Laura Lamont's Life In Pictures (27 page)

It was a few days before Christmas, Jimmy and Clara off from work, and no doubt off somewhere together. Ginger and Bill came over to see the children, but more to do their part as professional actors: Bill brought in the tree and set it up in the stand, his silver spurs jangling all the while. It didn’t matter anymore that Irving had been angry at Ginger for leaving the studio; he wouldn’t see the guests anyway. Triumph had made Ginger more famous than ever, more famous than Laura and Robert Hunter, more famous even than Susie and Johnny, and Laura herself felt starstruck, as if they hadn’t been friends since the beginning of time, the beginning of her life as Laura Lamont, which seemed as old as the glaciers, and she was embarrassed how much it meant to her to have Ginger in her living room. Fragrant pine needles scattered from the tree like snowflakes, and Laura tried to follow them for a pattern, a secret message from the great beyond. Ginger unpacked ornaments from a large box and hung them one at a time on the branches of the tree, always asking Junior whether she should go higher or lower, left or right. Laura, Junior, and Florence sat rapt on the sofas, watching the performance. After the tree was sufficiently decorated, Ginger led the group in a game of charades, which everyone loved, even Florence, who pretended to despise the game until it was her turn, and then gamely became Roy Rogers or Rin Tin Tin, barking silently at the twinkling tree. Laura had to hide her face while watching Florence, because it
was just too much to watch her daughter’s sweet bravery, her willingness to try to behave as if the world were still a benevolent, normal place. Irving, the good American that he was, had always loved Christmas best of all the holidays, perhaps because he’d never celebrated it until he was an adult. There was no Jesus, of course, only singing and presents and Santa Claus, a holiday made of tinsel and magic, perfect for Hollywood.

The nurse, however, didn’t care about Christmas, or was paid enough to pretend not to. She was large and thick, like so many of the women Laura remembered from her childhood, capable of lifting Irving out of bed and carrying him into the bathroom with no help whatsoever. Laura did her best to look away, as Irving had instructed. Someone was always with him, day and night. The doctors themselves came every other day, scratched notes on their little white pads, and left Laura with ever more prescriptions. She’d started to take twice as many blue pills as she was supposed to, but who was going to notice? It was Irving’s pulse they were always taking, Irving’s heart that concerned them. Laura stood still, as if she and her husband were in the eye of a storm, and if they didn’t move a muscle, their house would remain intact, with only the water sucked out of the pool and the leaves torn off the trees.

T
he next morning, Laura helped Irving into the tub to take a bath. His body was smaller even than when they met, when he already seemed to Laura the size of a woodland sprite. His bones were pressing against his skin, forcing her to sponge new knobs and connections where before there had been flat expanses, or even gentle bodily slopes and curves. Laura dunked the sponge again and again, always making sure the water was neither too hot nor too cool. Irving leaned
forward and back as directed, letting the warm water run from Laura’s hands to his skin.

“What do you want me to get you for Christmas, my love?” Laura asked.

Irving laughed a very small laugh, though it clearly pained him.

“Surely you must want something.”

Irving gripped his knees with his hands, pulling himself as upright as possible. His glasses were in the bedroom, which always gave his face that slightly faraway look that Laura remembered so well from her wedding night, as if he no longer needed to see in order to know what he was looking for.

“I would like a thousand more nights with you,” Irving said. “For a start.”

Laura dropped the sponge into the tub with a small splash, and wrapped her arms around her husband, the cool porcelain of the tub between their bodies.

There were only a handful of moments Laura could think of, in the span of her entire life, when she was unable to identify the seam in between what she felt and what she said or did, moments during which all of the selves that she’d ever been lined up perfectly, with no cracks in between. When she found her sister’s body, when Florence was born, when Clara first smiled, when Josephine called to say that their father had died, when she saw Irving hold their son in his arms for the first time, when she kissed Irving for the first time, when she and Irving first saw and touched and kissed each other’s bodies for the first time, when they were married, and when she knew she was his, forever, forever, forever. And now this moment was added to the list.

“I think we’ll need more than that,” she said, her mouth on his shoulder, on his collarbone, on his unshaven cheek. Water had
splashed out of the tub and onto her robe and Laura wished that it were ink, some physical proof that her husband had loved her so much, and that she had held on to him as long as she could.

I
rving died in the middle of the night on Christmas Eve, with Laura and the sturdy nurse standing beside his bed, both of them having been roused from their half sleep by a series of unusual noises coming from Irving’s bed. Laura clutched the nurse’s hand with her right hand and Irving’s hand with her left, her eyes still adjusting to the dark. She reached for the lamp switch, but the nurse steered her hand away—it would be a shock to Irving’s nervous system to have a bright light turned on, she thought; better to let him slip from darkness to darkness. Laura’s ears were filled with the quickened pace of her own heart, which rushed and pumped as loudly as the ocean. Laura squeezed the nurse’s hand as hard as she could, while Irving’s fingers only twitched in her palm. She spoke to him quietly, trying to calm him as she had calmed the children when they were babies, whispering promises that she didn’t know whether she could keep, platitudes her Irving would have laughed at, had he been well. They were more for herself than for him, she knew, but what could Laura do but try? Her husband was dying, and she had things to tell him. It was over in a minute, and Irving’s body relaxed into silence. Laura moved the nurse aside and switched on the light, wanting to see her husband’s face again before it turned into something else, something frozen and hard, the way her father’s had been. She rested her hand against his cheek, feeling the bones in his face, his skin still warm. Laura felt as if a camera were watching them, recording every movement. She thought of Hildy’s face, full of blood and anger, and her father’s sorry
mask of day-old makeup. At least Irving still looked like her husband. In the film, the wife closed her husband’s eyes; the wife knelt on the floor beside her husband’s bed and wept. She saw herself through the twin lenses of a camera, at once upside down and right-side up, the edges of the frame flickering as they moved past, quicker than the eye could see.

I
rving Green was laid to rest at Hollywood Forever Cemetery, at a plot directly in line with the Gardner Brothers water tower, which was visible over the shared wall. He had chosen the plot himself well before the end, and Laura thought it suited him. Irving had told her once, on one of their first dates, the story of the cemetery. The cemetery had owned the land that Gardner Brothers sat on, owned the entire lot, but had rented it to the studio. It must have seemed like a lark to them, to the serious people whose business was death, to see a film studio set up shop in their backyard. They’d always assumed they would get the land back—what was more reliable, burials or movie stars?

The doctor’s final pronouncement had been pneumonia, which anyone could get during a particularly bad cold, but which Irving’s weak heart and lungs could not fight off. Louis Gardner insisted on paying for everything, and despite her daughters’ protestations, Laura did not refuse him. It was to be a private service, but all of Hollywood had been invited, and attended. Laura sat with her sunglasses and a black veil in the front row, right before the coffin, her three children flanking her. Clara cried most of all, dampening Laura’s crepe de chine dress with her muddled whimpering. When Louis Gardner rose to address the assembled crowd of actors, directors, and other Gardner Brothers employees, Laura blew her nose into her hankie so
loudly that he would get her message. The giddy friendliness she’d felt when she arrived in Hollywood was gone, and in its place was a wooden box. The answer seemed as simple as this: If Laura loved anyone too much, they would be taken away. She held on to her children more tightly, their arms and hands grabbing at one another as if they were dangling from a skyscraper made of grief. Junior sat on her left, his legs swinging above the ground, Florence’s arm wrapped around his shoulder as tightly as if their chairs were fifty feet in the air. Laura half started out of her seat, afraid that he might fall, but realized that everyone was looking at her, and instead just reached out, as if her hand could hold on to all of her children at once.

Laura looked over her shoulder and saw Ginger and Bill sitting right behind her. Her mother hadn’t come, but Josephine was two seats over from Ginger, having flown on her own dime, as soon as she’d heard. She stared straight ahead, steady as a mermaid on the prow of a ship. Louis Gardner and his family were in the third row, and Susie and Johnny, and after that Laura couldn’t bear to look. Everyone was watching her face, as if trying to gauge her misery.
Yes
, she wanted to shout,
yes
,
my husband is dead
, but she couldn’t. It didn’t feel real, all the flowers filling the house, all the people in black sitting behind her. Laura wanted to wake up in her bed and have Irving next to her, reading a script or writing notes furiously on his next project. She wanted Junior to have a father, and the girls—they were all in the same boat now, Laura and her children, all fatherless and bereft.

The service went on too long—after Louis, several actors got up to speak, including Johnny, who had put on thirty pounds and seemed to be wearing a toupee. Ginger spoke, which made Laura as happy as she could possibly be, as if there were a tightrope strung between the past and the present and Ginger was on it, walking backward. There was no mention of God, or heaven, only the glamorous universe Irving
had helped to create, the heaven that could outlast everyone present, which was just how he would have wanted it. After it was over, Laura stood in place and let herself be embraced by hundreds of people, many of whom she had never met. This was a role she had played before, and it wasn’t until Junior said that he was hungry, and Josephine pushed her way to the front of the line, that Laura agreed to be taken home. Clara glared at Laura when it was time to go, as if in leaving they were saying good-bye to Irving for good. Laura wanted to tell her daughter, her sweetest and eldest, that what was gone was not at the cemetery and not at the house but in their hearts forever, but she couldn’t, because she missed her husband too much to make up something that sounded better than agony.