“You. You’re the reason. He went away. He didn’t want you”—these words, almost calmly uttered, flung after the terrified child like a handful of stinging pebbles.
And the child, naked, ran blindly along a corridor and pounded at a neighbor’s door crying, “Help! Help us!” and there was no answer. And the child ran farther along the corridor and pounded at a second door crying, “Help! Help us!” and there was no answer. And the child ran to a third door, and pounded on it, and this time the door was opened, and an astonished young man, tanned and muscular in an undershirt and beltless trousers stared down at her, he had an actor’s face but he blinked now in unfeigned astonishment at this frantic little girl who was totally naked, her face streaked with tears, crying, “H-help us, my mother is sick, come help my mother she’s sick,” and the first thing the young man did was to snatch up a shirt of his from a chair to wrap quickly about the child, to cover her nakedness, saying then, “All right now, little girl, your mother is sick? What’s wrong with your mother?”
AUNT JESS AND UNCLE CLIVE
She loved me; she was taken from me but she loved me always.
“Your momma is well enough to see you now, Norma Jeane.”
It was Miss Flynn speaking. And Mr. Pearce behind her in the doorway. Like pallbearers they were. Gladys’s friend Jess Flynn with her reddened eyelids and her twitchy-rabbit nose and Gladys’s friend Clive Pearce stroking his chin, nervously stroking his chin and sucking a mint. “Your momma has been asking for you, Norma Jeane!” Miss Flynn said. “The doctors say she’s well enough to see you. Shall we go?”
Shall we go? This was movie talk; the child was alerted to danger.
Yet as in a movie you must play out the scene. You must not show your suspicion. For of course you don’t know beforehand. Only if you’d stayed through the feature to see the movie a second time would you know what the strained smiles, the evasive eyes, the clumsy dialogue really mean.
The child smiled happily. The child was trusting and wanted you to see it.
Ten days had passed since Gladys Mortensen had been “taken away.” Hospitalized at the State Hospital at Norwalk, south of L.A. The city air was still hazy-humid and made your eyes water, but the canyon fires were beginning to subside. Fewer sirens screamed in the night. Families evacuated from the canyons north of the city were being allowed to return to their homes. Most schools had resumed. Though Norma Jeane had not returned to school and would not return to Highland Elementary, to fourth grade. The child cried easily and was “nervous.” Slept in Miss Flynn’s sitting room on Miss Flynn’s pull-out sofa on loose, untucked-in sheets from Gladys’s apartment. Sometimes she was able to sleep for as many as six or seven hours in a row. When Miss Flynn gave her “just half” of a white pill that tasted like bitter flour on the tongue, she slept a deep dazed stuporous sleep that made her little heart pound like slow measured blows of a sledgehammer and turned her skin clammy as a slug. And when she wakened from this sleep she recalled nothing of where she had been. I wasn’t seeing her. I wasn’t there to see her taken away.
There was a fairy tale Grandma Della used to tell Norma Jeane; maybe it was a story Grandma Della had made up herself: a little girl who sees too much, a little girl who hears too much, a crow comes to peck out her eyes, a “big fish walking on his tail” comes to gobble up her ears, and for good measure a red fox bites off her pointy little nose! See what happens, miss?
The promised day. Yet it came as a surprise. Miss Flynn kneading her hands, smiling with her mouth and her teeth that didn’t quite fit in her mouth, explaining that Gladys “had been asking for her.”
It was cruel of Gladys to have said of Jess Flynn that she was a thirty-five-year-old virgin. Jess was a voice instructor and music assistant at The Studio, she’d been recruited years ago as a graduate of the San Francisco Choir School with a soprano voice lovely as Lily Pons’s. Gladys said, “Jess’s bad luck! There are as many ‘lovely’ sopranos in Hollywood as there are cockroaches. And cocks.” But you mustn’t laugh, you mustn’t even smile when Gladys “talked dirty” and embarrassed her friends. You mustn’t even let on you were listening unless Gladys winked at you.
So there came, that morning, Jess Flynn smiling with her mouth, her moist sad eyes, and twitchy nose. She’d had to take the day off from work. Saying she’d been on the phone with the doctors and Norma Jeane’s “momma” was well enough to see her, and she and Clive Pearce would be driving her, and they’d be bringing “some things in suitcases” which Jess would pack; Norma Jeane could go out into the backyard and play and didn’t have to help. (But how could you “play” when your mother was sick in the hospital?) Outside, wiping her eyes that stung in the gritty air, the child didn’t allow herself to think that something was wrong; momma was a wrong name for Gladys, as Jess Flynn must know.
Didn’t see her carried away. Arms in sleeves tied behind her back. Strapped naked to the stretcher and a thin blanket thrown over her. Spat, screamed, tried to tear herself free. And the ambulance attendants, sweaty-faced, cursing her in turn, carrying her away.
They’d explained to Norma Jeane that she hadn’t seen, she hadn’t been anywhere near.
Maybe Miss Flynn had put her hands over Norma Jeane’s face? That was ever so much nicer than a crow pecking out her eyes!
Miss Flynn, Mr. Pearce. But they were not a couple unless a movie couple in a comedy. Gladys’s closest friends in the boardinghouse. They were very fond of Norma Jeane, truly! Mr. Pearce was upset by what had happened and Miss Flynn had promised to “take care of” Norma Jeane, and so she had, for ten difficult days. Now the diagnosis was official, now a decision had been made. Norma Jeane overheard Jess weeping and sniffing, talking at length on the telephone in the other room. I feel so terrible! But it could not go on permanently. God forgive me, I know I promised. And I meant it, I love this little girl like my own child, I mean—if I had a child. But I have to work, God knows I have to work, I have no money saved, there is nothing else to be done. In the beige linen dress already showing half-moons of perspiration at her underarms. After weeping in the bathroom she’d vigorously brushed her teeth as she did when she was nervous; now the pale gums leaked blood.
Clive Pearce was known in the boardinghouse as the “gentleman Brit.” An actor under contract to The Studio, in his late thirties but still hoping for a break; as Gladys said with a droll downturning of her mouth, “Most of our ‘breaks’ are broke.” Clive Pearce was wearing a dark suit, a white cotton shirt, and an ascot tie. Handsome, but he’d nicked himself shaving. His breath smelled of fumes and of chocolate peppermint, a smell Norma Jeane recognized with her eyes shut. Here was “Uncle Clive”—as he’d suggested she call him, but she’d never been able to say that for it didn’t seem right, for he was not my uncle really. Still, Norma Jeane liked Mr. Pearce, very very much! Her piano instructor she’d tried so hard to please. Just to coax a smile from Mr. Pearce made her happy. And she liked Miss Flynn very much, too, Miss Flynn who’d urged her, just these past few days, to call her “Aunt Jess”—“Auntie Jess”—but the words stuck in Norma Jeane’s throat for she was not my aunt really.
Miss Flynn cleared her throat. “Shall we go?”—and that ghastly smile.
Mr. Pearce, guilt-stricken, noisily sucking his mint, hoisted up Gladys’s suitcases, two smaller suitcases in the grip of one big hand, the third in the other. Not looking at Norma Jeane, muttering What’s to be done, what’s to be done, nothing else to be done, God help us.
There was a movie in which Aunt Jess and Uncle Clive were married and Norma Jeane would be their little girl. But this was not that movie.
Broad-shouldered Mr. Pearce carried the suitcases out to the automobile at the curb, which was his own. Chattering nervously, Miss Flynn led Norma Jeane out by the hand. It was a warm-oven day in which the sun, hidden by smoky clouds, seemed to be everywhere. Mr. Pearce was to drive of course, for men always drove cars. Norma Jeane begged for Miss Flynn to sit in the back with her and her doll, but Mis
s Flynn sat in front with Mr. Pearce. It would be a drive of perhaps an hour, and not many words were exchanged between the front and back seats. The rattling noise of the motor, air hissing through opened windows. Miss Flynn sniffed as she read directions to Mr. Pearce from a sheet of paper. Only at this time would the drive be “going to visit Mother in the hospital”; in retrospect it would be something else. If you could see the movie twice, that is.
Always it’s important to be costumed correctly, whatever the scene. Norma Jeane was wearing her only good school clothes: a plaid pleated skirt, a white cotton blouse (ironed by Jess Flynn herself that morning), reasonably clean mended white socks, and her newest undies. Her curly-snarly hair was brushed, though not combed. (“No use!” Miss Flynn sighed, letting the hairbrush fall onto her bed. “I’d be tearing half the hair out of your head, Norma Jeane, if I persisted.”)
Embarrassing to Miss Flynn and Mr. Pearce that Norma Jeane clutched so desperately at her doll. That doll was so shabby, its skin fire-scorched and most of its hair burnt away and its glassy-blue eyes fixed in an expression of idiot horror. Miss Flynn had promised Norma Jeane she would purchase her another doll but there’d been no time or else Miss Flynn had forgotten. Norma Jeane was prepared to hug her doll tight and never let her go—“This is my doll. My mother gave me.”
The doll had been spared by the fire in Gladys’s bedroom. In a fury, Gladys had managed to start a fire on her bed, in the bedclothes, after Norma Jeane had escaped the scalding-hot bath to run for help to a neighbor; this was wrong to do, Norma Jeane knew, it was always wrong to “go behind your mother’s back” as Gladys called it; but Norma Jeane had had to do it, and Gladys bolted the door behind her and started a fire with matches, burning most of the glamorous black crepe dress and the midnight-blue velvet dress Norma Jeane had been made to wear on the day of the funeral on Wilshire Boulevard, several ripped-up photographs (one of them Norma Jeane’s father? Norma Jeane would never see that handsome photograph again), and shoes, cosmetics; in her rage she’d have liked to burn everything she owned, including the spinet piano that had once belonged to Fredric March and of which she was so proud, and her very own self she’d have liked to burn, but the emergency medics had broken down the door to prevent it, smoke billowing out of the apartment, and there, Gladys Mortensen, a sallow-skinned naked woman, so thin her bones nearly protruded through her skin, a woman with a lined, contorted witch’s face, screaming obscenities and clawing and kicking at her rescuers, who’d had to be wrestled down and “put into restraint for her own good”—as Norma Jeane would hear Miss Flynn and others in the boardinghouse repeatedly describing the scene—which Norma Jeane had not seen because she hadn’t been there, or someone had covered her eyes.
“Now, you know you weren’t there, Norma Jeane. You were safe and sound with me.”
Your punishment if you’re a woman. Not loved enough.
This was the day Norma Jeane was taken to “visit momma” in the hospital. But where was Norwalk? South of Los Angeles, she was told. Miss Flynn cleared her throat as she read off directions for Mr. Pearce, who seemed anxious and annoyed. He was not Uncle Clive now. At piano lessons Mr. Pearce was sometimes quiet and sad-sighing and sometimes lively and funny, it had to do with the smell of his breath; if his breath smelled that way, Norma Jeane knew they’d have a good time, no matter how awkwardly she played. With a pencil Mr. Pearce beat time on the piano one-two, one-two, one-two and sometimes on his little pupil’s head, which made her giggle. Leaning his warm whiskey breath to Norma Jeane’s ear to hum loudly like a bumblebee and beating time louder with his pencil one-two, one-two, one-two and playfully there came poking Mr. Pearce’s snaky tongue into Norma Jeane’s ear!—she squealed and giggled and would have run away to hide except Mr. Pearce scolded saying don’t be silly—and she came back to the piano bench shivering and giggling, and so the lesson continued. I loved being tickled! Even if it hurt sometimes. I loved being smooched like Grandma Della would do, I missed Grandma so. I never minded if my face was scratched. Then there were piano lessons when Mr. Pearce, breathing quickly, and anxious, suddenly shut up the keyboard (which was never shut by Gladys and which looked strange, being shut), declaring, “No more lessons for today!” and walked out of the apartment without a backward glance.
Strange, too, how one evening that summer when Norma Jeane, up past her bedtime, nudged and burrowed persistently against Mr. Pearce, who’d dropped by to have a drink with Gladys, crowding between Gladys and her visitor on the sofa, trying like a puppy to push her way into his lap, and Gladys, staring, said sharply, “Norma Jeane, behave yourself. You’re being disgusting.” Then to Mr. Pearce she said, in a lower voice, “Clive, what’s this?” And the naughty giggling little girl was banished to the bedroom, where she couldn’t overhear the adults’ conversation, except after a few excited minutes it seemed they were laughing companionably again; and there came the reassuring click! of a bottle against glass. And from that hour Norma Jeane understood that Mr. Pearce was not always the same person and you were silly to expect otherwise; as Gladys was not always the same person. In fact, Norma Jeane was getting to be a surprise to herself: sometimes she was happy-silly, sometimes quick to cry, sometimes far off and prone to playacting, sometimes “nerved up,” as Gladys defined the state, and “scared of her own shadow like it’s a snake.”
And always there was Norma Jeane’s Magic Friend in the mirror. Peeking at her from a corner of the mirror or staring boldly, full-faced. The mirror could be like a movie; maybe the mirror was a movie. And that pretty little curly-haired girl who was her.
Clutching her doll, Norma Jeane regarded the backs of the heads of the adults in the front seat of Mr. Pearce’s automobile. The “gentleman Brit” in handsome dark suit and ascot tie was not Mr. Pearce on the piano bench lost in rapturous concentration playing Beethoven’s brief heartbreaking “Für Elise”—“note by note the most exquisite music ever written,” Gladys extravagantly claimed—nor was he Mr. Pearce humming loudly like a bumblebee and tickling Norma Jeane beside him on the piano bench, spidery fingers “playing” piano up and down her shivery body; nor was Miss Flynn, shading her eyes against migraine, the Miss Flynn who’d hugged her and wept over her and begged her to call her “Aunt Jess”—“Auntie Jess.” Yet Norma Jeane did not believe these adults had purposefully deceived her, any more than Gladys had deceived her. These were different times and different scenes. In film there is no inevitable sequence, for all is present tense. Film can be run backward as well as forward. Film can be severely edited. Film can be whited out. Film is the repository of that which, failing to be remembered, is immortal. One day when Norma Jeane would come permanently to dwell in the Kingdom of Madness she would recall how logical, if still hurtful, was this day. She would recall, erroneously, that Mr. Pearce had played “Für Elise” before setting out on their journey. “One last time, my dear.” Soon she would learn the teachings of Christian Science and much would become clear that was unclear that day. Mind is all, truth makes us free, deception and lies and pain and evil are but human illusions caused by ourselves to punish ourselves and not real; only out of weakness and ignorance do we succumb to such. For always there was a way to forgive, through Jesus Christ.
If only you could comprehend what the hurt was, you must forgive.
This was the day Norma Jeane was taken to visit with her “momma” in the hospital at Norwalk except this was the day Norma Jeane was taken instead to a brick building on El Centro Avenue bearing a sign above its front entrance that would imprint itself permanently upon Norma Jeane’s soul even as, at the moment she first sighted it, she did not “see” it at all.
LOS ANGELES ORPHANS HOME SOCIETY
EST. 1921
Not a hospital? But where was the hospital? Where was Mother?
Miss Flynn, sniffing and scolding, excitable as Norma Jeane had never seen her, had to pry the terrified child out of the backseat of Clive Pearce’s automobile. “Norma Jeane, please. Be a good girl please, Norm
a Jeane. Don’t kick me, Norma Jeane!” Turning his back on the struggle, Mr. Pearce quickly strode away to have a smoke in the open air. He’d had mostly walk-on roles for so many years—often he was posed in profile, with an enigmatic-Brit smile—he had no idea how to manage an actual scene; his classic Brit training at the Royal Academy had not included improvisation. Miss Flynn shouted to him, “At least bring the suitcases inside, Clive, damn you!” In Miss Flynn’s recounting of this traumatic morning, she’d had to half-carry, half-drag Gladys Mortensen’s daughter into the orphanage. She’d alternately begged and scolded, “Please forgive me, Norma Jeane, there’s no other place for you right now—your mother is sick, the doctors say she’s very sick—she tried to hurt you, you know—she can’t be a mother to you just now—I can’t be a mother to you just now—oh, Norma Jeane! Bad girl! That hurts.” Inside the dank, airless building Norma Jeane began to tremble uncontrollably and in the director’s office she wept, stuttering as she told the stout woman with a carved-looking face that she wasn’t an orphan, she had a mother. She wasn’t an orphan. She had a mother. Miss Flynn hastily departed, blowing her nose into a hankie. Mr. Pearce had delivered Gladys’s suitcases into the vestibule and hastily departed also. The teary-faced runny-nosed Norma Jeane Baker (for so documents identified her: born June 1, 1926, Los Angeles County General Hospital) was left alone with Dr. Mittelstadt, who’d summoned into her office a slightly younger matron, a frowning woman in a stained coverall. Still the child protested. She wasn’t an orphan. She had a mother. She had a father living in a big mansion in Beverly Hills.