Cheat and Charmer (42 page)

“I’m sorry, kids,” Dinah said. “I know, it’s awful to see your m-m-mother cry.”

Then she opened her arms and they approached, but in a gingerly fashion, afraid not so much of hurting her but of seeing her burst into tears again. But she didn’t cry. She hugged and kissed them, and asked them about school and all the things that had happened to them while she was in the hospital, and was simply their mother again.

Still, now that she was home, she wept constantly. It happened when she was alone, often when she had gone back to bed after a session of going up and down the stairs with Veevi or Gussie helping her. Then she would slide under the cool sheets and sob. She mentioned it to Shelley Zuckerman when she went to have her stitches removed. “I c-c-c-can’t stop crying,” she said. He said it was normal and natural, and, like Mary O’Donnell, reminded her that she had been blessed with two beautiful children. She said nothing about feeling that she was being punished; how could she, she told herself, when she didn’t even believe in God? She continued to cry, though, and Jake, at his wits’ end, summoned Dr. Zuckerman. The doctor sat on the edge of Dinah’s bed and talked to her as if he had read her mind and knew her deepest fears, and she found his words comforting: no, there would be no difference in their sex life; she and Jake could carry on just as
before. His manner was warm, kind, candid. He suggested that she consider therapy if the crying persisted. Before leaving, he joked with Peter and Lorna about the way they hollered at him when they were born. His visit, Dinah felt, had done her a world of good. Time to stop all this, she commanded herself. After all, I’ve got a house to run. Shape up or ship out!

The evening after Dr. Zuckerman’s visit, she came downstairs for dinner. The next morning she came down to breakfast, not in her bathrobe but dressed and in time to eat with the kids and to wait with them for the school bus. She smelled the fresh morning air and touched the flowers she had planted. She felt strong on her feet and full of energy. Back inside the house, she sat down in the kitchen with her Robinson Reminder open in front of her, and she and Gussie wrote out a grocery list.

Then she looked at her housekeeper across the gray Formica table, both of them smoking Camels. “Gussie, do you have too much to do?” she asked. “Do you need extra help?”

Gussie said that she’d spoken to Mr. Lasker while Dinah was in the hospital, and he’d said it was okay to give Miss Fanny an extra day so they could keep up with all the laundry.

Dinah, who hadn’t known about this change, said it was fine. Was there anything else? she wanted to know.

“I hate to complain, Mrs. Lasker,” Gussie said, “but Mrs. Albrecht junior wants me to bring her up a tray, just like I was doing for you. If you want me to, I’ll do it, but far as I can see she ain’t had no hysterectomy, and I got my vacuuming and all my housework to do, and it do cut into my morning.” Whenever Gussie switched from “proper” English to her own way of speaking, Dinah knew the conversation was confidential, and she resolved to do something about the problem before it went too far.

Privately, she thought, We were Communists, for Christ’s sake, and here we are running this Negro woman ragged going upstairs and downstairs bringing us breakfast in bed.

Was there anything else? Gussie gave her a peculiar look. “Mrs. Lasker,” she said in a low voice, “you best be checking your gin supplies. I found an empty bottle in the trash out back, and I sure ain’t the one done put it there.”

“My sister?”

Gussie nodded. “There’s a bottle under the bed,” she added. “There’s one in there right now. But what worries me the most, Mrs. Lasker, is that she smokes in the bed. Now, I’m safe and sound out there in my room over
the garage, but all of you is here in the house and I’m afraid she gonna set fire to the place. Just the other day, I found some burn holes in the sheets.”

Dinah drew in her breath sharply. “Oh, boy. This is bad. What’re we gonna do?”

Gussie shook her head. She didn’t like Genevieve Albrecht, who asked her what she thought about
Brown v. Board of Education
and headlines in the newspapers, and then, while Dinah (which is what Gussie privately called her employer) was in the hospital, told her what to make for dinner that night. It was a relief to have weekends off and to go home to her house in the Crenshaw District. The Lasker house was getting a little too crowded.

Dinah went out that morning to do some errands, but when she came home she was so tired that she could barely get upstairs to take a nap. She slept deeply, however, until she sensed someone in the room. Opening her eyes, she found Veevi turning to leave. “It’s okay, I’m awake, Vee,” she said.

Veevi, who slept until after one o’clock every day, was still in her pajamas. She sat down on one of the upholstered armchairs in front of the fireplace opposite Dinah’s and Jake’s beds. The pajamas were pink cotton, and they peeped through her navy blue bathrobe, revealing bare feet, very white, with red toenails, and ankles that looked almost blue below the hem of her pajamas.

“Want to go downstairs for c-c-c-coffee?” Dinah asked her.

“Just had it. I told Gussie to wake me up at one, and she brought it up to me.”

“With orange juice and toast?”

“Mmm.” She smiled.

“Well, Vee, I’m glad you enjoyed it but, you know, Gus has an awful lot of work to do, now that we’ve got eight people living here. Maybe you ought to come downstairs from now on.”

“Did she say something?” Veevi looked perturbed.

“No, of course not.”

“It’s such a small thing.”

“No, dear, it isn’t a small thing. You should see her nights when we go out and come back—she’s absolutely conked out in the den. Gussie works hard—and I mean hard.”

“Fine,” said Veevi. “But she didn’t seem to mind.”

“There’s a lot of laundry now, and—”

“Don’t you have Fanny, or Miss Fanny, or whatever you call her?”

“There’s a lot for both of them. Veevi—”

“Hmm?” Veevi had nestled into the armchair, her knees pulled up against her chest. She had just lit a cigarette. “I guess I’m a big burden,” she said, removing shreds of tobacco from her lips.

“You’re not a b-b-b-burden at all. There’s extra work, that’s all. Let’s make it easy on her. Listen, Vee,” Dinah said, sitting up and slipping on her loafers. “Gussie did say she’s finding empties in the trash out in back and cigarette b-b-b-burns in your sheets.”

Veevi looked away, then back at Dinah, and smiled, at once dismissive and abashed. “Well,” she said. “Really. Imagine being spied on like that. It’s simple. I can’t sleep. It’s, you know, this change from Paris to Los Angeles. People tell me it can take weeks. I’m all discombobulated and upside down. If I have a little drink before I turn off the lights, it relaxes me. I threw the bottle out myself because I didn’t want anyone to know. Honestly. There’s no need for her to spy on me.”

“Veevi, she’s not sp-sp-spying. She found the bottles. The burn holes,” Dinah said hurriedly, not wanting to prolong the conversation. “But, Vee, you can’t smoke in bed. Otherwise I’ll be the one who can’t sleep. I mean, the kids …”

“Fine,” said Veevi reasonably. “I won’t smoke in bed.”

“Look, get dressed and come downstairs. I’m dying to get back to my garden. There are a million things I want to do out there, and old Joe said he’d help me. Wanna come, too?”

“Look at you,” said Veevi, “with a gardener and a maid and a laundress.
La châtelaine
.”

“Yes,” Dinah said, “and I l-l-l-love it.” She looked directly at her sister and remembered that out in Malibu, Veevi had proclaimed that she didn’t believe in household help. Then one of the refugee women asked for a job doing the laundry and she gave it to her, as a favor, she said, and Dorshka did all the cooking. That left Veevi free to read all she wanted to when she wasn’t working.

“Help me downstairs, Vee. I’m still a little woozy going down.”

Veevi stood on Dinah’s left, bracing her as she held the banister with her right hand and went, step by step, down the pale green carpeted stairs. Dinah had to admit that her sister’s breath was sour with old alcohol. But, she reminded herself, that’s why she came home. She’s sad and exhausted, and drinking to get to sleep. She’ll get settled and find a job, and then she’ll be too busy to drink. But the thought of the drinking oppressed
her, and she felt her knees sag as she turned a sharp corner on the stairs. “Oops,” she said to Veevi. “Maybe I overdid it this morning.”

“Want to go back to bed?” Veevi asked brightly.

“No,” Dinah said. “I want to put in a full day. Staying in bed is depressing. I want to get out there and get d-d-d-dirt on my hands. If I can bend over,” she added, laughing.

“The Duchess of Delfern,” Veevi said with a mirthless laugh. “I guess you’ve come a long way from Claggett Oil.”

“You’re goddamn right I have,” Dinah said as they went into the breakfast room.

U
ntil lately, Dinah had loved the enormous spaces of her house and its many silent and secret places. But now it swarmed with people. The kids had friends over to swim after school or to play inside when it was too cold to swim, and Claire, a tenth-grader, brought friends home from the private girls’ school she attended. Dinah learned from Jake that at first, while she was in the hospital, Veevi’s old friends had stopped by late in the day for a drink, and sometimes, at her invitation, for dinner. Sometimes Jake was there, but usually he wasn’t because he was visiting Dinah. At those times, the Lasker kids and Coco ate in the kitchen, while Claire and her mother and their friends ate in the dining room. Poor Gussie then had two meals to prepare, the second one often improvised at an hour’s notice. But the friends had stopped coming, now that she was home, Jake told Dinah.

“So what else is new?” she said.

She was too glad to be home, and at the same time too sad, to worry about people’s reactions to her testifying, especially when they were eating at her table. Jake said it didn’t matter anyway, because they weren’t people who counted in the industry anymore—they’d all been blacklisted. Then he changed the subject and said it was time for them to start entertaining again. There were a lot of people they owed, and he’d been too busy with the Tooling picture to do much entertaining. If they started giving parties, he added, Veevi might meet somebody, and that would solve everything.

As far as a job was concerned, Jake and Veevi had worked out an arrangement: she would be his private story editor, which involved reading manuscripts and writing synopses, and he would pay her a weekly salary. Meanwhile, through Jake and Reggie Pertwee, she would try to find work
as an actress, though this, they all admitted, was a long shot. Movies were out, for the time being, but television was a nut that might be easier to crack. Dinah told Jake that it was taking a while for her to get back on her feet, but she promised to give a party within a month.

Late one evening in November, when Dinah was almost herself again, she, Jake, and Veevi were sitting in the den, as they often did on fall nights. Jake had made a fire, and each of them had a brandy snifter. They were going through Veevi’s books—not the books she’d left behind in Paris, but the ones from her years with Stefan. Their furniture had been in storage for fifteen years now. Though Veevi wouldn’t claim her belongings until she found a house of her own, she and Dinah had agreed that she shouldn’t have to live without her books. A Bekins truck with roughly fifty boxes had pulled up several days ago, and two hairy-armed moving men had carried them into the house and stacked them in the entryway. Since then, at around ten every night, Jake had followed “the girls,” as he called them, into the den for a nightcap and an unpacking of books, which the three of them would scrutinize not only as candidates for temporary inclusion in the Laskers’ library but as potential movie properties that Veevi could summarize for Jake.

Jake was energetically slitting open boxes with a Swiss Army knife, pulling out books, and handing them to Dinah, who stacked them in piles in front of the sofa.

“What’s this? I never heard of it,” Jake said, handing a heavy volume to Dinah.