All That Glitters (15 page)

She motioned for me to draw up the chair, and as I did she thrust out the flat of her palm at me and, as though to warn me away, said, “That’s far enough. Sit down, take a load off.”

I sat and she proceeded to interrogate me as to my evening’s activities. I made no secret of the fact that I’d dined with Belinda.

“She tryin’ to put the make on you? She hot for your fair white body?”

I grinned cockily. “If she were, she wouldn’t have much trouble.” I thought I’d get something back, but as she frowned, considering something, I noticed a sudden rustling movement under the covers and in moments the famous Chihuahua, Tiny, had wriggled into sight, poking its pointy face from underneath the covers. Babe caught the creature up and hugged it against her breast. “Nice Tiny, sweet Tiny,” she crooned, and the dog settled down against her, its tail wagging. Babe stroked the pale belly with her long-nailed hand, while she gave me the full once-over.

I was amused when she actually said “Humph!” It sounded old-fashioned and somehow endearing and I was prepared to be conciliatory, but she seemed bent on provoking some sort of quarrel.

“I heard you and her were living together in sin. Up there at old Maude’s place. With the daughter right there in the house and everything. Sounds pretty tacky to me.”

“Does it?” I countered briskly. “I guess some people are better equipped to judge what’s tacky than others.” I didn’t pause, but plowed straight on. “As for our living together, if you’d ever been to Sunnyside you’d realize that the guesthouse, where I stayed, is a long way from the main house, where Belinda lived, and you should also realize that she would never have been interested in me, since at the time she and Frank were planning to get married.”

She pursed her lips and gave the dog a wettish smack. “Maybe it wasn’t Belinda after all; maybe you were boffing old Maude. At her age, too. What some dames will do for a lay. Talk about cradle-robbing.”

“Maybe so, maybe not. One thing we know—it wasn’t on the Super Chief. Was it?” I sat back with a smug look. Babe and the dog both eyed me with some puzzlement.

“I don’t get it. What’s that supposed to mean, ‘Super Chief’?”

“Golly, and all this time I thought you were busy treasuring the memory of our little cross-country rendezvous. As we hurtled through the night, wrapped in each other’s arms—all across Wyoming—or was it Oklahoma?”

She frowned. “What’re you talking about—Wyoming? Super Chief? What’s the gag?”

“No gag. For your enlightenment, Miss A, I have reference to the end of the Second World War, in which I was privileged to play a minor role—VJ Day, August 15, year of our Lord 1945. Miss Gladys Lillie of Battle Crick. I mean,
you
remember Gladys Lillie, don’t you?”

She slid her glasses down her nose and regarded me suspiciously over their rims. “Listen, buster, just what’re you inferring?”

“No no no, lady,” I corrected. “I’m
implying
;
you
can
infer
whatever you like. I merely meant that one of my most treasured memories is of that night. Can you really have forgotten? I’m really surprised—I thought I’d made a better—um—impression on you.”

She gave me a sour look and stuck her glasses back firmly in place. “I can’t be expected to remember every guy I come across. Nineteen forty-five? You must’ve been a baby.”

“
You
didn’t think so. I seem to remember you—ah—said you liked doing your bit for the boys. ‘The brave boys who are facing death all over the globe,’ I believe that’s how you chose to put it. Rather delicately, I thought, considering how robustly you did your bit for
this
boy.”

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.