January 1937
By the afternoon of the party, the only loose end is the lack of a response from Albert Einstein, the hoped-for guest of honor.
Doris sent a note of condolence as soon as she heard about Edna’s death in December. She didn’t really expect a response—of course, that would have been Edna’s job—and she didn’t get one. But several weeks later, as she laid plans for her ambitious dinner party, she reached out once again.
Certainly, Albert is paralyzed with grief. From their first meeting six years earlier, a dinner with the Hubbles, she understood Edna’s and Albert’s deeply complementary natures. Yes, Edna almost always trailed behind or stood to one side of genius, but it was Edna who decided where the Einsteins would go and who they would socialize with. Doris maneuvered herself onto Edna’s short list, which meant that the Einsteins had ample opportunities to get to know her—both during their two-month visit back in, when was it? 1931? and their stay in Pasadena the following year. Sometimes they came with the Hubbles to dine at El Sueno. Other times, Albert and Edna arrived alone to spend the afternoon. Albert was particularly fond of little Kenyon. He delighted in bouncing the toddler on his knee.
You are the grandfather he never had; she told him, quietly, one evening.
It is an honor, he said, beaming. I remember so long ago when my son, too, was this age.
So now Albert, almost certainly alone and despondent in faraway Princeton, is not responding, not coming to dinner. But there are other distinguished guests who will attend. The Hubbles, of course; Edwin and his elusive wife Grace. Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald—Hollywood’s favorite couple, for reasons that Doris can’t quite fathom. The Basil Rathbones. John Goodrich, there at the house on the horrible day of Milton’s death and standing by her ever since. Ramon Novarro and Theda Bara—among the few actors that Milton and Doris had become friends with.
They will arrive in less than two hours. Imagining herself a field marshal, she surveys her battlefield. Exuberant flowers overwhelm their vases. New candlesticks stand implausibly tall along the great length of the dining room table, fully extended tonight. Ice fills two chrome buckets at the bar. The steep frozen mounds hidden inside them occasionally subside with a muffled clank—a sound Doris always finds satisfying. The sweet and sharp smell of citrus arises from a small mountain of fresh lemons and limes and the shavings of lemon peels, prepared just the way the Rathbones like them.
Marta, meanwhile, is hard at work in the kitchen on the final dinner preparations. She has fended off every offer of outside help, even coming in yesterday on her day off to get a head start. “Miss Doris,” she says when challenged, “this is what I do. Other people, they do what they do. This is what I do.”
Kenyon is upstairs with the nanny, taking his bath and getting ready for an early bedtime. He protested, wanting to stay up for the guests, but Doris put her foot down.
She continues running through her mental checklist. The piano was tuned earlier in the week even though it didn’t need it. The pianist, Nyiregyhazi, has arrived early. He’s a gifted artist always on the verge of starvation. She pays him a $10-a-month retainer to play at her dinner parties—more than generous, she tells herself, since I almost never have parties. No doubt he hopes that tonight Doris will relent and let him join her and her guests at the grand table, but no. He is too rough and raw, too hungry and risky.
Now he emerges from the kitchen, badly dressed and hair askew as usual. She barely conceals her annoyance. He isn’t supposed to be seen until dessert is served. She sighs and prepares to explain to him once again that he needs to play his role and only his role. Just as I do, she thinks impatiently. Just as we all do.
“Miss Kenyon,” he says. “Doris.” There is an edge to his voice. Rarely does he call her Doris. “You need to go to the kitchen.”
“Honestly, Ny, can’t Marta deal with it? The guests will be arriving shortly, and¾”
“No. Really. You need to go to the kitchen right now.”
She sighs again. She heads toward the kitchen. She notes that Nyiregyhazi does not follow.
The first thing she sees is a hand on the kitchen table. The hand has a very large knife in it, knife heel on the table and tip pointed straight upward. Then she registers the face behind the knife, distorted with emotion. Helen’s face, but barely recognizable. The eyes are sunken, seeming to quiver in their sockets. Her once-beautiful halo of blonde hair has shrunk down to a flat and thin covering, mottled brown streaked with gray. There is a small rip in one of the sleeves of her light jacket.
“Helen? What are you doing here? How did you get in without me seeing you?” No, Doris retreats immediately, that sounded wrong. “I mean, you didn’t come to the front door?”
Marta, seated next to Helen at the table, moans. Doris now sees that Helen’s other hand is gripping Marta’s upper arm, tightly. “Oh, Miss Doris,” she cries, “it is all my fault. She came to the back and I let her in because she is your friend and she said you wanted her to be here tonight and she didn’t want to disturb you. She took my knife. It is all my fault.”
“It’s all right, Marta. Let’s stay calm.”
“Yes,” Helen says in a sepulchral tone, nodding. “Calm.”
“First, Helen, you need to put the knife down. On the table.”
“No.”
“Helen, Marta has a lot to attend to. I’m having guests.”
“I know. I read. In the gossip column.”
“It looks like you’re in some kind of trouble. Maybe I can help you.” Please don’t hurt Kenyon, as if saying a childish bedtime prayer. Or Marta or me or nanny. But especially not Kenyon.
“Yes. You can help me,” Helen says. Her voice is as empty as her eyes. “I need you to call my ex-husband. Gene. Get him to come here with my medicine. Tell him I’ve gone too long without my medicine and it hurts. He’ll come here. Here to your house.”
Helen’s hand starts to shake. The blade of the knife catches the light, dancing and flashing.
Doris, nearing panic, wonders: Can she get through to the old Helen? Can the old Helen’s love for her be brought to the surface, and then prevailed upon? “Helen,” she says, “I’ll help you if you help me.”
“What?”
“Let go of Marta’s arm. Put the knife down. Give me Gene’s number and I’ll call him.”
Helen considers that. Then she nods tentatively. “Yes. Marta can go. I’ll keep the knife. You make the call. Here. The number on this paper.” She throws a balled-up scrap of paper onto the table. Slowly, Doris walks to the table and picks up the crumpled sheet. She watches as Helen relaxes her grip on Marta’s arm, as Marta eases herself up from her chair and backs away from Helen. Good girl, Marta, Doris encourages her silently. Stay calm and keep moving. Move slowly, but keep moving away.
“Marta, please go upstairs and make sure Kenyon finishes getting ready for bed until I call you.”
“Oh, Miss Doris, I can’t—“
“Just do that. For me and Kenyon, Marta.”
Marta pushes the swinging kitchen door open just enough to slip out into the hallway, leaving Doris and Helen alone. Now Helen’s whole body is racked with small convulsions. Sweat begins to trickle down her forehead and cheeks.
“I’m going to go into the hall and make the call for you, Helen. But I would feel so much better if you would put the knife down. Please. You don’t need it.”
“I might. Maybe.”
“Well, then, I’ll leave the door open while I’m making the call. I want to make sure you’re all right.”
“Make the call from in here.”
“There’s no phone here, Helen. The phone is in the hall.”
Moment of truth, Doris thinks. If she insists on coming with me I won’t know what to do. Maybe Nyiregyhazi and I can overpower her. But odds are that Nyiregyhazi has run away.
Helen struggles to get to her feet, falters, and sinks back down onto her chair. She gestures with her free hand: call.
Doris turns away, protected now only by Helen’s weakness and the expanse of the table, nothing more. She pushes the kitchen door until it snaps into the locked-open position. Then she steps into the hall, picks up the phone and dials her next-door neighbor.
Ed Jones picks it up on the second ring.
“Hello, doctor? Hello. My name is Doris Kenyon. You don’t know me.” Ed, dear Ed, she pleads silently, I’m counting on you.
“Uh, hi, Doris.” She hears him chuckle. “I think maybe you dialed the wrong doctor.”
“Yes. I’m a friend of Helen Worthing’s. Your former wife. She’s here at my house. She is having some kind of serious problem and needs you to give her some medicine.”
“Doris, what’s going on? Are you in trouble?”
“Yes. At my house. It’s 315 North Saltair, in Brentwood.”
“You’re in danger? Do you need the police?”
“Yes, doctor. That’s right. As soon as possible, please. Helen really needs your help. Maybe you should come directly to the back door, off the kitchen.”
“Got it. Hang in there, Doris. I’m calling the cops right now. I’ll send them to the back door. Do you want me to come over now, meanwhile?”
“No, no. Just hurry, doctor.”
And hanging up feels like letting go of a life preserver in deep water.
They sit across the kitchen table from each other. Helen holds onto the knife, although now not gripping it as tightly. Sometimes it sags downward toward the table until she notices and points it upright again. Doris tries to get her to talk about her days with the Follies, so long ago, but Helen doesn’t respond much beyond a shrug and a sigh. So Doris tells a story about when Milton wore a terribly fake-looking beard in one of his movies and was teased unmercifully around the studio for days. Doris, then getting her hair bobbed on a bet, decided to box up her shorn hair and send it to him. “I put a note in the box,” she says. “It said, ‘For bigger and better beards.’”
She thinks she sees a glimpse of Helen, in there behind the hollowed-out cravings. Maybe so: Helen finally lays the knife down on the table in front of her and slumps forward, her elbows on the tabletop.
“I lost a bet once,” Helen says. “No. Twice. Two bets.”
“Which bets? Tell me.”
“The first was in Florida.” Her teeth are now chattering between short, almost spat-out sentences. “At that hotel where Phoebe and I went. When Mr. Ziegfeld set up that deal for us.”
“I remember.”
“I had to get a butterfly tattooed somewhere on my body. For losing the bet.”
“Oh, dear! Hollywood doesn’t like tattoos.”
“Not Mr. Ziegfeld either. So I got it on the bottom of my left foot.”
“I never saw it.”
Helen is shivering but seems determined to finish her story. “I was making Don Juan with Barrymore. The script had us kissing. Had me lifting my foot so that my satin mule would fall off.”
“Hollywood’s way of conveying lust without annoying the censors. So silly, right?” Engage, Doris tells herself. Buy time.
“But the camera saw it. My tattoo. Crosland had a fit. He made us reshoot it. From the other side. So my right shoe falls off with no tattoo.”
“Show it to me. The tattoo.” Keep her talking.
“What? Now?”
“Sure. While we wait.” Keep her lost in the past.
Helen lifts her head off the table. “Well. O.K.” She turns sideways in her chair, awkwardly, and leans over to untie her left shoe.
But the chair tips and Helen slides off, hitting the floor heavily on one hip. Then she pitches all the way over and her head makes a loud thump as it hits the linoleum, hard.
“Oh god!” Doris rushes around the table and kneels over her. Helen moans, curled up in a ball and eyelids fluttering. “Oh, Helen, Helen! Are you all right?” She sits down on the cold floor. “You’re shivering. Here, dear, let me hold you. Is your head O.K.? Talk to me, Helen. What was, what was . . . the other bet? The second bet?”
Helen opens unfocused eyes. “You.”
“What? Me? What do you mean? I was the second bet?”
“I trusted you. To always tell me the truth.”
“I did. I do.”
“You didn’t. About Lasky. You knew and you didn’t tell me. But he did. Lasky did. And he told me about you. About what you knew.”
“Oh, god.” Doris feels a sharp wrench pulling all the way across her stomach. She has felt it before. She knows she will feel it from now on, forever, when she thinks of Helen and this night. She hugs Helen tighter into her lap. There is no blood. She hugs her still harder. She is horrified to discover how unsubstantial Helen is—a stunned bird, dazed and wounded, almost weightless.