Chapter 11
Eleven
Monday, the day before we would return to Bramley Hall, proved to be less eventful than Sunday. A previous guest had left a jigsaw puzzle in a drawer of a sideboard. Loretta and I worked it together.
By invitation of my puzzle partner, Mr. Giovanni Leone paid us a visit at eleven o’clock.
In Hollywood, Mr. Leone was to shoes what Miss Marjorie Merrimen was to dresses and accessories.
I protested that I had mostly worn slippers, which accommodated my unusual feet well enough.
Loretta insisted that slippers would not do.
“We’re a walking family, honey. You’ll be taking long walks on the beach with us, long walks in parks.
We’ll be going to San Marino from time to time to walk the Huntington estate.
Henry Huntington, a dear man, died three years ago, but he left an amazing legacy.
Henry was book crazy, art crazy, and simply mad about elaborate gardens.
The estate is six hundred acres, and half of it is magnificently landscaped.
We sometimes walk around and around there for hours. ”
Mr. Leone didn’t merely sell shoes. He and his crew of artisans crafted them to order.
All the most stylish people—women and men—wore them.
Loretta insisted that I must relent and at once get on with having my feet measured.
Mr. Leone’s time was valuable, she said; six pairs of his shoes, suitable for a variety of occasions and activities, would cost us as much as a Ford Model A Victoria.
I started to react, but the slightest curve at the right corner of Loretta’s mouth and a certain twinkle in Mr. Leone’s large brown eyes revealed that she was ribbing me.
I said, “If I had been making such shoes for years, I would by now have retired to a villa in Italy.”
Mr. Leone smiled. “When these six pairs are delivered, I will do just that.”
His voice was soft, his manner as gentle as that of a clergyman whose faith was genuine.
No doubt Loretta had prepared him for what he would see when I removed my socks and slippers.
However, I was touched by the matter-of-fact way he proceeded to take measurements while putting me at ease by telling sweet, amusing stories about some of the celebrities who wore his shoes.
He made me feel almost as if my feet were not merely unremarkable but were also fair enough to grace a pair of glass slippers and attract the attention of a prince.
By the time he insisted on putting my socks on for me and helping me into my slippers, his tenderness had brought me close to tears.
I did not, however, want to become a Weepy Wanda, sobbing into my hanky every ten minutes until it shrank to the size of a postage stamp, so I counseled my heart to behave itself.
To this point in my narrative, I might have left the impression that my three-day journey from life as an enslaved freak to that of the ward of a prominent family in the film business was as smooth and joyful as what any bird might feel when taking flight from a tree branch into the heights of the sky.
In fact, though a profound gladness was the greater part of it, I was often also in emotional turmoil—afraid that my ascent would suddenly become a fall, abashed by the upper-class splendor for which I was so unsuited, confused by the manners, traditions, and rules of this new world.
Looking back, I can see that it was neither the wealth of my new guardians nor the prospect of freedom, not even the love with which they embraced me, that gave me the pluck and resolution to make my way forward and become what they believed I could become.
More than anything else, it was the kindness with which they showered me, kindness without pity, that encouraged me always onward, and not just their kindness but also that of people like Miss Merrimen and Mr. Leone and so many others who were their friends.
The times are mean and meaner every day, and the colony of those who make motion pictures is no less mean than the larger world it entertains, perhaps more so.
Somehow, by some quality that Loretta and Franklin possessed, some quality that included probity and integrity and compassion but was not properly described by those words alone, by some quality that surpassed my understanding at that time, they had gathered around them a community of like souls, the kinder people in an otherwise mean and indifferent cosmos.
They preferred that I call them Father and Mother, but I could not.
My saviors would forever be Franklin and Loretta to me, nothing less.
I would have felt most comfortable using the honorifics “sir” and “ma’am,” but they forbade me from doing so.
I thought of myself not as one of the family but as their devoted friend.
Although I was granted many privileges, I sought none.
I was astonished to have been rescued, to be valued.
I challenged myself to be the friend of the family who would never fail them.
That was the moment I knew I must soon begin to write about them and all they did for me.
My material would be far different from the cruelty, narcissism, and carelessness of Tom and Daisy Buchanan and their friends that Nick Carraway had chronicled in The Great Gatsby.
Even if the Fairchilds and their kind had been, underneath the glamor, a “rotten crowd” to equal the Buchanans and their ilk, I did not possess Nick’s keen nose for moral negligence of all degrees.
My seventeen years had relentlessly exposed me to the supreme depravity of Captain and his kind, which I imagined had desensitized me to the scent of lesser wickedness.
That night before we made the short trip to Bramley Hall, in the privacy of my own room in the bungalow, where I could not be heard, I cried softly.
The cause was not sadness, but quite the opposite.
I indulged myself for a short time and then slept.
I didn’t dream of Captain, and I hoped I never would again.