Suspicious Circumstances (16 page)

‘Mother, wasn’t there anything you could do?’

A mutter came from the pillows. ‘It was another page.’

‘I know.’

‘Sylvia didn’t really trust Mr Denker. She only put the first page in his safe. The other page — the original — She’s got it, she says, where we’ll never, never find it. Oh, that awful, awful woman.’

‘But, Mother, does Ronnie really have to marry her?’

‘Yes, dear. Yes.’

‘But what did the second page say?’

‘Terrible things.’

‘About Ronnie?’

There was a long pause, then the mutter, very faint, said, ‘About me.’

‘About you? You mean — the secret marriage to the National Figure?’

She shifted her head. Her eyes had been closed, now the enormous lashes flickered up for a moment and then down again.

‘Oh, Nickie, if you’d seen her while I read the photostat. Gloating, she was, positively gloating. “Mexico for me tomorrow, dear,” she said, “or jail for you before teatime. That would be time. That would be charming, wouldn’t it? Anny Rood arrested on Eve of Las Vegas Triumph for Murder of Norma Delanay.” ’

‘Arrested!’ I exclaimed. ‘But Mother, who’s going to believe you’d kill Norma just about that marriage? What if your husband did marry bigamously? It wasn’t your fault. You haven’t done anything. You…’ Then, to my horror, all my old disloyal anxieties came rushing in. ‘Mother, there wasn’t anything else in the letter?’

‘Else?’ The lashes flicked open again and this time the eyes were their customary selves, giving me the sharpest of sharp glances. She sat up with a jerk. ‘Nickie. Really! Else? What do you mean — else?’

‘But, Mother…’

‘Ah, you poor sweet child.’ I got a flashing Irresistible Number One smile then and she was enfolding me warmly to her bosom. ‘Dear Nickie, what a help you’ve been. Such a kind, sympathetic boy. This is an anguishing thing, absolutely anguishing. But poor Ronnie. But there’s nothing we can do, so we mustn’t mope.’

‘But, Mother, I wasn’t moping. I ... ‘

‘Darling.’ She kissed me, stopping any more words from coming out. Then she pushed me away from her so that she could study me with heart-felt maternal love. The crying hadn’t done anything to mar the bone-structure. There was nothing but a few glistening, very decorative tears sliding down her cheekbones. And the look I was getting was the good old One and Only Field Marshal look.

‘Darling, do you realize what time it is? After five. Less than two hours to go. The Mona Lisa Room will be jammed. People have paid thousands and thousands of dollars. Whatever has happened, now we must think only of them. We must get in there and fight. We must give our All. So run off to bed, dear. Tell all the others, too. No sitting around chattering, exhausting themselves. All of us — to bed for a lovely, refreshing nap.’

And before I could say or do anything else I was bundled out into the hall.

All the others were huddled in the living-room and the moment I joined them I was bombarded with questions. I told them everything and it took a good twenty minutes to sate their wild-eyed curiosity. Then the dreadful reality of It descended on them and they all scurried off to their rooms. I was left alone with Tray.

For a moment I just sat there feeling that nothing on earth could induce me to pretend to take a lovely refreshing nap, but then, after a few minutes, anything in the world seemed less awful than sitting there, so I started back to my room. On the way I had to pass Mother’s room and, as I did so, I heard her voice on the phone.

I didn’t want to listen, but the voice was so broken, so desperate, so unlike Mother that it stopped me in my tracks.

‘Ronnie, darling, I’m so terribly sorry. Oh, my poor Ronnie, I couldn’t help you. If you’d seen what the letter said … It was hopeless. Quite, quite hopeless. Oh, Ronnie, we’ve got to do something…’

I didn’t wait to hear any more. It was bad enough to have heard that much. I almost ran to my room.

As I flopped down on my bed, the full horror of The Opening plunged down on me making an unendurable combination with the anxieties.

I lay there, praying that fire and brimstone would rain down on Las Vegas the way it had rained down on Sodom and Gomorrah.

But no fire and brimstone rained and, in a stupor, like a shaven-headed prisoner on his way to the electric chair, somehow I was trooping over with the others to the main building, somehow I was in Mother’s dressing-room, which was so full of cables and flowers that it was as if Western Union had set up its headquarters in the Botanical Gardens, and then somehow I was in my own little dressing-room which I shared with Gino.

Things went on, I knew — Awful No Business Like Show Business Things. Steve Adriano popped his head around the door. The most celebrated of the celebrities flitted in and out. Pam borrowed something. Delight came in and kissed me. And then, long after I’d forgotten even the basic idea of what I was supposed to do, I heard the ghastly orchestra in the ghastly Mona Lisa Room banging out what I supposed was Billy Croft’s ghastly overture, although it sounded totally unfamiliar. Gino in his chauffeur’s uniform was lugging me out on the stage. There were Pam and Tray and Uncle Hans and Delight. Dreadful clatters of knives and buzzes of anticipation roared from the other side of the curtain.

And then, suddenly, there was no curtain, nothing but blazing lights and soul-destroying glimpses of a sea of humanity. In the nick of time, the music became recognizable and I remembered what it was all about.

But, as I remembered, it was even worse because the whole opening, which once had seemed so wildly original, now seemed completely insane to me. They would boo, they would throw things, they would surge up on to the stage, rush us out of town and hurl us over the Boulder Dam. For there I was in my high-school sweater and jeans being a revolting cute son clutching a football; there was Delight being a secretary’s secretary answering a phone; there was Tray being a dog, scratching; there was Pam being a secretary at a typewriter; there was Gino being a chauffeur polishing a stylized bit of car, and there was Uncle Hans being an egg-headed uncle poring over a chess game. And the M.C.’s voice, over a mike, was introducing us individually; then he said,

‘So, ladies and gentlemen, this is Anny Rood’s family. An ordinary family you would say? An ordinary family?’

Count five, I remembered. After the second ‘ordinary family’, count five. One, two, three, four, five … Crash went the cymbals and then we were off. Suddenly Tray was somersaulting around Pam, suddenly Gino was standing on his head, suddenly Uncle Hans was yodeling and suddenly here we go — Delight and I were plunging into our buck-and-wing.

My legs were doing the right things. Against all reason, they seemed to have a life of their own and, as Delight flashed me a smile, I didn’t care whether she was being toned down or not, because dimly I began to sense that the hatred out there at the tables wasn’t hatred. There was alertness, even an occasional ripple of appreciation. And then the ripple became a roar and a thunder of applause because Mother had made her entrance.

She hadn’t done anything. She’d just come in trailing M. Balmain’s two hundred miles of pink organza. But instantly, as she stood there and did her shattering bit with the eyelashes, there was no one else in the world.

Soon all the rest of us were in the wings again and Mother was out there alone, doing her first song. Mother’s voice might well have belonged to a crow with a head cold but if it did it was certainly the sexiest crow since evolution got under way, and what she did to the audience was sadistic. There was dead silence, followed by deafening applause. Then she was singing again, then she was dancing a sort of mad meringue with the two hundred miles of pink organza doing inconceivable things, then she was kidding herself and all Sex Goddesses, then she was moaning a Piaff-type heartbreak song and they were yelling and yelling and yelling.

It was still a dream but not a nightmare any more. Our middle bit came and there we all were on stage again with Uncle Hans yodeling and Mother yodeling and Tray being enraptured and it slayed them. Then Mother was on her own again for what seemed like hours; then there was the finale; then the demented, interminable, hysterical reception, then we were all backstage and every celebrity in the world was surging and pushing and plunging towards Mother’s dressing room.

Fine, I thought, fine. Mother’s done it again. Now we’ll be stinking rich. Fine. But enough was enough. I pushed past Frank Sinatra, ducked around Audrey Hepburn, fled from Liberace and got back to my dressing-room.

Gino wasn’t there. He was, I suppose, taking part in the Victory Dance in Mother’s dressing-room. I sat down in front of the mirror. Well, one show over. Now there was the eleven-thirty performance; then there would be tomorrow two shows; then the next day’s two shows; then … A lovely new career for Nickie Rood. Nickie Rood, the divinely talented dancer son of the divinely talented Miss Anny…

Suddenly the door opened behind me. I didn’t have to turn around because I was looking in the mirror. Ronnie was there — Ronnie in a tuxedo, looking as if Dracula and the Cat People and Frankenstein’s Monster and The Thing From The Deep had all been sucking his blood for hours.

‘Nickie,’ he said.

I swung around on my chair. He just stood tottering for a second, then he dropped down into Gino’s chair.

‘For pity’s sake,’ I exclaimed, ‘what is it? What…?’

‘Your mother,’ he said. ‘Get your mother.’

‘But She’s being mobbed by Names. She’s…’

‘Get her. Bring her here. Get her.’

The suppressed hysteria in him was excruciating and there’s no one like me for getting infected by suppressed hysteria. I jumped up and ran out of the door. The corridor was jammed with celebrities who had been bulged out of Mother’s dressing-room. They were all smoking and laughing and chattering, caught up in the elation of Mother's Triumph. Somehow I elbowed my way through ; somehow I got into the room with the jungle of flowers, the mountains of cables and the struggling mass of multimillion-dollar bodies.

I barged my way on. Lana Turner. ‘Excuse me.’ Judy Garland. ‘Pardon.’ Fred Astaire. ‘If I could just…’

I could see Mother ahead. She was out of The Dress, being very simple and pro in a white terry cloth bathrobe, standing by the dressing-table, surrounded by Hecht and Lancaster and John Huston and William Wyler and the Selznicks and Lettie Leroy. Lettie Leroy! Delight, looking very wild-eyed and eager, was hovering on the fringes of Fame. Ronnie’s hysteria inside me was getting less and less suppressed. I squeezed past Delight, who didn’t even notice me, pushed between Hecht and Lancaster and gasped,

‘Mother.’

‘Darling Nickie.’ Mother switched the full dazzle on me, then, my face being what it must have been, the dazzle got a little steely around the edges. ‘Yes, darling, what is it?’

‘Mother, I …’ Suddenly there didn’t seem to be any way in the world of getting a Triumphant Star at the Height of Her Triumph away from Hecht and Lancaster and John Huston and William Wyler and the Selznicks and Lettie Leroy. ‘Mother
…
I … I … I mean, can you come?’

‘Come?’ said Mother. ‘Come?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘If you’d come. There’s something. There's …’

‘Ah.’ Mother was much better at it than I was. ‘Ah, yes, of course. How foolish of me to forget. Darlings.’ She batted the lashes at Hecht, Lancaster, Huston, etc. ‘Just a moment. I’ll be right back.’

Together we squeezed out of the room and through the gauntlet of evicted celebrities in the corridor. Ronnie had shut my dressing room door. I opened it just enough for us to slip in and then closed it again.

Ronnie, who’d still been sitting in Gino’s chair, leaped to his feet.

Instantly Mother said, ‘Where’s Sylvia?’

‘Anny … oh, Anny …’

‘She wasn’t with you at the table. I saw right in the middle of my meringue.’ Wouldn’t you know? I thought even then in my delirium of nerves. Wouldn’t you know Mother would have cased the house? She clutched Ronnie’s arms. ‘Ronnie, what is it? What’s happened?’

The celebrities outside in the corridor sounded like the wild life of the Upper Amazon. Ronnie put his hand out to support himself on the back of Gino’s chair.

‘Anny, I went … At quarter to seven … I hadn’t seen her. I couldn’t face her. I swear it. After you left, I locked myself in my suite. But then, when it was time to bring her to the Opening, I went …’

‘Fabulous.’ The word somehow articulated itself in the celebrity babble outside. ‘That woman … She’s indestructible. A great star … That’s what a great star is…’

‘The door between the suites,’ Ronnie was saying. ‘I’d locked it. I had the key on my side. I went into Sylvia’s suite. She wasn’t in the living room. She wasn’t in the bedroom. I went into the bathroom. And … Anny
…
she was there in the tub. She was lying in the tub. She was dead.’

‘Dea…’ I began to yell, but instantly Mother’s hand was over my mouth. ‘The people,’ she hissed. ‘Out in the corridor. The people
…
Yes, Ronnie? Yes?’

‘Anny, she was dead. There wasn’t any doubt. She was dead and … and I stood there, I looked at her and I thought: I can’t. I can’t call the desk. I can’t let them know. Ten minutes before Anny’s opening? Sylvia dead ten minutes before…? Anny, I left her.’

‘Left her?’ said Mother.

‘I went back to my suite. I locked the door. I came over here. I sat at the table. I watched the act. I … Anny, She’s there in the tub dead.’

I dropped into my chair. I saw myself in the mirror in my high-school sweater and my blue jeans. I looked indescribable.

Suddenly I heard Mother’s voice, ‘I’ll come.’

‘But, Anny, you can’t. You of all people can’t be the one to…’

‘Yes,’ said Mother, ‘yes. This can only he me.’ She swung around to us both. The mask was wonderful — all lines and cheekbones, nothing given away, not even the tiniest hint of panic. ‘Ronnie … Nickie
…
stay here. Wait. Get rid of
these people somehow… Just wait.’

She slipped out of the room, evoking a roar of greeting from the corridor celebrities. Ronnie sat down on Gino's chair. We didn’t say anything. What was there to say, the saying of which wouldn’t turn us both into gibbering idiots? Gradually, it seemed, the Amazon noises outside got less. There was a sense of movement, of things being over, of driftings away. And then, sometime - heaven knew when the door opened again and there was Mother in slacks and a pink blouse.