Captain rose from his chair, and Loretta raised her pistol, and Captain said, “Relax. I’m just going to the bar to have a couple of beers. Your husband expects to find you here. There’s nowhere on the property where you can hide and hope to intercept him. I’ll have a word with the guards so they won’t let you leave with my girl by either the front or back doors. You got it?”
“Yes.”
When he had gone, Loretta and I took turns using the half bath that adjoined the dressing room. I removed my gloves because she had already seen my hands when I was onstage. After washing up, I put the gloves on once more. I’d be going out into the world, where it was safest to conceal everything below my neck. Dixie cups were stacked beside the sink, and we drank some water as we sat side by side on the rectangular vanity bench.
Without Captain to overhear, Loretta told me where we would go first when we left Blue Mood, who we would see and for what purpose. I was amazed that already she had laid out a plan of action and was prepared to follow it as soon as I was free of Captain.
“When that’s been done, where then?” I asked.
She was surprised, for she assumed that I understood what she and Franklin intended. “Why, of course you’ll come to live with us. We’ll adopt you. You’ll be one of ours, as much a part of the family as our three children—Isadora, Gertrude, and Harry.”
Such a grace seemed impossibly fantastic. My voice was unsteady when I said, “Adopt? But how? No birth certificate. No real name, only what Captain called me. The way I look, what I am, how—”
“Those are not worries you need to have,” she said, smoothing my hair with one hand. “We have the best of attorneys and a lot of friends in what might be called ‘high places.’ Franklin will handle it all. By tomorrow afternoon, we’ll be home, and you can meet the threehellions who will be your sisters and brother. In a month or two, your last name will legally be the same as theirs.”
I said, “But why? Why would you do this?”
Continuing to smooth my hair with one hand, she said, “Anyone who would harm or abandon a child—‘it would be better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.’ Every child deserves to be loved, sweetheart. It’s a hard world, and there’s not much any of us can undertake to make it right. But now and then there’s a little thing that we can do. Now and then like this.”
As she finished speaking, I did something that, in the interest of holding on to hope and sanity, I had not done in years. I wept. The “little thing” to her was everything to me. Such is the world.
My tears had long dried by the time Captain returned from the bar at a quarter till midnight. His movements were slightly too slow and clearly calculated, which is a strategy many tosspots embrace in an attempt to appear sober. He returned to his chair and fixed us with a menacing stare. Promptly at midnight, the band played a brassy fanfare. The floor show was about to begin.
Captain said, “I told management my star is too sick to go on. They weren’t happy. These are people you want to keep happy. When you take her out of here, if anyone stops you, say you’re taking her to a hospital. She’s got a fever and been throwing up. Got that?”
“Yes,” Loretta said.
He cocked his head and studied her. “You don’t have to like me.”
“I don’t.”
“I mean—–to pass the time with a little conversation, you don’t have to like me.”
“I loathe you. I despise you. I’m disgusted by you.”
He nodded solemnly. “That’s your privilege. Truth is, I don’t like you much, either. But I’m not so high and mighty that I won’t talk with you.”
At twenty minutes past midnight, when I would otherwise have been stepping out of the upright coffin nearly naked and abashed, to the gasps and little cries of revulsion from the audience, the dressing room door opened and Franklin returned, carrying a valise. Everyone stood. Franklin put the valise on the vanity and opened it. Captain came forward to examine the contents. Convinced everything was jake, he closed the valise and carried it to the door.
Copious beer had loosened the flesh of his face and benumbed the muscles. I expected him to dredge from the dark treacle in his pitchman heart an insincere, absurdly sentimental goodbye. Instead, he said, “Franklin and Loretta. You each spoke the other’s name just once. You have a lot of money in these lean times, but you’re no industrialist like Henry Ford. I ask myself what business is growing when so much else is shrinking. With so many Dicks and Janes eager to escape their troubles, rivers of coins are flowing into movie theaters. They say Greta Garbo was making five thousand bucks a week in the silents and now much more. You two have ‘showbiz’ polish. I don’t know your last name, but I have contacts. I could find you in three days. Do what you want with this twisted little freak. Just leave me alone, forget I ever existed, and I’ll return the favor.” As laughter and applause for Buddy Beamer swelled in the showroom, Captain stepped into the hall and pulled the door shut behind him.
Judge not lest you be judged. I had forgiven my mother. I had forgiven all the goggling marks who passed through the Museum of the Strange. I had forgiven the leering, laughing drunks in all those speakeasies. I now forgave Buddy Beamer. However, I still could not forgive Captain Forest Farnam. I wished him dead and asked God to forgive me for doing so.
Seven
The headlights of the yellow Cadillac sedan cleaved the night. To the west, a rippled track of light cast by the descending moon revealed an ocean that was otherwise a vast and daunting darkness.
Loretta and I had waited in the car while Franklin checked out of Hotel del Coronado and a bellhop put their luggage in the trunk. I must have been a curious sight, robed and hooded in the back seat, and one thirty in the morning was an uncommon checkout time. The del Coronado staff were too discreet to raise an eyebrow.
My rescuers rode up front and I behind them on the way to Los Angeles. I was weary but not sleepy. I seldom went to bed earlier than two in the morning. Besides, I was too excited and too nervous about the new life ahead of me to lie down on the seat and go to sleep. Loretta had mentioned a household staff that included a cook, three maids, and a majordomo. I’d read many novels of nineteenth-century England in which grand houses on sprawling estates provided the main setting, but I couldn’t imagine what residence would require such a retinue here in California, where the history of the place went back mere decades instead of centuries.
We motored north in silence, which might mean that we were emotionally exhausted, but which might also mean that we were all brooding over what this new arrangement entailed and having second thoughts. I felt that I should speak up, assure them that they could take me back to Captain.Really, I should say,he’s not as bad as he seemed tonight, he steals books for me, brings me the foods I like most, he never beats me, and in his care I’m safe from people worse than him, a world full of people worse than him, there’s much to be said for being safe.However, I didn’t have the courage to say any of that. I was too selfish to give them the option of undoing what had been done. If the future to which we had committed proved to be an ordeal for them, I could slip out of their house one night and make my way in the world as best I could, go where they couldn’t find me if they were compelled to search. Maybe I would find my way to the sea one night and swim out along the rippled track of light cast by the moon until the water drew me down and closed around me. The world is beautiful and enchanting, but there are many ways out of it if life becomes unendurable.
Northbound toward the city, I stared out the starboard window at the shapes of barren hills that defined the eastern horizon and rose to a universe of stars. From time to time, along the roadside, a series of eight or ten Burma-Shave signs offered an amusing rhyme, but I was too far behind the headlights to read the message that the placards conveyed.
Eight
After eighteen years in business, the Beverly Hills Hotel was still the most impressive establishment of its kind in that fabled city. Shortly after four o’clock in the morning, Franklin rented a luxurious bungalow. As a bellhop pushed a luggage cart, we followed him quietly, in respect of the many sleeping guests, along a softly lighted path through lushly planted grounds to our accommodations. In the barest breath of a breeze, the tall palms whispered to one another—she, she, she.I felt as if I were entering a heretofore secret world, an American Shangri-La, and that even the trees knew I did not belong in such a paradise.
