Читать книгу Elements of Chance - Barbara Wilkins - Страница 11

6

Max Perlstein, the brilliant composer and studio musician, occasionally took on a promising piano student, and when Valerie was ten, Nancy Carroll arranged for her to audition for him. Valerie had been terrified, not knowing what to expect. He was very nice, though. He was very casual. Tall and thin, he had long blond hair down to his shoulders. He wore jeans, a shirt, and loafers with no socks.

His house in Bel-Air sat on a half acre of land. It was low and rambling, vaguely Spanish, with light hardwood floors and very little furniture in the living room. Sofas flanked the stone fireplace, and a chunk of glass on a base served as a coffee table. The Steinway, of course. Several good oriental rugs. A few large expressionist paintings. Hundreds of books. Two German shepherds.

Valerie sat stiffly on the edge of one of the sofas as Max and Nancy bantered and laughed about mutual friends. Looking around the huge room, she realized the only times she had ever seen a house like this was in movies or in magazines.

She performed what she had rehearsed for months with Nancy, remembering her teacher’s words. “Feel the music.” She played a Beethoven sonata, part of a Mozart concerto, and finally a Bach fugue. Finishing, she turned toward Max. He was leaning forward, the expression on his face interested.

“Your technique’s pretty good,” he said, smiling. “Let’s try it out for a couple of weeks to see how we work together.”

“You did it,” said Nancy as they left, hugging her. “You’re on your way now.”

Valerie soon learned the routine of the house. A maid came in twice a week, and occasionally one of Max’s girlfriends would sun herself by the pool while Valerie had her lesson. Max pushed her into the master’s program at UCLA, and she played for Zubin Mehta, for Georg Solti, and for other conductors and musicians passing through Los Angeles. She even played for Vladimir Horowitz one heady afternoon, and dreamed for days of his kind words for her performance.

At fourteen, Valerie looked like a twelve-year-old. When she made any kind of public appearance, Max had her dress in little Peter Pan collars and pleated skirts, her shining blond hair in a ponytail.

“Musicians, mathematicians, and poets all hit when they’re young, kiddo,” Max told her. He prepared her for the Young Musicians Foundation competition, in which two hundred contestants from all over the country competed for the prize of fifteen hundred dollars and a concert tour with guaranteed publicity.

Valerie played her way through the series of eliminations at UCLA’s Royce Hall. Her interpretation of Beethoven’s Appassionata in the finals brought her a standing ovation and first place.

The concert tour included appearances throughout California. “Fire … poetry of sound … vibrant,” said the Los Angeles Times, who called Max to arrange an interview with her. There was another interview with the Herald-Examiner, and others with the classical music stations.

“Great news, kiddo,” said Max, waving a piece of paper at Valerie as she arrived for her lesson. “You’ve been offered a scholarship to the London Conservatory of Music. A grant’s been established by Penn International. They’re a world-wide banking outfit. It’s recognition, Valerie. It’s the next step. You win every competition, you got some press when you won the Young Musicians Foundation award, the concert tour got you some more. It’s all building. It’s the next step.”

“I can’t do it, Max,” she said. “I’m not ready to leave you.”

“Don’t count on me, kiddo. I’ve always been straight with you about why I took you on. Somebody did it for me when I was at that point in my own career, and it’s my way of paying my dues. We couldn’t have gone on forever. You’re going to need a manager soon, and I can’t do it. I have my own life, and my own career. Now that I’m scoring films, I don’t have a lot of teaching time.”

“But my mom and dad, they’d never let me go.”

“Get serious,” Max chided. “You’ll be staying with a woman named Anne Hallowell. She’s a lady, with a capital L. A big patron of the arts, and mucho bucks.”

“A Lady,” Valerie breathed, and the fantasies she’d had of herself as a kidnapped princess flooded her mind. Lady Anne Hallowell. She savored the titled name in her mind.

By the time Valerie walked the three blocks to Sunset Boulevard to catch the bus home, her mind was buzzing. London. Lady Anne Hallowell. Maybe there was even a castle. Oh, she could hardly wait to get home to tell her parents.

Vicki was strangely subdued. “That’s wonderful, baby,” she said. “It’s a great opportunity for you. You’ll need some clothes, I guess. I suppose Max can take you shopping. He’ll know what you need. God knows where we’ll get the money, though.”

“Don’t you want me to go?” Valerie knew from the tone in Vicki’s voice that something was wrong.

Al, when he got home, barely acknowledged her news. The next day was no better. Valerie felt as if she had done something vaguely shameful.

“Max is going to take me down to get my passport tomorrow,” Valerie said as she arrived home one evening. She saw what seemed to be fear in Vicki’s eyes. “Mom, is there something wrong?”

“No, no. Nothing,” said Vicki, sipping her beer.

“Anyway, we have to go to the Federal Building down on Wilshire. There’s a place across the street where Max says I can get my picture taken. I’ll need my birth certificate.”

“Oh, God,” Vicki sighed.

“What’s the matter, Mom? Are you okay?”

“I’m okay,” Vicki said sadly.

“You haven’t lost my birth certificate, have you? Is that it?”

“No, it isn’t that,” Vicki said, pulling herself to her feet. “You sit down. I’ll get it.”

A wave of panic washed over Valerie as she watched her mother walk down the hall on her way to the bedroom. In a moment, she returned with a manila envelope. Her face was white.

“I’ve been thinking and thinking about this, baby, and I don’t think there’s any easy way to do it. It’s been driving Al and me nuts, I’ll tell you that. Believe me, I never wanted this day to come.”

Valerie took the manila envelope from Vicki’s outstretched hand and removed the document inside.

A female infant had been born on January 21, 1954, at 7:20 in the morning. The weight was seven pounds, eight ounces, the length twenty inches. Under “Name of mother” was Cynthia Schuyler. The father was unknown. The infant was named Valerie Jane Schuyler. The hospital was Saint John’s in Portland, Oregon, and not in Santa Monica, where Valerie had always been told she was born.

“What is this?” Valerie asked, her voice shaking.

“It’s your birth certificate, baby,” Vicki sighed.

“It can’t be,” Valerie said, bewildered.

“It’s why Al and I have been so upset about you going to England. Because we knew you’d have to get a passport, and you’d have to see your birth certificate.”

“I’m adopted,” Valerie said, wondering why her voice sounded so strange. Adopted. Impossible. She felt suddenly lost.

“Well, not really,” said Vicki. “We’ve never really adopted you. Cini would call, but we never had a number where we could reach her. She never even told us what name she was using, so we couldn’t find her to sign the papers. Then we were afraid the records could be traced. So we just let it go. Of course, we knew all along it couldn’t be kept a secret forever.”

“I don’t understand. What do you mean you were afraid the records could be traced?”

“Oh, baby, I’m sorry,” Vicki said, shaking her head. “Cini was a good friend of mine, a real party girl. She was hanging around with a guy from out of town, a very dangerous guy. She got pregnant, and when she finally told him, he said she was blackmailing him and he was going to kill her. By that time it was way too late for an abortion, so she split. She thought nobody would ever find her in Portland. I went up to be with her for a few months until you were born. When I brought you back, Al and I played it like you were our own. The only time we had to show your birth certificate was when you started kindergarten. We said we were in the process of adopting you, and we were filing papers. We just stalled and stalled. Finally, they got a new secretary at the school, and it just never came up again.”

“Where is she? What happened to her? Who was my father?”

“Cini stayed in Portland for a couple of months. She’d call. But that was just for those two months. She called me once from Dallas, about six years ago, but she didn’t call me anymore after that. Maybe the guy found her after all. He was very powerful, nobody to fool with. She miscalculated, that was all. She was in over her head.”

“Who was he?”

“She never told me,” Vicki sighed. “She said it would be better if I didn’t know. I always thought he was from Las Vegas. Maybe with the mob. Cini liked those guys … the more dangerous, the more exciting. That was how she looked at things. This guy, well, he gave her some beautiful jewelry, and one of those little red Thunderbirds. And money, of course. What we cared about then was having a good time, guys, and what we could get from them. Or where we had been the night before, and clothes …” Her voice trailed off as she remembered.

“She was a prostitute,” Valerie said slowly.

“Well, not exactly. Cini was from a good family back East somewhere. She just liked to have a good time. She was gorgeous, baby, a showstopper. All delicate and fragile. But the way she walked … the way she looked at a guy. They couldn’t keep away from her. And fun. God, Cini was more fun than anyone.” Vicki paused, and the expression on her face was compassionate and loving.

“Are you okay, baby?” She touched Valerie’s hand.

“I’m fine,” she whispered numbly. “I’m just, well, surprised is all.”

“I’ve got some pictures of her. Do you want to see them?”

“No,” Valerie cried, wanting to run out of the apartment, run and run, until all this went away.

“I’ll get them,” Vicki said, jumping up, seemingly energized by relief. In a moment she returned with a bulging brown envelope.

“Here, come on. Sit with me on the couch.” Vicki pulled Valerie next to her and scattered dozens of snapshots over the magazines, newspapers, and ashtrays on the coffee table.

Gingerly, Valerie picked up a large black-and-white head shot of a face that could be her own in a few years’ time. Her hair was as fair as Valerie’s, her eyes pale, her cheekbones high. My mother, Valerie thought, with a thrill of recognition that took her breath away. The next snapshot, out of focus, showed Vicki, Al, her mother, and another man, all smiling for a nightclub photographer. There were drinks on the table in front of them, ashtrays, a little lamp with a metal shade.

“That was just after Al and I started going together,” Vicki said. “And Cini. Isn’t she gorgeous? I can’t remember who that guy was.”

Vicki picked up another picture and handed it to Valerie. It was a long shot in color of her mother sitting on the fender of a red Thunderbird, one of the little ones from the fifties that Valerie still saw driving around town.

“That was the car,” Vicki said. “Look at that dress. Her clothes were great.”

Photograph followed photograph. Cini, tall and slender, wearing a one-piece bathing suit on a beach, the ocean and blue sky behind her. Her legs were spread, her hands on her hips, and the look on her face seemed to dare the world to show her how good it was. “That was the weekend a couple of guys flew us down to Rosarito Beach in their private plane,” Vicki said. “We landed right in front of the hotel on the landing strip there, and went in for lunch. Everybody used to do that. And this is at a Jimmy Durante show in Las Vegas. What was that hotel?” Vicki paused to sip her beer. “Well, I can’t remember, but we had a ball. Here we were at Romanoff’s. Everybody used to go there. Bogart. Bacall. This is at the Coconut Grove. That’s in the Ambassador Hotel, down on Wilshire. We used to go there to see Lena Horne, Harry Belafonte. And here …”

Later that night, as she lay in bed, too exhausted to sleep, Valerie felt that nothing would ever be right again.