Judith Krantz (20 page)

She had not been clever, she had not been lucky, she who deserved by birth and beauty to be both. But now, while it wasn’t yet too late, she must be fore-sighted. Liddy vowed to herself that her daughters would not be alienated from him when Mike Kilkullen struck it rich.

When Jazz was tiny, her sisters ignored her, absorbed in their own teenage activities, out riding for most of the day. She was always hopefully aware of them when they visited, trying to tag along after them as soon as she could walk. They ignored her until her fourth year, when Rosie decreed that Jazz was old enough to be left in their charge from time to time. Then they began to torment her, for their mother’s unrelenting influence had taught them to believe that Jazz had no right to be alive. She was the child of the evil and powerful woman who had taken their father away from them, the woman who was responsible for the fact that their father had to be courted and catered to as if he were a king, for if they neglected him, he would no longer care about them at all, engrossed as he was with his new wife, his new child.

Fernanda and Valerie, spiteful and jealous, pretended to give Jazz a new hairdo and braided her hair into so many tiny braids that the rubber bands at the ends pulled out hundreds of strands; they stole her
favorite dolls and returned them subtly changed in various horrible ways; they removed the bulb of the night-light that she was used to having in her room, and replaced it in the morning so that Rosie wouldn’t notice; they played hide-and-seek and disappeared for an hour at a time.

In front of their father, the two girls left Jazz in peace, and although they could always manipulate Rosie, they never dared to practice their tricks if Sylvie was at the ranch. Jazz wanted to win the acceptance of the big girls so much that she pretended that their cruel games were games indeed. She never told on them to her parents or her nurse, because telling on people was always sneaky. Somehow, somewhere, she had absorbed that version of the rules of fairness. She thought that if she held her tongue, Fernanda and Valerie, who were goddesses to her, would realize what a good girl she really was and let her into the longed-for, private world of their eternal, smirking secrets.

As they grew a little older and realized that Jazz would not let them provoke her, they tried other tactics. Whenever they were alone with her, they pretended that she was invisible. They passed each other the butter or the salad across her, so that she had to draw back or be hit, while they discussed her in the third person.

“Did you know that the little Orphink Annie got a terrible report card?” Fernanda would ask.

“It’s because she spends all her time training her dog, that filthy Sandy,” Valerie would reply. “That Orphink girl will never amount to much. That’s what I heard Susie saying just yesterday.”

“It’s not true!” Jazz would cry, her words snatched out of her mouth, vanishing.

“They say the Orphink has a mother who’s away somewhere doing something important, but I don’t believe it, do you?”

“If she really had a mother like that, then she wouldn’t be an Orphink, would she?” was the ritual answer.

“She is away, she’s in England! I have a letter from her!” Jazz screamed.

“Did you hear a dog bark?” Fernanda asked Valerie. “It must be that ugly old Sandy again.”

“If the Orphink really has a mother, she’s certainly not a good mother.”

“She must be a very, very bad mother if she goes away all the time. Except that I don’t believe she’s real.”

When one of them passed her in the garden, the big girls would hiss “Orphink,” without looking at Jazz. “Orphink,” they would silently mouth at her across the dining room table when their father wasn’t watching. In front of him, they would call her “Annie” and tell him that it was their pet name for her.

Jazz blinded herself to them, mute in misery. Didn’t they like her, not even a little bit, she wondered endlessly? What was wrong with her for them to be so mean? Yet she never told anyone. She was filled with a kind of shame, the shame of the persecuted. She didn’t want to make things worse. If she didn’t repeat the words, they wouldn’t exist. If she didn’t show that she minded, it wouldn’t be real.

Jazz knew nothing of the history of the divorce. Brought up to speak out freely by both her parents, Jazz’s first experiences in duplicity and cruelty were learned at the hands of Fernanda and Valerie, hands that were guided by Liddy.

By the time Jazz was eight, her older half sisters had stopped trying to bait her. She was too dull-witted to bother with, they decided, and their own lives were too full. For the next few years, now young married women, they rarely visited the ranch in spite of their mother’s demands that they do so.

In Jazz’s eighth year, Sylvie Norberg decided that she felt like taking time off from moviemaking. She had never been more in demand, her agent was driven almost mad by the opportunities she missed, but she forbade him to so much as send her a script, no matter
who had written it. Sylvie wanted a respite and if her agent didn’t understand that, so much the worse for him.

Jazz’s life entered a period of paradise. Rosie left, briefly mourned, to take care of another little girl, for Jazz was too grown-up for a nurse, and besides, now she had her mother at home.

During the summer of that year, when Jazz was out of school, she and Sylvie spent more time together than they ever had before. Jazz was her mother’s companion during the days, while her father rode the range, and together they made plans for each day. Often they took their horses and went to the beach for a picnic, using the private road that had been constructed to pass under the San Diego Freeway, which now ran the length of the ranch almost two miles inland from their shoreline. They went sailing together, Jazz handling the boat more expertly than her mother, and frequently they drove into San Juan Capistrano in the afternoon for ice cream.

Afterwards, as likely as not, they were drawn to visit the Mission compound surrounding that enormous stone church that had been laboriously built over a nine-year period and, according to family legend, contained stones that had been taken from Valencia Point. The ambitions of its builders had been mighty, too mighty, as Sylvie pointed out in the only moralistic phrase she ever uttered, for only six years after the church was finished, its bell tower was destroyed by an earthquake, toppling down while mass was being celebrated and killing forty people.

Both mother and daughter loved the astonishingly European atmosphere of the Mission grounds, the monumental, vaulted ruins that would have looked equally at home in Italy as in Spain; the narrow, friendly, charmingly humble chapel in which mass was still celebrated; the flocks of absurdly tame, white pigeons who never hurried as they marched in tiny, officious steps over the old paving, the warbling of the thousands of swallows who nested in the buildings of the Mission, still returning on March 19 of every year
and inspiring many different and contradictory theories to explain their migratory schedule.

Jazz and Sylvie often brought their ice cream cones and sat on the wooden bench that they found on the far left side of the Mission. From this favorite bench the view contained only a giant, ancient California pepper tree, a wishing well, a wall covered with bright red bougainvillea, the ruined arches of an arcade, and a rose garden that had certainly seen better days, but as they sat there they were conscious of a particular deep, resonant peacefulness that seemed to exist in no other place.

“Someday we’ll go to Europe together,” Sylvie promised, winding a strand of Jazz’s hair around her finger. She made a ringlet and let it slip off her finger, the curl immediately slipping back into a wavelet. Where did those golden eyes come from, Sylvie wondered, as she looked at her daughter? She knew that they were her own eyes in shape and placement, but the chiming topaz of Jazz’s pupils was not to be found in anyone in Sylvie’s family, or in Mike’s, as far as he knew. She’ll be tall, Sylvie thought, taller than I am, and lovely. Yes, she had been right not to have other children. One child was enough when that child was Jazz. How well she had managed her life!

Month after month passed when Jazz was certain of exactly what would happen tomorrow, when she would be allowed to curl up in an armchair after dinner and watch her parents dance together in the music room under the huge, low beams of the ceiling. The heavy twelve-by-twelves had been fastened together before there were nails on the ranch. Rawhide straps still held them together, thongs of such sturdy leather that time had no effect on them, and only changes in the weather caused them to make a creaking noise, as if the Hacienda Valencia were a ship at sea.
Oh, how she wished it were. A
small, safe little ship, sailing on and on, with just the three of them aboard, through the moonlight and the sunlight, day after day, night after night, with nothing ever changing, not even the
music of the Beatles. Forever and ever. Strawberry fields
forever
.

That blissful summer when she was eight, Jazz began to take photographs. Her father bought her a Kodak and a few rolls of film, since a child should start with a minimum of equipment, particularly when her enthusiasm might not last.

Jazz’s first subject was Sylvie, sitting on the broad veranda of the hacienda, in dappled morning sunlight, reading a book and wearing a blue and white flowered dressing gown.

The first time she looked into the camera and saw her mother’s profile and shoulders framed by the lens, her eyes lowered toward the book, Jazz was overwhelmed by a great and unforgettable burst of joy. She pressed the button and knew that now she
owned
that instant in time, she
owned
that image of her mother, it belonged to her, to no one else in the world, and it could never be taken away.

Sylvie looked up and smiled, as photographers always asked her to do, and Jazz took another picture. Sylvie kept smiling, holding still and looking at the camera, cooperating with the little girl, but Jazz, who didn’t want to waste her precious film on a duplication of her second picture, said, “Mommy, just pretend that I’m not here.”

Sylvie grinned at this precocious command. Jazz sounded just as sure of herself as she must have sounded herself when she was a child, she thought, and returned tranquilly to her book, concentrating on it entirely, while Jazz circled round and round, coming closer and then standing back, all the while peering into the viewfinder to see what she could see, without taking a picture.

The novelty of reducing the broad range of what her eyes normally could take in, down to the limited scope of the lens, fascinated her. She could, if she wanted to, photograph only her mother’s hands, or her feet, or her sleeve. She could stand at a distance and
reduce her mother to a tiny part of a big picture and yet contain her from head to toes, or she could come in very close, until all the lens held was her mother’s head, oddly distorted.

She knew nothing about focus or exposure. She didn’t even know that there was anything to know, nor did she wonder. Even pressing the button and taking the picture was far less important than her utter absorption in her newfound ability to
capture life
, to hold it tightly inside a square or a rectangle; then to move a little in another direction and make it change according to her will; to place the borders of the picture where she wanted them to be, to pin things down in just the way she chose.

Jazz had never felt totally powerful before. For the rest of her days, so long as she had a camera, she would never feel totally powerless again.

“Jazz, are you ever going to finish that roll?” Sylvie asked gently. “It’s almost time for lunch. I have to get dressed.” She turned her head in inquiry to Jazz, who had crept up behind her, and in that instant Jazz snapped her third photograph, as Sylvie started to rise.

“One more, please, Mommy,” Jazz implored her. “You were moving. Just one more.” Sylvie laughed out loud at that familiar command.

“ ‘One more,’ ” she echoed. “My poor baby, born into the ranks of paparazzi—it must be prenatal influence.”

“Oh, Mommy, hold still! I want to get it just right,” Jazz begged, and Sylvie stayed in her chair. “No,” Jazz said, shaking her head vigorously, “not exactly like that, put your eyebrows back up, please Mommy, the way they were a second ago when you asked me when I was going to finish.”

“Not just a paparazzo, but a perfectionist too! That sounds like trouble,” Sylvie commented as she complied, mildly wishing that her husband had asked her first before he had decided that Jazz was old enough to own a camera. She had never played with a
camera when she was a child, and in all her years of being photographed, she had never been at all curious about what went on behind the lens. She was the eternal subject, never the recorder of the subject, and unlike many camera-wise stars, she was concerned only with emotions, not with lighting or angles. My child, she thought, could learn more if she belonged to Sophia Loren.

After lunch, when Sylvie went shopping with Susie, driving to a local farmer’s roadside market for corn that had just been picked and perfectly ripe peaches for pie, Jazz was so absorbed by her new camera that she didn’t go with them for this shopping treat that normally she would never miss.

Instead, she wandered through the hacienda gardens, trying to see if a flower or a tree would provide her with the same sensation of owning a moment of life that she’d had in the morning. She slipped outside the green oasis of the gardens, and since the barns and stables were empty, with all the vaqueros out on the range, she pointed her camera at her pony, at the dogs that roamed the stables, at a row of old iron rakes that hung on a wall, at some of the buildings that her greatgrandfather had photographed when they were new. She used her film stingily, afraid that it would run out before her father got home and she could take pictures of him.

By the end of the afternoon, Jazz had decided that she only wanted to take pictures of people. The command and possession of a special moment in time, the new excitement that she had felt when she first photographed her mother, didn’t exist for her in inanimate objects, and she couldn’t tell the animals what to do.