Chapter Thirty-Four
Thirty-Four
After three years with Harmony Sussman as her teacher, Isadora had become, in her family’s opinion, a musical genius.
She could play a romantic piece like Liszt’s “Dream of Love” and follow at once with a piano sonata by Haydn in high style.
However, on those occasions when Izzy smiled while at the keyboard, she was playing a number by Duke Ellington or the Hot Five, or a tune Chick Webb’s band performed on a broadcast from the Savoy Ballroom.
The following Monday, at three o’clock in the afternoon, Chef Luigi Lattuada and I were standing on opposite sides of the center island in the kitchen, having coffee, when the subject of Isadora came up somewhat indirectly. I said, “This is really good coffee.”
“I add a little chicory root when I brew it.”
“Chicory root,” I said. “I’ll have to remember that.”
“Yes, a day might arrive when your life depends on remembering chicory root. You never know.”
“Is the difference only chicory root?”
“I also add a little cinnamon. I hope remembering both that and chicory won’t tax your memory too much.”
“This is really, really good coffee.”
“Even though I take great pride in my coffee, such pride that I would kill any man who spoke against it, forgive me if I suspect you came here to talk about something else.”
After the siblings rushed out of the schoolroom at the end of the day’s instruction, each hurrying to the object of her or his fascination, I had wandered the gardens with no conscious purpose.
I was in a state of mild melancholy that I could not explain.
In truth, I didn’t desire to understand the source of it.
I wasn’t a moody person and didn’t want to slide into being one.
Perhaps I had wandered into the kitchen because the analysis and advice of a chef seemed far less likely to damage my psyche than would the diagnosis of a trained psychotherapist. Were I to praise Chef’s coffee a third time, I would appear insincere; though superb java, it wasn’t so good that he could justify murdering anyone who spoke ill of the brew, and we both knew it.
When I began to discuss my melancholy, I realized I knew the cause of it after all.
“Isadora is sixteen. She’s finding herself, her talent, her purpose so fast that in a couple years she’ll be off on her own.
And a couple years after that, Gertie will go, and then Harry.
It’ll all fly by as if it were a few months.
What will the Bram be like without them? ”
Chef deeply inhaled the fragrant steam rising from his mug and sighed with pleasure.
“It will still be the Bram in every way that matters,” he said, as if he could discern the future from the aroma of a particular cup of coffee as reliably as phyllomancers could predict events by studying tea leaves.
“What comes next surely could be less charming, though we might be surprised. Franklin and Loretta built this place for the love of family and to delight children. A place that’s built for such reasons, whether grand or modest, will always inspire love and provide delight.
We just have to be patient and see how it works out.
Baby birds shed their eggs for a nest and then the nest for the sky.
But these baby birds won’t ever shed us, Adiel.
They have been inoculated against every cold affliction of the heart.
They’ll be warmhearted all their lives, and they’ll love us as much as we love them.
Family is important to them, to us all.”
When birds leave the nest in which they hatched, they make a new nest elsewhere.
A nest provides safety, high above the reach of most predators.
Bramley Hall was the only nest that I had ever known, and I didn’t have the instinctive skills to build a new one.
Franklin and Loretta made me a beneficiary in their wills, promised me a life in the Bram, and it was their nature to ensure that every promise they made was ironclad.
I was not afraid of being put out of Bramley Hall to forage for myself.
I was not worried that Franklin and Loretta and my three siblings might go away.
However, by the power of some unpredictable calamity, they might be taken away—leaving me the last of the Fairchild family and alone.
There is less to fear when you have nothing to lose.
Following Gertie’s crisis in January, Franklin and Loretta had been swept back into a troubled film project that he described as like an ocean vortex, whirling ever faster, pulling everyone—cast and crew—into oblivion.
Time passed, and the shoot wrapped, and they marveled that the film was “less embarrassing than expected.”
Late in the afternoon of the third day of July, Franklin was sitting in a lounge chair, under a patio umbrella, on the deck by the swimming pool.
He was casually but smartly dressed. In an hour, he and Loretta were having dinner at a restaurant on the beach in Santa Monica to celebrate the completion of the picture.
I settled in the chair beside his. “You look as handsome as that new guy—Cary Grant.”
“You’re a terrible liar, Addie. No one but Cary Grant is as handsome as Cary Grant. He’s going to be the biggest thing ever.”
“Well, he’s always well put together. In that outfit you’re as well put together as he is.”
“I’ll accept that much. I’m more a Buster Keaton type who can dress like Cary Grant.”
Six months had passed since Loretta recounted what happened to her in the earthquake of 1906. She’d left it to Franklin to tell me about Mercy Village, the orphanage to which they had been committed separately.
Now, as the sun painted ripples of orange light on the swimming pool, he said, “Mercy Village isn’t worth the time it takes to damn its name.
” Franklin was not given to anger often, perhaps because anger is said to be, after pride, the most lethal emotion to the prospects of the soul.
Now his voice was marked not by rage but by impersonal displeasure at unworthy acts, a cool indignation.
“I was sent there on the same bus with Loretta. I had more low experience than she did. I knew right off that the place was a sewer. I knew what risks a young girl took by being in the care of the couple who owned the place—Nigel and Marigold. Loretta was so innocent. I had to look after her. We became friends, though we never imagined where our friendship would one day lead.”
Two iridescent ruby-throated hummingbirds were busy in the day before us, hovering in feathered splendor and then abruptly darting to another flower to sip what it offered.
I asked, “How long were you kept in Mercy Village?”
“More than three years. By then Loretta was almost thirteen. I was fifteen and could pass for eighteen. Those days, less than half of kids graduated—or even attended—high school. There were no laws against child labor. Everywhere kids our age were working for low wages, pitiful wages, but they were on their own and eager for it. We knew how hard it might be. Many children worked twelve hours a day. But some prospered. If we stayed in Mercy Village, we had no hope of prospering. It was a rough-and-tumble time.”
“The orphanage just let you walk out?” I asked.
“We didn’t ask, Addie. We just left one night. The next four years, through 1913, we did piecework in the garment industry.”
Word by word, his voice grew softer. He stared past me at the house, his mind conveying him to another time.
Considering how well his life had gone these past two decades, I might have expected a modest smile, a suggestion of quiet satisfaction.
But his face composed itself into a somber expression.
When he returned to the moment, he said, “President Wilson was promising peace while ensuring World War I, meanwhile imprisoning his domestic adversaries without trial. American troops deposed the president of Mexico. That same year, Loretta and I were married. Cecil B. DeMille’s movie Squaw Man, the first full-length picture, was a huge hit.
Motion pictures were exploding in popularity.
I was twenty. My bride was seventeen. We needed to get out of the threads-and-needles business and find what we wanted to devote our lives to.
Back then, the choices seemed to be either working for a company that made guns and bullets or one making movies. ”
I said, “You’re not a guns-and-bullets guy.”
“I’m not,” he agreed, “but I’m glad they exist. Without them, the only movies we’d be making would be about what a great, kind man Kaiser Wilhelm was.
Anyway, Loretta and I didn’t have much to offer Hollywood other than energy.
Loretta was as pretty as they get, and she had writing talent.
I had nothing more than a line of bunkum, hokum, and humbug.
But Hollywood usually treats a fast-talking guy with a good-looking girl on his arm as if he’s a genius and she’s pretty damn smart in her own right for recognizing his potential.
It’s pathetic, but that’s how it was, is, and probably always will be.
So we faked our way into low-level crew jobs and bootstrapped each other out of the trenches and into the executive suite. ”
The expression that had persisted since he’d alluded to World War I suddenly gave way to a far more cheerful aspect. His eyes were done with melancholy in favor of warm satisfaction. The arc of his smile was as good a definition of affection as any in a dictionary.
I followed the direction of his stare and saw Loretta standing on the terrace, outside the library, casually but smartly dressed for dinner at the beach, a radiant figure in the oblique sunlight. She waved at us.
Franklin and I got up from our lounge chairs, and I said, “I’m amazed to be here. I can never repay you or find the words . . . the words to . . .”
His frown was not of disapproval but of dismay, and it lasted only an instant.
Perhaps he saw that I might break into tears and that breaking into tears was the last thing I wanted to do.
He said, “Listen, kid, the truth is we brought you here because we’re selfish Hollywood narcissists who ruthlessly use people, use them and use them until they have nothing more to give.
We do so without shame or regret, and in fact with wicked glee, so you had better continue to give more than you get or you are gone. Is that clear?”
He had managed to transform my pending tears into laughter. Hugging him, I said, “Yes, sir, it’s very clear. I’ve seen Mr. Max Schreck in Nosferatu in your very own screening room, so I know the kind of creatures I’m dealing with.”
“Good,” he said. “Now, I’m going to dinner with my wife, where we can spend a few hours scheming against not only you but also our other children. It falls to you to have dinner here and to pretend to Chef Lattuada that you enjoy his food.”
He kissed my brow and headed up the garden path toward the house. Loretta waved again, at me this time, and I waved back.
And so, after spending some time in the gardens, I went into the house and lied to Chef Lattuada, assuring him that dinner was marvelous when in fact it was so much better than that.