All That Glitters (38 page)

She paused while the waiter brought tea. When he left, Donna resumed. “I went to that pretty church on the square, the one with all the flowers in front, and I prayed. Do you know what I prayed? That they can part without wounds, that they can just quietly get it over with now and go their separate ways. Is that too much to ask? I don’t want to see her hurt anymore.”

“What about the baby?” I asked.

She shrugged helplessly. “She insists she’s going to go ahead and have it.”

“She mustn’t. It’ll ruin her. Hedda—”

It wasn’t to be thought of. When April reappeared, Donna discreetly withdrew, leaving me to talk turkey with her daughter. Yet, though I spoke as persuasively as I knew how, I could tell I wasn’t getting anywhere.

“Hedda doesn’t scare me, and Frank wants a child. Frances can’t give him one. I can. I’m going to. I don’t care what happens, I’m going to do it. For him. A son and heir.”

Greater love hath no woman than that she should give up a blooming movie career for her lover whom she can never have, but to whom she can present an illegitimate son. But what was to happen to the kid? This wasn’t the eighties, when women could have out-of-wedlock children and so what? This was still the early sixties, when such things were mightily frowned upon.

I was forced to tell Donna I’d struck out. And soon we began seeing another, less serene April. The sweetness seemed to evaporate; she became nettlesome and crabby. I began feeling nervous around her. Jenny said it was because of the baby; I didn’t think so. One day she cut her hair off at a whack, dyed it brown, gave up makeup, began wearing weird clothes, talking to herself. It was scrambled-eggs time again. In truth, there are certain people you meet up with who have an aura of doom. It has nothing to do with a dark or perverse nature, nothing malign, but you sense that they’re just not going to make it, that sooner or later things are going to go sour and there’s a bad end waiting for them. It was beginning to seem that that’s how it was with April.

We loved her, we cared about her, we feared for her. She was falling apart before our eyes and we couldn’t help her. I called Dr. Rand once, twice, three times, burning up the wires to Paris until he hung up on me, then wouldn’t take my calls. April kept saying that things were closing in on her, and I assumed it was because of the Frank situation. But it was so much more. Because for someone in her position, everything was doubled, trebled, quadrupled. By now she was living in that rarefied atmosphere of the star, she was even getting a star complex, but at the same time detesting all the circumstances that made this possible. “It’s strangling me,” I remember her once saying. “I can’t breathe. I can’t catch my breath. I hate it. Oh, Charlie—I really hate it!”

She did, too; she hated it but was trapped by it—just one more specimen in the Hollywood zoo, the Metro menagerie. Ava Gardner was living in Rome at the time and she and April had met, become friendly. Ava was a girl who’d sorted things out for herself, however painfully, and she had good advice for the younger girl—Get out, baby—but April was oddly passive even as she was being swept up into the maelstrom, round and round and round, then sucked down and down, out of sight, to the place where the only written word is
finis.

Time passed. Lots of time. We even lost track of her, and though we waited for cocktail-party seepage concerning the scheduled birth, none was forthcoming. By now Jen and I were having a few problems of our own, domestic variety, and after the picture wrapped she decided to stay on in London for a while, and I returned home alone over the Pole. When I got to Hollywood, the rumor factory was grinding out talk pertaining to Frances: it was being bruited that she was in a hospital “for observation.” The word was first made public in Lenny Lyons’s column, then it came out in Hedda, who until now had been insisting that Frances had entered St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica for an “exploratory operation,” and Frank confirmed it all when I saw him.

Frank was often distracted, stumbling for the first time in his life that I knew of, and trying desperately to put together a new deal under his Adonis Productions banner. Having spent prodigally to buy the rights to a current Broadway stage hit, starring a prominent actress, he vowed to have the success of his career (incidentally, earmarking the role of the daughter as April’s).

“What can Frankie Adonis be thinking of?” carped Hedda in her morning pillar. “Going around town telling all his friends that none other than April Rains will play Cassandra in his new movie. A fatal move if ever I heard one. Between you and me and the gatepost, April is rumored not much up to playing much of anything, since she is presently horse de combat [sic] in a Connecticut rest home.” Racka-racka.

Hedda was right about one thing: April was definitely a patient at the Hartford Retreat, a mental hospital where various notables from sundry branches of show business have gone at one time or other; the place was on a par with Menninger’s. Judy Garland had been in and out several times during her periods of depression, other celebrities as well.

On my next trip east I hired a car and drove up to Hartford to see my family, then went to visit April. It proved to be the unhappiest visit of all. “Hello, Charlie,” she said as I came into her bungalow.

“Hello yourself. How’re you doing?”

“All right, I guess. They don’t complain about me. I may be getting out of here soon. Maybe.”

“Good news, baby.” I kissed her. She didn’t look so hot. “Not off your feed, are you?”

“A little.” She pulled a droll face. “How’s Jenny?”

It was my turn to make a face. I explained that Jenny was still in London and for the time being we’d agreed to disagree. I said I’d been in touch with Donna, but just now April seemed more interested in my vicissitudes than in my correspondence with her mother. I dealt with my boring story briefly, then maneuvered the conversation around to her again. “Well, beauty, how’s it going? And remember, this is your old pal Chazz. Don’t try to kid me.”

“I guess you know—I lost the son and heir, woe is me.” Woe is her was right. When I touched her hand, it started to tremble and her face began working; I slipped quickly to her side and put my arms tight around her.

“Don’t, hey, don’t, please.” I might have said, “Hey, it won’t help,” but maybe it would have; whose arms had she cried in lately? Who was there for her to turn to except guys with Easter Island faces and shrink degrees from Vienna? She had every right to shed tears. What worse calamity for a woman than to lose the baby of her body? April was a staunch and stalwart girl; but I knew that she’d suffered profoundly the loss of this child—Frank’s child, which she’d endured so much to bring into the world, only to find out eleven days later that the baby had died in its crib, what the doctors call S.I.D.—Sudden Infant Death—fine one minute, not breathing the next. It had been a bitter, bitter blow, one she never fully recovered from. Her guilt had been overwhelming. Did people think she’d suffocated it on purpose? Did Frank think she’d been negligent?
Had
she been? Lots of nutty ideas like that.

In time her body healed, but her mind was something else again; that was unstitched, too, and soon began to unravel.

“Sorry, honey, I’m so sorry. I know how much you wanted it.” She had me weeping against her cheek; this scene really undid me. I mean, what do you say? Frank’s kid.

“He wanted it so much,” she said, pulling some Kleenex from a box on the table, some for her, some for me. We blotted up each other’s faces. “I guess it just wasn’t in the cards.” She sniffed and balled her tissue, then backboarded it into the waste-basket. “Bad genes, maybe. I read this article that says everything’s in the genes. I wanted him to be a present to Frank. He wanted it so much. Damn. I screwed up his kid. And now there won’t be any more, doctor says.”

I told her she wasn’t the first one all this had happened to. “It’s how things happen sometimes.” In my heart I pitied her, a thing I knew she’d hate me for, and I masked it as best I could, saying that since it was such a lovely day outside, why not enjoy it?

Outside, nature seemed to spread itself generously on all sides as if purely for our benefit—green, green everywhere, with patches of flowers and attractive glimpses of water. I could see that she was receiving good treatment, and what was better, she seemed to be responding. But she was having problems, lots of problems. By now it was pretty clear to her that the movie career was in jeopardy, but she didn’t care about that. Surprisingly, she also failed to show much interest in ever getting it together with Frank again. It was a case of a bit too much water over the dam, I thought, too much blood under the bridge.

“Frank…” I began, then stopped, wondering how to go on with what I had to tell her.

She smiled. “Yes? Frank what?” She spoke quickly, as if to dispense with the matter in a businesslike fashion. “What about him?”

“I talked to him the other day. I told him—in fact I promised him I’d come and see you.”

“How is Frank?” she asked. I didn’t like the way that question sounded; flat, impersonal, uncaring.

Fine, I replied, Frank was fine.

“He always is, isn’t he?” I glanced quickly at her, searching for something behind the words, but I could tell from her blank expression there was nothing hidden intended; it was only a commonplace. “What’s he up to these days?”

Those last words answered my unspoken question; she hadn’t heard from him, was probably ignorant of the recent changes in his life. I mentioned one or two matters involving him that I thought might arouse her interest, but she showed little. Then I said, “I’m supposed to tell you—he wants you to know: Frances is in the hospital.”

April was genuinely upset. “Nothing serious, I hope.”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Oh.” She lowered her lids as though to obscure her thought. “Poor, poor Frank. As if he didn’t have enough problems. What is it? Not cancer?” I nodded. “Can they do anything?”

I shook my head. “It seems to be that old question of time.”

“Oh.”

I paused fractionally, then: “April?”

“Yes?”

“Do you understand what that means? If Frances dies, I mean?”

“Oh God.” She shut her eyes again and sat down abruptly on a bench, as if her knees had given out all at once. “Don’t say it. Please, Charlie, I don’t want to hear it.”

“Hear what?”

“What you’re getting up the nerve to say. Whatever you’ve come here to tell me. If it’s about Frank—I don’t want to hear it.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“I do. Charlie—this is it. I’m not going to see him anymore. I’m sorry his wife’s dying, but I don’t want to see him. I’m cutting off. I’m getting out. Before—before—”

“Before you hurt him more, you mean.”

“
No!
Before I go—g-go down the tubes.”

“You’re not going down the tubes—don’t say that.”

“I am, I am, I feel it, every day it gets worse. They can’t really help me here, I tell you it’s not
going to work
!”

“What makes you think that?”

Her sad smile as she shook her head; I’ll never forget it. She was turning in her number; they’d retire it, of course, but the game was over. And what then?

“April, honey, listen to me, you’re upset. The baby, Frank—don’t—don’t tell him this, not now—not yet.”

“No, Charlie. I want
you
to tell him. I want you to go to him and tell him I’ve stopped loving him, that no matter what happens I can’t marry him, that he can’t marry me. It isn’t possible anymore. It’s too late. The boat sailed. The good ship
Lollipop
.” She gave a hopeless shrug, then laughed. “It’s like
Rebecca
, isn’t it? The first wife, reaching back from the grave to twist the lives of those who come after; the second wife, who’s so mousy she doesn’t even have a name—except
Rebecca
had a happy ending, didn’t it? I don’t think there’s a happy ending for me and Frank.” She shook her head sadly. “No, I don’t think so….”

She trailed off into some vague distance. I had to say something, just to break the silence. “He’d come and see you if you’d let him. Let him, honey, please let him.”

“No, I don’t think so. Paris was—well, Paris, but I don’t want to see him anymore. Besides, it’s bound to get into the papers—Hedda would have a field day. So let’s skip it, hm?” Her voice was hollow and she spoke with utter finality. “Do you need any more explanation?” she added.

No, I said, not really; she didn’t owe anyone any explanations. Except maybe Frank.

“You’ll do that for me, won’t you, please? Put it the best way you know how, tell him—” She broke off, got up, walked in a circle with her hands over her face. After a little while she took them away and I saw her defeated look. She tried to brighten it a bit, saying, “I’m really sorry about Frances, though. It’s an awful thing, cancer. I dread the thought.”

I, too, was dreading the thought—the thought that, for no reason I could comprehend, she was turning thumbs down on any possible future with Frank. Worse, I had this feeling about her—this really bad feeling. Screws were being loosened, the back door was coming off its hinges.

When I asked about her future plans, she grew cloudy, the light dimmed. “Will you be coming back to Hollywood?” I asked. “I saw in
Variety
how they’re holding the Wilder picture open for you.”

“It’s a lovely part, but I don’t think—I’m sure I won’t be doing it. I don’t think I’d be up to it.”

“Well, Frank mentioned he was looking for something for you, his own production, good part… lotsa bucks?”

She shook her head. “Frank’s just being frivolous again. I don’t think—well, I just think he’d be unwise. Anyway, I couldn’t make another picture, I can’t act anymore. I’d be too afraid.”

I hated it all, but I had to take it as the gospel according to April. She volunteered the information that her mother was coming to stay with her, and I thought that was a good idea. Certainly someone should be with her; the doctor said she was disinclined to make friends among the patients. Then she rose abruptly and faced me.

“You’re sweet, Chazz,” she said, “and I appreciate your coming to see me. But—” She shaded her eyes. “Here comes Miss Menzies. It’s time for my routine. Miss Menzies is really a clockwork nurse.”