Why Eva continued to come over each day without confrontingher, June could only guess. There had to be more to it than just her not wanting to give up the free typing lessons. It was almost as if the young woman wanted to help June out of the mess she was in, and there could be only two plausible reasons for that. The first was that Eva understood love and loss, and how tragically complicated it was when the two became entwined.
And the second? Somehow Eva had decided in their ever-lengthening afternoon conversations that this—love and loss, the two together like that—was something they had in common.
June doubted their experiences were all that much alike, but that apparently didn’t matter to Eva. Eva’s knowing looks and careful questions about Elwood suggested she’d guessed June had begun falling for Elwood long before Frank was dead, and yet Eva didn’t seem to care that that was true. How could that not matter? It mattered to June. It was troubling, embarrassing. And unexplainable. It was almost as if deep down June knew she’d been meant to marry Elwood from the very beginning and she had blown it. If she’d gone the way divine Providence had led her, she would have broken off with Frank after meeting Elwood.
It would have been awkward in the beginning, breaking things off with Frank, and maybe Frank would’ve had to weather a few seasons of anger toward his brother, but in the end Frank would’ve forgiven Elwood for stealing away his girlfriend. He would have forgiven her, too. Frank was that kind of person.
So much about her life would’ve been different if she’d been tuned in to what destiny had been whispering to her back then and which she had ignored.
Perhaps the reason Eva had said nothing as yet was because she thought she could somehow help fix the broken mess that was June’s life because she couldn’t fix her own. Eva had assumed an identity that could get her into heaps of trouble, was cleaninghouses for a living—a thankless job if you don’t care for the person whose house you’re cleaning—and she was still grieving a man who’d been dead for, what, fifteen years?
And yet…
And yet, there was more to Eva’s grief than just the long-ago death of her fiancé. All she had to do was look as closely at Eva as Eva had been looking at her. Eva was grieving the loss of all that had never been hers, and now never would be—a long and happy life with the man she loved.
Perhaps they were more alike than June first thought.
June remembered everything about the day she met Elwood. She and Frank had been going out for several weeks after a chance meeting at the studio commissary. One Sunday afternoon he’d asked if she’d like to meet his twin brother, the talented screenwriter who lived out in Malibu. June said yes.
She’d wanted to meet Frank’s brother for several reasons. June had already seen a photograph of Elwood at Frank’s half of a duplex on Vermont Avenue, so she knew they weren’t identical, but the brothers were nonetheless near mirror images of each other. She wanted to meet this man who looked so much like the man she was sure she was falling in love with, who had grown up in the same house as Frank, slept in the same bedroom, and attended all the same family gatherings. She also wanted to meet the brother who had, the way Frank told it, saved Frank’s life when they were in the Argonne together as infantrymen in the fall of 1918. Frank had taken a bullet in the back during a hasty retreat and Elwood had gone back for him, despite heavy enemy fire, and dragged him to safety.
And yes, she wanted to meet the screenwriter who had foundsuccess in a business that could be as stingy with notoriety as it was generous.
It was a little less than an hour’s drive to Elwood’s place in Malibu—a town by the sea that June had vague memories of having once been to with her mother for a weekend at someone’s beach house.
As they made their way west, June asked Frank how it was that both of the brothers ended up working in Hollywood since Reno was where they’d been born and raised.
“It was all Elwood’s doing,” Frank said. “He was always the smart one, the planner. He knew he would go to college and get a degree and make a career with his writing. That’s exactly what he did, too, when we got back from the war. He was always scribbling in notebooks when we were younger—all kinds of short stories and the beginnings of novels, things like that. College didn’t interest me. I liked working with my hands. Making things, figuring things out, taking things apart. You couldn’t have paid me to sit in a classroom again.”
He told her that Elwood had arrived in Hollywood first, with his brand-new English degree, and got a job at Warner Brothers in the reading room, analyzing scripts. Everyone quickly saw his talent and he was given more responsibility, like working on treatments of movies already in production and then trying his hand at adapting books into screenplays. Elwood had been able to get Frank his job on the Warner Brothers backlot in 1934, just before being lured away to MGM with an offer of a lucrative new contract.
“I don’t know where I would be if not for Elwood,” Frank said. “Not where I am, that’s for sure. And not here with you.” He reached across the seat to take June’s hand. “I was bouncing around from job to job and poker table to poker table. Elwood could see I had forgotten there was more to life than piddly paychecks andplaying cards. He’s the one who convinced me to come to Los Angeles and take a job at the studio.”
“He sounds like a wonderful brother,” June said, and she meant it.
“He is.”
“But not married? I would have thought someone like that would have been snatched up years ago.”
“Well…” Frank paused and furrowed a brow, as though needing to think about his next words. “He’s dated over the years, and he’s been to plenty of events with a woman on his arm, but Elwood is kind of…uncomfortable around the ladies, you could say. He has funny little habits that make him seem a little—I don’t know the word. And he got hurt a couple too many times, I think.”
“That’s so sad.”
“I think so, too.”
“Is that why he lives way out in Malibu?”
“That, and he likes being away from the noise and the hullabaloo. He says he writes better where it’s quiet. And he likes the beach.”
“MGM doesn’t care he lives so far out?”
“They’d probably love it if he drove in to the studio every day but they can get what they want and need most from him without him having to do that. They’ll send him a novel or a story idea or a terrible screenplay that needs fixing and they’ll say, ‘How long do you need to turn this into a great script?’ and he can make it happen in a month, a little more if he needs to read the novel first. Sometimes they’ll send a courier out to pick up his work if they want to see it right away. They’re getting the best of Elwood Blankenship without him having to come in to the office much and I guess that makes everybody happy.”
“And Elwood is happy?”
“I think so. It’s kind of hard to tell with him. He never talks about his feelings. But he’s always been that way.”
It was now quite obvious to June that Frank and his twin, even though they could probably pass for each other at a short distance, weren’t really like each other at all. The way Frank was describing Elwood wasn’t like Frank in any way, except for maybe the kindness part. Frank was always looking out for the other guy. He was the most unpretentious and genuinely considerate man June ever met.
