Best to Laugh: A Novel (17 page)

29

I
T
HAD
BEEN
MY
INTENTION
to start out 1979 by greeting the dawn with an early-morning swim, but on the way to the pool I came across Madame Pepper taking out her garbage.

Startled, we both gasped, and after we caught our breaths she whispered, “What are you doing up so early?” just as I asked, “What are you doing?”

I gave my explanation and she held up a plastic garbage bag.

“I always empty the trash on January first. It’s good for the soul—and for the apartment.”

“But you didn’t feel a need,” I said, gesturing at her copper-colored beaded gown, “to take off your party dress from last night?”

“This I just put on,” said Madame Pepper, holding out her shawl like batwings to better expose her dress. “For the second part of ritual.”

“Which is?” I asked, following her to the garbage bins.

After she’d tossed in the knotted plastic bag, she brushed off her hands and smiled, like someone about to reveal a secret and wanting to enjoy it by herself for just a moment more.

“Why don’t you join me?”

“Join you for what?”

Impatience scuttled across her heavy features. “For second part of ritual.”

“Okay,” I said, intrigued. “I’ll just get some clothes on and I’ll meet—”

“—I am thinking it’s perfect the way you are.”

I was barefoot and wearing an old terry robe over my swimsuit, but the old woman’s expression taunted,
I dare you,
and never good at turning down dares, I said, “All right. Let’s go.”

We stole quietly through the grounds of Peyton Hall and to the sidewalk and didn’t speak until we were nearly at the La Brea intersection.

“Wow,” I said, looking down the expanse of Hollywood Boulevard. “There’s nobody here.”

“Precisely,” said Madame Pepper. “It is the first day of New Year and we have one of the most famous streets in the world all to ourselves.”

She took my arm. “Since 1942, Candy, every January first, I have walked down to Vine and back as the sun comes up. And always in fancy clothes, as the ritual demands.”

“And you do this because—”

“—because I am able! Because it reminds me, that worldwide symbol of mystery and allure and dreams—is right here!” She flung her free arm east. “And here it is that I make my resolution to accept mystery and allure and dreams for another year!”

“Why, you old Hollywood romantic,” I said, giving her a little nudge with my hip.

“When there’s nothing else to believe in, why not choose romance?”

This was not the blithe response I was expecting.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

The old woman’s fingers tightened around my bicep.

“Candy, how do you think I got here?”

“Here to Hollywood?” I asked, and when she nodded I said, “By plane? No, wait; they hadn’t been invented yet.”

“Ha, so funny. But, you are right, I did not take plane. A boat. In 1933. I was twenty-two years old.”

I did some quick calculations.

“You’re younger than my grandma.”

“You sound surprised.”

“I never thought I’d defend my grandma’s leisure suits or the dye jobs she gives herself . . . but they are a little more youthful than shawls and long skirts and head scarves.”

Madame Pepper snorted a laugh.

“You remind me so much of my sister, Sophie. She also was smart aleck.”

“Is she in America, too?”

“Sophie? Oh, my Sophie’s long gone. She died in the war. Not in your mother and father’s war. The one before it.”

I shivered in the cool morning air, wishing I were wearing more than a swimsuit and robe.

“I’m sorry.”

“Me, too,” said Madame Pepper. “Ah, Greta Garbo.”

We stopped for a moment, looking down at the star of the Swedish actress.

“My friend Polly said she had the prettiest shoulders. They were broad, like yours.”

“Tell me more,” I said, and covering the hand she had tucked in the crook of my elbow with my own, we walked slowly, the hem of Madame Pepper’s long dress dusting the smooth granite of the Walk of Fame.

We walked far enough in silence to convince me she didn’t want to honor my request, but then she began speaking, in a dreamy voice so soft that I had to lean in toward her.

“Friedrich Pfeffer was cinematographer, an artist! Most of his work is in silent pictures, but also he filmed
A Star to Hold
and
Gentle Lies,
which can be seen on the late show. But most importantly—to me—he was my husband.”

“Pfeffer,” I said, “so Pfeffer is—”

“—yes, I anglicized it. You have to make things easy for Americans.”

I smiled at the insult.

“We met in summer of 1931. He was older than I by a dozen years and already established in the European cinema. He was part of a German crew filming a movie in my hometown, Bucharest. I was exiting Dancescu’s Bakery with my marmalade rolls as he was entering for his tea biscuits, and it was either love at first sight, or lust; either way, it didn’t take long before we were sharing a bed.” She frowned at me. “This shocks you?”

“Why would it?”

“The young sometimes think that premarital sex is their discovery.”

I let my jaw drop. “Is that what you meant, that you were having sex? Because I thought you were just sharing a bed, you know, for sleep!”

The fortune-teller snorted.

“Just like Sophie.”

Her quick laugh was replaced by the long sad whisper of a sigh.

“A year after we marry an offer from Hollywood arrived and of course Friedrich takes it. I would have loved Sophie to come with us, but she now had married also, to Josef, a doctor.”

She turned again toward me and to a casual observer it might look as if the old woman were looking directly at me, but the storytelling veil had dropped over her eyes, and I knew that in her gaze she wasn’t seeing me but the people of whom she spoke.

“With Friedrich’s help, I got work in costume department—it’s true, in Hollywood, it often is who you know. That is where I first met my friend Polly, although she left MGM for Paramount and Edith Head. I
loved the work, loved not just the artistry but being the ear to so many stories. You fit someone, you dress them, you hear their stories!

“My letters to Sophie were like confections, filled with descriptions of this strange world I found myself in, where oranges, grapefruits, and lemons hung like jewels from backyard trees, and where air was perfumed with this jewelry fruit, and also flowers which I had never seen. And how she loved for me to tell her the gossip! I would write of a dinner party where the person across the table, asking to ‘Please pass the butter’ might be Carole Lombard or William Powell. ‘Tell me more!’ she would write, and for two years my letters were filled with this glamorous piffle. Then Friedrich died.”

I drew in a quick breath of surprise.

“Of stupid accident on the set! They were shooting in sound stage and he falls off the crane! The crane he had been on hundreds of times before!”

“I’m so sorry.”

Madame Pepper’s nod was slow. “There was much to be sorry about at that time. I was of course devastated and angry, too—how could he fall off crane and make me a widow at twenty-four?—but I am thinking at least this is worst my life will know.

“Time passes; that is its cure and curse. Sophie’s letters, usually so bright and filled with news of their baby Anica, or Josef’s patients—once a butcher paid his bill with spoiled sausage making Josef joke, ‘Was my care that bad?’—grew darker with news of Hitler, and I beg them to come to America. Begged.”

Madame Pepper’s lush eyebrows lowered as she squinted her eyes, as if the memory was a bad headache.

“Josef’s family on his mother’s side was Polish, and he and Sophie and little Anica were visiting these relatives in September of ’39.” We walked at least ten steps before she said, “In Wielun, Poland.

“It was a surprise bombing on the city. By the Germans. The beginnings of the war, and my sister and her family perished in it.”

“Spare change?” asked a ragged woman, stepping out from behind a ticket kiosk by Grauman’s.

Madame Pepper shook her head, and I stated the obvious, “We didn’t bring our purses.”

“The Supreme Court justices are all aliens,” said the panhandler. “Except for Thurgood Marshall. He’s from Baltimore.”

“I would have gladly paid for that information,” I said and two sec
onds later I apologized. “When things get too heavy, my reflex is . . . never mind. Please. Go on.”

“Yes. That is all I could do: go on.” She stared ahead, nodding her head. “All during the war, I was frantic to get my mother, my father, my brother Gavril here, but they wouldn’t leave—even in wartime! Bucharest was bombed and they survived, but for my parents it was a survival that finally wore them out. Both died several years later, not able to believe what had become of their world.”

We stepped on one, two, a dozen stars, and when she didn’t speak again, I said, “I’m so sorry. So sorry for what you had to go through.”

“Yes,” said Madame Pepper. “But I am not alone in having sadness. You, too, know it.”

“I do. We’re in the same sad club.”

“The Club of Sorrows.”

“The club that no one wants to be a member of.”

“The club where people get turned away for not having enough pain.”

“That’s right,” I said. “We’re exclusive. You’ve got to know death and devastation to join our club.”

Our laughter was of the resigned, Whaddya gonna do? variety.

“Look here,” said Madame Pepper, stopping to examine a star. “Vivien Leigh. If I could have a different face—hers I would have. Or Hedy Lamarr’s—who could have been her sister.”

A
S
WE
BEGAN
WALKING
AGAIN,
Madame Pepper took my hand, and we swung them, like kids.

“So tell me more about your ritual,” I said. “What made you want to ring in the New Year by walking the Boulevard? By walking the Boulevard in an evening gown?”

“It is the end of 1941,” she said after a moment. “I had been dropped off from a party in Beverly Hills—the fanciest, most festive New Year’s Eve party I had ever known. Pearl Harbor had been struck only weeks before and now the war, already such a terrible reality for me with the death of Sophie and her family, was real for Americans. But that party! Everyone—the stars, the producers, the directors, all of Hollywood royalty—danced and ate and drank, and at midnight we clung to each other singing ‘Auld Lang Syne,’ and, Candy, there were no dry eyes.

“No one, it seemed, wanted that party to end, but finally I was
chauffeured home—I had just moved into Peyton Hall—by a director who’d worked with my husband Friedrich. It was nearly dawn when I climbed out of that car, a little
betrunken
from the flow of champagne, but instead of going to my apartment, I decided to take walk down Hollywood Boulevard. Being tipsy did not save me from how I felt—so sad and hopeless, wondering, Who knows? Maybe the bombs come here and this street will be no more. Maybe next year, I, like my husband, like my sister, my niece, my brother-in-law will be no more. So, Candy, the first time I walk it; well, it was more a stagger, and I was not so much the romantic.”

“I wish you’d have let me change.”

“Why? You are cold?”

“No.” My robe was belted tight and the rising sun was doing its job to warm me. “No, I would have liked to dress for the . . . specialness of the occasion.”

Madame’s smile was sly. “I am thinking walking down Hollywood Boulevard in swimsuit is special enough.”

“All right, then.” Letting go of her hand, I took off my robe and draped it over my arm, so that I was indeed walking down Hollywood Boulevard in my special-enough swimsuit.

With my shoulders back and head held high, I strutted down the Walk of Fame as if it were my personal runway. Madame Pepper began to issue forth her peculiar little snorts, and the more she laughed the more I turned up the performance, tossing my robe to her so that I could leap and dance around the stars unencumbered. To be jumping around and shimmying on Hollywood Boulevard in my faded old swim-team suit made me feel wildly liberated and wildly addled; I was like a newly defected ballerina from the Bolshoi who’d gotten kicked in the head during a pas de deux.

Across the street, near the closed-up newsstand, a stooped man pushing a shopping cart paused in his collection of cans and bottles to offer a loud, shrill wolf whistle.

Inspired by my newfound fan, I wished Buster Keaton a Happy New Year and did a cartwheel right over his pink, black, and gold star.

Madame Pepper cackled as I greeted the various stars I danced by.

“Happy New Year, Nat King Cole! Happy New Year, John Barrymore! Happy New Year, Licia Albanese, whoever you are!”

We crossed the street and standing on a star, I struck a glamorous, you-may-photograph-me-now pose.

“Happy New Year, Betty Grable!”

“I danced with her at the USO Club,” shouted the shopping cart man. “Her and Evelyn Keyes!”

“Happy New Year, Evelyn Keyes!”

A woman folding up the cardboard that had served as her mattress looked up from the recessed corner of a storefront.

“And Virginia Mayo!” she said, her smile revealing only three teeth whose tenancy along her gum line didn’t look to be long lasting. “I was her stand-in back in the day. We were the exact same size.”

“Happy New Year, Virginia Mayo!”

I could have continued offering up best wishes to all the stars lining the street, but when a police car turned on to the Boulevard from Cahuenga, Madame Pepper handed me my robe.

“Who knows what is considered creating a public nuisance these days,” she said.

B
Y
EIGHT
O’CLOCK
THAT
MORNING,
I was in cool, chlorinated water, amusing myself in the pool I had all to myself. I turned backward somersaults, raced against (and always beat) imaginary opponents and walked on my hands in the shallow end. When I pulled myself out of the water, I collapsed onto a chaise longue and, offering myself up to the pale morning sun, dozed off. Seconds, minutes, or hours later, I heard a voice ask, “Why are you smiling?”