Her thin lips formed a straight, grim line.
“Not to you, sir.”
“I believe your name’s Erica.”
I told her mine, first and last.
“Would you at least tell Miss Grant I’m here? I’ve come all the way from Los Angeles to have a few words with her.”
“She already told you no.”
“That was several days ago. She’s entitled to change her mind.”
“She hasn’t.”
I tried to warn her with a smile.
“Are you the gatekeeper, Erica?”
“I’m Miss Grant’s companion. I watch out for her.”
“Does she need someone doing that?”
“At times.”
“You also play pretty piano pieces that she enjoys.”
“Please go away and leave us alone.”
“I’m afraid I’m the persistent type.”
“You have no right to bother us.”
“Maybe not, but I’m going to, anyway.”
She studied me a long moment with her steady eyes.
“I’ll speak with her. Please wait here.”
She turned up the drive past the old Bentley, which was parked beside the house. When she’d disappeared around the corner, I followed. The Bentley was big and grand but needed work; I could see chips in the paint, which had lost its sheen, and the leather upholstery inside was spilling some of its stuffing. As I stepped around the corner of the house, I saw Erica and Vivian Grant standing together beneath an arbor at the center of a nicely cultivated garden, speaking quietly. Miss Grant wore gardening gloves and a jumpsuit of soft velour, with a wide-brimmed straw hat over her graying hair, which was tied back in a scarf. Dark glasses hid her eyes, stark against her pale face, which appeared to be free of makeup but still looked well pampered and quite beautiful in a mature, patrician way.
She nodded solemnly before looking my way, still unsmiling. Erica touched her arm briefly, then disappeared into the house as Vivian Grant raised a gloved hand to beckon me. As I crossed through the garden along a path of round stepping-stones, the piano playing resumed inside the house, floating pleasantly across the brightly blooming beds of bulb flowers.
Vivian Grant was removing her gloves as I approached.
“I suppose I have no choice but to speak with you.”
“I can be tough that way.”
“Rude and intrusive might be more accurate terms.”
“I can’t argue with that.”
“What exactly is it you want from me, Mr. Justice?”
“Answers to a few questions.”
“About Charlotte?”
“Charlotte, Randall Capri’s book, some other things.”
She sighed painfully.
“Randall Capri’s nasty little book.”
“You’ve read it?”
“Unfortunately, I have.”
“Charlotte had the same reaction.”
“Did she.”
She said it flatly, coldly, without her voice rising to a question mark.
“Perhaps we could sit while we talk.”
“We’ll take your questions one at a time and see how far we get.”
She indicated a bench behind me, beneath the arbor. I backed into it, and she moved to another opposite. When she was comfortably seated, with one leg scissored over the other, she loosened the strap at her chin and removed the straw hat. She placed her gloves inside the hat, and set the hat on the bench beside her, upside down and perfectly balanced so the gloves didn’t spill out. When that was done, she removed a pack of cigarettes and a small gold lighter from a pocket of her jumpsuit, withdrew a slim cigarette and lit it with one neat puff, placed the lighter and the pack inside the hat atop the gloves, then she inhaled again, bringing her eyes level with my own. She performed each move slowly and meticulously, as if there was a careful order to everything that must not be upset, as if the slightest crack in her precisely arranged world could widen dangerously, inviting catastrophe.
Except for some buzzing bees, the piano sonata was the only sound that came into the garden. I began to understand why Vivian Grant had settled in La Jolla, and why she was willing to sell off her precious furniture piece by piece to remain there.
“Your friend Erica plays quite well.”
“She’s classically trained—Juilliard.”
“For the stage?”
“She performed in concert for a number of years before giving it up. Like me, she never really cared for the spotlight.”
“You were an actress once, making movies.”
“Many people who crave attention for certain reasons are just as terrified by it.”
“Is that what brought you and Erica together, your mutual desire for privacy?”
“Partly.”
“When was that?”
She exhaled some smoke, smiling a little.
“Quite a long time ago, Mr. Justice.”
“Did Charlotte know Erica?”
“No.”
“Isn’t that odd, your own daughter kept from meeting your closest companion?”
“I’ve never believed one’s private life need be anything else.”
“Not even with family.”
“Not even.”
“You didn’t feel that way when you married Rod Preston. You wanted the whole world to know.”
Rather than responding, she pulled on the cigarette, forsaking the smile.
“According to Capri’s book, the wedding pictures appeared in
Photoplay.
You and your husband gave a gazillion interviews. When Charlotte was born, the publicity started all over again, with her baby photos handed out to all the fan magazines.”
“The studio arranged all that. If I’d had my way—”
She broke off and the piano notes accentuated her silence.
“If you’d had your way, what, Vivian?”
“I would have done things differently.”
“Like never marrying Rod Preston at all?”
“I thought I loved him. I tried to convince myself I did.”
“The studio must have put the pressure on.”
“More on Rod than me.”
“You wanted to get married, then.”
“Almost every girl did in those days. It was expected.”
“Even if your true feelings, your secret feelings, were for women?”
“You presume a lot, don’t you?”
“Is my language too blunt?”
“It’s just that I’m not accustomed to speaking in this way about private matters.”
“Does the word ‘lesbian’ trouble you?”
“It’s not a word I’ve had much occasion to use. It’s what I am, and I’m not ashamed of it, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Just private.”
“Is that such a terrible way to live, without making a spectacle of yourself before the whole world?”
“I guess it depends on who gets hurt by one’s need for privacy.”
“I came of age in the 1950s, Mr. Justice, when one didn’t have so many choices. Certain aspects of life, certain feelings, were unthinkable, unspeakable. Young people today don’t realize what it was like, how restricted one was.”
“So you chose a conventional life.”
“I wanted to do what was right, to be a good person.”
“A wife and mother.”
“Yes, and an actress. I thought that if I could make that part a success, make the fantasy work, so to speak, perhaps the other problematic parts of my life might fall into place as well. I believe a lot of us lived that way in those days, hoping pretense and artifice might carry us through.”
“So to please the studio, you married Rod.”
“To please a lot of people, I suppose. There were a lot of girls like that in Hollywood then, willing to do what the men asked. I suppose there still are. Some things don’t change much, do they?”
“It obviously took a toll on you.”
She paused with her cigarette aloft, about to inhale, upsetting the rhythm of her movements, breaking the comfortable pattern.
“Why do you say that?”
“You suffered a serious breakdown.”
“There was nothing like that in Randall Capri’s book.”
“You were institutionalized, Miss Grant, treated for psychiatric disorder.”
She sat up straight, stiffening, staring at the drifting smoke.
“I had some problems for a time. Many people go through troubling periods.”
She kept her eyes on the twisting smoke for a while, then turned them on me.
“Charlotte apparently told you.”
“It must have been difficult, trying to make a marriage work that felt false at its core. It must have been maddening.”
A small, grim smile formed on her lips.
“Maddening, yes.”
“Forgive my poor choice of words.”
“No, no, not at all—maddening is exactly what it was.”
“You felt trapped.”
“Trapped, suffocated, manipulated, weak, false, ashamed. I think that about covers it.”
“You had a child. That didn’t make things easier?”
Her eyes drifted up and away, like the smoke. She spoke slowly, distantly.
“I so wanted to be a good mother, to love Charlotte. The harder I tried, the worse things became. It was as if everything were breaking inside me, as if all the circuitry that held me together was snapping.”
Her roving eyes finally settled close to mine, but her voice was still faraway.
“I remember just before Charlotte turned two. I tried to summon all my strength, do everything I could to make my marriage work and be the mother Charlotte deserved. I’d immersed myself in the Bible, sought counseling at church, been to two or three psychiatrists. I actually thought I might be able to pull it off, make a go of it. Then I learned certain disturbing things about Rod, and it all fell apart.”
“You lost control, collapsed emotionally.”
She smiled limply, with a slight shrug.
“I went crazy. There it is.”
“What caused you to snap, Miss Grant? Discovering your husband was homosexual?”
She drew in a deep breath, let it out slowly.
“I didn’t mind the men so much. By then I was no longer so naïve. It was the boys that bothered me.”
Her smile became twisted again, filled with contempt.
“The older Rod got, the younger they got.”
“Randall Capri’s book was accurate then.”
My words seemed to draw her back to the present. She removed her dark glasses, folded them, placed them in the hat.
“The part about our marriage being arranged, yes, that was accurate. And Rod’s—what should we call it—his fascination for young boys. The rest, I wouldn’t know about. It was a loathsome book, don’t you think? I don’t know why they need to publish filth like that. The world’s become such a rotten and degraded place. There are no standards any longer, no decency.”
“Maybe it’s always been rotten, and we just write more about it now.”
“Maybe, but I miss the days when we all didn’t have to know so much.”
“You’d rather the truth stay buried, with so many boys being victimized?”
She raised her chin haughtily, peering down her fine nose.
“Frankly, yes.”
She ground out her cigarette against a brick, found a clean tissue, wrapped the butt in the tissue, and placed it in the hat next to her glasses.
“If that’s selfish, Mr. Justice, so be it. We live in a selfish world, don’t we? That book has caused us nothing but problems. We’ve had to change our phone number three times since it was published. Somehow, they keep finding us, offering me money to go on television and talk about it. Can you imagine? And now you’re here, asking all these unpleasant questions. All because of that damned book.”
“It caused Charlotte her share of pain as well.”
She looked at me questioningly, as if she’d forgotten her daughter entirely for a moment.
“When she came to see me, Miss Grant, she was still quite upset about what Randall Capri had written.”
“Yes, I can imagine.”
“Though she refused to believe any of it.”
“Charlotte was as blind in her own way as I was when I was a young woman. She only wanted to see the good in her father, to be the perfect daughter, the way I’d tried to be the perfect wife.”
“Is that what put you and Charlotte at odds—the truth about her father?”
“Charlotte always resented me, Mr. Justice, with some justification. I was never much of a mother to her. I’ve had enough trouble just taking care of myself. Without Erica, I—”
She glanced quickly away, waving her hand at an insect I could neither hear nor see.
“Charlotte mentioned that the two of you argued several months ago and became badly estranged.”
“I refused to attend Rod’s funeral. She was furious.”
“Couldn’t you have gone, for her sake?”
“I wasn’t sure I could handle it. It would have been like starting the pretense all over again, reliving the charade that my life had been. Listening to all those people say wonderful things about Rod, when I knew the truth. I found the idea intolerable.”