She grew more indignant. “You got me mixed up with ten other dames, sonny,” she said, refusing my look. “I never went around screwing sailors on trains.”
“Maybe, but the Super Chief wasn’t just any train,” I said wickedly. “Don’t you remember, you said it was ‘a silver bullet speeding to the heart of love’? Of course, that was during the night. Next day you didn’t know me from Adam.”
By this time she was really giving me the fisheye. “Look, Strongheart, if this is some sort of joke—”
I leaned back in my chair and watched her for a moment. Then: “Yeah, yeah, sure,” I said, “that’s it, just a joke. Forget it. I was just pulling your leg.”
There was another pause; then, adjusting herself against the pillows, she said, “That’s okay, I was the one who was pulling your leg. Sure, I remember you. You were this cute-lookin’ guy in sailor blues and you had all these battle ribbons across your chest. You kinda caught my eye. Nice. It was very nice. We really celebrated—didn’t we?”
“You had that pocketbook. That big pocketbook, full of—”
“Yes? Full of what?”
“I was just wondering if you’d remember. You had a lot of those miniature bottles of booze.”
“I remember. You drank Johnnie Walker Red.”
I was impressed. She really did remember. But she still hadn’t come out with why she’d sent for me, and I wasn’t up to prompting her or trying to figure the thing out. Even in the light from the bedside lamp, which she kept dim by hanging a pink silk scarf over it, she showed the age she hid so well onstage. Her voice sounded tired, and I remember wondering if she wasn’t coming down with something,
She pushed her head back into the pillows and gave me another look. “Why did you bring up those things?” she asked. “Why didn’t you mention them before?”
I smiled and shrugged. Who knew? Again she scrutinized me, and I got the impression there was something troubling her—something she wanted to get off her chest. I couldn’t be sure, but I was studying her just as hard as she was studying me. Finally she made a negligent gesture, as if none of this really mattered, and I took that as my cue to leave. She didn’t press me to linger.
When I’d climbed into bed, after checking the latest snowfall, I thought over our little interview. Obviously she hadn’t remembered me at all. If she had, she would have recalled that, VJ Day having fallen in August, I would have been in summer whites, not winter blues, and that I’d worn no ribbons, since I’d never been decorated. No doubt it was some other sailor she was remembering, on some other train.
I must have dozed off in the middle of these musings for the next thing I knew—this was late, probably after two, though I never looked at my watch to verify the time—I was wakened by the instantly recognizable smell of smoke. And where there’s smoke, there’s fire. I sprang out of bed and dashed into the sitting room, switched on the lights to see an ominous pall curling from under Babe’s closed door and slowly rising to the ceiling. I shouted the alarm and grabbed the phone. I saw Sluggo come charging out of his room—I remember the pajamas, striped in black and yellow, his hairy chest—he banged on Babe’s door, then crashed inside. The smoke blossomed out like the mushroom cloud of an atom bomb. While I was warning the desk of our situation, Sluggo staggered out, cradling an inert Babe in his arms. Meanwhile, Pepe had appeared and was taking hold of Babe’s lower extremities and following along.
I hung up and went to help him—the smoke was thick, we were all coughing as the haze grew worse around us—and my next thought was that Babe was dead, asphyxiated before Sluggo had reached her. I used the next moment to throw the windows open; then Sluggo passed her to Pepe, who’d climbed out onto the fire escape.
It was freezing out there. I ran and dragged her fur coat from the closet and stuck my head out the window to wrap it around her. Sluggo snatched it out of my hands and threw it over her. Babe gave a low groan; my God, I thought, looking at the top of her wigless head as she stirred in his arms, she’s nearly bald—hardly a normal reaction to the danger we all had been in. Then the door burst open and half a dozen firemen in rubber boots and helmets came clomping into the room with axes and the working end of a hose.
The captain said Babe had obviously fallen asleep with a cigarette, but I corrected him—she didn’t smoke. It was the silk scarf over the light bulb. I moved aside as two firefighters dragged a smoldering queen-size mattress into the sitting room, followed by another man holding a limp Tiny.
“Dead?” I asked, taking it. He shrugged. I carried the dog into the hallway, where a clutch of curious hotel guests huddled in nightdress. Something told me the dog wasn’t dead, and I opened its mouth and began blowing air down its throat.
“He’s crazy,” I heard someone say. “You can’t give artificial respiration to a dog.”
But I wasn’t the crazy one, he was, for, to my relief, the dog revived. When its eyes were open and I saw that it was breathing regularly, I went to tell Pepe, only to discover that he and Sluggo had taken Babe down in a service elevator to a waiting ambulance.
When things had quieted down and we were assured that she was out of danger but would be spending the night at the hospital, the management found another room for me, small and smelling of fresh paint. I stayed up most of the time with the dog, and in the morning they brought my clothes and gear in on a trolley. By mid-morning the word came that planes were flying out of O’Hare and by afternoon I was winging my way to Cleveland, the next leg on my journey. I had left Tiny with Belinda, asking her to get the dog into Pepe’s hands before they all left for California.
The night’s events made the news; all anyone could talk about was the nocturnal rescue of Babe Austrian from the “deadly conflagration”—there’d been little fire—by “a trusted retainer.” No mention of yours truly.
After Cleveland, I hit Detroit, and in the coldest of weathers I spent another week and a half making up for lost time and leapfrogging all over the Midwest, eventually arriving back in New York around mid-March. Perhaps a month had gone by when one morning I got a phone call from a secretary at my publisher’s office. A Mr. Ventura had telephoned from Los Angeles and could I return the call as soon as possible? I wasn’t eager to be back in touch with my friend Pepsi, but I was curious, so did as requested.
“Thank you for returning my call,” Pepe said in those quincelike tones of his. And then he got to the point. “Do you think you’ll be returning here any time soon? Miss A would like to see you as soon as you get back.”
I said I had no plans for returning until the Fourth of July weekend. “Is she sick?”
“Not really. A few complaints, nothing major. But she’d like a word or two with you if you have the time.”
I said to put her on, but was kept waiting until I was about to hang up.
“How ya doin’?” came the familiar question. I replied in the positive; how was she?
“Okay, don’t worry about the Babe. Only I was wonderin’, when are you comin’ out? I got somethin’ I want to talk to you about.”
I told her my plans and there was another pause. “Why don’t you tell me now?” I suggested, with neither an idea of what the problem was nor how I might help. It didn’t matter anyway: she wouldn’t discuss matters by phone, and by the time I arrived in July it would be too late. We said goodbye, but when I thought things over, I began to wonder. Her voice had sounded weak, not up to snuff at all, and I had a feeling something was amiss. It being convenient for me to leave in time for the Oscars, I altered my plans, closed up the apartment, and headed for the Coast.
The night of my arrival I called the penthouse to let Babe know I was here. Pepe, gracious as ever, thanked me, said he would find time for an appointment, and took my number.
I didn’t hear a damn thing for three days!
I’d forgotten about her when I got the call, saying Miss A would be pleased to see me the next afternoon at one. It was a command performance, no doubt about it, and, wondering what the
big secret was, I planned accordingly.
It’s sometimes said that if walls could talk, there would be no need for books—talking walls would have it all. I hadn’t been inside the walls of Babe’s Sunset Towers penthouse since the time Dore and I had dropped off the script for Frankie. But before my last trip east, several times as I’d driven along the curves of the Strip I’d noticed moving vans parked in the vicinity of the Towers—tenants moving out, however, not in. There was a noticeable shabbiness cloaking the building.
This place is dying, I thought as I crossed to the elevator and pushed the button. The elevator had been automated now, there was no attendant, and I rode up in silence, wondering what I was to find at the top.
Arriving, I pushed the bell and heard the chimes. I waited, glancing out the small window to my right, to where the streams of cars tooled up and down the Strip, and I glimpsed the slanting roofs of the Villa Lorraine farther east. I turned back as the apartment door opened and I was greeted, not by Sugar May, as of old, but by Pepe Ventura himself.
He looked the same, though his hair was longer and his mustache darker. He was wearing a patterned shirt, tight pants, and huaraches, and the same diamond glinted in his lobe.
“Hello, come in, I’m glad you’re here,” he said all in one breath, and, closing the door, he ushered me into the living room. I passed through the draped archway and entered what surely was by now a museum. The long, low-ceilinged room was hushed and still, reeking of stale air and containing little light. Each of the Venetian blinds was drawn; several lamps burned dimly. It was all very Miss Havisham, as if the clocks had been stopped at the marriage hour forty years before, and with the rats still eating at the seven-tiered wedding cake. The whole place was like a cocoon, a time capsule, everything perfectly, intimately maintained just as it had been, everything stuffed or preserved under glass. Babe had made this space her monument.
Everywhere my eye fell there were movie-star glossy stills of Babe Austrian, culled from different periods of her long career; the thirties, forties, fifties, sixties—the decades seemed to roll themselves out before my eyes, Babe in all her incarnations. Interspersed with these were photographs of other celebrities: Cole Porter was there, Claire Boothe Luce, Al Jolson, Bob Hope and Martha Raye, Anita Loos, and so on, the super-famous of this century. There were also a number of Frank’s pictures set about on the tops of chests, and on the wall the twin portrait of Babe and Frankie; the two faces looked out at me with their quizzical expressions, and I wondered if they’d found whatever it was they were looking for. There were other, single oil portraits of Babe, one in the altogether, as well as the famous nude statue by Italo Foscari in its lighted niche.
“Please sit down,” said Pepe, entering behind me with brisk steps. He waited until I sat, then disappeared through the archway, and I heard voices in muffled conference. I got up again and went to one of the windows to tip a bit more light in through the blinds. I sat again. Waited. All was quiet, except for the Strip traffic far below and the ticking of a mantel clock. I looked around. There was no dust on anything; the pillows were plumped; there were current magazines carefully aligned on the mirrored coffee table; the gold-veined mirrored walls had been cleaned up to a certain height (but no higher: a man’s reach; beyond that the cleaner could or would not go, and the surface was smoky). I noticed a cobweb in a corner. I had never seen a deader room; it reminded me of one of those anterooms in a mortuary where you go to view the remains of the dear departed. I also noted the indentations in the carpeting, carpeting that had somehow stood the wear and tear of time, and now had the heavy imprint of somebody’s sturdy ground-gripper shoes. Their corrugations seemed to go in all directions. Footprints in the rugs of time.
I turned as Pepe reentered. He motioned me to a small sofa in a curved window niche looking out onto the terrace, where I could see a profusion of plants and flowers. There was a hose, a watering can, some gloves on a table, and I wondered who did the gardening. I sat where he wanted me to and he took a place beside me.
“I really should apologize,” he began. “I can understand how mystifying this probably is to you.”
I replied that yes, it did seem strange; I was trying to get my bearings with him; he, too, seemed odd. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but there was something different in his attitude.
He flashed his white teeth under his Pancho Villa mustache. “I’m not surprised. But I’m sure you’ll understand when I tell you that these have been our instructions. It’s not that we’re trying to be dramatic or anything or withhold information, it’s just that—it’s how she wants it.”
“Miss A, you mean?”
“Yes, Miss A. You’ve been asked here in order that she may speak with you about a matter of considerable importance.”
Fine with me. “What matter? And what importance?”
“I’m afraid that’s part of what I’m not allowed to tell you. She wishes to do it herself.”
“All right, I have no objection. When may I see her?”
“I’m sure it won’t be very long now. Outside of yourself in Chicago, she hasn’t had any visitors ‘at home,’ so to speak, in a long time. She’s very nervous over seeing you again. There are some—some things she wishes to tell you. She’s felt the need for some time, but it’s only lately that she’s found the courage to do so. She’s been waiting for your return.”
I glimpsed the burly figure of Sluggo lurking in the background, as though looking for something to happen.
“Am I to gather from all this that she’s ill?” I asked.
“Well… some problems. One or two, but things are relatively under control. And thanks for coming so quickly. I hope you’ll be easy on her.”
Now, what the hell did that mean? The whole scene struck me as hoaxy, silly as a frat-house initiation. Was this Babe’s passion for elaborate staging? Maybe the reason for all the delay was that she was inside trying to paste herself together so she’d look her usual glamorous self—the long lashes, the red fingernails, the works. Well, I thought, she put me up in the blizzard, I owe her this.
As I went on waiting, I was reminded of that other afternoon, more than twenty years ago, when I’d sweltered waiting for this very same individual but under far different circumstances. Promptness might be the politeness of kings, but it was not of movie queens, current or ex. I could hear a faint tinkling sound, chimelike and slightly Oriental, as if at any moment Gale Sondergaard might step through a beaded curtain and stick a dangerous letter in my hand. Pepe was making small talk, the worst kind: had I seen the latest movie, what did I think of the lovely weather, wasn’t there a lot more traffic on the Strip, how long would I be staying in town, had I spoken with Angie Brown? I mean bor-ing.
Then apparently it was time. He got up and asked me to come with him. “It’s all right,” he whispered as we got to the end of the hall, where there was a closed door, “you may go in. And please, I beg you—be kind to her.”
Thank you, Deborah Kerr. Babe undoing the buttons on her blouse. I’ll be kind. Yes, sure, although I wasn’t sure just how kind I was prepared to be. My motor was running fast as I opened the door and walked in. I shut the door behind me and paused to take in the scene—Babe’s scene. More Babe-stuff: crystal chandelier with a velvet sleeve over the chain, Austrian shades ruched all to hell and gone, satin-tufted chaise stuffed with pillows, soft piled rug, lots of satin, lots of swags, windows with the lambrequin treatment, the bed raised on a dais, hung with gauzy panels that fell from the high ceiling to the floor, and there in the bed a figure, our Babe, well bolstered against pillows, staring straight at me.
“Oh you son-of-a-bitch,” I swore softly.
“Hello, luv,” said Dore Screwball.
I mean it.
Him.
There.
In the bed.
Her bed. The bed of Babe Austrian, the dead Babe Austrian.
What the hell!
My first reaction was, what’s that fool doing in her bed? He doesn?
??t belong there. Then in another moment I realized that, whatever else he was, this was no fool, that he was not in her bed but in his, and that he did, indeed, belong there. The balding head, fringed by sparse, short white hair. The features naked, without their makeup, no face paint anywhere in evidence. Just as I’d seen him at the chicken ranch. Wearing a bathrobe of maroon flannel, a perfectly ordinary-looking, by no means new, a many-wearings, comfortable garment, the hands with noticeably short fingernails, no polish, those tired blue eyes looking up at me, doubtful, rueful, entreating understanding, yet somehow filled with the old Dorewickedness. I was torn between anger and the desire to laugh, so I laughed. Nothing else seemed right. I laughed.
“Hello, Dore, what’s new?”
“Same old shit, ducks. What’s new with you?”
It was surreal. Weird, man, weird. “Good to see you, Dore. Tell me, how long has this been going on?”
“Years, luv.”
“Yuma? Torreon? Snake Bend?”
“That was in-between. Babe was ‘on vacation.’ Come sit. Take a load off.”
Though he spoke in Dore’s voice, it was still her line; it rang falsely—for the first time. I took the chair and sat by the corner of the bed. How ridiculous. How grotesque. How inconceivable. Was this Grand Guignol or Keystone Kops?
I damned my stupidity, telling myself I ought to have realized it sooner, should have known how I and the rest of the world were being duped. And for just how long? A magnificent job it was, this masquerade, this beauty of a hoax that had been pulled on me, on us all. But how? How?
We stared hard at each other, back and forth, he and I, wondering what to say. He reclined there in that ridiculous bed, against the piled pillows, like something out of a movie. Something quaint, bizarre, totally unlikely—and yet he lay back with such an indolent air of—of “Doreness.” The master of every situation, particularly one so outré and thoroughly outrageous as this one. Gloria Swanson wasn’t even close.