del Villaloso?’

“Zev found Villaloso at his usual place, the racetrack. He didn’t want a public scene so he told him he wanted to speak to him outside. Zev could tell from Villaloso’s face that he knew he was in trouble, but at first he just shrugged off his accusations. He said he barely knew Azaylee and that he had never seen her alone. Then Zev let the bodyguards loose on him, and after a few minutes he changed his tune. He said she had come to him with some ridiculous story about him being the father of her child, wanting him to marry her. He said she had thrown herself at him, that she had followed him to Tijuana, and that she was nothing but a little tramp.

“That was when Zev took over, knocking out a few of Villaloso’s precious white teeth in the process.

“‘Where is she?’ Zev demanded, so filled with rage that he didn’t even feel the pain from his bruised fists. ‘Tell me what has happened to her, or I’ll kill you with my own hands.’

“Villaloso’s face was part of his stock-in-trade. Now it was a mess and he decided he didn’t want to die too. ‘I gave her some money,’ he said, gasping, spitting out blood and some more teeth. ‘She went to Tijuana…’.

“Zev knew what he meant. Cheap abortions were available in every back street of Tijuana. He groaned and put his hands to his face as he thought of Azaylee in the hands of some butcher. He knew he had better move fast before they could touch her. Leaving Villaloso in care of one of the guards, he and the other took off for Tijuana.

“They started with the ‘clinics,’ but she wasn’t there. Villaloso hadn’t given her enough money for that. Someone suggested they try ‘Doc’ Miller, usually known as ‘Doc Loco’ because he was always ‘loco’ from tequila. He was an American who had migrated south to Mexico after being struck off the medical register years before for almost
killing a patient with an ovedose while under the influence of drink.

“They found him, all right, propping up his usual sleazy bar, dead drunk of course and with money in his pocket—the money Villaloso had given Azaylee. Zev just left him there and went to find her.

“The room was filthy with cockroaches the size of silver dollars all over the place and the stink of raw sewage from the open drain outside the tiny window that let in just enough light for him to see her. She was lying on a sagging iron cot, covered with a dirty, bloodstained sheet. Her eyes were closed and her breathing shallow and beads of sweat stood out on her forehead.

“Her face was as gray as the sheet, and Zev groaned as he felt her head: She was burning with fever. He pulled back the sheet and stared at the bloody mess, then he closed his eyes, tilting back his head and praying out loud for God to help her, for he had no doubt Azaylee was mortally ill.