Chapter 12 Grady
GRADY
The morning after we met with the attorney, Mara and I decided to visit our mother’s grave.
We stopped first at a small flower shop in Brentwood for white daisies and pale pink roses.
Our mother had loved daisies, often saying they reminded her of her own mother.
The clerk wrapped them in brown paper and tied it with string and soon we were back in Mara’s Range Rover, headed east on Sunset Boulevard.
As we drove, the neighborhood shifted from the massive gated estates of Brentwood into Beverly Hills, past the iconic pink Beverly Hills Hotel, then into the grittier energy of the Sunset Strip with its towering billboards advertising the latest films and albums. The palm trees that lined the boulevard stood tall against the brilliant blue sky.
This had once been my world. Yet it felt as foreign as Mars to me now.
My life in Willet Cove was quiet, filled with ordinary, simple joys.
It was the life I’d chosen. Had it been the right choice?
One never knew, I guess, about the decisions we made along the way.
Were they right or misguided? Would a different choice have brought everything we desired?
Or was it simpler than that? Our destinies preordained and it was only self-delusion that thought otherwise?
As we turned north toward Glendale, the dramatic brown peaks of the San Gabriel Mountains came into view, rising against the horizon. The landscape shifted again, becoming more suburban, hillier. Spanish-style buildings gave way to residential neighborhoods climbing the foothills.
If I took the money, I could buy Esme a house. That was a fact. I could send Robbie to a good college, one worthy of his intellect. Robbie could do so much good in the world with the financial foundation beneath him.
But would it take the ugly pit out of my stomach? The one that had been there since I learned the truth about my father? It had faded in the years since I’d left L.A. but only like a dormant illness. All of this brought it all back. The trial. The reporters following us.
“What’re you thinking about?” Mara asked as we wound higher into the hills.
I turned to look at her. She wore jeans and a blouse but still managed to look like a movie star. “The twenty-million dollar question.”
“Any decisions?”
“Does it make us bad people if we take it?”
“Hank says no. I say maybe. I’m not sure,” Mara said. “But I do know that money in the right hands can do good, even if we’re not good.”
I thought about Esme’s favorite Mary Oliver poem, “Wild Geese.” “What’s the Mary Oliver line? We don’t have to be good.”
“We just have to be like the geese, right?” Mara asked.
“That’s what Ms. Oliver tells us, yes.”
I glanced out the window at the dry brown hillsides dotted with scrub brush and the occasional oak tree. It was a nice seventy-five degrees, without a cloud in the sky. The sun streaming in through the windows warmed my skin.
Forest Lawn’s wrought-iron gates appeared ahead, grand and perfectly maintained.
We drove through, and the brown hills gave way to green lawns, manicured and watered, rolling across the hillsides despite the drought-dry landscape surrounding them.
Palm trees and oaks cast shadows across rows of headstones.
Mara navigated the winding cemetery roads past sections with names like Garden of Honor and Courts of Remembrance, finally pulling off onto a smaller path and parking under an oak tree.
We walked across recently mowed grass past rows of headstones.
Some were elaborate, towering monuments.
Others were simple plaques flush with the ground.
Finally, we came upon our mother’s granite headstone, placed on a slight rise, under the shade of a pepper tree, its lacy green branches fluttering in the breeze.
CAROLINE NASH HALE
Beloved Mother
1958-2007
Mara knelt and brushed some leaves off the stone.
I placed the flowers in a metal cylinder built into the ground next to the headstone.
We sat down on the grass, legs crossed, facing the headstone.
The sun was warm on my back. Birds called from somewhere in the pepper tree.
In the distance, I could hear a lawn mower.
“It’s nice here, isn’t it?” Mara asked. “Peaceful.”
“Yeah. This was a good choice. Mom liked the shade.”
Mara smiled. “She was always concerned about getting too much sun on her skin. I think of it every time I put sunscreen on the kids.”
“Do you think she knew who he really was?”
“Dad?”
I nodded. “Yeah. I think about that sometimes. I can’t remember what they were like together. When I examine those years, it’s like a magician pulling one of those endless scarves from a sleeve. The silk goes on and on without any conclusion.”
“I remember finding her in her bathroom one night after we were supposed to be in bed,” Mara said, pulling her knees to her chest and resting her chin on them. “She was curled up in this ball—on the floor—crying her eyes out. I was probably eight at the time. Dad was somewhere else.”
“I can’t remember him being home much at all,” I said. “Did you ask her why she was crying?” The image of our pretty mother on the floor made my chest ache.
“No. The minute she saw me, she jumped up, wiping her eyes, pretending like nothing was wrong.”
“She always kept whatever was really going on to herself. At least in front of us,” I said. “I do remember one thing, though. A few months before she died, she told me that who we choose to marry is the most important decision we’ll ever make.”
“That could be damning or the opposite.”
“Right. Did she see her marriage as a blessing or a curse?”
“If you take the inheritance, you can take care of Esme and the kids,” Mara said.
I flinched at the abrupt change of subject. “Yeah, I’ve been thinking about that. Even if she doesn’t feel the same way I do, I could give her a house and money for the kids’ college funds.”
“And use some of it for your foundation.”
“Yeah. I’ve been thinking about that too,” I said.
We sat quietly for a few minutes. Mara pulled a blade of grass from the lawn, twisting it between her fingers.
“I went to see him in prison. A few months back,” Mara said.
I stared at her, stunned. “I had no idea you were still in contact with him.”
“That was the one and only time I went to see him. I just wanted to ask him some questions. He looked so different. All hollowed out and green tinged. Whatever power he’d once possessed had been sucked away, leaving just skin and bones.”
“You think he was murdered?”
She shook her head. “No. I think he decided to end things. Maybe after I visited him.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I said some pretty ugly things to him,” Mara said.
“Well-deserved,” I said. “Did you get any answers to your questions?”
“Not really. When they brought him out to the visiting room, he acted like I was meeting him for a social occasion. It was so weird. Like we could just order a martini and a steak like he used to when he took me out to lunch.” Her voice grew husky as she continued.
“He asked about the kids and Hank. He had the nerve to insinuate that Hank’s directing career was because of him.
I almost walked out at that point. But I wanted to look him in the eye and see if there was any remorse on his part. ”
“Did you see any?”
“No. He said I had to understand the environment he worked in. It wasn’t an office job.
It was Hollywood. Power dynamics existed whether he created them or not.
Those women weren’t na?ve. They wanted careers.
He had influence. He told me that’s how the world works—people trade what they have for what they want.
” She laughed, short and humorless. “And then he told me some of the women thanked him for what he’d done for them.
He said we wouldn’t see that in the papers even though it was true.
Hollywood runs on transactions and that he didn’t invent the rules.
He just knew how to play the game better than most. Can you believe that? ”
“I can now that I know who he really was, yeah.”
She lowered her voice in a good imitation of our father. “‘It was a different time, Mara. People didn’t see things the way they do now.’”
“So no accountability?”
“Zero. He said he’d given his life to the industry.
Created hundreds of jobs and helped thousands of families put food on the table.
He still saw himself as a hero. A misunderstood one.
” She shook her head. “And this was the kicker. ‘Men like me get sacrificed so everyone else can feel clean. History will be kinder than the press. I’m no threat.’”
“Unbelievable.”
“I know. I’m like, ‘But you are a threat. That’s why you’re in here.’”
“Did you say that to him?”
“I did, yeah. And some other stuff too. I told him if history’s kinder to him then it’s because men like him rewrote it to suit their own narrative. That made him mad. It’s the only time during our conversation that I saw the mask slip.”
“Interesting.”
“And then he asked me if I’d forgiven him.”
“What did you say?” I asked.
“It’ll be a cold day in hell before that happened. And that that’s exactly where he was headed.”
“Yikes.”
“I know. But that wasn’t the worst thing. Not to him anyway. I told him he was irrelevant now. His actions made any of the good he brought to the film industry disappear, like they never happened at all. He was only known as a rapist now, not a film maker.”
“Which is true,” I said.
“And he knew it.”
We sat with that for a moment.
“Did he ask about me?” I asked finally.
She shook her head. “No. He talked about himself the entire time.”
“It’s weird he left us money, considering how little he seemed to care about us.”
“Don’t forget it was Mom who made him set up the trusts before she died,” Mara said. “Mr. Wilson said as much.”
I nodded. “One last attempt to make sure we would be all right without her.”
“She’d want us to take what was ours,” Mara said. “Be happy. Do good.”
Regardless of whatever else was true, even I couldn’t deny my mother’s intentions when it came to us. She’d somehow managed to get a selfish man to do what she wanted. Take care of her kids.
“I wish I had a sign from her,” I said. “Telling me what to do.”
“The sign was the trust she set up and the will itself. And she brought money into the marriage. None of it was possible without her.”
That truth slapped me right in the face. Mara was right. My mother couldn’t have been clearer about what she wanted. She wanted us to have what she felt belonged to us. Maybe it was time I did too.
The weather remained warm that afternoon and into the evening.
Hank had called to say he wouldn’t be home for dinner, so Mara and I decided to grill burgers and eat outside.
Mara had soothing Hawaiian music playing in the kitchen as she cut vegetables and put together a salad.
My niece and nephew shrieked with laughter as one of them launched off the diving board.
I stood at the grill, flipping burgers. The scent of grilled meat reminded me of summer and all the fun times I’d enjoyed at Gillian and Alex’s pool with Esme and the kids.
Jordan stood at the side of the pool, dripping wet. “Uncle Grady, watch this!”
“I’m watching,” I called back.
He took a running start and cannonballed into the deep end. Water sloshed over the side, soaking the concrete.
“Ten out of ten,” I said.
Jordan grinned, triumphant, and swam off to join his sister in a game of catch the beach ball.
I took a sip of my beer, enjoying the sounds of the kids’ laughter and the warmth of the evening.
This was the type of life I could have with Esme and the kids if I could stomach how we got there.
I thought again of Gillian and Alex’s beautiful deck and the happy afternoons and evenings we’d spent around their pool during the last few weeks of summer.
I'd felt envious of Alex more than once.
I hated to admit it, even to myself, but it was true.
Not just the money, but what it represented.
Security and the ability to provide for and protect the people you loved from worry.
I’d walked away from a job that could have given me all of that.
At the time, it had felt imperative that I reject anything to do with my father for fear I would become him.
But there was also the sense that I shouldn’t get to have such a wonderful life after what he’d done to innocent women.
I’d wanted to punish myself for being too naive to see who he really was.
Perhaps, though, I didn't have to keep punishing myself for his crimes.
I could take the money. Transform it into something good.
Use it to take care of the people I loved. My mother would have wanted that.
Tomorrow I'd fly home. And tomorrow night, I'd tell Esme how I felt about her and about the inheritance and the dreams I had of the kind of life we could enjoy together. It was time to be a grown-up. Long past time, actually.