Starstruck (6 page)

“Or Dane Forrest!” Doris shrieked, before Margaret could make up her mind. “Maybe you’ll get to meet Dane Forrest!” Scrambling onto the bed, Doris gazed in mock adoration at the framed photo of the handsome star that hung on the wall above. “Do you think you’ll be in a movie where you get to kiss him on the mouth?”

“Doris! Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Oh,
Dane
!” Doris shrieked, peppering the photo with slurping mock kisses. “I love you! I want to kiss you until our faces melt together and we have only one face!”

“Doris,
stop it!
You’ll get lipstick all over him!”

Shrieking with laughter, Doris expertly dodged Margaret’s volley of pillows. “Just remember,” she shouted, “when you’re a big famous star with the world falling at your feet: you leave Jimmy Molloy alone. Jimmy Molloy is
mine
!”

“Just what in the name of heaven is going on in here?”

Looming in the doorway was the well-upholstered figure of Emmeline, looking like someone had set her girdle on fire—while she was still in it. Both girls froze.

“Well?” The housekeeper crossed her arms over her chest. “Would you like to tell me what you’re doing up here, screaming your heads off like a couple of banshees?”

“Oh, Emmeline—”

“Don’t you ‘oh, Emmeline’ me, Miss Margaret! Never in all my born days have I heard such hooting and hollering from a pair of young ladies! I don’t like to think what the missus must have thought.”

“Mother?” Margaret’s stomach lurched. “She’s home?”

Emmeline’s eyes glittered. “And the mister.”

“B-but I thought they were dining at the club tonight!” Margaret sputtered.

“There’s been a change of plans. They’re having their cocktails in the library now. And I hope you don’t mind me saying it, Miss Margaret, but you’re mighty lucky it was me up here in the next room and not her.”

Margaret gasped. Emmeline must have heard everything. This was a catastrophe. She’d counted on time to plan, to figure out the best way to broach the subject with her parents. Now she would have to tell them tonight, before Emmeline could.

“Dinner at home,” Emmeline muttered furiously. Clearly, she was in one of her moods. “And me without so much as a joint or a bird for the table. But the missus wants what the missus wants. Young Miss Doris better hightail it on out of here. She’ll eat better at her own table tonight than at this one, to be sure. And you, Miss Margaret.” The housekeeper rounded
on Margaret, her red round face like a thundercloud. “You’d best be downstairs at seven on the dot, scrubbed and dressed something proper, or you’ll have hell to catch from the missus.” She cast a long look around Margaret’s ruined bedroom. “And best clear up this mess or you’ll have hell to catch from
me
. I’m a housekeeper, not a chambermaid.”

“Jeepers.” Doris watched Emmeline’s plump form retreat down the carpeted hallway. “What a grouch.”

Margaret sighed. “Believe me, if you had to spend all day trapped in this house with my mother, you’d be pretty grouchy too.”

T
he tall carved chairs lined the long polished table like faceless sentries. Dark velvet curtains, tightly drawn, seemed to mock even the possibility of light. The food, which Mrs. Frobisher summoned wordlessly from the kitchen course by course by means of a little brass bell, was a punishment in and of itself: brown soup, brown vegetables, brown sauce, brown meat so defiant in its dullness that Margaret sometimes imagined she could hear the recently deceased animal speaking from beyond the grave:
Go on, eat me. I promise you won’t enjoy it
.

Other families might playfully tease one another over dinner, sharing stories of their day or raucous jokes, but at the Frobisher table, children were encouraged to be silent, and women ornamental. This left just her father to hold forth, through course after course, on the pressing social issues of the day. If it weren’t for the specific targets of his rants, Margaret thought
with increasing despair, a casual observer could be forgiven for believing they had somehow time-traveled back to the nineteenth century.

“And as for Roosevelt,” Mr. Frobisher was saying, brandishing a forkful of the disconcertingly chewy lamb Emmeline had rustled up from who knew what godforsaken corner of the icebox, “don’t even get me started on that traitorous criminal.”

He’d gotten started on “that traitorous criminal” during the consommé and hadn’t let up since. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, currently in his second term as president, was at the head of a long list of people Lowell Hornsby Frobisher III did not care for, a rogue’s gallery that also included (but was hardly limited to) immigrants, Democrats, Communists, Jews, Negroes, Mexicans, Chinese, psychiatrists, interior decorators, hoboes, Catholics, jazz musicians, and so-called warmongers (a term that, in his mind, was generally interchangeable with immigrants, Democrats, Communists, and Jews). Margaret, who was expected to remain dutifully silent throughout her father’s oratories, often kept herself sane by running a mental tally of how many times he could mention one of those despised groups in a single sentence.

“As if the blasted New Deal weren’t bad enough,” her father continued, “with him and his Democrats (
ding!
) giving a bunch of no-good hoboes and immigrants (
ding, ding!
) the rightful property of millions of decent, hardworking Americans like us, now he’ll try to drag America into a war with Germany, a war that will benefit absolutely no one except a bunch of warmongering Communists and Jews.”

Ding, ding, ding!
Margaret thought with satisfaction.

“Never mind the fact that Herr Hitler hasn’t given us the
slightest indication he has any intention of war.” Mr. Frobisher paused to spread a bit of his lamb chop with a dollop of unaccountably olive-colored mint sauce before he continued. “Germany is simply exercising the right of a sovereign nation to arm itself. As for this latest business in Austria, well, the Austrians greeted Herr Hitler with open arms. Two peoples with the same culture, the same language, the same blood; there’s no point in keeping them divided.”

Mrs. Frobisher nodded vigorously as her husband triumphantly chewed his morsel of meat. “Of course, dear.” Her face was as rapt as though she hadn’t heard this exact lecture at least a hundred times before. It was an endless source of mystery to Margaret how her mother, capable of striking terror in the stoutest of hearts, could so convincingly play the “little woman” in the presence of her father. It almost gave her a strange kind of hope for her own future as an actress. “Of course, you’re perfectly right. Still, there’s just something about Mr. Hitler that rubs me the wrong way.” Mrs. Frobisher gave a little shake of her head. “I understand he’s done
wonderful
things for Germany. But I’m afraid when I see him in the paper, or in the newsreels, I can’t help but cringe. With all that shouting, he just seems terribly
uncouth
.”

“Un
couth
?” Mr. Frobisher roared with laughter. “Uncouth indeed! And that, my dear, is precisely why women have no place in politics.” He wiped his eyes with the corner of his monogrammed linen napkin. “Herr Hitler is governing a
nation
, Mildred, not presiding over a meeting of the Junior League.”

“Oh dear.” Mildred Frobisher tittered along gamely. “I suppose I’ve made myself look rather silly.”

“Never mind.” Mr. Frobisher patted his stomach. “We’ll turn
the conversation to something of more interest for you ladies. Let’s see … Margaret.” He turned to his daughter with a start, as though surprised to see she’d been sitting there all this time. “What happened to you today?”

Here it was
. The chance she’d been waiting for since she’d come downstairs for dinner. She took a deep breath, struggling to control the butterflies fluttering wildly in her stomach. “Well, Father, actually, my day was rather interesting.”

“Oh?” Her mother’s tone was superficially friendly, but Margaret could immediately hear the suspicion in her voice, and she knew at once she’d used the wrong word.
Interesting?
The guiding principle of the Frobisher household was to make sure nothing interesting happened, ever. “And just what might you mean by that?”

“Well …” Margaret dug her fingernails hard into her palms, steeling herself to continue, and launched into the story she had mentally prepared while dressing. “Ah, you see, after school, some of us girls went to the ice cream parlor.”

“Margaret,
really
,” her mother scolded. “What have I told you about eating between meals? The beginning of the summer season is just two months away.”

“I
know
, Mother,” Margaret replied, gritting her teeth. “But I only had a Coke.”

“Still. You can’t be too careful. With your figure—”

“It was a special occasion!” Margaret blurted out. “It was … it was Evelyn Gamble’s birthday.”

She hadn’t planned to say that, but once the lie was out of her mouth, she realized it was the perfect alibi. Her mother was always after her to spend more time with Evelyn Gamble. That the two girls had hated each other virtually their entire
lives was irrelevant; in Mildred Frobisher’s world, social standing was a much more important reason for being friends with someone than actually enjoying her company. But instead of the expected coo of approval, her mother frowned. “Isn’t Evelyn Gamble’s birthday in November? As I remember it, the dinner dance the Gambles hosted for her sweet sixteen was just before Thanksgiving.”

Rats!
Leave it to Mildred Frobisher to remember every party to which the Gambles had reluctantly invited her. “Oh, well, it wasn’t her actual birthday! It was her … her …” Margaret’s eyes darted to a crack in the heavy curtains, through which she glimpsed a sliver of purple blossoms from the garden. “It was her … jacaranda birthday!”

“Her
what
?”

You want to be an actress, Margie? Start acting
. “Her jacaranda birthday. For the … the Jacaranda Club. It’s kind of a secret … a secret society some of us have at school. It’s very exclusive, just me and Evelyn and”—she groped for some names of which her mother would approve—“Claire Prince and Mary Ann Nesbit and Jeannie McFarland and Eleanor Gump. And Doris, of course.” Even if it was an imaginary club, she didn’t want Doris to be left out. “The day you join, that’s called your birthday. So today was Evelyn’s birthday.”

Her mother looked horrified. “You’ve a secret club you’ve only just invited Evelyn Gamble to join?”

“Oh no! It’s um … the one-year anniversary of her joining.” Better to get back to the original story, and fast. “Anyway, there we were at the ice cream place, having a swell time …” Margaret stopped herself again;
swell
, along with
bucks, nuts
, and
dump
, headed the long list of words Mrs.
Frobisher deemed unseemly for a proper young lady to use. “… I mean, a marvelous time, when a man came up to speak to me.”

“A man?” Mr. Frobisher looked up from his mashed potatoes for the first time since he had magnanimously extended his daughter her invitation to speak. “What the devil did he want?”

“Oh, he wasn’t being fresh or anything like that. Honest, Father. He was very polite. He just said that he’d noticed me and”—the words came out in a tumble—“and would I want to be an actress and if so then he’d like to give me a screen test.”

Her parents stared at her blankly.

Margaret forged on. “You know. It’s like a tryout for the pictures. First you have to take a test, to see how you photograph. They have you come in and you play a scene and see if you’re any good, and if you pass the test they offer you a contract.”

Her father gave her a long, disbelieving look. He opened his mouth as if to say something.

And then, to Margaret’s horror, he burst out
laughing
.

“You were right, Margaret,” he hooted. “That certainly was very interesting. Very interesting indeed. Mildred, I think you can have Emmeline serve the dessert now.”

“Wait!”
Margaret had not raised her voice to her father since she was an infant mewling in her crib, but desperate times called for desperate measures. “This is real! He’s the real McCoy! Just look!” Frantically, she pulled Larry Julius’s creamy business card from her satin sash, where she had tucked it for just this moment, and thrust it into her astonished father’s hand.

“Julius,” her father grunted, examining the card as though it
were a square of soiled toilet paper. “What kind of name is that, Roman? He must be a Catholic.”

“For Pete’s sake, Dad! He’s probably a Jew, but who cares about that? This is Olympus Studios!” Margaret was yelling now. It didn’t matter anymore. All that mattered was that she got through to them, made them understand how important this was. “I know what you think about actors, but you’re wrong. Katharine Hepburn is from a society family. So is Franchot Tone. Diana Chesterfield—well,
Picture Palace
said that Diana Chesterfield happens to be a cousin of the king of England himself! There’s no reason a nice girl can’t go into the pictures if she wants to! And I want to. I want it more than anything I’ve ever wanted in my whole life!”