Cheat and Charmer (73 page)

Late in the afternoon they reached Las Vegas, their first stop, right on
schedule. The kids wanted to swim, Dinah wanted to take a shower, and Gussie wanted to stretch her legs. Dinah had called ahead earlier in the week and made a reservation at an AAA-endorsed motel at the far end of the Strip. She parked the car in front of the motel office and went in to register. At the front desk, she rang the bell and a young woman came out from behind a multicolored beaded curtain. She smiled, confirmed the reservation, and gave Dinah a clipboard with a registration form and a ballpoint pen. As Dinah was filling out the form, the woman said, “Is that a colored woman out there in your car?”

Dinah raised her eyes. “Why, yes, it is. Why?”

“Is she with you?”

“Yes. Why do you ask?”

“She can’t stay here.”

Dinah’s face was gray when she got into the car. In silence, she started the engine, and the children and Gussie asked her what was the matter. But she didn’t answer them, not until she’d stopped at a gas station. When she told them, Lorna burst into tears; Peter looked at Gussie and reached out to touch her shoulder.

“Oh, Mrs. Lasker—”

“I’m just so sore!” Dinah interrupted her. “Of all the l-l-l-lousy places in the world. Las V-V-V-Vegas! Wait till I tell Jake about this! Gussie, I’m so sorry.…”

“Don’t be sorry, Mrs. Lasker,” said Gussie. “It isn’t your fault, and I should have thought of it myself. Let’s not pay it no nevermind. Let’s find out where the colored motel is. You can put me there.”

But the kids burst out,
“No!”

“We’ll sleep in the car!” Peter shouted.

“I wouldn’t dream of l-l-l-letting you sleep away from us,” Dinah said. “But we’re not going to sleep in the car.”

“Why can’t we all sleep at the colored motel?” Lorna asked.

“Well?” said Dinah to Gussie.

“No, Mrs. Lasker. I don’t recommend it.”

“No?” Dinah looked at Gussie.

“Not with the children,” she added.

Peter looked at her, puzzled and curious, aware, since Palm Springs, that things often went on in the adult world that kids knew nothing about.

“You sure, Gus?” said Dinah.

“Mrs. Lasker, I don’t want to take these babies to one of those places.
It ain’t that it’s colored. But, you know—this is
Vegas
.” She looked at Dinah significantly.

Dinah nodded, grabbed her purse and the AAA booklet, and went to a phone booth. She dialed a number from the book and said, very distinctly, “I am traveling by car with my three children and my N-N-N-NEGRO housekeeper. Can we get two rooms for the night?”

“No,” said the voice on the line. “We don’t take colored.”

“Well, thank you very much, you h-h-h-horse’s ass.”

She tried another number from the AAA book. This time the voice said, “We don’t allow niggers here.”

“F-F-F-Fuck you,” she said, and hung up.

She tried two more places: “We don’t allow coloreds.” “We don’t take Negroes.”

She stood in the phone booth biting her thumbnail. Where was she going to find a place to stay? Maybe this whole trip was a mistake and she should drive back to L.A. and put everyone on a plane the next day. Then she thought of the Flamingo, got the number from information, and dialed. To the hotel management, she explained that she was the wife of producer-writer-director Jake Lasker, who had recently stayed there, and happened to be a very good friend of Victor Lewis’s, and that she needed two rooms. Did she want single or double beds? “Double. By the way, my housekeeper is traveling with us and she is a N-N-N-Negro. Is that going to be a problem?”

“Certainly not, Mrs. Lasker. We’re all great admirers of your husband’s work.” This could only mean, she told herself, that they appreciated Jake’s great achievement in losing five thousand bucks at blackjack the last time he’d stayed there.

Indeed, they gave her—free of charge—an air-conditioned suite with a bathtub the size of a small swimming pool. The kids were tired and hungry by now, so she took them and Gussie—who at first was reluctant to accompany them—downstairs to the main restaurant for dinner. Then Gussie took Lorna upstairs for a bath and bed, while Dinah allowed Peter to stay with her and watch the floor show.

To Peter’s astonishment, the show included several numbers with lines of nearly bare-breasted dancers dressed in skimpy costumes bedecked with flashing beads and feathered headdresses. Mesmerized, Peter kept looking back and forth between his mother and the chorus girls, saying to her, “Wait till I tell Joelly,” his best friend, and giggling.

During one of the numbers, she felt a hand on her shoulder and looked up. “I’m Duff Burgoyne,” said a man she had never seen before, shaking Dinah’s hand, then Peter’s. “The fellas tell me you’re staying here tonight. I’m a big fan of your husband’s work, Mrs. Lasker. Ran into him in Vic Lewis’s dressing room last time he was here. Vic says he’s having a ball rehearsing your husband’s show in New York. I see you’ve got a very open mind about your son’s education. I admire that in a woman.” He gazed into her eyes, and his friendliness and charm vanished for her immediately. She was looking at a stocky, muscular man in his late thirties with closely cropped prematurely salt-and-pepper hair. His rust-colored tie was loosened from an open collar around his thick neck. His leathery skin was tanned to a swarthy burnish. An old scar over his left eyebrow and another on his chin, a nose that had more than once been smashed and reconstructed, a Boston accent and a mouth full of rearranged teeth spoke of an embattled and streetwise past and gave him a studied and decorative tough-guy look about which, Dinah could tell, he was extremely vain. His voice—a smooth, controlled bellow—was saturated with sexual innuendo and educated violence.

“I also don’t mind telling you how much I admire you for having the courage to testify,” he said.

“Mr. Burgoyne,” she said quietly, leaning over behind Peter’s back. “As you can see, I’m here with my son?” Her voice went up slightly, as if she were making a request. “It’s nice of you to stop by. I’ll tell my husband we met.”

“Please do, Mrs. Lasker,” he said, raking her with his eyes. “Your husband’s a very talented man. I wish he had liked a treatment of mine a bit better, though. I admire someone who can make comedy out of crime.”

“Good night, Mr. Burgoyne,” she said, having no idea what he was talking about, but smiling her phoniest, broadest, most white-toothed smile. “You know, my husband’s quite a fan of yours, too.” It was a lie, of course.

“Glad to hear it!” he said, squeezing her hand again and slapping Peter on the back so sharply that the boy turned around and glared at him.

Back in the room she shared with Peter, Dinah tried calling Jake after Peter had fallen asleep, but he didn’t answer. She tried to imagine what he was doing, worried that he might be at a deli somewhere, stuffing himself with deadly “Jew-food,” as he liked to call it. She fell asleep wondering what it would have been like at the colored motel, and what it was about Burgoyne that gave her the creeps.

In the car the next morning, the kids asked Gussie questions, and she told them what it was like to grow up in Texas—Marlin, Texas. Peter wanted to know if there had been separate entrances and Colored Only benches and drinking fountains.

“Yes, we had the Jim Crow laws,” Gussie said. But she added that most of her childhood had been spent on her grandfather’s farm, which was so big that it had its own church and its own store, and that she’d never spent any time around white people until she turned fourteen, when she went to work.

By the middle of the afternoon, Dinah began to worry about the coming night’s lodging and whether Gussie would be turned away.

But at Bryce Canyon and at Salt Lake City, nobody said anything about Gussie, and they spent the nights in comfortable, air-conditioned motels. There was one, though, that had no air-conditioning, and during the night Dinah woke up sweating and overwhelmed with remorse at having rebuked Veevi for the way she’d treated Lorna. Then, remembering Lorna’s tears, she got sore at Veevi all over again, and even more at herself for having said nothing so many times. No, the words had been said, and they were going to stay said. But she remained apprehensive, nonetheless, and knew it was because of Veevi and Mike and the subpoena.

After two full days in Yellowstone, they left on the third morning. The Lasker kids were subdued. They had seen enough sights for a while. It was Peter’s turn to sit in back, where he read “Little Lulu” and “Archie” and “Donald Duck” comics, while Lorna, beside her mother in the front seat, looked dreamily ahead and stuck her arm out the window so that she could let the air play across her skin. Gussie hummed “He’s got his eye on the sparrow” to herself, and Dinah hummed along.

Sometimes Lorna and Peter quarreled over who was going to sit where, told each other to shut up, and shouted “I hate you intensely” at each other. At those moments, Dinah felt the trip had been a mistake and just wanted to get it over with.

I’ve got to get there before Jake does, Dinah kept repeating to herself as she drove the next day. I’ve got to get to Chicago before Jake does. He was scheduled to arrive that night from New York. She no longer pointed out
every farmhouse and cornfield but kept her eyes fixed on the road and only half heard the kids’ by now ritualized talk about dead-bug splats on the windshield, their games of Twenty Questions, their songs. It was close to five when she pulled into the driveway of a three-story house in Highland Park. Hubie and Betty Lasker, Jake’s cousin and his wife, ran out to greet the travelers, their two daughters, Karen and Paula, behind them.

Just as the Lasker family stepped out of the car, they heard a whirring, buzzing hum in the air, which was thick with brown vibrations. To their horror, they heard and felt their shoes crunching down on layers and layers of brown-ridged capsules. Betty Lasker, a brisk and energetic woman with thick arched eyebrows, shouted, “Seventeen-year locusts! They won’t hurt you.”

Nevertheless, Gussie and Dinah and the Lasker kids hurried into the house as fast as they could, shrieking as they crunched more insects underfoot.

“What is this?” Dinah asked. “Some kind of b-b-b-biblical pl-pl-pl-plague?”

“They drive us nuts for a couple of weeks and then disappear. Seventeen years later, out they come, and the whole thing happens all over again.” Betty laughed, and Dinah liked her warmth and her rich, fruity Chicago accent.

Dinah shivered. “Have you heard from Jake?”

“I’m just leaving now to pick him up at the airport,” answered Hubie. “Wanna come?”

“You take the kids and I’ll take a shower and a nap,” Dinah said. “Actually, I wonder if I could use the phone?”

Betty took her to a guest room, which had twin beds. The air-conditioning blocked out the sound of the locusts, though myriad dead ones were heaped up like stale chocolates on the ledge of the closed windowsill. Minutes later, with the door locked, instead of taking her clothes off to get into the shower, Dinah placed a long-distance call.

Please be there, she said to herself. Please pick up the phone. Right now. Pick up the goddamn phone right now.

Finally, there was a click, and a voice on the other end.

“Vee? It’s me. Listen, Veevi, don’t do it. Don’t t-t-t-testify.”

Her voice was calm and firm, urgent but not agitated.

“Why not? You did it for Jake. Why shouldn’t I do it for Mike?”

“Veevi! L-L-L-Listen to me. D-D-D-DON’T DO IT.” She was stuttering badly. “It’s WR-WR-WRONG. There are NO good reasons to do it.”

“Oh, come on,” she said, with her old, familiar disdain. “ ‘Birds do it,’ ” she began to sing. “ ‘Bees do it …’ ” She was off-key and slurring.

“Veevi, stop. Listen to me. We could have made it, Jake and I. I know that now. We could have survived it—jail, M-M-Mexico, the works—whatever happened. And you can, too. Look, Vee—this is a t-t-t-terrible c-c-c-country.” Her stutter was maddening; it was impossible to get the words out. “Am-m-m-merica is all wr-wr-wr-wrong. Do you hear me? AM-M-MERICA IS ALL WR-WR-WR-WRONG.”

“ ‘Movie people on their knees do it …’ ”

“V-V-V-Vee! SH-SH-SHUT UP. I’m tr-tr-tr-tr—oh, SHIT!—I’m tr-tr-tr-trying to tell you something. D-D-D-DON’T give in to it. If I could go back and choose again, I’d g-g-g-g-go to—Jesus Ch-Ch-Ch-Christ!” she exploded in frustration. “JAIL.”