He turned his face away.
“She wants you to know she loves you, but she’s afraid you’ll think she’s kidding after all these years.”
“She’s right.”
“Maybe now that she’s trying to say it, you could listen,” Beebo suggested casually.
Toby gave a deep sigh. “I guess that’s what she’s been doing all week,” he said. “She keeps saying she has something to say but she never says anything.” He returned Beebo’s gaze, his blue eyes, so like his mother’s, pained and puzzled. “I don’t care how she says it, if only she means it. I was lousy to her because whenever I try to tell her something, she’s lousy to me. I wanted to get back at her.”
“You’ve only got one mother, Toby. You’ve got to make the best of her. I wouldn’t care so much what my mother was like, if I’d only known her. She died when I was young.”
Toby pondered this a while, and then said, “If you ever run away again, I’ll go with you.” It was not an offer, it was a request—a plea.
“You’re welcome aboard,” she smiled.
Venus was waiting for them outside the elevator door in the service entrance, one early evening in the first week of September. Strangely, Beebo wasn’t surprised. It had been coming for weeks, and now she had to face it.
Toby grimaced at his mother, and Beebo handed her the carton of home-cooked food. “Here’s your dinner,” she said. “Mrs. Pasquini appreciates all the orders.”
“You might as well keep it, she never eats it,” Toby revealed. “She just orders it to keep you coming over.”
“Sh!” Venus exclaimed at him. She was wearing a bright-blue knit dress, into which her famous frame was smoothly slipped; a glowing target for the eyes.
“Toby says you’re a good driver,” Venus said. “Now I suppose he’ll pester Leo to teach him when we get home.”
“You know I can’t drive, Mom,” he said wearily. “They don’t give licenses to epileptics.”
“Well, we’ll talk to the governor, darling,” she said.
“Besides, what do you mean, ‘home’? California?” He looked at her suddenly, brightening. “I thought we were going to be here all winter.”
Beebo felt almost dizzy at the thought of losing Venus before she had won her. It was too much to bear. Everything went wrong in bunches. “Home?” she repeated, frowning at Venus.
“Well, you both look as if I had dropped a bomb,” Venus declared. “I just thought, with Toby’s friends in California, and all those miserable horses and sunshine and ocean…I guess I can put up with the smog.”
“Mom, that’s great,” he said, surprise all over his face. “Are you doing a new picture?”
“No, darling. I’m turning over a new leaf,” she said.
They looked at each other and Beebo sensed an awkward rapport between them. After a decent pause she said, “Well—have a good trip, you two. I guess I won’t be seeing you again, Toby.”
He turned to her in consternation, and Venus said, “Don’t be silly, darling. I have some lovely martinis all ready upstairs and a perfectly irresistible business proposition for you.”
“Business?” Beebo said.
Toby made a face. “Monkey business,” he said. “Can you walk on your hands, Beebo?”
“Hush, darling,” Venus said, pulling them both into the elevator. “Not until she’s had her martini.”
Toby had a distant look on his face on the way up. “I’ll have to write to everybody,” he said. “So they’ll know I’m coming.”
Beebo let herself be led into the living room, full of sharp doubts that made her jumpy. Venus watched Toby go with a smile. “He’ll be busy for hours,” she told Beebo. “He rewrites all his letters two or three times. You’d think he was going to publish them someday.”
Beebo sat down on a long white sofa and accepted a martini with an unsteady hand. The trembling had started already, and it seemed impossible to talk or act like a normal human being.
But Venus, who was more of a sorceress than a goddess, talked softly to her for half an hour, letting the drinks and her own silvery charm relax her guest. Even then, Beebo looked so gloomy that Venus began to chuckle at her. She refilled their glasses and asked her, “Do you hate yourself for coming up tonight?”
“Not as much as I hate you for asking me,” Beebo said.
“Be fair now, darling,” Venus chided. “I’m not responsible for your weakness, am I?”
“You know damn well you are,” Beebo said. And in the pause that followed she felt that if she didn’t escape now, she never would. “I’m sorry, it’s not your fault,” she said, trying to sound matter-of-fact. “I guess you were born with—all that.” She couldn’t look at “all that” while she spoke of it.
“No, I had to grow it, darling. Took me fifteen years, and it was a hell of a wait.”
Beebo moved to the edge of the sofa when Venus joined her. “Were you a poor proud orphan till some movie scout discovered you?”
“Oh, God no!” Venus laughed. “My family was solid apple pie. The trouble was, I was always so damn beautiful I never had a chance to be normal.” She spoke dispassionately, as if she were analyzing a friend. It wasn’t snobbish. “I was supposed to be fast and loose because I looked it. At first the attention spoiled me. I was cocky. A candy-box valentine brat with corkscrew curls—my mother’s pride and joy. Until I drove her frantic, and my friends out of my life. Nobody could stand me. Honestly. You laugh, but I cried when it happened. I couldn’t understand why I was alone all of a sudden.
“I got shy and scared. Went my own way and told the world to go to hell. After a while, when my figure caught up with my face, I made some new friends: boys. It was so easy to give in. So hard to be anything but what people thought you were,” she said, and Beebo responded with
