Cheat and Charmer (71 page)

In Jake’s upstairs office that afternoon, Dinah sat restlessly behind his desk. He wasn’t at the apartment; his secretary said he’d just left for the rehearsal studio. She wouldn’t get a chance to talk to him until that night, because he couldn’t be disturbed during auditions. Was there someone else she could call? Dorshka, perhaps? But if Dorshka didn’t know that her own son was in town, Dinah reflected,
she
wasn’t going to be the one to tell her. And if Dorshka
did
know but hadn’t said anything, she must have had a good reason for keeping it to herself.

Resigned to a long wait, and feeling guilty for going against Nelly’s advice, Dinah put the phone down and went into her dressing room, where she changed into her gardening shorts and halter. This would be her last day of gardening until she came back in September.

Soon, squatting on her haunches, she was contentedly troweling holes for the blocks of pansies that would border the pool patio. Seeing Manny Steiner had reminded her to bring out her own little transistor, and she listened to old swing tunes as she lost herself in the dirt and the flowers and felt the sun beating down on her back. She loved her house and making things grow outdoors in the California sun, and she wondered what it was going to be like to live in the East again for the first time since 1922. She was remembering the bugs and the humidity in Pittsburgh when she heard Veevi’s customary “Hello, hello!” so mock-British, as she approached from the house.

“I don’t know why I’m doing this,” Dinah explained a few minutes later. “I’m not even gonna see these darling little creatures this s-s-s-summer.” Veevi had emerged from the dressing room wearing a two-piece bathing suit.

“You like putting your hands in the dirt—you do it for the fun of it,” she said. “You like gardening; I like books.”

“ ‘How true,’ ” Dinah answered, lapsing into the sisterly banter they had shared for aeons, in which every word was a self-consciously deployed cliché, a deliberately arch or archaic turn of phrase. It was as if everything they said to each other had to have implicit quotation marks around it, lest they be caught talking to each other in just a simple, ordinary way. Had
Dinah wanted to play it straight, she could have added that she also happened to like books, but Veevi always had to accent their differences: I like this, but you like that. Though she never said so, Dinah found this tallying of differences tedious.

She waited for Veevi to stretch out, as she usually did, on a pool chaise, but instead Veevi turned the chaise away from the sun and toward Dinah, sat down, crossed her legs, and leaned slightly forward. Dinah made a half turn so that she could work the soil and talk to her sister at the same time.

“Tell me, Sister Ina,” Veevi began, lighting a Lucky Strike. “What was it like when you testified? What did you say? What did they ask you?”

Dinah sprang up and stood with her legs apart and her gloved hands on her hips. “What was it like when I t-t-t-testified? That’s what you want to know?”

Veevi nodded.

“I thought you’d never ask,” she said with a sardonic mock aside.

“Tell me.”

“It was cold, imp-p-p-personal, matter-of-f-f-f-fact,” Dinah replied without hesitation. “And awful. Simply awful.”

“How so?”

Dinah pulled off her gardening gloves and sat down on the edge of the chaise opposite Veevi’s. Then she told Veevi everything that had happened from the moment the man in the gray hat had shoved the subpoena into her hand to the instant she had seen poor Artie Squires in the hotel corridor. She described the Honorable Curtis P. Kingman (who had died recently, she’d read) and Horace Marlow, and repeated every question they had asked her—all of which she remembered with photographic precision and a sense of horror that even now she could feel running up and down her spine.

She spoke evenly, directly, and without hesitation, even though she had to endure the usual lockup in the jailhouse of her throat. But, ultimately, the stutter didn’t get in the way. It was as if she had saved up her story until this very moment, and it poured out of her. Yet she wasn’t offering a confession or an apology. Her comely face and clear voice did not ask for absolution. Neither did she attempt antic facial expressions, ironic asides, or put anything, so to speak, in quotation marks. She did not measure her words to fit her sister’s expression, which she nevertheless watched closely. For once, Veevi listened without raising her eyebrows, pursing her lips, glancing aside at invisible interlocutors, or assuming any of the repertoire
of a thousand expressions with which she conveyed disdain, belittlement, mockery, or skepticism.

“And that’s it,” Dinah concluded. “I came home and wrote you the next morning. And never heard from you, although Mike certainly gave us a piece of his mind.”

Veevi glanced away ever so slightly. “Mmm,” she said abstractedly. “Yes, I know. But, Ina?”

Dinah looked at her again. Was it coming now? The “How could you?” Dinah had been expecting since the summer of 1951. She was ready for it, and braced herself by looking away from her sister’s face momentarily and simply waiting for the bullet. It was three-thirty. The light had begun to change and the shadows to lengthen; the afternoon heat was letting up, and the fragrant air she loved so much chased the smog away with a thousand scents.

“Ina?” Veevi said in a strangled voice. “Would you take a look at this?”

Veevi reached into her purse and pulled out a letter, one of those tissue-thin blue airmail letters that immediately signified “Europe” for Dinah.

“Is it from Mike?” Dinah asked.

Veevi nodded. “Here, read it.”

The moment she saw the salutation,
“Dearest V.,”
Dinah’s heart sank. “
As you know, we’re making progress with the divorce, which I’ve tried to make as easy on you as possible. I’m doing everything I can to make sure you get the alimony you need. But I need hardly remind you that divorce is a pretty expensive proposition. I have finally bent to necessity and decided to let them make a movie of
The Confession.” Dinah quickly read on, making an effort not to react, and learned the following: that Willie Weil had bought the property and had scheduled meetings in Los Angeles to pitch the story to Seymour Mandlin, the head of Palomar. Willie had gotten commitments from Brando and Kurt Jurgens—even without a script. If Mandlin went for it, Weil was reasonably certain he could get Mike twelve weeks’ work in L.A. to write the screenplay. A whole summer in L.A. was just what Mike wanted, he said, because he needed to catch up with Coco, Claire, and his mother. And, of course, Veevi herself, if she felt they could be friends. He didn’t mind telling her that he would be coming alone; Odile was going to be in Italy and Austria on location with the Crandells for Hunt’s new picture. The whole plan, however, had come up against a gigantic snag.
“Mandlin won’t do the deal,”
Dinah read,
“unless you clear me with the Committee.”

“Oh shit,” Dinah said. “Oh g-g-g-goddamn it to hell.”

“Keep reading, Ina.”

Being separated and even almost divorced from her didn’t make a bit of difference, Mike explained: Seymour P. Mandlin, according to Willie Weil, wanted the deal but was adamant about keeping his studio absolutely pinko-free.
“It’s evil and insane,”
Dinah read out loud,
“but that’s how it is. Anybody who thinks this lousy business is dying down is out of his mind. I know it’s been rough on you these past couple of years. Believe me, I think about you all the time. But the only way I can meet my responsibilities to you is by getting this job, and I can’t get the job if I don’t have the clearance. I never thought I’d have to ask you for something like this—I know how abhorrent it is to both of us. But I wouldn’t be asking you even to think it over if I felt we had a real choice in the matter.”

He’d be arriving sometime in early June and would call her when he got in. He wanted to take her out to dinner, so she had plenty of time to think it over.

But he’s here already
, Dinah almost blurted out. Veevi must have sent him a telegram at once saying she’d do it, since he would never have risked coming to the States with the question still up in the air. “When did you g-g-g-get this?” she asked instead.

“Couple of weeks ago.”

“And you’ve agreed to do it?”

“Well, I’ve been thinking about it.”

Oh, you liar
, Dinah didn’t say. “You’re not going to do it, are you?”

“Mmm. I am. That’s why I asked you about, you know, your session. I need the name of that lawyer you used.”

“Veevi—” Dinah said. “You don’t have to do this, you know.”

“Oh,” said Veevi, sighing. “But I do. The Khrushchev speech.”

“The Kh-Kh-Kh-Khrushchev speech? What about it?”

“It’s changed everything, hasn’t it? It doesn’t mean the same thing anymore, standing up to the Committee.”

“Is that what you’re t-t-telling yourself?”

“Oh, really, Ina. We were all such fucking idiots.”

“But, Vee, that’s b-b-b-beside the p-p-point.”

“You’re telling me not to do it? Why?”

Dinah took a deep breath and let it out. “Simple. It’s wrong. And I wish I hadn’t done it, that’s all.”

“But all this—” Veevi gestured grandly, mockingly, toward the pool and the house. “You’d have lost it.”

“So?” Dinah said.

“It’s easy for you to say now.”

“True. I’m not k-k-k-killing myself over it, Vee. But, on b-b-balance, I wish I hadn’t.”

Dinah put her gardening gloves back on, sat down on her haunches, and resumed digging. Veevi lit a cigarette. Dinah worked, and Veevi smoked in silence for a while.

“You know, Ina,” said Veevi, “it was the Communists who killed Stefan.”

Dinah dropped her trowel and turned around. “What are you
talking
about?”

“Somebody in the Party sold him out to the Gestapo.”

Dinah stared at Veevi, speechless.

“You see,” Veevi continued, “they were planning ahead, those clever French Communists. Of course, they had their instructions from Moscow, and they were
very
worried about having a bunch of Jewish Resistance heroes in postwar France. Wouldn’t look good in elections, when they’d have to compete with the Nationalists.”

“Who told you this?”

“A friend of Bill Nemeth’s, a journalist. Another dashing Hungarian—is there any other kind?—and an ex-Communist, or so he said, who’d done sabotage with Stefan. I don’t know where he got it, but he was a reliable type.”

“You never told me this. Are you sure?”

“Absolutely one-hundred-percent foolproof sure? No. How can I be? But that’s what he told me.”

Dinah got up and sat down across from her sister. “Look, Vee, even if it’s true—don’t kid yourself. You’re not thinking about who nailed Stefan or what Khrushchev said in that sp-sp-speech. Come on, Vee. You’re just cooking up reasons to testify.”

“If I clear Mike, I’ll get my passport back,” Veevi said with a dreamy smile. “We’ll go back to Paris together and be just as we were. We’ll bring Dorshka home with us and the girls. She doesn’t exactly want to die in ‘the land of the free and the home of the brave.’ Or is it ‘the home of the free and the land of the brave’? Hard to keep it straight.”

She gave a light laugh. Her eyes were sparkling. There was a touch of gaiety about her, and a look of anticipated joy suffused her face.

Dinah gave her back the letter, which Veevi carefully folded and tucked
inside her cigarette case. “Can you get me that lawyer’s number? I need to call him today. Mike should be getting here sometime this week.”

“You don’t want to think it over some more, discuss it with him when he gets here?”

“I want the lawyer’s number.”

She looked up at Dinah and made a triumphant bubby face that Dinah understood at once to mean: I always knew he’d come back. Everything will be wonderful again.

“Ah, you want it now. This minute. Okay,” Dinah said, rising. “It’s your life, dearie Vee. But listen to me, please. If you’re really going to go ahead with this, make sure you name me. Name Renna Schlossberg, Cliff B-B-B-Boatwright—”

“Oh, not Cliff! I could never name him!”

“Why not?” Dinah turned to face Veevi and stood with her hands on her hips.

“Well, he’d think—”

“He’d know goddamn well why you were doing it and he’d understand completely. He’s been in love with you his whole life, and he’ll love you till the day he d-d-d-dies. You know what, Vee? When I testified, there were people who stopped talking to me. I knew they would and I didn’t give a royal f-f-f-fuck, and I still don’t. But that’s not going to happen to you. You’re the exception, Vee. You could be an ax murderer and no one would blame you for it. So listen to me. I’ll say it again: name the fewest people you can, and make sure the ones you do name are p-p-p-people they already know about and can’t screw twice, like Cliff.”

“Mmm,” Veevi said. Dinah saw that she wasn’t listening. “Just think, Ina. He’ll be here. The whole summer!”

“Vee—”

“Without the French Open.”

The sisters laughed. “Okay, I’ll get the number. Be right back.”

It took only a few minutes for Dinah to go upstairs to Jake’s office and find Burt Unwin’s number, but during that time she realized that she would be lying to herself if she didn’t admit that the thought of Veevi’s going back to Paris filled her with a certain satisfaction. It was exactly what everyone needed—for Veevi to be back with the man she adored, in the city she loved—and it would certainly make her own life once again peaceful and calm, or as peaceful and calm as life with Jake Lasker could ever be. But
so what? she reproached herself. It was so simple and obvious, she thought, as she headed for the stairs. For Veevi to testify would be a disaster. Mike wasn’t going to come through in the end. And when that happened, Veevi would be left alone, abandoned, with the knowledge that she had testified; it would shatter her. She might not think she had principles, Dinah reflected, but she did, and it would matter to her greatly what Cliff Boatwright, for example, thought of her. Aware, though, that Veevi had made up her mind, Dinah wondered what more she could do.