Borrowed Finery: A Memoir Read online

“I had only a few days to find someone to take care of you.” Then he repeated his words: “I had no choice.”

  * * *

  Along with the other younger children in the camp, I dug for gold in the bank that rose from the stream. Sophie explained that it was “fool’s gold,” a glittering pyrite, that we were unearthing. The others wandered off. I went on digging as though my life depended upon it, as though I were tunneling out of a prison.

  * * *

  One free-time afternoon, I explored the other side of the stream, crossing it where flattened stones formed a kind of watery bridge. Although I was watchful, on the lookout for mountain lions, whose roars at night I had heard, and my skin prickled at the swoosh of wings as a bird flew from one tree to another and at the scrabbling sound of a chipmunk running up a tree trunk, I persisted.

  After a while, I came to a dip in the hills and, in it, a village. I walked down the middle of the only street. Nothing stirred, not even a leaf on a straggly tree next to the saloon with its swinging half-doors. There was something odd about this place. I looked up. Windows on upper floors framed blue squares of sky. Behind the church, the boardinghouses, the store, a sheriff’s office, were huge braces supporting what were only fronts.

  It was so unexpected to come across it, so mysterious. When I told Sophie about it, she said it was a movie set no longer in use. Like fool’s gold, I told myself years after, so false in its promise, so real in itself.

  * * *

  Every weekday I walked several long blocks to the public school I attended in the flat, dusty little town. On my way there, I passed a large weedy lot. One morning, policemen were all over it, staring at the ground. The headless body of a child I’d known by sight had been discovered the afternoon before. Her head had been found stuffed into her book bag.

  * * *

  I learned that if I were to see my parents, I had to live away from them. The four or five times I visited them during that year I spent in Redlands, Mrs. Cummings would put me on a train to Los Angeles, placing me in the charge of a porter. Once, a friend of my father’s, Vin Lawrence, met the train. He drove directly from the station to an all-night miniature golf course. It was brightly lit up, like a small-town circus. Vin loved golf, which he called “the green mistress.”

  He talked to me as if I were grown up, in a voice that sounded like soft barking. Now and then he whistled or made popping sounds with his mouth and clapped his small hands together—especially when his stroke had been good—resting the golf club he was using against one leg. He explained that my father had been unable to meet me because he had “lifted a few too many glasses,” an explanation I had heard before that wasn’t one.

  He played the little course with utmost seriousness as I walked or waited beside him. He kept up a running commentary. A story about my mother held my attention. He called her “Spain.”

  He and my father had searched for and found an elegant black gown for her to wear to a movie opening at Grauman’s Chinese. They didn’t know she had spent the day stuffing herself with olive oil and garlic on dark bread, food for which she had been suddenly possessed by intense longing. She arrived at the theater in time, wearing the velvet gown but stinking to high heaven. It was the first story I’d heard about her. Until then I had had only my own stories.

  Another time, no one met the train. It was early evening. I sat for a while on a station bench, a small suitcase next to me. I worked out the words on a sign over a booth a few yards away. TRAVELER’S AID, it read.

  I was a traveler and I needed aid. I went over. I don’t recall any conversation, but I do remember the outcome. The woman behind the booth gave me taxi fare, and she smiled as she put the bills in both my hands.

  * * *

  My parents moved to Malibu Beach, where they rented a house built to look like the midsection of a small ship. A deck jutted out over the sand. At the top there was a large square room, like a captain’s bridge, my father said, from which I could see the vast ocean.

  I spent several weekends at the Malibu house. At a fated hour all the mornings I was there, my father gripped my resistant hands and lifted me over the foaming waves of the surf toward the dreadful green waters of the Pacific, into which he dropped me.

  I sank at once, then rose, running in the water, keeping afloat in a way that every second left me in doubt about whether I would live to the next. I heard myself gasping and sputtering; it frightened me further. I knew there were miles of water-filled space below me. The only thing keeping me above it was the frenzied movement of my feet. “I’m drowning!” I’d cry. “No you aren’t!” my father called out in a hard, jocular voice from a few yards away. And I wasn’t.

  * * *

  Malibu was a beach movie palace. Actors and actresses, oiled with various preparations to keep themselves from getting sunburned, lay gleaming on the sand, or walked along the edge of the surf, as I once saw Richard Barthelmess do. On a morning, the next-door neighbors appeared, Lilyan Tashman in a startling white bathing suit, her face a polar snowfield of cold cream, and her husband, Edmund Lowe, with his black thread of mustache.

  One Sunday morning, John Gilbert took me for a long walk, holding my hand and talking to me in his high, thin voice. Most weekends I was there, one of my father’s actor friends, Charles Bickford, would drop by from somewhere to sit on the beach and talk to Daddy in his deep voice.

  After he had gone, Daddy said, “Actors are so dumb. You wouldn’t believe how dumb they are!”

  * * *

  Mary Barthelmess, a few years older than I, gave me a pair of rose-colored beach pajamas she had outgrown. When I tried them on, I was stung on my rear end by a bee trapped inside the cotton folds. I had learned it was dangerous to complain within my mother’s hearing. My hand flew to cover my mouth and hold in my startled cry.

  Several weeks earlier, I had murmured to Daddy that I had a toothache. My mother just then entered the room. In a neutral voice she said, “I’ll fix that for you.” She turned, smiling, to my father. “Would you put her in the rumble seat?” It may have seemed to him that she had nothing in mind but a short drive in the open air, but I heard sounds of distant thunder.

  She drove on the steep, curving hills that rose across from Malibu. Through the back window, I saw how rigidly she held her back, how stiff her neck was, as she drove like the wind and I was shaken like a rattle.

  The drive lasted twenty minutes or so—the drive lasted forever. When we returned to the beach house, she emerged from the car and stood like a statue for a moment, staring at me in the rumble seat with her great dark eyes, her face stony. “Do you still have a toothache?” she inquired politely. Driving me on the mountain roads had not lessened her rage but intensified it.

  * * *

  One afternoon I found my father slouched in a canvas chair on the “captain’s bridge,” a bottle of gin on the floor next to his right foot. “Colonel Fear,” he called out, in a stupefied voice. I glanced quickly back at the door, thinking someone might be there. No one. “Have you ever met him? Ah, if you’d met him, you’d not forget him,” he muttered. Briefly his bloodshot blue eyes came into focus. He saw it was me. “And whose little girl are you?” he inquired, in a comical falsetto voice. When I laughed, he said, “I knew when I took you to the Adirondacks that I’d won you. I licked up a bit of salt I’d spilled on my hand, and you said, ‘You’re funny,’ and that’s how I knew.”

  It was true that he had won me. Part of the time he was an ally, part of the time a betrayer. I was not afraid of him, only of what he might do. One afternoon when he dropped me into the ocean, and I was sputtering as I dog-paddled—though by that time I had overcome my terror to some extent—he asked me whom I’d prefer to be stranded on a desert island with, Vin Lawrence or himself. Perversely, I said, “Vin!” to his bobbing head a few yards away. He laughed, swallowed water, swam to me, and held my arm all the way back to the beach.

  * * *

  Vin Lawrence told me about an evening walking along the bea
ch with my father. He said that earlier they had lifted a few glasses. As they walked, they found themselves treading on hundreds of tiny fish puffing and flopping on the sand. My father threw them back into the ocean, handfuls at a time. The surf flung them up on the beach again. “He was frantic,” Vin said. When I grew up, I learned the fish had come to the beach to mate and then to die.

  * * *

  One night, along with an actor, Minor Watson, my father drove us to Venice Amusement Park. The roller coaster’s dark coil lifted up from the surface of the black water and flung its length farther into the darkness. Only a few small bulbs hung from a wire, casting a dim light on the narrow tracks. Daddy persuaded me to try the ride. I was reluctant. Still, I stepped after him into one of the open cars where Minor Watson was already sitting, a vague, kindly smile on his face.

  We plunged and ascended. I howled to be let off, howled in fright, clutched my father’s jacket until, as the track leveled out, the car slowed down before coming to a halt.

  Dazed, I stumbled along the pier until I heard my father’s voice calling me. I turned around to see Daddy and Minor standing together in front of a glaringly lit shooting gallery, their faces in shadow. I felt I didn’t know anyone in the world, and no one knew me.

  Daddy picked up a rifle chained to the counter, shot, hit a target, and won a stuffed animal. On our return to Malibu, he drew the car up in front of a sprawling estate in Santa Monica.

  “Pal, take this creature to the door,” he said, as he handed me the toy, “and give it to anyone who answers the bell. Whoever the hell it is, tell him the bear is for your cousin, Douglas Fairbanks.”

  The task restored some balance I’d lost on the roller-coaster ride, and I did it willingly. I walked up a long path to the front door and rang an ornate bell. After a while, it was answered by an old man in some sort of costume. He peered down at me and asked, “Yes, miss?”

  I handed up the bear and repeated my father’s message. The old man accepted both words and toy and said he’d pass them on to Mr. Fairbanks when he returned from the studio.

  * * *

  The last day I spent at Malibu Beach, Uncle Elwood appeared on the sand wearing a black bathing suit.

  I don’t know how he had arrived there. I knew he had come to see me. I took his hand and led him across sand warmed by the morning sun and into the foaming surf, urging him on, elatedly, until we were both dog-paddling in the Pacific. He came the next day and then, as far as I knew, returned to Balmville.

  Within a month or two of his visit, I too returned to the minister’s house on the hill, with whom or how I don’t recall.

  I thought I might burst with happiness, freed from a yearlong curse, as though I were a girl in a fairy tale.

  Uncle Elwood told me he had stood on the roof of the old stable to watch the California-bound train make its way north on the east bank of the Hudson River, the train I had been on with Aunt Jessie.

  One afternoon I saw a taxi pause at the bottom of the driveway. An elderly woman emerged from the passenger seat.

  It had been raining on and off for days. The driveway was impassable for most cars except for Uncle Elwood’s doughty old Packard. I watched the woman make her slow way through the rain and mud.

  At last she stood in the hall, laughing with what I took to be embarrassment at her disheveled state, at the mud on her shoes.

  “Paulita,” she said. My heart sank. She was my Spanish grandmother, come to take me away. Her duties with her Spanish relative in Cuba were lighter; she would not be traveling there every year. At some moment during the grim hours that followed each other like links in a chain drawing me away from Uncle Elwood, she looked at me for a long moment and then said to him, “She is of my blood.”

  It was far worse than a fairy-tale enchantment. My parting from the minister was an amputation.

  Long Island

  Once upon a time, there were four brothers, Fermin, Leopold, Frank (also known as Panchito), and Vincent. There was a sister, too, Elsie, youngest of them all. Two of the brothers, Leopold and Vincent, lived with their mother, my grandmother, Candelaria, in a small brick house on Audley Street, in Kew Gardens, Long Island. I went to live there in 1930.

  Fermin, the oldest son, was married to Elpidia, a peasant woman born in a small Cuban village. They lived in a section of New York City then known as Spanish Harlem with their two daughters, Isabel and Natalie. Eventually, a third daughter was born, Alicia.

  Frank was employed by a pharmaceutical company as a salesman. His work required him to travel in South America, a good market for drugs. In his youth, he had played baseball and had almost made it into the major leagues. He was the most American of his mother’s five children, at least externally.

  Vincent, small of stature, with no visible waist, kept up his trousers with suspenders. He accompanied singers or violinists on the piano and was sometimes away on tour. Most afternoons he left the brick house swiftly and silently on mysterious errands. When he was home, he practiced the piano all day long, or so it seemed to me.

  When Frank dropped in for a visit after months away in Peru or Argentina, Vincent didn’t look up from the keyboard until he had completed the piece he was playing. With a sliding glance at his brother, he would say, “Oh. Hello. Frank.”

  He spoke English with a severe and glacial precision, seeming to bite each word like a coin to test its genuineness before letting it go.

  After I had been living on Audley Street a month or so, he followed me into the bathroom one morning. I was sitting on the toilet. He turned on a tap in the sink so the sound of water flowing covered the trickle of my urine. “You see?” he stated grimly. He repeated the two words, providing his own echo.

  My father once said mockingly, “Vi-cen-tīc-o plays the am-pīc-o … and says everything twice.” Two must have held an eerie numerical spell over Vincent. As well as repeating words twice, he tripped twice every time he climbed a flight of stairs.

  Leopold lived on the top floor of the house in a studio-like room with a skylight. A large drawing board tilted at an angle was the first thing I saw when the door opened. At its top was a narrow trench holding several drawing pencils and the razor blades he sharpened them with. Each razor bore a thumbprint-shaped smudge of black powder from the veins of lead that ran through the pencils.

  Leopold was an art director at Macfadden Publications. He showed me a photograph of Mr. Macfadden, posing as the world’s strongest man in a True Story magazine advertisement for a product or an exercise—I forget which—guaranteed to make weaklings strong. He wore bathing trunks that revealed his tanned chest and arms sheathed in muscles that resembled dark taffy. He looked very old—which, Leopold explained, made his muscular development the more remarkable.

  Leopold was away on vacation when I arrived at the house on Audley Street. I suffered from piercing earaches in the first few weeks. My grandmother, alarmed by my anguished cries, telephoned the minister for help. When I learned he was coming, my weeping ceased. But I knew, a desperate knowing, that he would stay only a few hours. The earaches diminished in intensity. That time Uncle Elwood visited me in Kew Gardens was the last time I saw him for many years. We wrote each other periodically.

  My heart had grown dull. Sorrow, and the changes in my life that were its cause, had worked its desolation upon me.

  Leopold changed that. He taught me chess and swung me in the air, and his large-hearted laughter lifted my spirits. When I opened the door to his room, I breathed in the buoyant aroma of the Cuban cigars he smoked. His deep-set dark eyes were like my mother’s except for their tenderness of expression. His stride was graceful, wary, and indomitable, like a big cat’s.

  When Vincent was away and only my grandmother and Leopold were in the house, I rested safely in the present.

  But when Vincent returned to Audley Street from his engagements, I stayed outdoors after school. I played with neighborhood children or by myself until it was the hour when Leopold would arrive at the Kew Gardens rai
lroad station. I watched from a living room window as he walked up the narrow cement path, too narrow to accommodate his stride; he stepped off it, now and then, onto patches of rusty-looking grass on either side.

  I would run to the hall in time to see him greet his mother and bend down to kiss her cheek—none of the other brothers kissed her—and after I’d waited awhile, I’d go upstairs and knock on his door. He would open it and smile down at me.

  On sunny weekends, his studio, as he called it, was radiant with light. It was a different world from the bleak floor below. I slept in the same bed with my grandmother if Vincent was home. He always took my small room and bed.

  “Have the sheets been changed?” he’d call out in the hall, without troubling to see if there was anyone within range to hear him. I could sense his rage, suddenly flaring up like a banked fire.

  Once in a great while, Fermin visited. The fire of his rage was not banked. He maintained a grim silence around us, breaking it only to mutter furiously into my grandmother’s ear. I knew she felt his heated breath. While she listened, her expression was one of strained submission, not so much a response to what he was telling her as the habitual mode of her being.

  She had been born in northern Spain. After a sea voyage to Cuba, she was married to my grandfather, the owner of a sugar plantation, Cienegita. The marriage had been arranged by her parents with the advice of their cousin, Luisa Ponvert, owner of Olmiguero, a neighboring plantation.

  Widowed at an early age, my grandmother came to the United States with her five children soon after the end of the Spanish-American War. During its last days, Cienegita was burned to the ground by what she described as a band of carpetbaggers, who left intact only the machinery for boiling the sugarcane.

  Her father offered her $5,000, a very large sum in those days, to return to Spain. But she wanted to live in the country her husband had loved and often visited on plantation business.

  She was sixteen when she first arrived in Havana. One afternoon, before meeting her bridegroom, she told me she had stepped onto the balcony of the house in Havana where she was staying temporarily with family friends. She was on the fourth floor, and to see the street more clearly she knelt down, pushed her head through two bars of the balcony’s railing, and then couldn’t withdraw it. A crowd gathered on the street. Some people laughed; some looked worried. Eventually she was freed from the grille, not much the worse for wear. The crowd had distracted her from her own plight and kept her amused and interested.