The Property of a Lady (56 page)

Maryland

Cal pressed the bell to summon Nurse Milgrim, worried by Missie’s pale face and trembling voice. The clock on her table said 2
A.M
., and he knew she must be exhausted as well as racked with the pain of her memories. She was staring down at the pink orchid brooch in her hands.

“I’ll never part with it,” she whispered. “Never.”

Nurse Milgrim bustled in, crisp and alert in her starched white uniform. She looked at Missie and then at Cal and demanded, “What did I tell you? Now she’s worn out and all upset. I blame you for this, young man.” She poured a glass of water. “Come on now,” she coaxed, “let’s take our pills and then I’ll get you a nice cup of tea and it’s off to bed.”

Missie swallowed her pills and shook her head. “Don’t you understand, Nurse Milgrim?” she said. “Now I’ve begun, I must finish. Only then will Cal be able to help me.”

Milgrim glanced at him sharply and he shrugged his shoulders. “It’s important to all of us,” he told her.

Her eyes widened in alarm and she said, “Well … in that case, maybe I’d better make some sandwiches,” and departed in a rustle of white cotton.

“Azaylee couldn’t go to the funeral,” Missie said, “not that I would have wanted her to. They kept her in the hospital for two weeks, ‘for observation,’ they said, though at the end of it they were no wiser. She had just retreated into her own safe little world and no one could
reach her. They said it was shock and with time she would be fine. But I knew better.”

Her haunted violet eyes met his. “An enormous wreath of pink orchids was delivered to the cemetery just as O’Hara’s coffin was being lowered into the grave. The delivery man handed me the card.” She paused. “It was from Rico and Giorgio Oriconne.”

“Then it was they who …?”

She nodded. “He had underestimated their strength in Chicago. They had powerful friends and already had the place sewn up. They just let him go ahead and spend his money on his club and then …” She bowed her head, “No charges were ever brought, of course. It was just another seven-day wonder written off as an ‘unknown gangland killing.’ But that is what I have always believed.”

Nurse Milgrim reappeared silently with plates of neat crustless sandwiches and a chocolate cake. “Eat a little,” she urged Missie. “You’ll need to keep your strength up.”

Missie sipped her tea gratefully and said to Cal, “I took Azaylee out of the hospital and went back to California and Rosa. I thought being back home again would bring her out of her depression. Everyone was so sweet and kind, telling her their stories about their work in the movies, but she didn’t seem to notice. All she cared about was Viktor, she wouldn’t let him out of her sight. I can see them now, on the porch at Rosemont, Viktor’s head on her lap as she stared across the lawn at the passersby in the street without ever seeing them. O’Hara had left me a little money, not a fortune, because he was a man who spent it as fast as it came in, but then, you see, he thought he had all the time in the world.

“A year passed and I could stand it no longer. I decided to take Azaylee to Switzerland to the eminent psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung. I wanted to know for certain whether her problem was medical or mental.” She looked at Cal again. “And I want to tell you, I prayed that
it was medical because at least then we might be able to do something about it.

“Jung was very interested in her case. Of course his work was confidential and I told him, without mentioning names, how she had lost her family, of our escape and our life afterward, and that she did not know the details. I told him she had never seen a photograph of her family and didn’t even know their real identities. And of course I told him about O’Hara.

“Jung said her case was one of the most interesting he had ever come across. He said Azaylee was suffering from a combination of things: depression, hysteria, and repressed emotions, locked away in her since childhood. She was in danger of losing her identity, ‘a personality disorder’ he called it. I told him how she had never mentioned her mama and papa and how she had just seemed to accept the fact that she lived on Rivington Street with Sofia and me. And I told him how she clung to the dog. He nodded and said she was a classic case and he would do his best to treat her.

“We lived in Zurich, off and on, for more than two years. We rented an apartment in a little hotel in the mountains; we loved the crisp clear air and the unending views, and I think somehow we both finally felt safe there. Every now and then we would journey back to California and stay for a month or two, but Azaylee was making progress and I was afraid to take her away from Dr. Jung. I knew that behind those long, lovely quiet eyes lay a mind in turmoil, and I wanted it all to be straightened out.

“Finally Jung said that for the moment he had done all he could, and we went back to Hollywood for good. Azaylee seemed happy and more outgoing than I had ever seen her. She went back to school and picked up her old friendships with Rosa’s girls as if nothing had ever happened. She took up her dance lessons again and somehow
they became the focus of her life. I suppose that was what she always wanted to do, really. Just dance.”

She looked levelly at Cal and said, “Of course you realize I’m talking about Ava Adair.”

He stared back at her, stunned. “Ava Adair? The movie star?”

“I’ll tell you how it happened.” She took a sip of the cold tea and pressed a hand to her brow, thinking. Then she said, “It all began with a chance meeting, and for the life of me I’ve never been able to decide whether it created her life or whether it ruined it….”

She thought of how innocently it had all started out, telling Cal how Dick Nevern had come back to see them, flushed with success from
Scheherazade
and the three other major feature films he had completed for Magic Studios. He was an important director now but he was still the same nice, plain, bespectacled young man they had always known, and even though beautiful movie actresses threw themselves at him, he was still shy. He had never forgotten how close a shave that rocking chair on the farm porch in Oklahoma had been, and he claimed he owed it all to C. Z. Abrams, who had given him his chance.

“Abrams was reputed to be the most private person in Hollywood. No one really knew him, he had no real friends, just business acquaintances, but he really liked Dick. Dick would go to his big house on Lexington Drive several times a week to watch new movies or the day’s rushes. They would have supper, always very formal with servants and all, but C. Z. never told Dick anything personal about himself. All he knew of him was that he was a devout Jew who kept the Sabbath strictly.

“Anyway, the day that Dick came round to see us Azaylee came rushing in from dance class. It was one of her really good days and she was vivacious and alive and really pleased to see him. She was fourteen years old and of course she was beautiful, in that unusual way of hers—
all enormous pansy-gold eyes and a great tumble of platinum hair. She was tall for her age and still too thin, but she had beautiful legs and a sort of dancer’s grace in the way she moved and walked.

“I noticed Dick looking at her interestedly and I wasn’t in the least bit surprised when he said, ‘You know, Missie, Azaylee is made for the movies. The cameras would just love her and so would the audiences.’

“I shook my head and smiled. I said she was way too young to think about that, and then he said something that really surprised me.

“I really hate to tell tales out of school,” he began, and then he grinned and said maybe he should rephrase that, because what he wanted to say was that Azaylee had been skipping high school and doing the rounds of the studios, lying about her age and looking for work as a dancer or an extra—anything, just as long as she could be part of the magical movie world.

“Of course, she had been unsuccessful because she was so obviously a child pretending to be a woman. But he said that if that was what she really wanted to do, then why didn’t I let him take some tests of her and maybe get her a small role in his next movie? He would guarantee to look after her personally, guard her with his life if necessary, and he’d bet his Oklahoma boots she would be a star before too long.

“I told him again that she was too young, that I would forbid her ever to go near the studios until she was at least sixteen. This was 1928 and Hollywood had changed. It was a boom town now. Rosa and I owned five houses along Fountain Avenue. Rosemont, where we now lived ourselves instead of in the little bungalow out back, was the smallest. The studios were churning out film after film, Hollywood Boulevard was a proper thoroughfare clogged with traffic, and Beverly Hills was a proper town. A lot of the old stars were gone: Valentino dead; Mabel Normand, Fatty Arbuckle ruined by scandal, murders,
drugs; it was all going on by then. Hollywood had lost its innocence, you might say, along with our own young Bathing Beauties, who had found out that posing for nude photographs made them a great deal more money than being in Sennett’s line-up. You can see why it was not a world I really wanted a vulnerable, fragile child like Azaylee exposed to. I wanted her to stay in school and life to go on just as it was, with Rosa and the girls. No ups—no downs. I had finally found anonymity and I guess I just wanted to keep it.

“The talkies were just coming in and the whole industry was in a state of flux. No one seemed to know what would happen next and soon many of the old favorites would be gone, discarded by the once-sycophantic studios because their voices were said to be unsuitable. But of course it didn’t stop Azaylee haunting the studios even though I threatened her with a tutor again.

“It was when Viktor died that I changed my mind. He was the oldest dog in Hollywood, a veteran even for a borzoi, but he had been blind for years and barely moved from his favorite spot on the porch. Of course it was a tragedy because he was one of our last few links with Misha. But for Azaylee it was a disaster. We scoured the country for another borzoi and finally he arrived: six months old, a golden coat like Viktor, and ready to play. Rex was an instant hit but he wasn’t Viktor, we all knew that. And when I saw that look creeping back into Azaylee’s eyes, that feyness, the sliding away again, I called Dick and said that maybe he had better do those tests after all.”

Hollywood

C. Z. was waiting for Dick to arrive from the studios with the day’s rushes. They had got into the habit of showing them at his house late at night rather than at the studio,
partly because he enjoyed Dick’s company but mostly because it brought some life to his big, empty house.

It was ten o’clock and the sky outside the tall windows overlooking the perfect gardens was dark: He might have been anywhere in the world, a well-dressed anonymous person in a polished anonymous room in some anonymous city. It was eight years since he had beaten Mel Schroeder at his own game and ended up as owner of a couple of ramshackle barns on Cahuenga with a movie camera and a few reels of film, and in that time he had become the legendary C. Z. Abrams the movie mogul, up there with Goldwyn and Zukor, Fox and Warner. But in his heart he was still Zev Abramski, a lonely man. So lonely that he needed Dick Nevern’s company and the pressure of a twenty-hour work day to fill his time, and then, if he was lucky, he would be so exhausted he might catch four hours of dreamless sleep before he faced another day.

He had seen from Mel Schroeder’s eyes that he’d thought he had a real sucker there, sitting waiting for him on the veranda of the Hotel Hollywood sweating in his black pawnbroker suit and stiff white collar, embarrassed by his guttural English and his foreign look. But Schroeder hadn’t known about the anger and despair that had kindled a fire in him, and Schroeder was only the first of a dozen men to feel the razor edge of Zev Abramski’s ambitious mind cut them to the ground.

With his usual caution, learned through many hardships, Zev had done a little checking of Schroeder and discovered that he had already sold four phony “studios” to gullible men via his ads in small local journals in one-horse townships across the country. Discouraged, he had decided not to meet Schroeder after all, but then he had looked into things a little deeper and changed his mind. Schroeder’s scam was to show a remote piece of land he had bought for a few dollars because there were no roads and it was virtually inaccessible. He would explain that
everyone was out on location in the desert or at the beach and that he conducted all his business from his office in Hollywood, and that’s why there was only one camera around and no people. He displayed the reels of film and pointed out the virtues of the tottering wooden buildings that normally housed cattle or hay that he grandiosely called studios. Next he brought out the fraudulent balance sheets for Schroeder’s Movie Studios showing sales of hundreds of two-reelers to mythical distributors across the nation, with a tidy sum of one hundred thousand dollars in profit plus seventy-five thousand still owed the company. And no nasty red figures in the debits column.

“All bought and paid for by yours truly,” he had told Zev, mopping his sweating brow as they strode around the hot, dusty acres, “and it’s a going concern; five movies in production today and more scheduled. My trouble is I can’t take the climate.” He thumped his chest. “The old ticker, y’see. Doctor says I must get back East where it’s cooler—and pronto. If not, I’m a dead man.” He winked at Zev, pale and icy-eyed in his hot black suit. “With them odds, who am I to say no?” He stared at him silently for a moment and then he said, “I like you and I’m gonna make you an offer you can’t refuse. I can see you’re a decent young man and just right for this business. I’m telling you there’s a fortune to be made here. It’s just my tough luck that I’m struck down by illness.” He sighed heavily and then added with a brave smile, “Still, God’s wish is His law, and who am I to question His actions?”