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  “Everybody, my brother. Lieutenant Abraham Lincoln Fernauld, born on the twelfth of February. Stinkin’ Lincoln—or Linc.”

  She introduced them in turn. When she reached Marylin, Linc Fernauld’s grin faded momentarily. “Maybe I’ve been stuck away from civilization too long,” he said. “But you were pretty fantastic, Mare.”

  She winced. This abbreviation of her name always made her wince. “Thank you,” she said, adding with a tinge of aggression, “It’s Marylin. M-a-r-y-l-i-n.”

  He raised one eyebrow wryly. “Interesting spelling. Should go over big on the marquee.”

  “It’s a family name,” she said.

  “One thing. Unless you want ’em shuffling and coughing in the balcony, you’ll have to project a bit more.” This last remark was said with a thoughtful frown, and she sensed he spoke not to put her in her teenage place but to give his impression of her performance.

  “My bête noire, a small voice.”

  Everyone was gathering up coats, sweaters, books. In a chattering tangle they clumped up the aisle to the door that was left unlocked for them.

  Linc, Marylin, and BJ lingered in the vestibule, where the late-afternoon sun filtered through the windows to cast a golden tarnish on Beverly High’s cased silver trophies.

  “Come on, Beej,” Linc said. “Treat you to a hot-fudge sundae at Chapman’s.”

  “Chapman’s?” BJ said hopefully, then groaned. “I’m on a diet.”

  “Still? Well, we have Marylin along. She can eat it for you.”

  “I’m sorry, but . . .” Marylin’s routine refusal faltered. Linc was watching her. His dark brown eyes held an eloquently complex message: awe, lust, admiration, and another quality, indecipherable and compelling. She tried to look away and failed.

  “Omigawd!” BJ hit her head. “I can’t do anything. This is Tuesday. Mrs. de Roche will be there in twenty minutes.”

  “Still pounding away on the Steinway?”

  “My lesson’s at five.”

  “I’ll drop you off at home,” Linc said, still looking at Marylin. “Somebody has to eat your sundae.”

  Marylin nodded.

  * * *

  Simon’s, the big round drive-in on Wilshire Boulevard, served as official hangout for the Beverly High elite and those desirous of emulating them. Chapman’s, an ice-cream parlor on Santa Monica Boulevard about a half-mile from school, drew only youthful gourmets interested in rich and delicious ice cream. At five the place was empty except for an older woman waiting at the cash register for her pint of chocolate to be mashed down into a cardboard container.

  Marylin and Linc sat in the rear booth, facing one another. His glass was empty except for a residue of fudge in that indented pit where the spoon cannot reach. She was still conveying tiny coffee-flavored spoonfuls to her mouth. Ice cream, Marylin’s favorite food, was a rare luxury in the impoverished Wace household, and her habitual method of savoring any treat was to string it out as long as possible.

  “You’re a remarkably slow eater,” he said.

  “Things I enjoy I do slowly.”

  “I’ll have to remember that,” he said, his voice slightly rougher, as if it came from a different part of his throat.

  The tone shivered a strange, dauntless pleasure throughout Marylin’s body. She smiled at him, then looked down, twirling her spoon in the last, softened dregs of pale brown.

  “Have a steady?” he asked.

  “Nobody.”

  “Are you a Senior?”

  “A Junior.”

  “BJ’s play is the junior play—how could I forget?” he said, hitting the side of his head. “So then you’re sweet sixteen?”

  She could feel the flush travel up her face. “Not quite so sweet,” she murmured.

  “None of those salacious innuendos, Marylin Wace. They can drive a man ape, if he’s been in the Pacific for six months.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I’m twenty-three. Think being here with you makes me a dirty old man or a cradle robber?”

  “Neither.”

  “Do your parents let you go out with servicemen?”

  “My father is dead,” she said, swallowing sharply. No matter how many times she uttered the words, they hurt to say.

  “The war?” he asked quietly.

  She shook her head. “He was working—in a haberdashery shop—and a burglar shot him.”

  He nodded and touched her hand sympathetically. Under the light pressure of his fingertips, a wanton tingling blossomed, traveling up her arm, drawing a sigh from her lips. If only this could go on forever. . . . Crazy, crazy Marylin, she thought.

  He moved his hand. “I’ve heard about you. BJ, bless her, writes endless letters, and there’s been much ink used on this exquisite, talented creature in her drama class—”

  “She does have a tendency to exaggerate.”

  “Not in this case. Has she mentioned me?”

  “Often. She’s very proud. You fly an Avenger, a torpedo plane, and you’ve won the Distinguished Flying Cross—”

  “She talks too much.”

  Marylin smiled. “Before the war, you were going to . . . Stanford?”

  “Right.”

  “What were you going to be?”

  “The same as I am now. A man.”

  “I meant, what were you majoring in? Medicine? Law? Or do you want to be a screenwriter like your father?”

  “Oh, yes. Sure. Absolutely.” His face darkened into an expression of bitter unhappiness; she had to control herself from reaching over to touch his hand. He said, “All right, I’ll ’fess up. There’s something I’ve always wanted to emulate. Publish two good, meaningful novels then sell out to do Hollywood garbage.”

  She knew many who professed to despise or disdain their parents as parents, but to dismiss Joshua Fernauld (about whom there hovered the aura of sinful glamour invariably tethered to high-living men of vast talent in show business) as a hack shocked her to the core. “He’s a fabulous writer! He’s got an Oscar to prove it.”

  “From a jury of his peers,” Linc said acidly.

  “His dialogue jumps to life.”

  “I can see that one semester in high-school drama has turned you into a fine critic.”

  “This snobbishness about the movies really gets me!” Marylin cried. Her outspoken anger completely bewildered her. What had catapulted her, Marylin Wace who avoided every unpleasantness, into this brouhaha? “Why must people assume it’s slumming to write a fine movie script, while writing crummy books or a trashy play is something sacred?”

  He jerked as if she had probed a raw nerve. “Would you admit,” he asked with heavy vitriol, “that your lack of understanding might emanate from a certain . . . shall we call it immaturity? Oh, hell! I should know better than to talk seriously to a high-school kid!”

  Marylin’s heart was galloping, sending a wild charge through her body. “Millions of people see his work,” she heard herself say. “He has a chance to influence them, to make them better or kinder. I’ve gone to After the Fall and Lava Flow four times each, and they always leave a kind of glow.”

  “Why not take Fleischmann’s yeast? That gives the same results.” His sarcasm was loud, brutal.

  The counter girl and soda jerk were staring at them.

  Marylin knew she must stop. She could not stop. “Whether you want to admit it or not, if Shakespeare were writing today, he would be under contract to MGM or Paramount.”

  “Thank you for that surprising insight.”

  “He’d be like your father, earning Oscars, and I don’t think this idea is coming as any surprise to you.”

  His tanned hands clenched into fists on the tabletop, and there were lines on either side of his mouth. “Listen, you movie-struck bobby-soxer, don’t try to psychoanalyze me. Don’t think you can figure out what’s in my mind. Just because you’re a gorgeous, gorgeous eyeful with a fantastic little body doesn’t mean you’re Sigmund Freud. Stick to the stuff below the beltline, that’s more
in your line. All you know about me is that I’m hot to make you.”

  To her horror, Marylin felt tears welling in her eyes. If she were an actress with the least modicum of talent or technique, wouldn’t she be able to hide these idiotic tears? He’s only out to make me—that is the hidden complexity in his eyes, she thought, and put her shaking hand over her forehead.

  “Hey,” he said quietly.

  She took out a handkerchief, bending her head, and under the pretext of blowing her nose, dabbed surreptitiously at her eyes. She glimpsed his tanned fingers clenching and unclenching, and guessed suddenly that shouting matches like this were as alien to him as to her.

  “Allergy,” she mumbled.

  Money clinked on the table. Marylin hurried outside ahead of him and saw that dusk was turning the sky purple.

  Linc put the key in the ignition of the big Packard, but did not turn on the engine. After a minute he said, “I’ve been away too long. Forgotten the polite art of male-female conversation.”

  “It’s okay,” she said listlessly.

  “I didn’t mean to crumple you with my rhetoric.”

  “I egged you on.”

  He gazed into the twilight. “You’re right, of course. I have always known that Dad’s a tremendous talent. There’s not much triumph in being a perpetual spindly sapling dwarfed by a tremendous oak.”

  “You mean you write too?”

  “It’s the Fernauld family disease. I’m not like BJ. She can go to him for help. Not me. Never! All I can do is snarl and skulk like a wounded cub. Let’s face it, the war came as a benison. On the Enterprise there’s no need for me to peck at the old Remington and inform myself that Joshua Fernauld is pouring out Pablum for the masses whereas Lincoln Fernauld is writing erudite, lyrical prose, the great American novel.”

  “Linc—”

  “Will you let me finish? Marylin, when this war is over, I’ll be a plumber, a ditchdigger, a bank robber, anything except a writer.”

  “I shouldn’t have argued. It’s not like me. And I don’t know anything about literature or screenwriting.”

  “You’re remarkably astute about both,” he said. “And another thing. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want to make you, but that’s not all there is.”

  “It’s not?”

  “You’re one of nature’s masterpieces, Marylin Wace. Though I long to touch, I enjoy looking.” There was a huskiness in his voice. Something had crept into the big car, an electricity that made her quiver. She felt prized open, vulnerable, submissive, waiting.

  You’ve known him all of one hour, she told herself.

  “Friends?” he asked.

  “Friends,” she murmured.

  “My parents must be home by now, and they’ll expect to see me,” he said. “Marylin, where do you live?”

  She gave him her address, and they drove through the mistshrouded twilight.

  The Waces’ apartment had been added on, an afterthought that perched like an out-of-place mortarboard atop a detached two-car garage. This undistinguished part of Beverly Hills was R1, to rent out any part of the small bungalows constituted a zoning violation, but with the wartime housing shortage the city fathers bent their straight backs enough to turn slightly in the other direction, so no police came to question the apartment’s legality.

  The blackout blinds were pulled every which way, and light blazed unevenly at the bottoms and through the rips at the sides. Climbing rickety wooden stairs, Marylin recollected their brief stop on North Hillcrest Road to let BJ out of the car. The Fernaulds lived in a commodious mansion that crouched like a placid Tudor lion on rolling, lovingly watered, expensive green real estate. She felt a shame that Linc was a witness to her poverty.

  The smell of frying increased and NolaBee’s cheerful rendition of “Poinciana” grew louder at every step, and Linc, grasping Marylin’s hand, took her books.

  As Linc and Marylin reached the top of the steps, NolaBee’s song halted abruptly. Linc peered down at Marylin, silently handing her back her books. Then, without a good-bye, he turned, loping down the steps. Marylin watched him go, the outline of a tall, lankily graceful man disappearing into the evening shadows.

  4

  The apartment was square except for the narrow bite given over to the bathroom, and was unobstructed by walls. Into this space the Waces had crowded their eccentric conglomeration of possessions: three dented metal folding chairs circled an heirloom mahogany gateleg table, two looming, overgarnished Victorian wardrobes jutted out from the walls, forming an alcove for NolaBee’s box springs and mattress, which was covered not with a normal bedspread but with a worn rubicund oriental carpet.

  None of the Waces had any conception how to keep house, and personal possessions were strewn over every available surface.

  A metal screen, haphazardly collaged by NolaBee with covers from fan magazines, leaned against the wall near the makeshift kitchen where she tended a hissing skillet full of chicken. A flowered apron swathed her black slacks, and her hair was concealed by the jaunty red turban that she wore to work.

  For nearly a year now, NolaBee had been employed at Hughes Aircraft. The war, having scooped up ten million men, ravenously demanded armaments, and America’s Depression-racked industry had burst alive, revving up to three perpetual shifts, hiring workers of either sex, every age and color. Hughes’s employment office had taken on the inexperienced NolaBee without query or quibble. It tickled her funnybone to wonder what her Fairburn and Roy ancestors would think if they could see her riveting wings to B-19’s between two Negro women—the younger one the gold of brown sugar, the other a regular black mammy—and being right friendly with them both, too. Her ancestors and Chilton’s had owned slaves, and NolaBee, like the rest of the extended family, was without the least dreg of masochistic, retroactive guilt. Her people, she was positive, had been just in every dealing with their human possessions, had tenderly nursed each aged darkie—how could it be otherwise? Her people were Georgia gentlefolk.

  Turning a drumstick, NolaBee flashed Marylin a welcoming smile. Roy raised her curly brown head from her homework—she sat on the floor between the wardrobes, an area designated as her room because her iron cot formed an angle with the cherrywood bookcase whose bottom shelf held her joy and consolation, a secondhand tablemodel Radiola. “It’s nearly six,” she said. “What kept you?”

  Marylin, who was the only one of them with any craving for order, smiled dazedly. Without thinking, she picked up her mother’s old jacket and Roy’s hand-me-down blue topper and hung them on the coatrack.

  “Yes,” said NolaBee. “I was getting a mite worried.”

  “The rehearsal—”

  NolaBee interrupted, cocking her head. “Oh, that’s right. I forgot. You’re starting on the play the screenwriter’s little girl wrote.”

  “BJ Fernauld.” Marylin spoke the patronym, her lips softening as for a kiss. “After we finished . . .” Her voice faded. Always exceptionally close to her mother, Marylin had never been afflicted with an adolescent’s stubborn secretiveness, yet as she started to explain her lateness, to tell Mama about Linc, her tongue went thick. She did not want to share any part of the last hour.

  “It’s the Junior-Class play, isn’t it?” NolaBee asked, not waiting for an answer. “I reckon there’ll be a lot of people come to see it.”

  “Probably just the kids, Mama. Anyway, it’s not until the end of next semester.”

  “Well, I reckon he’ll be there, the screenwriter,” said NolaBee. “I’ll help you learn your lines after supper.” Fat spattered as she flipped a chicken thigh. “Honey, I do wish you’d call if you’re walking home after dark.”

  “Somebody drove her,” said Roy. “I heard the car.”

  “A beau?” NolaBee’s cigarette waggled as she smiled.

  “Oh, Mama . . .” Marylin blushed.

  “What’s his name?”

  “Linc . . . Lincoln.”

  “Look at you, red as a beet.” NolaBee chuckled as she fish
ed out pieces of chicken. “I reckon this ole bird is done clear through. Girls, let’s get at him while he’s good and hot.”

  * * *

  After they finished eating, NolaBee shuffled the slick mimeograph paper, cuing Marylin in her lines. Smoke drifted lazily around the red turban and the gold-gleaming pageboy.

  Roy stretched on her cot, listening to Amos n’ Andy with her head touching the cracked pink paint of her little radio. When Marylin was working on her roles, the volume had to be kept down. All pleasure and work revolved subserviently around that hoped-for, worked-for, yearned-for career of Marylin’s.

  It was problematic for a girl entering Horace Mann Grammar School as late as seventh grade to carve a social niche, and though Roy had made a few acquaintances to chatter with at recess and lunch period, she had never been invited to a classmate’s home. She imagined all the other kids dwelling in aseptic households that were presided over by the bland, trimly garbed mothers whom she saw in shiny sedans outside the school and by fathers who departed in the morning and returned at night on a schedule as inviolable as a Swiss cuckoo clock. An existence so opposite from her own that she in turn had never invited anyone to the topsy-turvy apartment.

  Roy was nothing if not constant, and in her loneliness she set her family on a high pedestal and clung closer to them: she revered her father as a slain god, she saw Marylin as an exquisite heroine faintly tinged by tragedy, and NolaBee as a fascinating, dashing woman of unequaled bravery.

  During the commercial she surveyed her mother and sister.

  Roy would not be mortal if she weren’t jealous of her exquisite older sibling. She did not resent the carefully hoarded, crumpled bills that were taken from NolaBee’s big fake alligator purse to pay for Marylin’s singing lessons, dancing lessons, her brand new clothes from Yorkshire’s and Nobby Knit. No, it was when her mother and sister sat engrossed like this, their heads close, their arms touching, that a hot, liquid mourning flooded through Roy and she felt unworthy, unloved, and unlovable.