Another Side of Paradise Page 3

  Twenty minutes later I am still on my chaise longue, shoulders hunched. Darkness falls on the western coast like a hastily tossed cloak and I sit in the twilight and shiver, knotted by disappointment. Scott Fitzgerald is long married, rumored to be in debt, and on the downside of famous. I am engaged to nobility, eager for children, and most likely at the peak of whatever beauty God gave me. I cannot afford to be a fool.

  But I am bewitched by this man. I relive us on the dance floor, delighting in our proximity, trying to decide if his eyes are blue or green or grey. I did not merely imagine that for thirty minutes we were bonded, or that with Scott Fitzgerald I experienced an emotion—deeper, more complex—I have yet to feel with Don and don’t expect I ever will. My memory is not a mirage. With burning impatience, I pick up the telephone. An operator gives me Scott’s number at the Garden of Allah.

  “Scott, I’d love to meet Scottie,” I say, trying not to tweet like a sparrow. “Why don’t the three of us go out together?”

  He does not immediately respond, and I feel diminished by his hesitation. This woman is trouble, he might be thinking. Calloused. Unfeminine.

  But, finally, he says yes.

  Chapter 5

  1937

  Scottie has her father’s face. Whether her high spirits and strawberry blond hair come from her mother’s line, I can’t say, but she is slender as a green bean, sunny, and fresh. Two of her male friends are in tow from Connecticut, where she attends a genteel boarding school. They are specimens of young manhood in the F. Scott Fitzgerald mold, circa 1922: sun-kissed, blond, dressed in white pants and navy jackets as if they’d leaped from a yacht.

  The young men’s glossy youthfulness makes my date seem more threadbare than his years. He doesn’t stop clucking over his daughter as if she were child, not a young woman. Scott calls her Pie, one of those Muffy-Fluffy nicknames that doting relatives bestow in a show of affection. “Pie, finish your meat.” “Pie, sit up straight.” “Miss Pie, wrong knife,” he chides while he chain-smokes Raleighs and drums his long, elegant fingers on Café Trocadero’s least romantic table, ten feet from the hat check.

  Where is the jester who tangoed into my heart? Scott is a crank who looks as if he’s faded in the wash and yet, it’s impossible not to like his daughter. Scottie orders in French far more polished than my own, which isn’t dreadful, assuming you are generous about irregular verbs. She asks for her canard à l’orange humbly. Nothing arrogant about this girl.

  “Miss Graham, can you tell me about your work? It sounds awfully glittery.” “Miss Graham, how long have you lived in Hollywood?” It touches me that Scott’s daughter, who might be incensed by seeing her married father with a date, is solicitous. Someone has made it clear that the foundation of civilized behavior is making sure other people are at ease. I banish the thought that it was the mysterious Zelda who tutored her in charm.

  “What do you plan to do whilst you visit, Scottie?” I ask. “You shan’t be gone all day and I could show you around.”

  “ Whilst. Shan’t. Miss Graham, your accent is divine. I’ll do whatever Daddy has lined up.” She squeezes Scott’s hand in a gesture both protective and proprietary. Yet she adds, “What a lovely hat,” reaching up to touch the wispy veil that falls over one eye. “I’ve been admiring it all night.”

  Before our date became a family affair and I switched to a simple black sheath with a bolero, I’d planned to wear a lilac halter-necked dress that framed my décolletage. My hat, with its carnelian poppy, is tonight’s sole concession to gaiety. I am tempted to take off the ridiculous adornment and give it to Scottie here and now, but I merely smile and thank her as the orchestra strikes up “Afraid to Dream.”

  “Miss Graham, may I have this dance?” says blond boy number one, ignoring the much younger lady to his left.

  “I’m sorry but this dance is promised to someone else,” I say, reaching for Scott. He looks surprised.

  “She’s enchanting, your daughter,” I tell him when we reach the dance floor.

  “She hasn’t had it easy.” I hear pride, but he clamps down in a way that doesn’t invite probing.

  “How long is she staying?”

  “A month.” Dear God . “Tomorrow I’ve arranged for her to get a studio tour and meet Mickey Rooney. After that . . .” He throws up his hands. “I’m so unsettled here I can’t take off much time and that only underscores what an abominable father I am. My daughter deserves better.”

  “You couldn’t be more considerate,” I offer, unclear of this man’s complicated life, and even less of its details. “Anyone can see how much you care for her, and she, you.” He makes a noise short of a grunt. “I could help take Scottie around to see the sights,” I say, with hesitation. I don’t want him to find me too eager. If there are rules, what are they?

  “That’s generous, Sheilah. I won’t forget the offer.” With that, blond boy number two cuts in, and my fretting date fox-trots away with his daughter.

  At the end of the evening, Scott drops off Scottie’s friends and then drives her to the Beverly Hills Hotel, where she is staying with his friends Helen Hayes and her husband, Charlie MacArthur. It takes only minutes more for him to reach my villa and walk me to the door. Moths buzz around the light and the scent of oleander tantalizes all my senses. I planned to say goodbye with a polite thank -you, but I long to switch on the electricity from the other night.

  “Please don’t go, Scott,” I say, pulling him toward me, speaking in a low voice.

  He doesn’t move beyond arching an eyebrow.

  I take F. Scott Fitzgerald by the hand. Willingly, he follows. In the living room I avert my eyes from Don’s roses, whose petals have begun to scatter on my Chinese rug. From my radio, which I’ve left on to avoid the sadness of returning to a soundless home, a breathy, late-night torch song wafts our way, its lyrics sentimental. Out of the darkness you suddenly appeared. You smiled and I was taken by surprise . . . but the moon got in my eyes. Bing Crosby croons what’s in my heart as I lead Scott one flight up to my bedroom. I drop his hand to light a candle, ignoring that it is a souvenir from my engagement party. The flame leaps and sizzles in the dewy breeze that blows through an opened window.

  “I like you,” I say, hoping he remembers our first words. He answers by burying his face in my thick, ash blond hair. His shade, exactly. What else do we share? Little, I guess, beyond the desire to feel each other’s warmth and the awareness of a certain complementary loneliness. I am glad for this. I have too little self-love to seek my own reflection.

  He slips off my bolero and begins to unzip my dress, which falls to my hips, revealing my black crepe slip.

  “Please step out of your shoes,” he murmurs hoarsely. I obey. He appraises me down and up and back again, until he reaches my eyes. “I don’t deserve you,” he says.

  I don’t deserve you.

  He places his serious pinstripe jacket on the velvet slipper chair that crouches in the corner like a handmaiden. I loosen his bow tie—again, a bow tie—and begin to unbutton his shirt so I might wriggle my hands beneath its softened cotton and feel his shoulders. They are muscular and for a man who isn’t tall, appealingly wide and strong, like a boxer. He could be thirty. He removes his gold cuff links, one by one, and sets them on my vanity table, next to my tortoiseshell hairbrush. I do not want to think about who gave the links to him, or that a wedding ring remains on his finger. I unpin my hat as he flicks away one strap of my slip, then the other. The garment puddles atop my dress.

  “In a minute, I will kiss you, but first I need to drink you in.” He doesn’t break eye contact as he caresses the contours of my face, the straight slope of my narrow nose, and my full lips, leaving a tattoo of Coronation Red on his fingertip. He dips it in his mouth, then mine. I mirror every gesture. We hold each other, almost dancing.

  “Kiss me now,” I say.

  “First say my name. Please.”

  “Scott.” The sound is both a confession and a puff of hope. “Scott Fitzgeral
d.”

  “I want to get to know you, Sheilah. You’re like nobody else.”

  Which I hope means: you are not at all like my wife, like Zelda. Jonah has remarked on our resemblance. I quarantine Zelda Fitzgerald in the same compartment as dear Don, banished from my bedroom. The last thing I want is to be the understudy for a man’s absent, celebrated wife.

  Scott is down to his boxers now. I sit on the bed, undo my garters, flex my leg, and remove a stocking, then another and slide off my silky panties until all that is between us is my cream satin brassiere. He reaches for its hooks.

  “Not yet,” I say, shaking my head.

  I am built along generous lines with a bosom more ample than I would choose. My assets presented themselves at age thirteen, as if to say, move along now, girlie, your childhood is over, whether you like it or not. Over time I have grown into my body, but I remain shy. My breasts are almost the last thing about myself that I reveal.

  I snuff out the candle. The room goes black. Scott and I shimmy beneath my coverlet, a leg and a hand here, a leg and a hand there, mouths and tongues moving slowly, getting to know one another, chokingly vulnerable. A chuckle. A gasp. A moan.

  Well. This is how it all began, during a night tender indeed. Only much later did it occur to me that, in those early days, part of our value to each other hinged on how little we knew of the other’s past.

  Chapter 6

  1910

  Lilye, ayln, mir zenen gegangen tsu zayn shpet ,” Lily, my mother said, walking two steps ahead of me in her rundown shoes. Hurry up or we’ll be late . I was old enough to be mortified by her guttural Yiddish and the schmatte tied around her head, yet not old enough to understand the burdens of her life. She used to wear a glossy chestnut wig with curls I liked to stroke, but since Tatte left, it is nowhere to be seen. Perhaps my father took it with him when he traveled to Germany or she sold it, along with half of our furniture and the silver candlesticks.

  Mama pushed me onto a double-decker bus heading south. To where, she refused to say. I longed to sit on top and see more of the city beyond our East End slum, but Mama led me and my brother Morris to the back of the bus, each grappling with our own small parcel of belongings, wrapped in brown paper shut tight with butcher’s twine. We were not top-of-the-bus people. We were not even people who owned satchels.

  “Do you think we’re going to see Tatte?” I asked Morris.

  “Lily, you know Tatte is dead.”

  I refused to believe that my father, who always found a licorice drop for me in the deep pockets of his overcoat, would leave me with only Mama, who kvetched far more than she smiled. I was his ketzeleh. His little pussycat. Through our flat’s thin walls, at night I heard Mama wail for him. Louis, Louis, Louis. From her lips the name sounded like a swear word Heimie and Meyer, my oldest brothers, used when they told each other to sod off.

  “Are we going past Buckingham Palace?” I asked. “Might we see the queen?”

  My mother laughed sourly. “When God was doling out brains, you were asleep,” she said, though that was untrue. I could add and subtract better than any other six-year-old in Stepney Green, make the bed I shared with my sisters, and sew a straight seam. I also knew that while everyone else in our family started their life far away in a place called Ukraine, I alone was born in the town of Leeds. That made me British. When my mother would swat my arse , I’d look her in the eye and repeat Tatte’s favorite curse. I’d say it in English, which she couldn’t understand: May you run to the toilet every three minutes or every three months. Mama made me feel as if my being alive had turned her life unbearable.

  We changed buses and the scenery shifted from city to country. Except for the cackling of crows, the tumult quieted. Passengers began to get off the bus but few people got on, which allowed Morris and me to peer out the window.

  “Lily!” He pointed to a set of stone gates. I hoped this was our destination, but as we passed, I saw it was a cemetery filled with crosses and statues. Even if Tatte had died, this could not be his resting place. The bus bumped ahead over a rutted road. I rested my head on my brother’s shoulder, and tried to imagine our father’s eyes—toffee brown—along with his dark, bushy beard and payes, which he let me pull.

  My mother jostled me awake. She urged us off the bus and the three of us walked for blocks, stopping to rest at every corner so she could rub her swollen feet. Finally, we reached a three-story brick building with a slate roof and two short towers sticking up like thumbs. I could read the first two words on the sign over the entrance: Jews and Hospital. Did my mother need to go to hospital? Did Morris? I had heard “consumption ” whispered in our flat. It had killed our neighbor’s wife. I tried to sound out the other words over the door, Orphanage and Asylum. I did not know how to say them or what they meant.

  Morris and I followed Mama into a long hall, where a man motioned us to turn right. The smell of floor wax made my nose twitch. My mother straightened her shawl and headscarf and walked forward, her face panicked, as if someone had accused her of stealing potatoes at the market.

  “ Ick bin Rivkah Shiel,” Mama said to a woman tall as a horse. She wore an iron-grey dress and sat at a desk at the far end of the hall. The woman’s hair was uncovered, pulled tightly into a bun. Silvery spectacles perched on her beak. “ Aun di bist mein kinder, Morris aun Lilya,” Mama squeaked. Before she pushed me ahead she whispered for me not to say how Tatte died or they’ll send me away. How did my father die? No one had ever explained this. And sent away from where? Here?

  “ Sei gesund,” she said, pulled me toward her for a short, unfamiliar hug, and then pressed Morris against her as well, offering the same farewell.

  “Come here children,” the woman urged, not unkindly. Behind us, Mama let out a shriek and ran toward the door like a hobbled sprint. I started to chase after her, but Morris yanked my hand and pointed to a banner high above us, noble red with gold fringe, as if this were a castle. It showed a woman in a robe sheltering a boy and a girl.

  “It will be better here than home,” Morris said in English, but I didn’t understand where we were, and though I was six and clever, I was a girl who wanted her mother. We continued to walk and reached the woman in grey.

  “‘Leave thy fatherless children,’” she said, as if delivering a speech to a hundred people. “‘I will preserve them alive, and let thy widows trust in me. ’” She was reading the words on the banner in an accent I later learned was considered to be better than ours. All that kept me upright was the terror that had unfolded in my bowels like an umbrella. I was afraid I would soil myself.

  It was then I admitted that I was more than a fatherless child. I was motherless as well, a broken broom, cast away. I wanted to run, but I didn’t know the way home.

  A man patted Morris’s yarmulke. “Come along, mind you,” he said, disappearing with him down a high-ceilinged hall, while the lady in grey led me to a room filled with girls of varied sizes and ages.

  “This is Lily Shiel,” she announced, “the last of you we’re expecting this month. Lily, this is Sadie, Helen, Freda, Pauline, and Rachel.” I hoped I wouldn’t be asked to repeat the names, which I instantly forgot. “Say hello, ladies.”

  Weakly, the group repeated, “Welcome, Lily.” Velcome.

  “For heaven’s sake, girls, show some spirit.”

  They complied, slightly louder this time. The lady pushed up her spectacles, her glance swimming from girl to girl. “I am Matron Weiss. You will follow me and do as I say.” I clutched my parcel to my chest.

  “Whatcha got there?” said a girl with red hair ribbons, long lashes, apple cheeks, and a ragged calico pinafore.

  “A doll, my Shabbos dress, my nightgown, my comb and brush, my toothbrush.” All my earthly possessions.

  “I’m Freda,” she said. “That’s Helen, my sister.” Standing nearby was a smaller girl missing both front teeth. Snot dripped from her crusty nose.

  “Is this a jail?” I asked under my breath. Last week I stole a hal
fpenny from Mama’s bag because I’d wanted a sweet like Tatte gave me. Was this my punishment?

  Freda looked at me as if I were a ninny. “It’s Norwood, don’t ya know?”

  I didn’t.

  “Where you get sent if your parents are dead or can’t look after ya,” she added. “My older sister lived here. She says the school ain’t bad.”

  It looked nothing like the shabby one-room school that my sisters and brothers went to in Stepney Green.

  “My sister says we’re lucky to be here,” Freda added. “They take only two from a family.”

  Take. Do they ever let you go? “Where is she now, your sister?”

  “She works in a house with six stories and two staircases.”

  I knew that story. Cinderella . For the first time since we’d gotten off the bus, I felt curiosity under my dread.

  Matron Weiss hushed us as her oxfords click-clacked on the waxed wood floor. Her cheeks were ruddy and chapped, her eyes as dark as prunes. We entered a steam-choked room that contained two large tin tubs, each half filled. A thick bar of red soap and a brush sat on a table next to a pile of thin white towels.

  “Now girls, line up, ribbons out.” Freda reached for her plaits. “Freda Rothenfeldt, did you not hear me?” Freda handed over her ribbons as reluctantly as if they were pearls. “Double-quick, no nonsense.”

  From the shadowy corner a tiny old woman approached with a pair of heavy scissors and in two snips, relieved Freda of her braids and tossed them in a bin. She pushed Freda along to another woman, short and thickset, who held smaller scissors. The second barber cut until Freda’s head was a big, fuzzy knob. I held on to my hair as if it were a hat while each girl in front of me was shorn. Someone screamed “no-no-no.” Until Matron Weiss grabbed my upper arm I did not realize the shrieking came from me.