And California dreamin’ is becomin’ a reality….
Right now I’m in the same chair as before and my friend Anna Thorwald is dozing in that decrepit hammock that’s ready to fall apart. She’s listed fourth among the ten longest-staying residents at Libertad, brick and bars and hospital green out here, off the Ventura Freeway on Route 101. Happy Dell Acres, as I call it. Thirteen years, seven months, and twenty-three days on the funny farm. And bunny shows at Easter. I don’t know, maybe it beats paying taxes.
Anyway, we’re still here under the pepper tree, Anna and I. The small red berries litter the hardpacked dirt where no grass grows, as if the earth had been sown with salt. I know Anna sleeps badly at night, and a sleepless night in this place I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. God help the ones who can’t sleep. You try whiling away the wee small hours unable to snap on the Late, Late Show any time you like, lying among the other looneytunes and staring into the darkness, the darkness you live in and breathe in but can’t sleep in, the clockless creeping dark that is a world unto itself for the nonsleeper.
She’s sleeping now, though. Her face is turned aside, one arm thrown across it as if to hide her identity. How vulnerable she looks, how poorly armored for this life. It was her own idea to revert to her former name: Anna Thorwald of Tennessee Avenue in Westwood. I live in hope and at the same time I despair. The odds are so lousy. She is truly alone, there’s no one. Me? I don’t matter; she doesn’t identify me with any of the events I’ve just narrated. It’s true, sometimes she really believes she’s Frank’s wife, that they got married, even that there were children. As we know, there might have been one at least, if the cards had been stacked differently. But most of her dreams are wrapped up in a single soiled doll, Clarabelle. That’s an end for you, a forty-three-year-old woman with a doll. I can see the way she holds it, lightly, even maternally, as though not to injure it. Baby—the one she had with Frank. Her Gift.
God, how I always liked her. What a great girl, what a really wonderful person. The kind of girl you’d like to have for your sweetheart or you’d want your boy to marry, the famous girl-next-door they used to talk so much about. Her laugh; of course, it’s not the same anymore, but I remember the way it used to sound when we were all in Italy those many years ago. I look at her now and think, Where did she go? What happened? Why is she this person now, not the other one, so changed that even I sometimes have trouble recognizing her? People change, sure, we pass them on the street and may not recognize them for a second or two, but finally we do. But not April. I defy her neighbors on Tennessee to say, Oh sure, I know her still. Maude Antrim’s close to ninety, but she hasn’t changed, she’s still Maude, only older. She’s there. Not April, April flew the coop. That face, that glow, gone. All gone.
I catch Nurse Popey tiptoeing across the lawn. Coming close, she asks sotto voce if I wouldn’t like to slip along before “Anna” wakes up. No, I say, she might be upset if I didn’t say goodbye. I wait. The patient stirs, awakes, tries to sit up, not an easy maneuver in that hammock. I help her out and to the other chair, into which she sinks gratefully. “How are you feeling?” I ask. She nods agreeably, as if she didn’t want me worrying about her. She certainly is game. Again I’m wondering what Frank would say if he were alive and here. How would he handle it all? I look her over for signs. Are her cheeks a little less pasty? Have they a hint of color? Does she seem the least bit more relaxed?
She throws one hand out with an alarming abruptness that makes me shy, as if I thought she meant me harm. No harm, though; she merely lays her hand on mine and pats it gently. For the first time she calls me by my name. She’s recognized me.
“Charlie?”
“Yes?” My heart skips a beat; I’m “Charlie” again.
“How are you? Are you okay?”
“Yes, sure, fine, really fine,” I hastily assure her. You may not think so, but I’m telling you this is a major breakthrough, her calling me by my name.
Hints of satisfaction, traces of a smile. “I’m glad, really glad. Frank always worried about you, you know. He always wanted to be sure everything was all right for you. He was always so proud of you.”
Frank was quite a guy, I counter, leading the talk away from myself.
“Oh yes, he was,” she says with conviction. “Misunderstood. He was completely misunderstood by so many people. All the things he used to do for people. He kept them secret. I’ll never forget him.”
“Good girl. You loved him a lot, didn’t you?”
“Yes. Yes. Yes, I really did love him. What a… pity… pity…” She trails off, shaking her head as though to clear it. “Strange. I guess that’s how things work out sometimes, isn’t it? Some things just aren’t meant to be. That wasn’t meant to be. You know? It just never could work. I kept hoping—we both kept hoping—but… I kept telling my mother he was the best thing for me. She wouldn’t ever believe it. You wouldn’t believe how she wouldn’t believe it. The way she looked at it, he was the villain in the melodrama. You know?”
I nod. “The guy with the long twisted mustaches? ‘Pay the rent!’ I can’t pay the rent!’ ‘I’ll pay the rent!’”
She blinks. “Who’ll pay the rent?” she asks, suddenly confused.
I say I supposed that would probably be the hero: “Bud.”
I say the name on purpose, to see her reaction. The doctors always tell me to get her to talk about it. I’m taking advantage of this lucid moment that could turn off at any given time. “You remember Bud,” I prompted.
Oh yes, she replies blithely, she remembers Bud all right. Her husband. The guy she married.
“He loved you, too,” I suggest.
“Oh yes,” she agrees, he did indeed. “What a nice boy,” she says with the same conviction. “Really nice. I used to call him ‘True Blue Bud.’ Why do parents call their boys ‘Bud’ anyway? I guess it’s sort of like ‘Junior,’ huh?”
Now a very strange phenomenon starts to occur, and I’m made aware that she has come to a sudden grasp of matters. For the first time in years I feel there may yet be some hope, that even at this late date the damage could be repaired, that she could be made well, that I could even get her out of here. I feel now that’s she’s actually human and real, a living person, not some android out of a sci-fi movie, a pod-person or a zombie. God help us all, I pray silently, and silently urge her on.
She recalls with some accuracy how she’d come into Feldy’s studio that rainy night when Bud was sitting on the corner of the makeshift stage he’d built at the workshop, how he’d taken her coat and made coffee and the way they’d talked. He’d made her feel at home right away.
“He was so good-looking, wasn’t he?” April said. “What a guy. A girl’d be lucky to get a fella like that, I thought. I wondered what he’d be like, making love with him.” I marvel at her words. Candid confessions such as this are not often to be heard from her lips. I wish I was a doctor so I could interpret them, but I’m not, so I bumble along as best I can.
“What was he like?” I ask boldly.
“Oh…” She’s a bit taken aback, shy even; but that’s to be expected: my dumb question. “He was giving. Very giving. He always wanted it to be good for me. But I don’t know, maybe I’m not any judge of that.”
“Why not?” She doesn’t answer. “Why not, Anna?” I persist.
She looks up quickly. “What?”
“Anna? Isn’t that your name—Anna?”
She laughs out loud, splaying her fingers at her chest. “Oh. Yes, I suppose it is, isn’t it? I’ve got so used to ‘April,’ though, these past years.” She thinks, presses fingers to her lips, glances sidewise at me. “Pretty name, April.”
“I think so. How’d you get it?”
She comes right out with it. “Frank gave it to me.”
“When?”
“Oh gosh—back there somewhere.”
“April? What year are we in?”
“What year?”
“Yes, what year is it?”
>
“Why, it’s… nineteen… nineteen… hm. Oh gosh—fifty-something?”
“Fifty what?”
“Oh darn, I just don’t know, Charlie, I’m sorry….” She drawls the words in mock despair. Then her face shows impatience and frustration. “Let me think a sec,” she mutters, making fists on her knees. She thinks hard, muttering and pushing at the tips of her fingers as though ticking off the years. “I was born in nineteen thirty-nine.”
“That’s right, you were,” I encourage. This is really good, I’m feeling excited, it’s creeping up my back. “Nineteen thirty-nine. So what year is this, then?”
She gazes at me with a pleading expression, as if to say “Please, Charlie, make it be nineteen sixty again.” I quickly consider. If I tell the truth, she may be so shocked she’ll vanish again and I won’t be able to reach her. Her being this way is so good, so wonderful—reaching her again, seeing April, not the dead doughfaced Anna. I want to hold on, clutch her, keep her here. It’s as if she’d lived for a long time in a dark cave and suddenly she appears at the cave opening, standing out in the light again, blonde and beautiful. April in tennis shorts and sunstreaked hair.
“Look,” I say, “I want to see you get well, we all do. The doctors and nurses, Mrs. Kraft, everyone wants to see you get well. Try, April, try, won’t you, for Frank’s sake? Think, honey, if Frank was around he wouldn’t want to see you in here, in this place.”
“I know. Don’t you think I know that? But where would I go, anyway? If I were well again, where would I go? Who would help me then?”
God, help me, I pray, please help me to say the right things. Don’t let me botch it up, don’t let me send her back into the cave. Suddenly I, too, am swept up by the release of emotion; I want so desperately to keep that glimmering light from going out again and leaving her in the dark.
I talk encouragingly—about the beach, since I know how much she loves it. “I’ve got a place out at Venice now, you’d like it. You could come there and stay.”
“Oh, I love Venice,” she says. “I was only there once. For a weekend, actually.” I realize she means the other Venice, in Italy, not the beach, but anything’s better than her silence. Keep her talking about Venice, about Capri. She remembers all right—about the paparazzi, the baying hounds—but she’s not fearful. She handles the memory. Bud—Frank—Frank—Bud…
“The only two men I ever made love with, you know,” she says.
No, I didn’t know, but I’m not surprised. It’s the kind of girl she was. She never slept around, everyone knew that.
“You loved them both.”
“Yes. I did. No, I didn’t, either. Frank, I loved Frank, that’s all. I married Kit but it wasn’t the same. You can understand, can’t you? Can’t you, Chazz?” She grips my hand so hard it hurts. I wince but hang on.
“Yes, sure I understand. I think I do. Only, April—why not—why don’t you try to explain it to me so I’m sure I have it all right? I know you and Frank couldn’t get together while he was still married to Frances, but—well, Frances died, didn’t she? And Frank was free to marry again. Everyone thought you would.”
“I guess everyone did.”
“Why didn’t you marry him, then?”
“Too late. It was too late then.”
“Why? Why too late?”
I was having trouble getting through to her; at every word I was afraid she’d slip away and get lost again.
“Why?” she wondered along with me. “I was afraid. By then they’d just about hammered me flat. The publicity, the notoriety, being chased after all the time, all those reporters, cameras… I didn’t want to be a part of it anymore. Always hiding, ducking in and out of places, wearing dark glasses, as if dark glasses could protect you. Like Jackie Onassis—anything to shut them out. But all dark glasses do is keep the sun out; they don’t keep out the world. Nothing keeps out the world. And, Charlie—people are so cruel, you know? Maybe not cruel exactly, but they want what they want when they want it. They don’t like being told no or ‘get away.’”
“They want their pound of flesh.”
“Yes, that’s it, flesh, they want the flesh. ‘In Person.’ ‘For One Week Only.’ But not just that. They want your mind, too. They want—inside. They really want to get inside your head.”
I see her watching me, earnestly, anxiously, with such appeal in her eyes. What she has paid, I think; the awful price. And for what? A stardom she never wanted, bestowed by Frank, who thought he saw a good bet and bet heavily—and lost.
I find myself thinking of that tootsie Peg Entwhistle and her leap off the Hollywood sign—smack into the cactus patch. April’s had been a far more spectacular leap; she was a regular Flying Wallenda, and without the net. She’ll stand as a prime example of what can happen to one more pretty girl who gets stung by the cinema asp, who lets herself be persuaded along the paths of filmdom.
Your name in lights is a pretty rare sight, all those light bulbs flashing on and off, blink—April—blink—Rains—blink blink blink, they lay down a red carpet from the curb to the lobby, people scream and claw and shove autograph books in your face or even matchbooks, napkins, you proffer your signature—one more among thousands—the newsreel and TV cameras whirr, “Look this way, April,” “Hey April, how’s your sex life?,” and the studio bosses give you the fisheye, wondering exactly how much you’re worth on the hoof, the movie hoof, the butchers weighing out their pounds of flesh, checking to see how long before the tits and ass fall, checking your grosses. It’s all built on grosses, of course, grosses are the bottom line. “We love ya, April,” but there’s that taint, like fish gone bad. It doesn’t take so long to do a nosedive; no matter how far or long the fall, the end’s the same: splat. Some people would be better off with a frontal lobotomy than a movie contract.
“Frankie—?” she says.
“Charlie, honey, I’m Charlie, remember?”
“Oh.” She makes a charming grimace. More and more I see the April of old, the sweet April I used to know. But there was something I wanted to get back to. “April, honey, when you married Bud—”
“Yes? What? That’s all right, go on, ask it.” Bravely. She isn’t afraid to face things. All the shock treatments in the world couldn’t bring this moment about.
“You turned Frank down and married Bud instead. But you say you didn’t love him—Bud, I mean. I’m having trouble with that.”
“Oh, Bud was sweet, he really was. But I couldn’t love him. I loved Frank, you see. Only Bud—he was—determined. You know? You might not realize, I don’t think many people did, but when Bud really set his mind to something, a Sherman tank couldn’t stop him—he just couldn’t be deflected. And… well… he decided he wanted me and he made up his mind he was going to get me. He just kept on and on, it’s all he ever talked about. ‘Marry me marry me marry me.’ And of course I wasn’t the kind of girl who—who’d live with him, without the ring and license, I mean. And there was the baby, too. Frank’s baby—poor thing—God, I loved that baby so, that dear little thing, eleven days it lived. Frank Junior. I just—oh, I don’t know!”
She was growing highly emotional; the tears welled, she choked up, and her hands started to tremble. That baby was almost twenty years ago, and it was painful to see how much it still meant to her, how deep the cut went. Indeed, time does not heal all wounds. I gripped her hands between mine and squeezed hard; after a while she became calm again and went on.
“Well, I guess that’s what motherhood’s all about, huh? I wanted another one, I wanted lots and lots of them, but… And Bud would have been such a good father, what a shame. I paid for it. I got paid back in spades. Whatever that means—getting paid in spades.”
And Bud, I ventured, how did he feel?
“Oh, Bud.” She made a vague gesture. “Bud thought it was all just great. Really grand. Every day was the Fourth of July. By saying yes I’d made him the happiest guy in the world. Funny, how that kind of thing can make you so happy. Must be love
. There was a time if I ever could have married Frank, I’d have been happy just that way. You go ga-ga over somebody and you can’t get it out of your head. Love’s a beautiful thing, I guess—when it works. Never worked for me, though.”
She paused, as though searching for something, then shrugged and went on.
“It worked for Bud okay, though. He was on Cloud Nine the minute I said yes. Winchell said we were getting spliced. Spliced—I thought that was funny. Well, we tried, we both really tried,” she said, “but it just wasn’t any good. I never ought to have married him in the first place, not when I felt the way I did about Frank. But I really liked him, and so I made up my mind we’d make a go of it, that maybe one day I’d really come to feel about him the way I felt about Frank. Only it never happened.
“Then he had the accident and he was crippled, in that damnable chair, and somehow I thought it was all my fault. If I hadn’t been off my horse, sitting on that damn stump. But I made up my mind I’d be the best wife for him; I tried, I really did. But I couldn’t fool him, you see. He was so smart, Bud, in his big dumb way, he understood me, and he knew what was going on. He knew I didn’t want to make love with him, and that whatever I’d tried to do for him, I still wanted to be with Frank.”