15
Normally I don’t have trouble sleeping, but Thursday arrives, for me, well before the sun rises, and no matter how many times I turn over beneath the top sheet, the bed feels too warm, and I can’t drift back off.
Around four thirty, I finally flick on the bedside lamp, the buttery glow hitting the tiny framed mosaic sitting just beneath it.
Nicollet. The one you’d give it all up for.
But what does that mean for Margaret? Twenty years ago, she walked out of her life and became a different person. Why?
What the shopkeeper-cum-gallerist said comes back to me: She was trying to find something. Or maybe get somewhere.
Voice croaky with sleep, I whisper, “What are you trying to find?”
I slide out of bed and get dressed.
The hotel is back in the other direction from Little Croissant, but I’ve got plenty of time to kill before I’m set to meet with Margaret, so I drive through the wee hours of the gray morning with my windows down, the sea air cycloning through the car.
It’s a good day, I think.
I’d wondered if Hayden had also relocated from the hotel, but when I pull into the quiet parking lot, I spot his car right away.
After parking, I lean into the back seat and dig through my backpack until I find a Sharpie, then pluck the green tea from the cup holder, poised to write on its damp side.
I debate for a second which missive to leave for him and settle on jotting down my phone number. That seems like a decisive reply to the question he left on mine: Friends?
I run it up to his door and make it back to the car before six a.m. A full two hours before I need to be at Margaret’s.
“Now what?” I say aloud.
The sound of the waves crashing against the shore behind the hotel answers me.
I’ve been so absorbed in the Margaret of it all that I actually haven’t been down to the beach since my first couple of days here—and that was at the peak of the afternoon, when the tourists nearly outweighed the sand.
Now I leave my stuff in the car, roll the windows up, and take the wooden walkway between the Grande Lucia and the next resort over, through the dunes and down toward the water. A sign warns of venomous snakes in the dune grass, and I find myself treating the walkway like a tightrope, sticking to the very center, just in case.
The tall pockets of wispy grass dwindle as I get closer to the water, and then drop away entirely, the platform ramping downward toward open beach.
At the end of the walkway, I slip my sandals off and step into the sand. It’s surprisingly cool between my toes, though the air is already dense with humidity. The first glow of the rising sun is peeking over the gray-green waves, seagulls cutting stark silhouettes overhead as they squawk across the sky.
A silver-haired woman in a wind suit is my only company, trawling along the lip of the tide with a metal detector. I perch atop a long, thick piece of bone-white driftwood, enjoying the stillness and the quiet, trying and failing to take a few phone pictures that might come close to capturing the feeling of energy and possibility that emanates from all around: the beach, the water, the sky.
On my phone, it’s a blur of blue-black pixels.
The most beautiful things never hold up on a screen.
That, I think, is why I became a writer instead of a photographer. I’d had a phase, back when we were kids and Audrey was still sick. For the first couple of years that I was aware, really aware, of what she was dealing with—and of the very real possibility that we could lose her—I remember spending all my time worrying. And then one year, for Christmas, my parents gave me a camera.
And instead of useless worrying, I began instead to catalog her. To stockpile every happy memory for later. Like if I had enough pictures of her, of our whole family, then I’d be able to reconstruct her if I had to. Or maybe I’d capture enough of her soul to keep her here.
Except I was bad at it. Terrible. So to supplement my visual log, I began to journal too. I stopped worrying so much, channeled all my frustration and helplessness into documenting. And whenever I was scared, I’d go back to my favorite entries and reread what I’d written, and I’d feel like I really was there.
All the emotions and sensations of the moment would rise, an echo, or a kind of time travel. With writing, you could always add more. More, more, more until you got to the heart of a thing, and after that, you could chip away the excess.
With photography, you had to get it right the first time. I didn’t have the patience for that. Or the faith in myself, if I’m being honest. I liked the security of revision.
She was trying to find something. Or maybe get somewhere, I think again.
It’s not dissimilar to why I started writing, or why I still do it. Not just the pursuit of some clinical truth, but the need to understand a person, make sense of what’s at their very core, closest to their heart.
To present that, clearly, truthfully, and to preserve it.
Across the water, the sun inches higher. Brilliant gold ripples toward me, bouncing across the choppy surface of the waves.
Then red, orange, white, pink. If the cool, moody tones of morning represent promise and potential, then these are that of hope, of a dream being realized.
The colors, it occurs to me, of the tiny mosaic on the side table in my rented bedroom.
“I suppose we should back up,” Margaret shouts over her shoulder at me.
She has to shout to be heard over the roar of the airboat as she guides it through the murky reeds behind her property. She’s letting me record today, but transcribing the recording later is going to be a nightmare with all this ambient sound, and I suspect that dousing ourselves in bug repellent before we boarded was also a fool’s errand, because the mosquitoes seem to be taking our precautions as a challenge rather than a deterrent. I’ve slapped four off me within the first ten minutes.
“It might be easier if we stopped for a while,” I shout.
“What?” Margaret shouts, proving my point.
“It might be easier if—” She cuts the propeller, and the sounds of the marsh swell to replace it. Dropping my voice to a more reasonable volume, I say, “Could we just drift for a little bit while we talk?”
“We’ll get eaten alive,” she says.
“Just for a little bit,” I say.
She adjusts her sun hat and sprays some more repellent on her arms.
“Do you take the boat out often?” I ask.
“Fairly often,” she says. “I find some of the best trash here.”
She hefts a net up from the base of the boat. “Bottles, plates, mugs, you name it. It’s my favorite spot to scavenge.”
“What about the beach?” I say. “Do you go there often?”
“We don’t have much of an offseason,” she says. “So occasionally, sure, but mostly I just let Jodi bring me back whatever she finds there.”
“Does she go often?” I ask, more out of personal curiosity than anything.
“Loads,” she says.
I think about my new mosaic, Nicollet, and how much the sunrise over the water reminded me of it. I guess sunrise over a beach is just one more thing Margaret gave up. The question is why.
“So now that we’ve talked about your great-grandfather and your grandfather, I was thinking we could talk about your dad,” I say. “Frederick Ives was born in…” I glance through my notes.
“In 1904,” she supplies, a second before I find the same number in my barely legible handwriting. “And his sister, Francine, was born the next year. And like I told you earlier, my grandfather was initially determined to give his children the freedom and ease that his own strict childhood had lacked. They more or less ran wild as kids, and then Gerald abandoned them for Hollywood when they were teenagers.”
“Right.” It’s going to be tricky to keep all of this straight. The book will need a family tree up front, with dates, for easy reference. “So, Frederick is 1904, Francine is 1905, and then Ruth Allen is born in secret in…” I check my notes. “Nineteen twenty-eight or twenty-nine?”
“I’m not sure which,” Margaret confirms. “They flubbed her birthday by a few months, I’m sure, just to make the lies more convincing.”
“And then they all end up living together. Gerald; his wife, Rosalind; and his sister, Gigi. Gigi’s adopted daughter, Ruth—who’s actually Gerald and Nina’s biological daughter—plus Gerald’s older children, Francine and Frederick, your father, who are…twenty-six and twenty-seven at that point?”
“Sounds about right,” she agrees.
“So before the whole family reunited, what were Francine and Frederick up to in San Francisco?” I ask.
“Still running wild. Their mother spent most of her time invested in various philanthropic efforts—this was during the Great Depression after all—but neither her son nor daughter had much interest in work of any kind, so they’d become known eccentrics, spending their estranged father’s money like it was a contest. Francine was obsessed with showing dogs and horses—at one point, she owned over twenty dogs and fifty horses.”
“Dear lord,” I say. “If I could whistle, I would.”
Margaret chuckles at this. “She had a dozen trainers on retainer but was also constantly firing and replacing them. She also, if my father is to be believed—which is a rather large if—treated them like a stable of lovers. She was constantly ‘falling in love,’ hiring the objects of her eye, then falling out of love and eventually firing them or driving them to quit.”
“Yikes,” I say. “That sounds like…”
“A lawsuit waiting to happen?” She snorts a laugh, then unscrews the cap on the bottle of water at her feet, taking a long glug. The sun is high, and I’ve become drenched through in sweat without noticing it happening.
I open my bottle too and chug, then swipe the sweat from my eyes. “And your father, he was…?”
“Gambling, mostly,” she says. “His…idiosyncrasies were more about what he’d bet with.”
This, I’ve read about. “Physical labor instead of money, right?”
Her chin dips, her mouth tight with distaste. “Money was of so little consequence to him that I guess losing or winning it didn’t provide much of a thrill. He preferred to play with humiliation on the line. He once had the third-wealthiest man in San Francisco mucking out his sister Francine’s overly bloated stables for a week. And he found himself on the other end of those situations plenty too.”
“How did your father get people to agree to these kinds of terms?” I ask.
“Honey, you haven’t been around many exorbitantly wealthy people, have you?” she says.
“I’ve interviewed a lot of actors and singers,” I disagree.
“That’s different,” she says. “That’s fast money. Money a person finds. The people who are born with it, they’re different.”
“You were born with it,” I point out.
“That’s how I know!” she says. “Remember, I was married to Cosmo Sinclair. I knew someone like your usual interview subject. Cosmo’s family had nothing. He never got used to the money or the attention. He was afraid that either he’d burn through the former, or the latter would burn through him. More like Lawrence.” Another one of her sad smiles, the kind that still makes her eyes seem flinty. “Cosmo missed it, the life he couldn’t go back to. All the time. But I couldn’t miss it, because I could barely imagine it.”
Hearing her talk about him makes me feel like there’s a hook in my heart, and I’m eager to be reeled in, to hear more about their love and their life together.
“I was a news story the moment I was born,” she goes on. “From before my first breath, there were two distinct Margaret Iveses. There was me, and then there was the other one, the one who belonged to the public. Who got written about. Who people loved at times and hated at others, and no matter where I stood with the public, I understood that it wasn’t really me.
“It was just a character the press made up. For Cosmo, he was splintered. His fame came on hard and fast, and once he got tangled up with me, it only got worse.
“Every bad thing that every perfect stranger said about him mattered. Because he wasn’t used to discounting it. He was used to people’s opinions of him having been formed by…well, him. His actions and intentions, their personal experience with him.
“It was killing him long before the accident.” She peers across the marsh, losing herself in the haze of memory.
I want to reach out and touch her hand, comfort her, be a friend to her. But I’m not, not yet. And I can’t be one more person projecting my knowledge of the iconic Tabloid Princess into belief that I actually truly know her.
So instead I let her sit, take her time, hoping she knows it belongs to her. That I don’t consider it mine, just because of who she is.
She blinks, facing me again. “Anyway, it wasn’t hard for my father to talk men of absurd wealth into absurd bets. He enjoyed his ridiculous life in San Francisco, and his sister, Francine, did too, right up until the moment Gerald sent for them. Neither had any interest in joining their father in Los Angeles, but not a single penny they’d been spending was truly theirs, so in the end, they had no choice.
“At first, my father and my aunt Francine tried to resume their previous lifestyles, but Gerald was down to business then. He decided it was time for his kids to get serious too, or risk being cut off. He wanted Francine to get married and my father to learn the family business.
“The irony was, Aunt Francine had decided she didn’t ever want to get married. She felt so strongly about it that she decided her best bet was to try to earn a place in the family business instead. Whereas the only thing my father felt strongly about was doing as little work as humanly possible.
“Dad thought he could skate by if he started working at the film studio, so Gerald set him up there, and Francine took over a failing ladies’ magazine. There had been women journalists there for years, but she was the first female coeditor in chief, then editor in chief when the coeditor quit. Years later, she told me she knew in her heart that when her father gave her that journal, the point was to scare her into marriage. Instead she worked hard to learn the business, and she turned it around. She had something my father lacked.”
I ask, “And what was that?”
“Desperation,” she says. “My father didn’t find his until later.”
The Story
Their version: Frederick Ives was a jealous man.
Her version: Frederick Ives was a jealous man.
As a boy, he was jealous of his schoolmates. Of their grades, of their success in sports. Of their teachers’ affection for them, and sometimes even of the ire they could inspire.
At home, he was jealous every time his sister, Francine, took the seat at the head of the dinner table, and when he started arriving early so he could have it, he was jealous of how casually late she’d stroll in, still covered in mud from the stables, how unbothered she seemed by their mother’s disapproval.
When he was twenty, a girl who’d spent weeks batting her eyelashes at him got engaged to another man, and though he had no intention of marrying her, he was jealous then too.
At twenty-seven, when his long-absent father forced him to relocate to the castle he’d built on the coast, Freddy was jealous of his half-orphaned cousin Ruth.
Of the delight she seemed to cause her uncle Gerald, and the careful structure to her life, which neither of Freddy’s parents had ever bothered to give Freddy as a boy.
He was born with enough money to buy almost anything, and so all he ever wanted was the things he couldn’t.
He was jealous too when Francine found something new to want, in the form of success at Hearth & Home Journal, and when she strong-armed the business back into the black, proving herself as their father’s true heir.
He tried to want Royal Pictures. To want the sleek, wood-paneled corner office he’d been given for no good reason—and frankly spent many afternoons napping in. He tried to want the secretary, Shelley, he’d been assigned and then promptly began sleeping with.
About twice a week, she informed him of a new meeting set by his father, and he quickly learned that these were the negotiations for contracts Gerald didn’t actually care about securing.
He brushed off actors, writers, and directors onto his son with regularity. And just as Gerald hoped, Freddy bungled those talks time and again with his total lack of knowledge about the business.
Even though he knew this was the role he was set to fulfill, it made Freddy feel incompetent, and he didn’t like feeling incompetent. Lazy? Sure. Incompetent? No. It was a matter of control.
He was asleep at his desk, face plastered to a stack of unread scripts (on which he’d been supposed to write notes last week), when Doris Bernhardt stormed into his office one day in 1935.
“So this is what I’m worth?” she demanded, marching right up to him. “I make him a pretty penny, and he shunts me off to the deadbeat son?”
Freddy’s secretary came rushing in next, slowed down by her kitten heels, and never had he seen such a stark contrast between two women. Shelley was dainty, bird boned with auburn hair and lush lips that matched her lush hips. She wore a long skirt that swished with every step she took and had a habit of toying with the necklace she wore around her delicate throat.
Doris Bernhardt was tall, angular, with thin lips and narrow hips. She wore flat shoes and wide-legged trousers, and not a lick of makeup that he could see. She had to be nearly thirty years old, but he doubted she would’ve had leading lady potential even if she were younger.
“Mr. Ives,” Shelley said, oozing apology, “I tried to tell Ms. Bernhardt—”
Ms. Bernhardt rolled her eyes. “Oh, yes, she told me all about how busy you are this morning. She insisted I come back next week for my scheduled meeting, but I had a feeling you’d be able to squeeze me in between some of your other important appointments.”
Shelley gaped at him, helpless. He became aware, abruptly, that if he didn’t take control, he was automatically ceding it to Bernhardt.
“Thank you, Shelley,” he said. “I’m happy to speak with Ms. Bernhardt. Hold my calls.”
He never really got calls, but it felt like the right thing to say, like it might give him back a fraction of his power, which suddenly seemed absolutely essential.
Shelley wavered.
“Goodbye, Shelley,” he said coolly, and she finally retreated.
He waited a second, just stared Bernhardt down. She stared right back, jaw set.
“Would you care to sit?” he asked.
She snorted, then slowly walked behind his desk and took his chair. He fought a smile. Rather than sitting across from her, in one of the slightly lower chairs positioned there, he rounded the desk too and leaned against it, arms crossed. “So what would you care to speak to the deadbeat son about?”
“Nothing,” she said. “I wish to speak to Gerald Ives about a new contract.”
“What about it exactly?” he asked, because he of course had not yet read the new contract being proposed to her, and did not in fact even know who she was.
“Well, for one thing,” she said, “I’d like to know why I’m being offered less money, for a longer term, when I’ve already been benched for the last six months. Is he trying to send me running to Universal?”
Of course he was. But for some reason, Freddy wasn’t supposed to admit this. “You know,” he said instead, “it’s not uncommon for actresses around your age to see fewer opportunities in this business.”
“Actresses my age?” she spat at him, lunging to her feet.
“I don’t mean any offense,” he said. “But you’ve got to be realistic here.”
She tipped her head back on a throaty laugh before leveling her fiery gaze on him. “I’ve got to be realistic?” she repeated. “I’ve got to be realistic? Yes, of course I’ve got to be realistic! I’m one of two female directors this studio has ever worked with. I’m acutely aware of my reliance upon realism at all times, whereas someone like you—someone raised in a castle and handed a job he doesn’t do, in an industry he knows nothing about—need never trouble himself with anything so mundane as realism!”
“You’re a director?” he said.
The question triggered her derisive snorting instinct.
“You’re a woman,” he reminded her.
“Yes, I believe my speech touched on that,” she said.
“Have you directed anything I’ve seen?” he asked.
Her face went red with anger. “I should hope so, given your position at Royal Pictures.”
She named three of her films. One he’d never heard of. Two he’d seen, and of those two, one was a smash hit. “Why would he be trying to get rid of you?” he asked.
Most of the time, he understood his father’s decisions.
Ms. Bernhardt snorted again and waved down her length with a flourish.
“Because of your dreadful wardrobe?” Freddy said, flummoxed, and he saw the first flash of what Doris Bernhardt looked like when she was smiling.
Like a cat with three canaries lined up in its jaw, little yellow feathers sticking out in a row. He couldn’t look away, could barely stand to blink and miss a second of that expression.
“I don’t have much sway here, Ms. Bernhardt,” he said.
“Bernie,” she interjected.
“Bernie,” he said. “As you pointed out, I do very little and know even less about this industry, and as for my father—well, he may have built a castle, but I assure you I wasn’t raised anywhere near either it or him. But you’re right that offering you less money is insulting, after what you’ve brought in. I’d be insulted too. Which might be the point. But if I had to guess—and of course I do—it has less to do with willfully insulting you and more to do with taking a gamble that you won’t walk, because you can’t. Because Universal and MGM won’t want you. He found you. He gave you your chance and cultivated your talent, and now he thinks he can get you for cheaper than you’re worth, because, very likely, he can.”
With another angry huff, she threw out her arms. “So it doesn’t matter that I’ve proven myself again and again in this business?”
He arched an eyebrow at her. “Judging by what I’ve heard from the many women I’ve come to know in the business, this is the industry standard. It’s…realistic.”
She collapsed back into the chair, a look of exhaustion sweeping over her, and though she was tall and angular, she looked delicate then. He both wanted to comfort her and suspected she would sock him in the jaw for his trouble.
He cleared his throat. “I will ask him though. I’ll plead your case.”
Her gaze narrowed warily. “Why?”
With total honesty, he answered, “Because I want your next movie. I want it here, at Royal Pictures.”
She surveyed him for a long moment, then rose from the chair. “Thank you for your time,” she said, not with deference but not with sarcasm either. “But I won’t be renewing my contract with Royal.”
She turned and walked from the room, and Freddy felt that loss, that emptiness, that moroseness he sometimes awoke to in the morning, multiplied tenfold.
He wanted something. He wanted something he couldn’t name, and so couldn’t reach out and take.
After that, he was a goner.
