Love Me Page 22

  And I know that better than anyone. Margo shivered, remembering her first screen test, when Dane’s unexpected appearance had saved her from certain disaster as surely as if he’d ridden in on a white horse. The corny love scene they’d played had felt so real, the trite dialogue so imbued with genuine emotion, that it had cast a spell over her that lingered to this day. It was the moment Dane had gone from an untouchable idol with his picture hanging on her wall to a real living, breathing man she knew she had to have. I can’t lose him, she thought. Not now. “So what do you think I should do?”

  “I just told you,” Gabby said. “Get it worked out.” She shook her head from side to side, her dark ringlets bobbing prettily against her flushed cheeks. “I have to tell you, Margie, I’m still kind of in shock. I mean, everyone knows you’d been practically living together till the studio put the kibosh on it. I figured you must have been doing it all over the place.”

  “Gabby.” There was something eating away at Margo, something she had to know. “If I ask you something, will you promise to tell me the absolute truth?”

  “Sure. If I can.”

  I guess that has to be good enough. Margo steeled herself with a deep breath. “Was there anything to that gossip item about Dane and Amanda? Do you honestly think there’s anything between them?”

  Gabby leaned back against one of the shell-shaped pillows, looking thoughtful. “No,” she said finally. “I don’t think there is. They’re old friends, I know that. And Amanda’s never said anything to me, but I can’t promise there isn’t some history there. Two people who look like they do, how can there not be? But now? No. Besides, that girl is still so hung up on Harry Gordon it’s almost funny. When she was staying with Viola and me, she used to lock herself in her bedroom every night and cry herself to sleep. I know she may look like bad news, but believe me, Amanda Farraday is a one-man woman.” She chewed her lip. “I’d keep an eye out for Diana Chesterfield, though.”

  It was all Margo could do not to make her whole body recoil at the thought. “Why do you say that?”

  “Oh, I don’t think she’s after him, exactly. In fact, there was always something a little fishy about that love affair, if you ask me. A little too perfect, you know what I mean?”

  Oh boy, do I. “I guess so.”

  “But she did seem to make herself awfully comfortable at the bridal shop,” Gabby continued. “It’s like she’s the first runner-up at the Miss America pageant. If for some reason you are unable to fulfill your duties …”

  “No,” Margo said. “Dane would never. Not after everything that’s happened.” And not least, she thought, because Diana is his sister.

  “If you say so. Maybe you should talk to her, though.”

  “About what?”

  “About your little problem.” Gabby shrugged. “I mean, if nothing else she must know the way to keep Dane Forrest happy between the sheets. Plus, you’d be marking your turf. And maybe making an ally at the same time.”

  Talk about Dane that way with Diana. It was too, too terrible to think about. Margo suppressed a gag. She was desperate to change the subject. “Why do you care so much anyway?” she asked.

  “Well, you know me, I love gossip,” Gabby said. “And this is pretty damn good. Plus, we’re friends, aren’t we, and friends worry about each other.”

  “Even in Hollywood?”

  “Who knows, maybe I’m getting soft in my old age.” Gabby grinned. “But you know, I feel like I just want you to have what Eddie and I have. To be so in love with someone and be able to express it to each other like that, it’s just …” Her eyes went dreamy. “All the pills, all the dope, that’s nothing compared to this. I don’t need any of it anymore if I’ve got Eddie. As long as I have him, I’ll be all right. It’s just the best feeling in the world.”

  Thankfully for Margo, Miss Perkins clattered back into the room before Gabby could go off on another unnervingly poetic reverie about the joys of lovemaking in the backseat of a Lincoln.

  “A million apologies,” the realtor said breathlessly, looking as though she were about to scatter the sheaf of paper affixed to her clipboard all over the floor. “I’m sorry to keep you waiting for so long. Unfortunately, the key to the dressing suite is nowhere to be found, and I haven’t been able to reach the owner anywhere. I’ve already called the locksmith, though, and he should be here in a jiffy.” She smoothed her hands over her smart green tweed suit. “While we wait, may I suggest another tour around the gardens? I’d love for you to take another look at the koi pond. And there is some statuary in the formal gardens that personally I’d have moved poolside, for a look of classical Roman decadence. …”

  The realtor droned on, chattering about hydrangea bushes and artificial waterfalls, but Margo had stopped listening. She was filled with a sudden urge to do something, to act. Everyone’s done everything for me, she thought. Just like Dane said, it’s like I’m a child. They tell me what to wear, where to live, whom to marry, what to say. Walking out of her parents’ house that night with Larry Julius was the last autonomous decision she had made.

  Maybe that’s what’s been holding me back with Dane, Margo thought, looking around the gorgeous room at the oyster bed, the canopy of pearls. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with me. It’s that I can’t be a woman until they stop treating me like a little girl.

  “… and of course”—Miss Perkins was still talking—“the fact that the house is west facing means that you’ll have a gorgeous view of the sunset during evening entertainment—”

  Margo cut her off unceremoniously. “It doesn’t matter. Call the locksmith and tell him he doesn’t need to come.”

  “But the dressing suite—”

  “Never mind about the dressing suite. I’m sure it’s fine. I’ll take the house.”

  Miss Perkins let out an audible gasp. “You … you will? But don’t you … I mean, perhaps you’d better speak with Mr. Forrest. …”

  “Mr. Forrest has perfect faith in me,” Margo said smartly, thinking of the no-nonsense tone that had crept into her formidable mother’s voice when she felt some tradesman or mechanic was trying to take advantage of her. “Besides, I’m buying this house myself. You can put all the paperwork in my name and send it to my bungalow in the morning. I’ll be waiting.”

  She accepted the realtor’s effusive thanks and excitement with gratification. It was time, Margo thought. Time to get out from under the thumb of the studio and have a house of her own, the way a woman, the way a movie star, should. Somebody had to make the decisions, and from now on it was going to be her. She’d make the house over in her image. Rip out that atrocious ballroom. Build a waterfall into the pool. Plant a privet hedge and flowering bushes all around until she felt as if she were living in a secret garden, like the book she’d loved as a child. She was going to have a home, and a life, of her own. She glanced back at the oyster bed.

  And Dane is just going to have to learn to love it.

  “Margie!” Gabby squealed as they made their way back outside. “This is so exciting! What a gorgeous house! We have to celebrate.”

  “Later.” Margo glanced at her delicate diamond watch. It was almost five o’clock. “Right now, I’ve got to be at Schwab’s.”

  “Oh, Margie, again?”

  “Again,” Margo said. “Every day until she comes.”

  “Who? Not Diana?”

  “No.” Margo felt filled with a new strength. No more lies, she thought. From now on, I tell the truth to everyone about everything. “My mother.”

  Helen Frobisher was an orderly woman.

  Upon rising each morning, she washed her hands, then her face, in the blue willow pitcher-and-washbasin set that had stood on her dresser since her marriage, and on her mother’s dresser before that. She combed and pinned her fading blond hair into a smooth and unvarying chignon with a marcasite comb as its only adornment, put on o
ne of the fastidiously correct silk crepe dresses hanging in her wardrobe, daubed her wrists and temples with the lavender-scented eau de toilette the doctor had suggested could help alleviate her headaches, and put the stoppered bottle back in exactly the same position on her silver vanity tray.

  In her drawing room, to which she retired at exactly nine-fifteen a.m., after supervising Emmeline’s clearing of the breakfast things and seeing her husband out the door to his club or his mistress’s house or wherever it was he went when he pretended he was going to the office, she sorted through the household documents at a secretary with a neatly labeled row of cubbyholes: one for bills, one for invitations, one for personal letters. Everything had its place, from the comb in her hair to the feelings bundled neatly in her heart.

  But the message Emmeline had relayed last week, along with her mistress’s breakfast tray and a nervous curtsey, as though the old fool thought she was about to be fired on the spot—well, Helen Frobisher wasn’t sure where she was supposed to put that.

  She’d written it down. Written it down and then crumpled the piece of paper into a ball and stuffed it in the corner of the bottom drawer of the secretary. She retrieved it now and smoothed it out on the leather blotter, squinting at the spots where the decidedly unorderly creases had faded the pencil scratching.

  Margaret. 5:00. Schwab’s Sunset Boulevard. Please come.

  All those years, all that sacrifice, and that was all the girl had left her. Taken everything Helen and Lowell Frobisher had offered her and thrown it back in their faces.

  And now she’s going to be a bride. Margaret was getting married. To some picture fellow. Some nameless slickster with no roots, no family, no identity apart from what the movie magazines made up for him. God knew where he came from, or who, or what. He’d have shellacked hair, a gleaming toothpaste smile, a light step on the dance floor—and absolutely no idea how to hold his knife or address a lady or what to properly call the lavatory. An upstart piece of trash, called a gentleman only by people fooled by the cut of his too-flashy suit.

  Like mother, like daughter.

  Maybe it was time to tell her the truth. If Margaret was really going to marry this fellow, if she was really going to fall forever out of the grasp of Pasadena and the Frobishers, she at least ought to know who she really was and where she really came from. Why their relationship had never been easy. Why Helen had been able to wave her out the door without the guilt or recrimination a normal mother would feel. A natural mother.

  A real mother.

  She ought to be told, Helen thought with a sigh. And I guess I’ve got to tell her. Schwab’s was as good a place as any. It couldn’t be tonight, obviously. The Frobishers had dinner with the Winthrops tonight. And dinner tomorrow with the Gambles and the McKendricks, senior and junior. Nothing was worth giving up a social occasion like that.

  But the night after that. Or maybe the one after that. After all, Margaret had said she’d be there every night. There was plenty of time to tell her. So she’d know who she was and whom to trust and where she belonged.

  So she wouldn’t make the same mistakes the Moore sisters had.

  Twenty-One

  “New York City!” The redcap’s clear baritone rang through the car, loud enough to rouse any napping traveler. “All out for New York City, Grand Central! Welcome to the Big Apple, ladies and gents!”

  New York City. At last.

  Amanda gave her hat a final adjustment in the small round mirror affixed to the wall of the tiny sleeping compartment that had been her home for the past sixteen hours, since the Twentieth Century Limited had pulled away from LaSalle Street Station in Chicago. Three days on trains, watching more country than she’d ever seen in her life go past through the window, and finally, here she was.

  She studied her exhausted-looking reflection, poking at her pallid cheeks, wondering if she could powder away the lilac shadows beneath her eyes. The city that never sleeps, she thought with a rueful grin. Meanwhile, I look like I need to sleep for about five years.

  “Grand Central, miss.” The redcap rattled the door with a knock that was polite but insistent. “Last stop.”

  Giving her hair a final pat, Amanda scooped up her leather traveling case and made for the exit. She stepped out onto the plush red carpet that ran the length of the sleek blue-gray train and onto the dim, smoke-filled platform. The sharp scent of diesel filled her nose as she pushed through the throngs of people waiting to embark for destinations north, skirting the uniformed porters struggling with piles of luggage, the little vignettes of joyous reunions and tearful farewells playing simultaneously all around her. Like everyone is in their own little movie.

  When she emerged at last into Grand Central Terminal, Amanda gasped.

  It looks like heaven. Like the beautiful watercolor of the gates of heaven in the big illustrated Bible her Sunday-school class back in Oklahoma had been allowed to take turns looking at as a reward for being quiet (and appropriately fearful) during the reverend’s weekly sermon about fire and brimstone: the same radiant streams of golden light bouncing off arches of pale, pearly stone; the carved friezes of smiling cherubs and trumpeting angels; the celestial blue ceiling upon which heavenly bodies seemed to float.

  The only thing different was the people. Streaming across the marble floor, never glancing left or right, purposeful as any crew she’d ever seen on a movie set. She stared at them in awe, eager to soak up every detail, like an anthropologist recording the rituals of an undiscovered tribe. The women’s hair was sleeker, she noticed. Their coats were cut slimmer—the wasp waist was definitely back. The men all carried newspapers and wore snap-brim hats tilted low over their faces, as though to protect them from some imaginary torrent of rain. Did everyone in New York walk so fast? And how did they not bump into each other? It was like a dance, a vast number choreographed by some unseen, unknowable director. Like God.

  Amanda giggled. Funny how I’m getting religion all of a sudden.

  “Hey, watch it, will ya, toots?” The voice blared like the horn of car. Amanda scurried out of the way just in time to avoid being trampled by a mustachioed man with a bowler hat and a briefcase. Before she could apologize, he was already gone.

  Wherever New Yorkers are going, Amanda thought, watching his figure recede among the teeming, speeding throng, they all act like they’re about an hour late.

  She finally made her way through the doors and out into the thrum of Forty-Second Street. In Hollywood, you always heard the East Coasters talk about how much they missed the Manhattan skyline, but from the sidewalk all Amanda could see was doors and windows and concrete and hardly a hint of sky.

  And people. So many people, in every size and shape and color of the rainbow, united only by a mutual relentless hurry that seemed to preclude any eye contact or attempt at conversational engagement.

  And yet, to her surprise, Amanda found she didn’t mind. She didn’t resent these swift-moving, smartly dressed people quite literally too busy to give her the time of day. Not at all. She wanted to be one of them.

  She wandered over to a quieter block and stood on the corner, watching two or three people hail a taxicab before she mustered the confidence to flag one down and asked the driver if he might take her to a good hotel. He looked her up and down, sticking his head out the window like an eel peering out of its hole to check for predators, and suggested she turn around. Amanda did, and realized she had been standing all this time directly under the gilded marquee of the Waldorf Astoria.

  A hotel. No wonder there are so many taxicabs.

  Sheepishly, she turned to thank the driver, but he had already pulled away from the curb. She thought of a line from the script from the picture they were making at Metro, the one they’d sent to Gabby to read for before they gave it to Judy Garland, as everyone but Gabby had known they would.

  “People come and go so quickly here,” she said aloud.

&
nbsp; Everything in the hushed lobby of the Waldorf Astoria, from the crystal chandeliers to the giant potted ferns to the exquisitely arranged groupings of antique gilt furniture, screamed money.

  Or rather, it didn’t scream; it whispered. This was not the flashy glamour of Hollywood, with its kidney-shaped swimming pools and plaster Corinthian columns as gaudy and hastily assembled as a set on a soundstage. This was old money, or at least as old as money got in the New World. The kind that was not earned but inherited, that by its very solidity had been burnished, not diminished, by the devastation of the Depression, that telegraphed a kind of aristocratic insouciance, a sort of “oh well, whatever happens, we’ll never be poor.” Must be nice.

  Amanda approached the front desk, feeling shyer and less sure of herself than she had in years. Like Norma Mae Gustafson, an Oklahoma rube in a tacky Woolworth’s dress. “Hello?”

  The clerk, unexpectedly soigné in his dark green uniform, turned to examine her. “May I help you?”

  “Yes. I’d like a room, please.”

  “Do you have a reservation?”

  “No, I’m afraid not.”

  The clerk shook his head slightly, as though he couldn’t believe anyone could be so colossally careless as to not keep a standing reservation at the Waldorf simply as a matter of course. “I’ll have to see what we have available. Do you have a preference as to the kind of accommodation?”