Cheat and Charmer (52 page)

Laughter poured through the room, and through Dinah, filling her with love for her husband. At such moments—when everyone had eaten well, and people were telling stories, and the children were asleep, and her large, beautiful house was alive with all its uses—Dinah’s happiness was a bright speechless buoyancy. It seemed that life was everything it could be, and that she and Jake together were harvesting their share of all that it should be.

Manny Steiner, his brown egg of a bald head shining, launched into a story of his own without preliminaries: “Some men are praying in Jerusalem, at the Wailing Wall. They’re davening back and forth”—and Manny started to daven—“and one guy says, ‘How do you know when
you’re praying to God and when you’re praying to a wall?’ Another fellow answers, ‘When you ask for the sun to shine or for your wife to make a good dinner, you’re praying to God. But when you ask for twenty-five thousand dollars, then you’re praying to a wall.’ ” Again, the room, like a large lung, expanded with laughter.

Then Irv Engel tried his hand with an interminable story, stuffed with “he said”s and “she said”s, and endless dialogue, and, unforgivably, Irv’s own anticipatory giggles. Irv hadn’t been raised on the streets of Chicago or New York but in a sixty-room mansion on a twenty-acre estate above Sunset in Beverly Hills. Shiksa that I am, said Dinah to herself, I know a good Jewish accent when I hear one and his is always phony and terrible. His timing was off, he added unnecessary details, and he meandered. But he was Irv Engel, president and head of production at Marathon Pictures, and he got his laughs. Gratified, he ran his hands over his thick hair, which was brushed back from his forehead.

“Tell us about your next play, Irv,” the normally sedate Dick Telford burst out. He may have been hoping to deflect Irv from launching into another endless story.

It was about Andrew Jackson, Irv said, and it was the third in a series of plays about critical moments in the lives of great American presidents. The first two were on Jefferson and John Adams, and they’d been quite successful. Everyone nodded and listened as, for several minutes, Irv expatiated on this subject.

The room went quiet, and somebody coughed. Norma Levine got up to go to the powder room. Shrewd and affable mogul that he was, Dinah wondered, didn’t Irv know that before dinner people talked deals, shooting schedules, Guild strikes, and Eisenhower, but that after dinner they wanted stories, music, and laughs? Dinah and Jake caught each other’s eyes; his face said, “Do something.”

The moment Engel finished his discussion, she made her move. “Milty! How ’bout it?” she called out.

Immensely tall and gawky, with blue eyes that quivered in pale pink sockets, the composer got up from the sofa, where he had been talking with Izzie Morocco. Stopping on his way to the piano, he extended a hand and pulled up a short, stout woman wearing a diamond as big, Dinah might have said, as her ass. This was Elaine Marcus, the songwriter Buzz Marcus’s wife; as Elaine Adams she’d been an understudy in
Finian’s Rainbow
and had left the stage to marry Marcus and raise a family. She had put on weight since her marriage, but she was a belter, a girl with a huge voice, and when she and Milty started with “Old Devil Moon,” men loosened their ties, women let their high heels drop to the carpet, and everyone sank back with a happy sigh into the Laskers’ silk sofas.

In Hollywood, a good party becomes a great one when people who entertain the public for a living sing and play just for one another’s pleasure. During those moments, there is nothing beyond the singing and playing itself. Those making the music do so to a knowing and appreciative audience. Receiving as a gift what the rest of the world must pay for, those in the audience feel themselves exempted from the entanglements and rivalries they are forced to confront every working day in “the industry.” Out across the capacious living room soars the live voice, undubbed, without microphones, so close that you can see the vibrations in the singer’s throat. The awkward, modest, but supremely talented Brooklyn expatriate, forever shy with women, becomes a witty and generous accompanist, singing harmony with perfect pitch, gliding effortlessly with the singer from show tunes and standards to blues and jazz. The singer, having renounced her profession for the joys of domesticity, easily reclaims her birthright. Song follows song, and the room fills with bliss.

Then someone called out for Jake to get up and sing the parody lyrics for which he was renowned. He went over to the piano, murmured something to Milty, leaned back with both elbows, and sang in a gravelly, respectably on-key, and faintly Bing Crosby–ish voice:

Before he had finished the song there were cheers, laughter, and applause. Norma Levine called out for Milty to play “Black Bottom,” so that Dinah and Groucho could do the Charleston together. Elaine Marcus got up again and sang Rodgers and Hart, Gershwin, Johnny Mercer, and Burke and Van Heusen songs, while people lolled on the sofas and the carpet, shoes off, legs stretched out.

It was well past twelve when Milty finally lowered the keyboard cover and, one by one, the couples reluctantly rose to go. Dinah felt the warmth of Jake’s hand on the back of her neck, stroking it a little, and she knew he was pleased and that everything had gone well. At the front door, there were good-night kisses and thank-yous, the distant sound of cars on Sunset, cold air drifting in through the heavy oak door. In the living room, couples still lingered on the sofas—the Steiners, Wynn Tooling and Maureen Tolliver, snuggled up against each other, the Telfords, Veevi and Saul, the Engels with their shoes off. Jake headed toward the den for a bottle of brandy, and Dinah went to the kitchen.

She was just coming back, carrying a tray with a pot of hot coffee, a pitcher of cream, and a new box of chocolate mints, when she noticed that something was different. There were loud voices—she wasn’t sure at first whose. Then she saw Anya Engel clinging tightly to Irv’s arm, both of them with their shoes back on, her brows furrowed and the twisted porthole of her mouth tightly closed.

Waving his pipe, Saul Landau was saying, “What do you mean, it’s ‘blowing over’? When, Irv, when? Are you rehiring all the people you fired? How many is it now, Irv? Forty, fifty, a hundred people? All out on their asses? When did you ever stand up to the Committee and the American Legion?”

“We’ve all suffered, Saul. Believe me, both of you,” said Irv, looking earnestly at Veevi. “A man in my position has to make difficult decisions—sometimes excruciating decisions, let me assure you.” His eyes flashed with anger, and his face, with its fleshy, overdefined features, contracted into a scowl. “And I am”—his voice rose higher and higher, until it was almost a falsetto—“ready to be responsible for them. I will say only this: I did whatever I had to do to save the studio. It’s true that I urged some people to testify, to give in to the bastards. I hated doing it. In my heart I knew it was not something that in ordinary circumstances any of them would do. I knew that none of them—almost none of them—did it with an ounce of
sincerity in their hearts. It was—you know—
acting
. You should have as much compassion for them as you do for your holy and unsullied self. I know, too, that some of the martyrs, the great moral heroes we all admire for refusing to talk—and I, for one, will not name them—live as strictly under Party discipline today as they did fifteen years ago. They scream and yell bloody murder about the violation of their constitutional rights, when they themselves have nothing but the most cynical and contemptuous opinion of democracy and have actually held trials for fellow writers whose work deviated from the Party line.…”

“Prove it,” sneered Saul. “Prove it.”

“Prove it? Happily. I suggest that you call up Clifford Boatwright tomorrow morning and ask him what happened when he published
If You Want to Know the Time
. Ask him if, by God, they didn’t put him on trial. Ask him if anyone demanded that he write a letter to the
New Masses
acknowledging the error of his ways. Ask him if Anatole Klein and Norman Metzger and Guy Bergman threatened him with expulsion from the Party. Go ahead and ask him.”

“It’s not so easy to call him,” Veevi said coolly. “He’s been living in Ireland since he got out of jail, writing for English TV.”

Dinah looked sharply at Veevi. Did she remember that sinister exchange beside the pool, when Metzger and Klein ganged up on Boatwright?

“No, Veevi, he’s back in New York, living at his mother’s,” Irv said. “I’ve been in touch with him. And that’s all I’m going to say about it at this point.”

Veevi looked startled at this piece of information. Saul glanced at her face, saw her eyes brightening, and bit down on his pipe.

“But what about Franklin Shaw?” Veevi said. “Come on, Irv. Franklin Shaw offered to talk. He wasn’t subpoenaed. Who does that, for Christ’s sake? Have you ever heard of anybody actually calling the Committee up and volunteering?”

“He’s bitter, Veevi. He’s another one they put on trial.”

“Nonsense,” said Saul. “Another malcontent.”

That word, Dinah thought.
Malcontent
. He’s still using that word. She looked at Veevi, and Veevi looked at her. She got it, Dinah thought. She heard it, too.

“He had better things to do with his talent than weave baskets in
Mexico,” said Irv. “And he honestly thought it over and decided he wanted to get back to work. You may not agree with him, Saul—that’s your privilege. But just because it isn’t your position doesn’t make it unprincipled.”

“Snitching isn’t unprincipled? Snitching on your friends?”

“Well, you know what they say,” Irv fired back. “ ‘With friends like that, who needs enemies?’ ”

No one laughed.

“He was called to account, as he damn well should have been,” Saul broke in. “But a trial? Nonsense. Franklin Shaw wasn’t put on trial.”

“Yes, he was, Saul,” Veevi said. “I know, I was there. It took place in my living room.”

“I was there, too. It was a lousy book, a reactionary book, and they had every right to tell him so.”

“It was a trial, Saul,” said Veevi calmly. “A trial, a public humiliation, and idiotic. We were all idiots then.”

A muscle under Saul’s right eye twitched almost imperceptibly.

“Look, you guys,” Irv continued. “If I can hold on to the studio, then I’ll have a place for everybody to come back to when this whole fucking thing blows over. Hell, I’ll even hire you back, Saul.”

“And he doesn’t even like you,” Anya snuffled, squeezing her husband’s arm. “You’re a bore—a smug, self-righteous bore. And your music’s dull, too.”

For the first time, Dinah understood that until then she had had only the shallowest view of the Engels’ marriage, and that Anya was a fiercely loyal wife. “I’ll rehire everyone I fired—the talented ones, anyway,” Irv said, smiling cruelly at Saul. “So Anya’s right—that rules you out. And then, through art, we’ll tell the truth about this time.”

Oh shit, thought Dinah. Talk about bores. He always hits that note.

“That’s a very nice plan for the future, Irv,” said Veevi. “But nevertheless you caved in and Saul didn’t. No matter what you say, doesn’t that make you rather a public martyr and a private shitheel?”

Dinah cringed. The entire evening crumbled like a stale cracker.

“No, Miss Milligan, it does not. Stand in my shoes and tell me what you would have done.”

“What you’ve done is made it as easy on yourself as possible,” said Saul. “You’ve got an excuse for every concession you’ve made. If they want you to fire people, you fire them and then you tell the press you deplore the blacklist. Why don’t you quit your job if you feel such anguish? Oh, I know: it’s
because you’re planning to pull the nails out of the hands of all the people you’ve crucified.”

“Get off the cross, Saul,” said Irv.

There was silence. Dinah’s heart was pounding. She looked at the carpet and then at Jake, who was standing, as if paralyzed, with the Telfords, their faces blank with genteel neutrality. Dinah tenderly put her hand on Anya’s elbow. “Come on, honey.” She led Anya to the coat closet, and just as she was gently wrapping Anya’s mink around her, she saw Veevi and Saul moving through the screen door and out to the pool.

“Well,” said Irv at the front door, engulfing Dinah’s hand in his two paws. “I certainly admire a woman of principle. I’m surprised she was able to tolerate being in the same room with me all evening.”

Anya, scowling, took his arm. “Come on, darling. It’s time to go home,” she said softly. Then, looking up at Dinah, she said, “You know, you’re much more beautiful than your sister.”

“Oh, Anya,” Dinah said, leaning forward to kiss Anya’s cheek. “Thank you. But I’m not.”

“You know,” Irv continued, speaking to both Jake and Dinah. “When my poor brother Tal first saw Genevieve Milligan on the Marathon lot, he came home and told me that he’d found his destiny.”

He shook his head, and Dinah saw tears in his eyes and remembered the rumor that L. J. Engel had never gotten over his grief at Tal’s broken engagement to Veevi, when she eloped with Ventura. And then Tal had died a few years later up in Vermont, where he’d gone to get out of Hollywood and to write another novel. It was unfinished at the time of his death, and it was rumored to be about Veevi.

“She’s still a pretty girl,” Anya said, again taking her husband’s elbow. “But nothing like before. You gave your sister a lovely party, Dinah. It was a generous gesture on your part. But I don’t see a future for her in this town. Good night, Dinah. Good night, Jake.”

And that was it. They were out the door.

And soon so was everyone else.