When we arrived, our driver angled to the curb in front of an illegally parked Cadillac limousine. Two passengers exited the limo to greet us—Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn. They had starred in a pair of hits that year—Bringing Up Baby, which had been released in February, and the recentHoliday. They had come because they were friends of Loretta and Franklin; however, they were also here for a higher purpose.
In the twilight, the immense Spanish Colonial building glowed as if it were made of translucent alabaster, and signal lamps shone at the top of up-lighted minarets. Here, in 1935, Benny Goodman’s orchestra broke through the wall of bad luck and pop arrangements that had hampered it and went full swing. Their one-month booking was extended to two months, leading to their ascendance thereafter.
Two formidable men in suits and ties, Pinkerton security agents arranged by Franklin, waited for us at the VIP entrance, which was well removed from the hundreds who stood in line to receive tickets at the box office. The two agents were in possession of passes provided for the Fairchild party by the developer-owner of the property. Pinkerton’s finest, each as intimidating as the former heavyweight champion Max Schmeling, shepherded us into the Palomar. A brief objection by the door attendants was quieted with atry-meglare from the agents and bythe doormen’s sudden realization that Mr. Grant and Miss Hepburn, already Hollywood royalty, were with us.
Four tables were roped off to separate our party from others on the palm-lined Palomar Terrace. We had direct access to the dance floor, which seemed as big as a football field, although we weren’t there to dance. Directly across the room from us, the stage waited for the big band, while a house trio provided welcoming but far from hot music. The Moorish decor featured lighting both dazzling and romantic. Two-thirds of the tables were already occupied. Glasses clinked. Flatware rang against china. Young women’s laughter trilled through the arches between the columns that framed the dance floor. I’d lived so many years in the smoke-free Bram, the cigarette haze was more pungent to me than to those who produced it, but it also possessed an exotic quality that enhanced the Moorish atmosphere.
Although I was as small as ever I had been, I could prove I was twenty-five, and although I seldom indulged in alcohol, I ordered a dry martini. Gertie, only eighteen, knew how to use her beautyandher deformed hand to forestall any challenge from the waiter when she ordered a grasshopper “with plenty of hop.” Harry was okay with a Coca-Cola. If he’d been eighty, he would have been content with a cola. His continuing interest in military history and history in general seemed to have conferred on him a gravitas that would rule out intoxication even when, in four years, he reached the legal age to indulge. If the waiters or the management would have challenged any of us, they would have focused on Chef Lattuada, for at that point in its history, the Palomar enforced a strict color policy. The developer of the ballroom retained a partial ownership position, and he owed a series of favors to Franklin and Loretta, so he gave us VIP passes even knowing others in the management would not have done so as long as our Luigi was with us. Chef would have stayed home without a fuss, but therewas no way in hell we were going to see Isadora perform without her much-loved honorary uncle here to share the moment.
Two years earlier, after a dozen auditions with California-based orchestras failed to get her work, Izzy was more driven than ever to be part of the jazz scene. She was a Fairchild, after all, and Fairchilds were motivated by rejection as much as they were inspired by success. Although the big band sound swept the nation, the heart of the scene was the East Coast, which provided more posh hotels, nightclubs, dance halls, resorts, and suitable venues than the rest of the country combined. Scores of bands stayed within that fruitful territory, though the best toured coast to coast. The Northwest birthed some good musicians but wasn’t a flashpoint for new sounds that excited the nation. After doing research through music magazines, Izzy packed and moved, at eighteen, to Seattle, where it was said that most local bands avoided ballads because they couldn’t find vocalists who were equivalent to national sweethearts like Doris Day and June Christy and Helen Forrest. She was hired by a ten-piece band that had steady bookings from Seattle to Spokane and south to Portland. Four months later, she was approached by Tommy Dorsey, whose band was in Seattle on tour. Soon she sang with Dorsey when Edythe Wright had the night off and on other nights did a duet or two with her. Tommy, “the Sentimental Gentleman of Swing,” created moods with music that made his orchestra one of the best of all dance bands and the very best for ballads. However, Edythe had—and had earned—billing, while Isadora was an “also appearing” named only from the stage; her opportunities were limited.
This night, we were at the Palomar to witness what might be Izzy’s big break or at least the beginning of a slow move to bigger things. This was also her first appearance close to home, and we Bramleyans were determined to be there in full force to support our girl. Only Rafael remained at home, and we would have brought him with us ifwe could have figured out how to disguise a ninety-pound dog as Izzy’s grandmother.
Tommy Dorsey’s band was a great one, and Bob Crosby’s was near great at times. The orchestra was owned by its musicians and run by Gil Bowers, the pianist. Bob, the brother of Bing, was the likable leader and singer. They had gone through a series of girl vocalists during the previous year, but they signed Izzy as the only female singer for the length of this tour.
We had spoken on the phone with her earlier in the day, between rehearsals. She had been excited but surprisingly composed. She no longer sounded like the girl who left the Bram for Seattle little more than one year ago. Of course I recognized her voice, but she seemed more than just a year older. She sounded like a grown woman. Hearing her, I missed her more terribly, not solely because she had been away but also because I had not been with her to see her evolve from one Isadora to another. She was most pleased that she’d become self-supporting. Her parents had been sending her a monthly stipend, but in the Fairchild tradition, she’d needed to make it on her own, prove herself to herself rather than to anyone else.
As dessert was being served, the house trio concluded their session. Minutes later, the MC introduced the Bob Crosby Orchestra. The curtain rose, revealing all fourteen musicians ready to swing. They broke into “The Big Noise from Winnetka,” a signature song of theirs. At least two thousand people poured onto the dance floor, which the management claimed could accommodate four thousand couples. Neither the music nor the dancers quite exhilarated me, but then I saw Izzy, and I could feel my heart pounding. The piano stood to the left of the orchestra, with Gil Bowers at the keyboard, and Izzy sat to the right of the piano, left of Bob Crosby. She looked beautiful and sophisticated, recognizably the young lady who had left home for Seattle but not much like the girl who led the Clyde Tombaugh Club on its late-nightadventures. The band played three more swinging numbers, and I could not recall ever having been more impatient in my life.
Then Bob Crosby introduced “our lovely Isadora Fairchild, who has a voice of smoke and steel and a way with the keyboard that even our Mr. Bowers says he envies.” She rose from her chair. She wore a peach-colored satin dress cut on the bias, with a low back and a form-skimming floor-length skirt that flared slightly at the bottom. She graciously acknowledged the light applause by briefly putting her right hand to her heart, and then she slid onto the piano bench, hitching up the flared bottom of her dress to keep it from getting in the way of the three pedals. She dared to segue from the band’s arrangement of “Stompin’ at the Savoy,” which had been fast enough to encourage the jitterbug, to “For All We Know,” one of the most beautiful ballads ever composed. Of those who stayed on the floor or ventured onto it for a slow dance, some came to a stop after eight or ten bars and stood listening, rapt. Izzy and the band then played a neat trick by allowing no time for applause, launching fast out of “For All We Know” into a serious up-tempo version of “The Scat Song,” which had the Palomar rocking.
When Izzy and the band hit the last note, I stood up without realizing it, beating my gloves together, my face stretched in a grin. Everyone at our section of roped-off tables had sprung to their feet, but it was not strictly a family-and-friends reaction; half the people in the joint felt that a standing O was warranted. In my exuberance, as Izzy took a bow, I turned to Gertie and grabbed her by the shoulders and declared, “That was my sister, mysister!”
“IthoughtI recognized her!” Gertie said. “The crazy old bitch probably still doesn’t know how to pronounce ‘nefesterous,’ but she sure as hell can sing.”
As the band struck up a vigorous “South Rampart Street Parade,” Harry joined us in a circle hug, and we put our heads together, andhe raised his voice to say, “You know what this means, don’t you? A year or two from now, we three won’t have names anymore. I will be ‘Isadora Fairchild’s brother,’ and you will be ‘Isadora Fairchild’s sisters,’ and the only way we’ll ever get our names back is to commit the crime of the century.”
Later in the show, Isadora sang two duets with Bob Crosby. He was a good singer, but he was no Bing. We didn’t stay for the second set but left when the band took a break. The staff of Bramley Hall had been given tomorrow off to recuperate. However, Loretta and Franklin had early appointments. Merely by their presence, Mr. Cary Grant and Miss Katherine Hepburn had done a good job of convincing uncounted bigots that Chef Luigi Lattuada must not be a person of color. They had exchanged phone numbers with him; he called them Archie and Kate, and they called him Weegee. We all expressed our gratitude to them, especially Gertie and I did, especially to the dreamy Mr. Grant, whom we hugged with much affection.
At that late hour, the ride in the chartered bus from Vermont Avenue to Bramley Hall took just half an hour. Everyone aboard was as invigorated as though midnight must still lay hours ahead; if we weren’t all talking at once, it sometimes seemed that way.
As the staff who lived off site departed the estate in their vehicles, as Lynette went to her apartment and Luigi to his, Rafael responded to the family’s noisy entrance with a sorrowful look of condemnation. Waiting in the foyer, lying on his left side and as limp as though expiring from loneliness, he withheld the wag of his tail to impress on us that leaving him alone for five hours was a grossly inconsiderate act. Gertie and I knelt beside him, gradually reviving him by effusively praising his beauty and devotion. Soon his tail motor switched on, and he began panting not from exertion but with delight that his family—his pack—had found their way back to him, putting an end to his long, lonely ordeal in the wilderness.
At the dog-treat jar in the kitchen, Gertie and I bought forgiveness with a generous penance of biscuits, while Harry stood gazing out a window, softly whistling “The Big Noise from Winnetka,” waiting patiently to put a leash on our pooch and escort him to the backyard for the final potty session of the night. A year or two previously, he’d begun insisting this duty must be his after sunset. “Nature,” he said, “assumes a different personality than she has in daylight, as do men whose hearts are secretly savage.” Gertie and I joked that he had been reading too many pulp magazines in the men’s adventure genre, tales of brawny heroes no doubt written by pale, scrawny young men who dreamed of becoming the next Hemingway. In time, we would come to realize that ingrained in Harry was a sense of responsibility to innocent people who were weaker than he was. Sometimes we have difficulty recognizing the hero in a young man whom we knew when he was but a foolish boy. When he proves his mature nature, we suddenly take greater pride in him.
Harry took Rafael outside, into the maelstrom of monsters and mayhem, while Gertie and I went to our rooms. After I had changed into my nightdress, brushed my teeth, and washed my face, I settled into bed—and got out again when I heard Rafael mewling at the door to the suite. We boarded the king-size bed from different sides and met in the middle. I didn’t switch off the nightstand lamp because part of my mind remained in the Palomar and was reluctant to leave. I sat up, propped against a pile of pillows, and Rafael chose to lie beside me with his head on my thigh.
Perhaps I don’t need to recount my thoughts when I sat pillowed in bed, a softly snoring dog at my side, on that June night in 1938. But that was a golden moment, that entire evening, and I cannot help but dwell on it. As a girl, Izzy’s greatest desire had been to see the world from pole to pole and ten times over; now she had become a young woman whose greatest desire was to hone her talent and make herselfinto the best singer and pianist she could be. Her earlier ambition was not ambition at all; seeing the world was a passive intention to be taken places and shown things. She had transformed herself into anactivewoman with goals that required commitment, hard work, and humble self-assessment. That transformation thrilled me, because I loved her too much to see her squander her life as a perpetual tourist. Furthermore, her voice and piano work were pure, without forced sentiment and other cheap tricks; the way that she presented herself was enchanting but clean, wholesome.
I was self-aware enough to know that in my heart of hearts I wanted to believe I had the littlest something to do with who Izzy had become and that by such a contribution I had somewhat redeemed myself. During my time in the family, if I had to any meaningful extent influenced Izzy to become the woman I’d seen at the Palomar, my years of tawdry exhibition in the carnival and speakeasies would weigh less against me in any judgment that I made of myself or that a greater power might one day hand down against me from a higher court.
Great happiness often causes insomnia. The human mind prefers to bathe in joy rather than to trade the bright, waking moment for sleep and all the alternatives to joy that it might bring. On this occasion, however, I exhaled myself into sleep with a sigh of deep satisfaction. In the first and better phase of the dream, I floated in the night sky, above a mountaintop observatory where astronomers studied the stars and planets. As if the air were water to me, I dove toward the 200-inch lens of the telescope. As I passed through that enormous disc without shattering it, I knew this must be the Mount Palomar Observatory, and I fell into a chair at a table for six. Izzy and her piano floated high over the dance floor. She was playing and singing. The song was “For All We Know.” Her voice and the piano music were ethereal. Except for me, no customers sat at the tables, and not one couple made use of the dance floor. I rose from my chair, walked through an archway between twoornate Moorish columns, and called up to Izzy, “Where is everyone?” Rather than answer me, she and her piano rose higher, higher. This Palomar Ballroom had no ceiling. Izzy’s voice and the piano music faded until she ascended out of sight into the stars, whereupon the scene became as silent as a mortuary basement. I stood at the center of the vast dance floor. As I turned in a circle, seeking someone who could explain the evacuation, I saw the weathered farmhouse had been transported from the middle of America and set down here on the vast dance floor, without an accompanying barn, silo, and stable. Pale light shaped its windows, and a strange shadow swooned from one room to another. I started forward. A sound halted me, a rustling like ten thousand dead leaves swept up in a gust of autumn wind. Beyond the columns and the archways, the Palomar dining terrace lay almost lightless, though I saw baroque forms, tall and thin and pale and angular, quivering and stilting among tables. They crowded into the archways to peer at me and proved to be grotesque praying mantises the size of people, with protuberant, polished black eyes. Movement at the periphery of vision returned my attention to the house, in front of which stood a cradle holding a baby, over which a mantis loomed, flexing its powerful raptorial forelegs that featured pincers to grip its prey, working the mandibles that would devour what it captured. Mantises were quiet predators, scaring off their enemies with a snakelike hissing, but as the insect reached into the cradle for its succulent dinner, all those crowding the archways shrilled with fierce excitement. Someone put a hand on my shoulder, and I pivoted. Towering over me, Captain Farnam smiled and said, “Have you missed me as much as I’ve missed you?”
I woke in a cold sweat, with a sense that Death himself had entered the room. I didn’t cry out, because I’d fallen asleep with the lamp on and could see that all was as it had been and should be. Some psychologists say that the more naive your life is, the more frightening your dreams will be; the subconscious tries as best it can to shake youand wake you to the truth that the world offers countless harbors in which evil individuals hide and scheme. You might think I’ve had so little experience that I must be naive. But naivete is the goodness that comes from having no knowledge or even thought of evil, and I am well educated in the subject. This was the third time I’d dreamed of the farmhouse and the first replay in more than four years. I took this repetition to mean it was predictive, a matter of clairvoyance. On each occasion, the scenario had grown more frightening, which suggested that the event I’d just seen—the murder of an infant—was the key event and drawing nearer, perhaps imminent. I had no idea whose child was at risk. Most disturbing at the moment was why my mind should cast a praying mantis as Death, when no insect that large existed, but I felt sure the explanation would be obvious when the threat to the victim became manifest.
At my side, Rafael slept undisturbed. His paws twitched as if he dreamed he was racing across Elysian Fields, drawn by a fragrance as mysterious as it was irresistible. Now and then his tail thumped the mattress a dozen times or so. I watched him with envy. Whatever he had learned about evil was a tiny fraction of what humanity knew of the subject.
Thirty-Seven
Maybe you believe in patterns of luck. Many intelligent people do, some who are mathematicians, many who work in other respectable professions. There are true stories of gamblers who, sitting down to a blackjack game or taking a stand at a craps table, had such a high percentage of wins over six, eight, or ten hours that they broke the bank at Monte Carlo.
However, all patterns of luck—good and bad—begin with an end date that can’t be known or reliably predicted. I endured a run of bad luck that lasted seventeen years. Following my encounter with Franklin and Loretta, I had for eight years enjoyed a streak of the best luck for which anyone could hope. I had no reason to believe that I would have nine more years of good fortune to balance my first seventeen ill-starred years on Earth. Indeed, if my dream of the infant and the praying mantis was predictive, the greatest maker of misfortune, Captain Farnam, was going to reenter my life sooner than later.
Beginning July 11, the Bob Crosby Orchestra had a break before resuming their tour in San Diego, and Izzy came home to the Bram for three days. The reunion was lovely, often joyous, but I could not escape the realization that our roles were changing in relation to oneanother. Izzy was twenty, five years my junior, but because she was out in the world doing cool things, I seemed to be still a girl while she had become a woman. Gertie, a strong personality, could hold her own with her sister; as I watched them engaging with each other, I saw Gertie, too, was fast becoming a woman, or already had done so while I’d been looking elsewhere. Harry possessed the kind of good looks that would always lend him a boyish quality, but his immersion in history and military history, which might have made another boy seem geeky, gave him a certain gravity. It was easier to see the man he would be than the boy he had been. I loved them as they had been and as they were becoming, and they loved me; at this precious time in our lives, we still would rather have been with one another than with anyone else. We seldom stopped talking except to laugh. Those were three of the best days I’d known, in part because I was aware that the drift of time and our different interests would ensure that such days became ever more rare.
Early Thursday morning, Izzy left for San Diego to spend the day in rehearsals for a Friday opening. I was afraid for her. She was twenty. She was talented. She was nobody’s fool. She knew right from wrong. She had no illusions about evil; she knew it was real, that it walked the world in human dress but also in a form unseen. However, a well-balanced sense of reality and the human condition, accounting for the seenandunseen, wasn’t a guarantee of safety. Evil’s intentions are as limited as those of an animal with minimal intelligence, but its strategies and tactics are of such dazzling variety as to suggest genius. Even in a person as fundamentally good as Isadora, the heart is deceitful above all things—mistakes are made; consequences must be endured.
When Izzy left, Harry went directly to his room and his history books. I don’t think he had yet given any thought to what he would do with his life. On the other hand, he did believe that the future was shaped by the past, that tomorrow was to be found in yesterday, somaybe he was getting ready for life in his own way. Gertie said goodbye to her sister and, before the tears that gathered in her eyes could spill, she hurried to her room. I didn’t have to follow to know that she would go straight to her typewriter. Soon the keys would be clacking under her six quick fingers. She was a voracious reader, and though she was not as obsessed with books as I was, she felt driven to write.
