It was an awful moment, raw as dripping blood. Sol, confused now, stood there, unable to move. Quietly, in an act of utter beauty, Alice went to him, wrapped an arm about his waist, and led the weeping man back to his seat.
Dizzy, spent, I bent over in the seat, my eyes closed.
Nothing happened. Reverend Smithson sat on the side, the lost Lamb of God himself.
The creak of a stage door at the side, behind a tattered curtain.
Ava Gardner walked out of the back shadows. A collective intake of breath, as I turned to glance at Desmond Peake, sitting behind us. A stony face, though the knuckles gripping the back of the seat in front of him were white and tight.
Ava, the forbidden congregant.
Her eyes downcast, she stood silently before that microphone. Dressed in a simple black dress, with decorous black ruffles at the neck, elbow-length black cotton gloves, a single strand of pearls around her neck, a black scarf draped on her head like a mantilla, she looked the modest mourner, though that would be impossible for her: she stunned us, this woman. She glanced at the Reverend Smithson, who smiled at her and nodded.
She cleared her throat. Immediately the organist hit some keys. Ava glanced her way, shook her head, and said in a throaty voice, “No. But thank you.”
Then, a cappella, she sang a slow, bluesy version of “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man,” Julie’s haunting lament from Show Boat. A perfect voice, compelling, thrilling. It was the doomed mulatto’s hymn to a loved one, the inevitability of a passion that takes over one’s life. Fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly…and, for one woman, for both Ava and for Julie, there could only be one man till they died. A lament for a lover, true, but now, transmogrified by Ava’s dirge-like piano-bar rendering, it was reinvented as a testament to her love for her friend Max.
And just like that it was over. She stopped, backed up, and disappeared into the back room. We sat there, all of us a little drunk with the moment. I started crying, big sloppy tears that rose unexpectedly, and I couldn’t stop. This was for Max, this special moment. It was, I told myself, a melodramatic moment from a nineteenth-century showboat revue, some climactic sweep of tears and drama. Tempest and Sunshine. The Parson’s Bride. The hero and heroine on the stage of the Cotton Blossom, a chorus swelling behind them, as the heroine emoted before a clamoring audience. This was the wondrous melodrama that made life on a showboat so important to the river towns and hamlets along the Mississippi River. It was right, it was sublime. It was theater, yes, and sentimental; but it was the life we all wanted to believe in, that moment when we feel so exquisitely alive and true and good.
Everyone wept.
Well, not everyone.
I turned to look back at Desmond Peake. I stopped sobbing. A ridiculous smile was plastered on his long, gaunt face. Rattled, I had no idea what it meant. Was he pleased that he’d caught the rebellious Ava in some Metro violation, the insubordinate actress playing fast and loose with her contract? Or was he pleased that she’d done the right thing? Or…or was Desmond more than the simplistic troglodyte or villain-let’s hiss and boo the showboat heavy-that I’d easily categorized?
With echoes of Ava’s bravado performance ringing in my ears, I stood to leave the room. But Desmond had gone before me. I wondered now: what manner of man was this Desmond Peake?
Chapter Twelve
I’d been jotting notes on a yellow pad, concise biographies of the folks who’d touched or, frankly, bruised Max in his final days. Sooner or later, I knew, some kernel of discovery-what did Sol call it? a “black pearl”?-would assert itself. And then I’d know. A pot of tea and an untouched watercress sandwich on the table. When Alice called, she spoke so rapidly that at first I had no idea what she wanted, though her strangled voice alarmed me, her words running together.
“Slow down, Alice,” I pleaded. “For God’s sake, what?”
“I can’t reach Sol.”
“What happened?”
A deep breath, a whistling sound from the back of her throat. “I was sitting here going through some letters when Sol called me.” Her voice broke. “He wasn’t making much sense, Edna. He rattled on and on and I kept saying, What? What? Those gagging sounds, senseless.”
“Tell me. Did anything happen?”
“I don’t know. He said he needed to go for a ride. Out of the city. I heard that clearly. ‘My head hurts.’ I heard that. ‘I gotta drive around.’” Alice’s voice rose. “Why does everyone out here have to drive around so much? Everybody is always driving out into the desert or up into the hills. Driving, driving.”
That made little sense to me, yet I let it go. People had their own ways of dealing with the junk that fell on them. In New York when I was rattled-though I rarely allowed myself such a weakness, considering it a frailty best given to some of my heroines-or when I was getting ready to do battle with someone, a more common occurrence given the bumbling souls I encountered in my workaday world-well, I walked. Up Park Avenue, over to Lexington, back home, down and over, one mile, sometimes two. Early morning. Late afternoon. In rain and snow, faithful to my regimen. It cleared the soul and calmed the digestion. It made people…bearable. People shuffled out of my barreling way, instinctively aware of the termagant in their hapless path. Back in my penthouse, purged and spent, I’d stare down at the tops of trees in Central Park below me and feel back in control.
Here, in this godless paradise, this land of vulgarity, people drove into the desert, often in darkest night when lizards slithered under a chalk moon, when night creatures bayed and hissed. Not for me. I’d take the helter-skelter barbarism of Manhattan any day. A city with gusto.
“Well,” I said now, “let him get whatever it is out of his system.”
“You don’t understand, Edna. Sol is falling apart.”
I waited. “Do you want me to stop in, Alice?”
A pleading in her voice, tremulous. “Will you, Edna?”
“Of course.”
By the time the taxi dropped me off in front of her bungalow, Alice had put on a pot of coffee. Her expression grim, she placed a cup before me, sat down opposite me, and quietly slid a copy of Variety across the table. “This arrived minutes ago.”
I glanced at the trade magazine. “What are you trying to tell me, Alice?”
She started to drink some coffee, but stopped, replaced the cup on the saucer. “It’s the first thing I spotted. I don’t know why, but I knew I had to look inside.” She took the magazine and flipped it open. Her fingers tapped on a small news item. “Sol never told me. Yes, he mentioned rumors of trouble, but maybe he didn’t know it until today.”
“What?” I demanded.
“General Foods, you know, Sanka coffee, the sponsor of The Goldbergs, has dropped the show from its listings. Because, supposedly, some actors are Communists. Or, maybe, they have a tinge of pinko coloring their marked-up scripts. The veteran character actor Philip Loeb is out, the man who plays Molly’s husband Jake and…and…”
“Sol,” I mumbled.
“Sol,” she echoed. “He’s not these things, you know. All right, he’s joined some leftist groups. He’s signed petitions. We all have. All of the good folks in Hollywood have. Katherine Hepburn. Groucho Marx. Judy Garland.” She stopped. “Sol is a man who despises Communists, Edna. God, his family fled Russia to find freedom in America.” She fell back on the sofa, her hands fluttering.
“That explains his bizarre phone call to you.”
“Well, he’s out of a job. Variety says Philip Loeb has left. Now Sol has to go. He saw this coming, you know. So many times Sol talked to Max about it. He said Gertrude Berg was worried-she’d been warned. General Foods warned her. Him, some others. Philip Loeb is fine gentleman, funny. Sol, the primetime comic as Commie? Who’s gonna turn on their Admiral televisions and watch him crack Cousin Irving jokes?”