Laura Lamont's Life In Pictures (15 page)

“Mom, Dad, Jo,” Laura said. “This is Irving.” She clung to his left elbow, both her arms wrapped around it like a human anchor. Irving stepped forward to greet them, and Laura stepped forward too, unable to let go. It was John who came to meet him first.

“Mr. Green,” John said, “I’m a great admirer of your work.”

“Mr. Emerson, please call me Irving.” The men shook hands, and Laura wept, as she’d known she would. Harriet poked her head in from the hall that led to the girls’ rooms, and Laura nodded at her—it was time to bring them in.

Clara and Florence appeared in the corner of the room, with Harriet’s hands giving them a gentle shove onto the rug. Josephine saw
them first. Laura was the family’s only chance for grandchildren, for nieces and nephews; that was clear. There would be no first cousins, not on the Emerson side of any family tree. Hildy might have—Hildy would have, Laura thought—but Josephine was as likely to produce a child as she was to produce a Pegasus. There were words to describe women like her, Laura knew. There were actresses she knew at Gardner Brothers who kept only one another’s company, who shared dressing rooms and beds and held one another tightly in the dark, just as she did with Irving. Laura didn’t mind—what was the difference to her? Their parents had put it together over time, realized that Josephine wasn’t going to marry one of the local farmer boys after all, but no one ever said a word. Hildy tried to say something to their mother once, the summer before she died. Josephine had just come back from a fishing trip in the bay, and was slick with watery goo, standing in the yard, gutting. Their mother had stuck a bar of soap into Hildy’s mouth and clamped her hand over it. Elsa had watched in horror, and no one had ever mentioned it again.

The girls were holding hands. They were still as different as sisters could be: Clara was tall for her age—the doctors always said so—with full cheeks and a face like sunshine, always beaming at everyone at once. Florence was small, with long, thin limbs, and dark hair that hung down past her shoulders. She was whip-smart and, at six, could read to herself, which her older sister could not. Laura wanted to brag to her parents, to show off her beautiful children, but she didn’t know where to start. Hadn’t Laura asked Harriet to pin their hair back? She’d wanted them to look flawless, like two human diamonds, and instead they just looked like little girls.

“Sweeties,” Laura said. “Come and meet your grandparents.” The word meant nothing to them—how could it? It was like calling a truck a lorry, or calling gasoline petrol. It wasn’t just how things were done here, assigning such clear names to people, and anyway, Clara
and Florence had made it this far without anyone but her. The word
father
was tricky enough, with Gordon expunged from the record and Irving still fairly new. They called him Pop, or Poppa, at his request, but Laura wondered how long it would last, and what it was doing to their tiny emotions to throw such words around. She wanted the girls to love Irving as much as she did, of course, but one couldn’t force such things into being true. He wasn’t a natural with the girls, but he was trying, which was more than Gordon had ever done.

T
he limousine came at half past four to take them to the Biltmore for the ceremony: Laura, Irving, and her parents. They would be seated at a round table with the rest of the cast from
Farewell, My Sister
, with Louis and Maxine Gardner at the next table with Susie and Johnny, who weren’t nominated for anything, and were sure to drink too much and embarrass the studio if left unsupervised. Laura had heard that Johnny had recently bought a ranch with half a dozen horses and thirty pigs, and was thinking about going into car racing professionally. Susie wore a sequined dress that surely weighed more than she did, and shook almost imperceptibly when there wasn’t alcohol slipping down her throat. Laura tried not to stare, just as she noticed other actors and actresses at tables farther back trying not to stare at her. It was all a game—she could see that, even then, when it was all as shiny as a baby’s toy. There was always someone new, someone fresh. Laura hadn’t admitted to Irving how much she wanted to win, but she did, especially with her father at her side. She wanted to climb onto that stage and have every single eye in the room trained straight on her. It was the same feeling she’d had as child, when she first stepped out onto her father’s stage and felt the audience’s gaze firm upon her face.

Irving had been to the awards before, every year since they began, but everyone else was nervous and fidgeting with their buttons and purse clasps. Laura felt ashamed that her first panic of the day arrived when she realized she didn’t know what her parents would wear—they didn’t have the clothes for the occasion. But Cosmo and Edna had thought of that, and there was a suit in John’s approximate size and a gown in Mary’s, with Edna on hand to make any and all necessary adjustments. There were only the two extra tickets, but Josephine seemed pleased to stay home with Harriet and the girls, so they could all get to know one another better.

It helped that Mary didn’t know who any of the stars were. Laura watched her mother squirm in her seat, flinching whenever addressed directly by the waiters. It was as if she hadn’t been around actors her entire life, around directors and writers and all sorts of dramatic types.
This is your life
, Laura wanted to say,
only bigger!
But Mary was struck mute by the flashbulbs, the champagne glasses that were refilled whenever they even approached empty, the feathers. (Edna had been right; there were feathers everywhere, sticking off hats and off brooches and shoulders and shoes—instead of pretending to be somber in the face of war, almost everyone seemed to be celebrating the fact that
they
hadn’t gone, that
they
were still here, and wasn’t it their American duty to look glamorous, after all?) John was more gregarious than his wife, and complimented all the actors and directors on their fine work. He’d seen everything; Laura had forgotten how much her father cared. He’d seen every movie she’d ever made, not that it was such a staggering number yet, only six. They were sitting next to each other, with Irving on Laura’s other side and Mary on John’s. Even Laura wasn’t used to seeing so many stars in one room—it wasn’t just Gardner Brothers, it was everyone in Hollywood, the entire parade! Robert Hunter looked so handsome in his tuxedo that all the men and women in the room swooned simultaneously,
as if his body had been engineered for that purpose alone, to walk across a room in a good-looking suit. Dolores Dee had somehow muscled her way in, and sat one table back, her seat pointing away from the stage, which was where they put people no one cared about anymore. Susie and Johnny looked like country bumpkins next to Hunter, too suntanned and noisy. Laura saw Joan Fontaine going into the ladies’ lounge and nearly followed her in.

It was different being off the Gardner Brothers lot, where everyone knew Laura and saw her every day, working like everybody else. At the Biltmore, actors and directors from other studios came up to her as well, and congratulated Laura on her achievement. She so rarely left the house without Irving that Laura sometimes forgot that other people knew who she was, that her face belonged in the public domain. Every now and then she would go to the grocery store with Harriet, and the whole place would begin to move in slow motion, as necks craned around aisles in order to keep her in their sights, whispers spreading around the store like brushfire, hopping from one shopper to the next. Laura thought of it like hunting, when her father would sometimes let her tag along when she was a girl, how the world would slow to the pace of your own breath, and everything else would disappear. She didn’t feel
hunted
, not exactly, just under observation. Irving and Louis kept close behind her, lest any producers try to whisper seductively into her ear.

Still, it was difficult to enjoy the evening when every time Laura looked at her mother, Mary’s mouth was clamped in a tight knot, her face pointed at the tablecloth.

“How are the flowers this year, Mother?” Laura said, leaning over her father’s plate.

Mary exhaled hard through her nose, like an angry bull. “This year?” she said. “It’s the winter, Elsa. I suppose you’ve forgotten what Wisconsin looks like in the winter. I think you’ve spent too
much time with the wrong kind of people, and you’ve forgotten where you came from.”

Irving’s head snapped back around, as did John’s. “What was that, dear?” John said, clearly hoping to have misheard his wife.

“She thinks I’ve abandoned her,” Laura said.

“I didn’t say that, but I might have,” Mary said. She crossed her arms over her stomach, the dress pulling at her shoulders. “All the money in the world only makes people greedier, you know.”

“Mary!” John said.

“John, I can speak for myself.”

Irving pulled Laura backward, so that the nape of her neck was flat against his mouth. “Don’t listen to her,” he said. “This is your night, not hers.” Laura turned into his chest, and away from her mother. Mary wouldn’t have admitted to being anti-Semitic; she supported whatever America supported, but damn it if she didn’t agree that the Jews were trouble. That was her problem with Irving, Laura knew. She didn’t want to think about what anyone at the neighboring tables might have heard, or whether any of the gossip writers were in the room, or whether even Irving, her dear, sweet Irving, would think differently about her now that he knew the truth. Laura
felt
wretched next to her mother, because it should have been Hildy here in Hollywood, and she—still Elsa, always Elsa—should have been at home, back in Door County, her entire world only as wide as the peninsula. It was all wrong; Laura knew that. She was a body double, and her mother was the only one who saw it. Her dress pulled tight across her hips—it wasn’t made for sitting, not really. Laura wished that she could flutter her eyelids shut and open them on Cherry County Playhouse Road. Irving rubbed her left hand between both of his, his small palms moving briskly. He probably thought her mother was a total cow. He didn’t understand, and there was no way Laura could tell him. Across the table, Mary turned her
face away from the stage and stared into the crowd. Her mother was stronger and angrier than any of the people in the room, Laura knew, no matter how much she looked like a trussed-up turkey, no matter any of it. Mary had suffered more than they had, and Laura knew that the real problem wasn’t with her, or with Irving. Next to her, everyone else in the room was held together with glitter and glue, with only Hollywood troubles, the kind that were solved by the end of the picture. Laura wiped at her eyes and focused on the stage.

Her category—Best Actress in a Motion Picture—was one of the last of the night, and so there was much clapping and nodding beforehand, though Laura didn’t hear a single word. She tried to stay calm, and to pretend that her mother hadn’t opened her mouth all night, and that everything was right as rain. All the other nominees in her category were in the room, and they looked beautiful, with the light from the giant chandeliers making everyone sparkle even more than usual. The actor announcing was handsome; Laura recognized him from his most recent film, a World War I drama in which he’d played a brave pilot, always with the wind whipping his scarf around his neck. Louis Gardner and Irving went to see every movie, or rather had everything brought to them, watching them in the screening room on the studio lot. There were rumors about poaching, but Laura didn’t believe them. People came to Gardner Brothers when they were ready for something new, something better. It had nothing to do with Irving. She gripped his hand under the table as the actor read her name along with the others. He paused before opening the envelope, as they always did—these were actors, after all, and every moment in the spotlight was as precious to them as oxygen.

Though Laura very much wanted to win, it was absolutely true that both Irving and her father wanted it even more. She watched their faces as the syllables came out of the actor’s mouth—Lore-ah Lah-monde—and the rest of the room, so full of applause, felt silent
to her ears. All Laura could see or hear were the two men who loved her the most, now standing up to embrace each other over her head, their suit jackets flapping about her ears. Laura wedged her way between them and kissed her father on the cheek and then her husband on the mouth, being careful not to muss her lipstick. Mary remained seated, the only one at the table. Laura had a fleeting, uncharitable thought that people might think that her mother was crippled, which was better than their knowing the truth: that her mother was reluctant to stand up and clap. A young man who looked like some military-school dropout appeared at the bottom of the ballroom’s staircase to help her to the podium and the microphone, where Laura blinked into the lights and said simply, “My parents are here,” which was indeed what she was thinking at the time, but not nearly for the reason the giddy audience may have thought. When they’d quieted down, and she felt more composed, Laura thanked Gardner Brothers, and all the voters, though she could have said anything at all and not realized it, so amazed was she by the heft of the statue itself, eight pounds, nearly the same as Florence when she was born, and how delightful it felt in her hands.