The Chaperone

  “My brother? He’s fine, thank you.”

  Louise rolled her eyes. “I mean the language. I wondered if you were familiar with the term schadenfreude. Pleasure in the misfortunes of others? We don’t really have a similar word in our language, and it seems to me we should. Especially in fair Wichita.”

  Cora shook her head. It was hard not to feel hurt. She hoped Louise knew her better than that. “I haven’t come here to gloat,” she said. “I’ve just come to see how you are. And I’ll speak of this visit to no one.”

  “If you did, I wouldn’t care.” She gave Cora a guarded look that suggested otherwise.

  “Well, I won’t.” Now Cora looked at the ceiling. She wanted to sit down. “Look, I’d like fifteen minutes. I’m sorry to have ambushed you like this. But if you give me fifteen minutes, I swear, I won’t bother you again.”

  She stared at Cora. It was impossible to know what she was thinking. When Louise was famous and making films, Cora had read a review by a critic who’d thought her untalented as an actress. He admitted she might be the most beautiful woman ever seen on screen, but he complained that beauty was all she brought to the table. People were so swept away by her dark eyes and the perfect symmetry of her features that they didn’t realize her face was inscrutable, and that really, there was no telling what feelings, if any, existed behind the eyes. The critic believed that if it weren’t for the title cards that spelled out what she was supposed to be thinking, no one would ever know how to interpret her lovely gaze. He was in the minority; most critics just considered her a subtle actor, especially for her era of over-the-top expressions. But now, in the hallway, with Louise-in-the-flesh regarding her from just a few feet away, Cora could have used a title card that might have hinted at Louise’s thoughts.

  Louise glanced at her watch. “Starting now?”

  “Starting when you offer me a seat.”

  Her room had a slanted ceiling, with one side meeting the floor, giving it the shape of an upright triangle. The single bed took up most of the limited space where an adult might hope to stand upright. And it was almost as dark as the hallway, the shades of both windows pulled down, the windows closed to the pleasant afternoon. There was a table lamp, but a scarf had been draped over the shade, weakening the bulb’s light. And it was, to say the least, uncluttered. There was the bed, an oriental rug, a chest of drawers, and a nightstand on which the lamp sat. A bowl of red apples sat atop a stack of books next to the bed, and a pair of black heels sat under the dresser. Cora saw no other possessions. If this had been Louise’s room when she was a child, she’d certainly purged it of all its girlish paraphernalia.

  There was nowhere to sit but the bed, which was unmade, with a good number of pillows stacked at the head and a book facedown on the rumpled blanket. Clearly, the bed was Louise’s seat. But the rug looked soft and reasonably thick, so Cora took hold of the bed’s foot rail and lowered herself to the floor. Louise seemed mildly startled—either that Cora would do such a thing, or that she even could. But then, she’d only known Cora in her corset-wearing days, when getting down on the floor would have required both assistance and time. Today, Cora wore a belted cotton dress, with only a slip and underwear underneath. Although she was twenty years older, she likely appeared surprisingly lithe.

  Louise looked at her watch again. “Starting now,” she said. She set the chocolates on the nightstand and got in bed, sitting upright against the pillows, her black-slacked legs stretched out over the blankets, her bare, pale ankles crossed. Now that she was sitting by the lamp, Cora could see her face clearly, and she understood what Earle’s friend had meant. Louise looked older than she should have, with lines around her eyes and mouth. The tip of her nose was a little pink, and a blood vessel had burst on one of her cheeks. But the eyes were the same, large and captivating. She stared at Cora, impatient.

  Cora stretched out and crossed her own legs. She did not expect Louise to make polite inquiries, to ask about Joseph, about Greta, about the boys or Alan. She would not burden Louise with her worries about Earle. She was clearly on the defensive, unable to consider more than her own pain. This would be a one-way conversation, the kind Cora often had at Kindness House.

  “Your mother doesn’t look well,” Cora said. It was probably the wrong place to start, but she didn’t have much time.

  “She isn’t.” Louise examined one of her hands. “She’s dying, I think. Emphysema. She didn’t even smoke—she has the hereditary kind. Which means I’ll get it, too.” She looked at Cora, annoyed. “Are you going to tell me I should be caring for her? Is that your mission today?”

  “No,” Cora said. It was another unfair accusation, but Cora guessed she shouldn’t take it personally. Louise had been drinking. She wasn’t drunk, but she was lisping a little, and Cora detected the same piney odor she’d smelled on her breath when she came home with Floyd Smithers all those years ago. Gin. Cora could recognize it now. It was what they’d poured in the punch at Earle’s wedding.

  “Well, good.” Louise lifted her chin. “I assure you dear Mother already has plenty of friends ready to see to her every need.”

  “Yes,” Cora said. “I just saw her with Zana downstairs.”

  “Ah, her fattest friend.” Louise glared at the door. “Zana. Every time she sees me she makes sure to tell me what a horrible daughter I am, and how I should be taking better care of poor, poor Myra.” She turned back to Cora. “But Poor Myra doesn’t want me waiting on her. She doesn’t want to look at me in my current, disappointing state.”

  Cora sighed. That seemed likely. “Did she tell you that?” she asked.

  “In her way. Did you know that my mother once held the largest collection on Louise Brooks in the world?” She paused to give Cora a smile, as wide as it was fake. “People would write me and say they were my biggest fans, but I knew my biggest fan was right here in Wichita. Mother saved every letter I wrote, every magazine I was in, every movie poster I graced. But that was in 1927.” She frowned, the black eyebrows lowered. “She’s a fair-weather fan, it turns out. When I first got home, she put every letter and photograph in two cardboard boxes, and she asked, ‘Louise, do you want these? Or shall I throw them away?’”

  “I’m sorry,” Cora said.

  Louise shrugged.

  “How’s your father?” It was the only hopeful question Cora could think of.

  “Hmm.” Louise tilted her head to one side. “Well, I’m not sure he knows I’m up here. But he’s a busy man, and it’s only been two years.”

  “Then why are you here?” Cora kept her voice soft. She wasn’t trying to badger. She really didn’t understand. Louise wasn’t caring for her mother, and Myra, now that Louise held little promise, seemed unable to care for her daughter. And Leonard Brooks wasn’t the reason.

  “Because I’m broke.” She said this as if the idea of it was very funny. “Go ahead and tell your chattering friends. Let it be known. I have zilch! Nothing! I thought I was broke when I left California.” She looked at the slanted ceiling of the room. “But then I had two dimes to rub together. Now I don’t even have that.”

  “How is that possible?” Cora leaned forward, tucking her knees to one side. “Don’t you get alimony?”

  “I didn’t ask for it. Both times I just wanted out. And I thought I would keep making more.” She held her flattened palms up. “I could have been a fantastic prostitute. But I just never thought long term.”

  Cora winced. “Why did you stop making films?”

  She didn’t answer right away. Instead, she looked at Cora carefully. It was as if she were a stray cat, trying to decide if she should come closer or if she would run away. Finally, still watching Cora’s eyes, she shrugged. “I was disgusted with Hollywood. They don’t even read there. They just watch.” Vertical lines deepened between her eyes. “They only know what they see, and they see you and think they know you, and then you think they do, too. The outside gets on the inside. It’s no good.”

  Cora nodded as if
she understood. But this story didn’t fit what she knew. It wasn’t as if Louise had left Hollywood in her prime, her dignity intact. She’d gone out with desperation, lowering herself to one silly western and then another. Cora had heard she was supposed to be in one last film, but every scene she was in was cut. Perhaps, in her mind, she’d walked away from it all, but it seemed more likely she’d been pushed. Why? Myra had said she couldn’t get along with people. That she threw everything away. She may have been drinking, even then. But maybe the drinking had nothing to do with the fall. Maybe she’d fallen first and started drinking as a result. It was hard to know what, exactly, had led her back to this sad little room. Maybe all the rage and grief could be traced back to Cherryvale and Mr. Flowers. But it was as likely her current sadness was planted before that by her own unhappy mother. Cora would never know. There was a chance that neither Myra nor Mr. Flowers had altered Louise in any real way. Maybe even before them, even without them, she was destined to be what she would be, driven by yearning and fury that were as much a part of who she was as her beautiful face.

  Cora looked at the stack of books by the bed. One had no writing on the spine. One was by Nietzsche. The bottom book was by Schopenhauer, one that Cora hadn’t read. For the first time, she wondered what might have become of Louise if she’d had a slightly different face—an imperfect nose, smaller, asymmetrical eyes, a jutting chin. She might have been a spinster librarian or a scholar, happily surrounded by books.

  “Why here, Louise? Why come here of all places? You can be broke anywhere.”

  Louise looked at her blankly.

  Cora leaned forward. “You have no love for this house. No love for this town. You never did. Why come back? What? Are you a homing pigeon for misery?”

  Louise looked away, then back at Cora. She seemed both startled and annoyed. “It’s my home. It’s where I belong.”

  “Horse feathers!” Cora slapped her hand against the side of the mattress, truly angry, but the action made Louise smile in her old, condescending way. Cora supposed she should have said “bullshit” or something else that would have sounded hard, but she still hated vulgar language. Louise could smile all she wanted. She knew what Cora meant.

  “You don’t belong here if you’re unhappy,” she continued. “Your mother makes you hateful, and you make her hateful. It doesn’t matter if she’s your mother. It’s an accident of birth. It doesn’t have to mean so much.” She looked down at the rug, the intricate patterns and swirls. “You belong where you have the best chance of being happy, Louise. You don’t like Hollywood? Fine. Don’t go back there. But don’t stay here. Go somewhere else, even if she’s dying. Go where you think you have the best chance to be happy. Get on the train and go.”

  Cora looked away, a little breathless. She was so outraged. She wanted to stand up and shake Louise by the shoulders. But she’d already done all she could. She’d felt this feckless many times before, working at Kindness House. No matter how she pleaded, she couldn’t climb in someone’s head and start steering. People did what they would do.

  “I’m too old,” Louise whispered. “I’m all used up. I’m not even me anymore.”

  “What?” Cora looked up at her, disbelieving. “Louise, how old are you?”

  “Thirty-six.”

  Cora tried not to laugh. It seemed so young, so impossibly young. But then, she’d been thirty-six exactly the summer they went to New York, and hadn’t she felt old before they left, almost broken, almost hopeless? She’d had no idea how much living was in store for her—Joseph, Greta, her grandchildren, her new love for Alan, for Raymond. The hands she’d held at Kindness House.

  “You’re not used up, Louise. I know you. I remember you. I’m certain there’s still quite a bit of you left.”

  Louise stared at her dully. She could be thinking anything. Downstairs, Zana was laughing, and the screen door slammed shut. Louise glanced at her watch.

  Cora took hold of the foot rail and pulled herself to her feet. A contract was a contract, and she was out of arguments. But before she left, on an unchecked impulse, she leaned down and kissed the top of Louise’s head, just as she’d done for her boys, and then for Greta, when telling them good night.

  She resigned herself to not knowing what effect—if any—her visit to Louise had had. She knew she could start checking the paper every morning, searching the arrest log for Louise’s name. Then, at least, she would know that she’d tried and failed. But it would make her so sad to see Louise’s name there, and she decided she might be better off not checking.

  She wished she could have been as disciplined when it came to news of the war. Every morning that spring, she searched each page for word on the Pacific front and then for any mention of a hospital or medical team. She only knew Earle was on a ship somewhere—his two letters had been purposefully vague, in keeping with censors’ requirements. So when any battle and casualties were reported, Cora waited in quiet terror. She knew that if bad news came, it would go to Beth first, so her stomach dropped with every ring of the phone. She checked the mail with obsessive anticipation, though Earle’s letters took weeks to reach Wichita and were no guarantee that he was fine. She wondered if her mother’s intuition would somehow tell her, at the very moment, if he was harmed. She’d read stories of people who’d sensed the passing of loved ones long before they heard the news.

  Some part of her also thought she might feel Mary O’Dell’s death in Massachusetts. Cora, as her blood daughter, would somehow feel her go and have her own private moment of grief, far from her half brothers and half sisters in Haverhill. But Cora never felt any moment like that. Either Mary O’Dell was enjoying a long life or there was no special conduit between them.

  One hot Saturday in June, she was at Kindness House all morning, and by the time she parked outside the house, Joseph was already checking the mail. She ran across the lawn as best she could, but he shook his head.

  “Nothing from him. Sorry.” He looked at her with sympathy, but that was all. Anyone could be looking, and though any brother might embrace a worried sister, they were so used to caution they didn’t risk it. “But you have this,” he said, handing her a postcard. The picture was a black-and-white still life, a shadowed iris in a vase. On the back, Cora’s address was written on one half, and Thanks was written on the other. Still, Cora might have recognized the handwriting, unchanged after all these years, even if LB wasn’t written below.

  The postmark read NYC, stamped just a few days before.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Earle wasn’t killed in the war. The ship he was on engaged in battle three times, but he would only tell Cora and Alan this after the war was over and he was back in St. Louis, his life with his wife and children and his shifts at the hospital resumed. There was no way to know if he would have survived Europe just as well—Cora was only relieved he was home and safe. And then Greta had another baby, a girl she named after her mother, and she would bring both Donna and baby Andrea by almost every week. Cora was aware of her good fortunes, all the grief she’d been spared. Not every mother had been so lucky, and she was still trying to comprehend the new reports coming in about the suffering in the concentration camps, as well as in Dresden and Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It scared her to think how much her life’s ease and happiness had been granted by chance. Earle could have been killed of course—but even more than that, she could have been born anywhere in the world, and to anyone, she and her loved ones suffering in ways she could barely fathom when she listened to the international news. This idea seemed a revelation, something that it had taken her years to really understand. But it was not so different from the way she’d felt as a child, grateful for the Kaufmanns, but anxious to know how easily the train might have left her with someone else. Everything would have been different.

  They had their minor troubles. In the winter of 1946, Joseph slipped on a patch of ice and broke his right wrist. His cast turned his hand into a giant, immobile claw, so that he resembled the irritable crab he
became during the twelve weeks he couldn’t work. And a rough spring storm knocked over one of the neighbor’s sycamores, which fell away from their neighbor’s house and right onto their own. But the third floor took most of the damage, and no one was hurt. Even as Cora had heavy rain and opportunistic squirrels ruining the upper floor of the house, she knew she should count her blessings.

  And then, Alan got sick. At first he was just more tired than usual, only going to the office in the mornings. Then he started sleeping through dinner, and though Cora would save a plate for him, he only picked at it. She told him she was worried, but he assured her he was fine, just needing to rest. It was Raymond who made him go to the doctor. They had a terrific fight about it, which Cora heard from up in her room. The fact that Alan put up such resistance was itself cause for concern. Later, both Cora and Raymond understood that he must have guessed he was truly ill. Pancreatic cancer, already progressed. There was no time to be astounded, to disbelieve. The doctor said two months, and warned none of it would be pleasant.

  Within just a few weeks, he couldn’t manage the stairs. Cora carried meals up to his room, soup she could spoon up to his lips. She brought up meals for Raymond, too. He’d retired from his practice the year before, so his days were free, and he posted himself in the green upholstered chair by Alan’s bed, reading aloud in his still-commanding voice whenever Alan felt up for listening. He administered the morphine, and he helped Alan to the bathroom at the end of the hall. Raymond was seventy, just one year younger than Alan, but he was still wide in the shoulders and strong enough to easily lift him into the bath.

  The whole while Alan was sick, Greta was pregnant with her third child. But she came over every afternoon at two, when Donna was in kindergarten and Andrea could be counted on to stay quiet and asleep in her buggy. If Greta thought anything of Raymond’s constant presence, she said nothing. She may or may not have understood that he was there all day, every day. In any case, Raymond still left by ten every night. Even then, they had to think about the neighbors, what they could and couldn’t explain. But Joseph was home at night, and he could manage any lifting until Raymond returned in the morning.