Make Believe

around.

“Tell me,” I yelled.

But she couldn’t. Leaning over her shoulders, I reached for the receiver. For a moment I could hear nothing, then a faraway voice started to say something. “Hello?”

“Oh my God, Edna. It’s you. It’s Lorena.”

“Tell me.”

Her voice shook. “I’m calling from Paramount. At work. Somebody called me here. Somebody from NBC that I’m friendly with. Harry Levy, a man…never mind. I don’t know what I’m saying, Edna. Sol’s dead. Harry just heard it from a reporter.” She sucked in her breath. “Edna, he hanged himself.”

I looked down at Alice, bunched up on the floor. She was looking up at me, doe-eyed, pitiful, as though I’d tell her she’d misheard the awful news.

“My God,” I whispered. “My God.”

“He hanged himself,” Lorena repeated.

“Edna.” Alice struggled to stand and touched my shoulder. “Tell me what happened.”

But I was listening to Lorena. “Edna, he left a note. They found it in his room. He hanged himself with a cord, but he left the door open. The landlady found him.”

“What did it say?” Fatigue in my voice, a dead tone, low.

She drew in her breath. “Something about America being a place that has forgotten how to love the people who love it.”

“Thank you, Lorena.” I replaced the receiver back in the cradle.

“Max. Sol.” Alice rocked back and forth on her heels.

Then, suddenly, she stopped moving and took a step toward Larry.

“Alice, I’m sor…”

She put out her hand, traffic-cop style, into his face. “Sol is dead, Larry.”

Quickly. “I heard. It’s so horrible.”

“He hanged himself.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Stop,” she yelled. “I don’t want to hear your phony sympathy now. He’s dead. Max. Sol.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Stop,” she screamed again. Then a strange smile covered her face, her eyes wild with panic. “The three musketeers are no more. Max and Sol. And Larry is left to pick up the pieces. If I remember correctly, if anything happened to one, the other two got the property they shared. The investments, small as they were. The blood- brother bond you all swore to.” She gave out a harsh, gritty laugh. “Guess what, Larry? You’re suddenly a man with a lot of money.”

Chapter Thirteen

Ava had promised me a Southern fried chicken dinner. She called to remind me, her voice a rumbling whisper on the phone. “I told you I’m a damned good cook, at least of chicken.” She paused. “I know you’re feeling down about Sol. I heard it was a quiet funeral.”

I didn’t answer. I’d been lying on my bed, eyes closed, the radio playing Tony Bennett’s “Cold, Cold Heart” over and over, the DJ intoxicated with the song.

That afternoon, haunted, I hailed a taxi and sailed into the hills, an aimless ramble that let me ponder the sprawling, ungainly city spread before me. The cabbie, at first confused by my vagueness, kept quiet after a while, simply nodding at my directions, probably believing a maddened lady was in the back seat. But no: the spacious landscape allowed me to think, making me more determined than ever.

“Don’t be alone tonight, Edna. Tonight at my place. Just you and me. No one else. I promise. Cozy, relaxed.” A pause during which I heard her sighing deeply. “No one talks to me about poor Sol, Edna. I don’t know anything but what I read in the papers, and that’s drivel. A photo of Gertrude Berg weeping. Max…and now Sol. I need someone to talk to me about it. Francis avoids the subject.”

“Just the two of us?”

“I promise. I’ll come get you. Tonight.”

I didn’t know what to answer. The splash and tumult of Sol’s sudden death laced all my brief conversations with Alice and Lorena. Worse, I’d spotted Desmond Peake lingering in the lobby of the Ambassador earlier, then having a drink in the cocktail lounge; but when I approached him, he made a rapid exit, nearly colliding with a woman with too many shopping bags. My nerves frayed, my disposition sour-and my suitcase already opened in my room, a few items dropped in-I didn’t want to stay in the suite listening to the radio all night. Every song-now I was subjected to Tony Bennett’s “Because of You”-reminded me of loss.

“Yes,” I told Ava. “Yes.”

***

We sat in a long sunroom filled with plants, clinging vines twisting around posts and inching over the window sills, pots of red geraniums and lavender phlox, a gone-to-mayhem spider plant, its shoots dangling over a wicker table covered with movie magazines. Issues of Modern Screen and Flirt and Titter with Ava on the cover. “I don’t know why I can’t stop buying magazines about myself,” she confided. A lived-in room, welcoming. Wide wicker chairs with overstuffed floral cushions. The late day sun peaked through the simple white-cotton dimity curtains, but the room was refreshingly cool.

She sat opposite me, her feet bare and cozily tucked under her legs as she reclined on the chair. “The tobacco field girl at home. Artie Shaw had a fit when I sat like this. Or walked barefoot in the house.” She grimaced. “Or, in fact, when I opened my ignorant mouth in front of his friends. John Steinbeck, I remember, kept saying, ‘I want to hear her voice, Artie. She has a great voice.’ Like I was a wind-up toy they bought at a fair. William Saroyan wrote a limerick about me after I did The Killers. The girl silhouetted against a chiaroscuro moon.”

“You look happy sitting like that.”

She looked surprised. “And I don’t look happy other times, Edna?”

“Not so happy, I suppose. Out in Hollywood”-I pointed nonsensically out the sunlit windows-“you look…modeled. You know, stylized.”

She grinned. “That’s Ava Gardner out there. The girl who is nervous when the cameras roll. Acting is…well… embarrassing for me, you know. Here is…Avah Gardner.” She pronounced her name with a Southern twang, the vowels exaggerated and harsh.

She served iced tea, heady with wild mint she insisted had taken over her back yard. The glass had beads of water on it, cold to the touch. “Good.”

“Sol.” Ava’s sudden mention of the dead actor was stark, abrupt. “Tell me what you know.”

I told her about the funeral. “How close were you to him?”

“Through Max, of course. He’d visit here with Max. We met for lunch when he was back from New York. He lent me jazz records. He was a private man who got nervous around me. He’d stammer and bumble, and that made me tease him horribly.” Her eyes got moist. “But a man who caused no trouble for anyone, a decent guy who liked to make people laugh. Since the blacklist nonsense, he never laughed again. He took it so hard, Edna.”

We sat with our tea and watched the sky darken, the leaves of the ice bushes brushing against the windows, rustling in the slight evening breeze. “My sister Bappie was very fond of him. After her marriage fell apart, she was footloose, scattered. Some summers back, when he was out here, they found each other, not romantically, I mean, but like two wandering souls who bump into each other in the night. They’d go to the movies, plays, stuff like that. Then she met a new guy and they drifted apart. Sol, being Sol, didn’t resent it, though I think he was lonely much of the time. I know he spent more and more time with Max. And then Max and Alice.”

“Another life shot down.”

Ava stood and peered out the window. “Remember back at The Coffee Pot with Sol? How we waited for the rain that never came? Sometimes I pray for rain at night, especially lately. You know, that drumming on the roof, on