Chapter Thirteen Julie #3
The pictures on the bookshelves—headshots, portraits, family photos—were in standing frames.
The earlier photos captured Julie’s insouciant sultriness; the most recent ones showed a dignified older woman who had aged as gracefully as Hollywood would allow.
There were lots of pictures with Bert. He had been an old-school hunk when they first met; they were a very glamorous couple.
There were images of their children, a boy and girl, from their tow-headed infancy to adulthood.
Due to the capriciousness of genetics, sometimes extraordinary-looking people had ordinary-looking children, but Julie and Bert’s children were gorgeous.
Jane felt tinges of both admiration and jealousy.
“She certainly has had an amazing career,” Jane remarked.
“Incredible, you guys have met, like, everyone!” Lindsey added.
“Yes, it’s been quite a ride. We feel very lucky...”
Bert trailed off so Jane jumped in.
“I have some ideas about how we can organize, but tell us what your priorities are.”
Bert steeled himself. “Yes, great, so... I’m not sure we’re going to be in this house much longer.
Julie isn’t very well, and I’m not sure I can give her the best care here, so.
.. my daughter thinks it’s time to sell the house.
Downsize. Which means I have to figure out what to do with all our things. ”
This hint of melancholy spurred Lindsey to shift into therapy mode. “Is that what you want?”
Jane was slightly mortified by the baldness of the question, but Bert didn’t seem to mind. “It isn’t what I want, of course it isn’t, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t the right thing. Anyway, you girls can see why I’ve been putting this off.”
“Yes, it can be very hard. Very emotional,” Jane said soothingly. “So, are we packing for a move...?”
“No, not today. Today, I want to start paring some of it down, some of this stuff I want to give to our kids, some I think might be good for a museum, you know, motion picture or music, or maybe even there is talk of something in her hometown in Ohio, I don’t know, maybe some of it I can take to an auction house, there are a lot of possibilities.
What I need for now is to get it all organized and catalogued somehow, then I can start making decisions. ”
Jane was impressed by his logical restraint. “That makes perfect sense. We’ll start with smaller steps. We can prepare an inventory. I wouldn’t want to touch all the pictures you have on the wall—”
“And those are only some of them—we have pictures all over the house—”
“Yes, we saw some gorgeous ones on the piano!” Lindsey exclaimed.
“Anyway, if it’s okay with you, we can sort all the standing frames on the shelves, so the professional images are separated from the family ones, and then we can sort chronologically.”
“Yes, that’s good,” Bert said, valiantly trying to sound cheerful about it.
“It’s tedious work, and if you don’t want to stay, we can get a lot done on our own. We can stockpile questions we have for you whenever you want to drop in,” Jane told him.
“I think I’ll stay with you for the time being.”
Usually, working under the watchful eye of a client made Jane feel self-conscious. But today, she was glad that Bert was going to be there.
“Oh boy, I remember that like it was yesterday.”
Bert was holding a framed photograph of Julie from one of her variety specials in the seventies, in which she stood behind a checkout counter on a grocery store set.
Done up in a huge bouffant wig with a headscarf and heavily applied makeup, Julie wore a checkout girl uniform, complete with a name tag that said JULIE .
“When is that from?” Jane asked. She was cataloging the mementos in a spreadsheet on her MacBook while Lindsey organized books and cleared the shelves.
“Oh geez, I think seventy-five? Maybe seventy-six or seventy-seven. Julie did a bunch of variety specials in the seventies, and she did Julie the Checkout Girl on almost all of them.”
Jane had a vague notion of what a seventies variety show was from the clips she had randomly seen on YouTube.
It was such a different time—they seemed so innocent and goofy.
Now they’d been supplanted by reality shows, the professional entertainers clowning replaced by amateur clowns trying to entertain, undeterred by lack of skill or talent.
“She looks so cute!” Lindsey chirped.
“She loved playing this character. The gag was, she was a motormouth who would talk at the customer the entire time she was ringing up the purchase, oversharing all kinds of personal stuff, so the customer could hardly get a word in. And then she’d mess up the cash register, charging two hundred bucks for a carton of milk, so she’d have to start all over. ”
“Oh, I’ve met people like that. It must’ve been hilarious,” Jane said.
“Julie actually worked at a grocery store when she was in high school, and sort of hated it, but sometimes when showbiz was really on her nerves she’d say, ‘Imagine a job where you punch in, you punch out, then leave it all behind, not thinking about it anymore. There’s something great about that.
’ Don’t get me wrong, she loved working, she was a born entertainer—but everyone gets aggravated sometimes. ”
“Yes, we do,” Jane agreed.
“It’s only human, of course!” Lindsey chimed in.
“Please don’t repeat this, but sometimes, Julie would take the costume home and put it on, because it tickled her so much. When Bob found out—Bob Mackie, he did all the costumes—he insisted on making her a bunch of duplicates. And she was so damn funny doing it, too. People loved it.”
It sounded a bit like hoary schtick to Jane, but she could also see it being a crowd-pleaser. “I bet. It’s fun seeing a beautiful woman frump it up, right?”
“Oh, she looked beautiful no matter what she was wearing, and she still does. And this was right around the time—well, if this is from seventy-seven—that we had our second baby. Julie never slowed down, not for one minute.”
Being around all this memorabilia was precipitating a strange feeling in Jane.
Nostalgia. Looking at Julie Robin’s old movie posters and publicity stills reminded Jane that her mother loved movies.
In fact, her mother was a fan of Julie Robin—she admired her for the same reasons Jane did.
When Jane was in elementary school, her mother took her to all kinds of movies, some rather sophisticated adult movies, movies that her father had no interest in seeing.
It was a wonderful respite for her, one that gave her glimpses of worlds she could imagine escaping to when she was old enough to leave home.
Jane realized that one of the only times her mother was ever still was when she was watching a movie.
It must have been an escape for her, too.
Jane was enjoying Bert’s reminiscences and didn’t want him to stop, but she was also feeling the imperative to get all this stuff organized.
“I’m afraid we’re not making much progress.”
“I’m sorry,” Bert said. “Memories keep getting jogged. Wonderful memories.”
“And I love hearing about them,” Jane assured him. “I just don’t want you to be disappointed in how much—or how little—we’re able to get done.”
“You don’t need to worry about that. You can always come back. I’ve got nothing but time nowadays.”
After another hour or so passed, they heard noise in the living room and Bert rose to his feet.
“That’ll be Julie. Would you like to meet her?”
“We’d love to,” Jane replied.
As Bert walked out, Lindsey whispered, “Oh my god, it is so cuuute how he adores her! So sweet!”
“Yes. It’s a little heartbreaking.”
“It’s heartwarming, not heartbreaking!” Lindsey replied.
A few minutes later, Bert asked them to come into the living room.
When they entered, Jane saw Julie lying on the couch in a long nightgown, eyes closed.
A home health aide, wearing a uniform with a cheerful, brightly colored pattern, stood unobtrusively nearby, one hand on a wheelchair, the other clutching a can of Ensure.
Julie’s hair was short and gray, a startling change from her trademark thick auburn tresses, and she wore no makeup.
She looked very tired, very frail. Having just seen all those images of Julie in her prime, it was a little shocking.
Was she still beautiful? There was a dignity to the way she was acquiescing to the indignity of aging, and that was beautiful.
“Baby, these are the young ladies who are helping me organize today.”
Simply opening her eyes seemed to require a herculean effort on Julie’s part. Her gaze was placid and vague—Jane could not tell if she was even registering their presence.
“Are you feeling okay today, my sweetheart?”
Julie’s gaze landed on Bert, and she nodded.
“I’m going to say that means you are feeling great, right, baby?”
As Bert knelt by her side and kissed her cheek, Jane thought she saw Julie flush with delight. Something came alive in her eyes, and she said, very softly, almost a whisper, “Baby.”
Bert gently caressed her cheek.
“That’s right, baby, I’m here.” He looked up at Jane and Lindsey. “She’s not very talkative these days.”
Julie’s head rolled to one side and gazed at Bert in a way that Jane thought seemed adoring. She may have been drifting off, but she was moored to him, he was her anchor.
“Bertie,” she said softly, with a faint smile.
The day had been a trip down Bert’s memory lane, and he was an engaging and evocative guide.
They’d managed to get a lot of the inventorying done, but not much else.
When they put all the pictures and mementos back on the shelves, it felt more like creating a shrine to Julie than actually organizing.
Perhaps, though, creating a shrine was a kind of organizing. Maybe even the best kind.