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Chapter Seven

“DID YOU TAKE THE PIERCE ARROW to rehearsal?” I asked Lola on our walk up Canyon Drive. “I walked,” Lola said. “Right over that hill there. Through the coyotes.”

We paused and looked toward Bronson Canyon and west toward the hill Lola had once crossed on foot at dawn. It would have been at least two miles over coyote- and rattlesnake-infested hills till you came down past Valentino’s old house to where the Hollywood Bowl was. But to Lola, after so many hikes up Mount Hollywood, these low hills might have seemed nothing in the days when they weren’t covered with the houses built on them now.

“On Sunday mornings when your Aunt Goldie spent the night, I’d bring her breakfast in bed,” Lola said. “I was so surprised the first time I did this.”

“Surprised?”

“Because she’d never had breakfast in bed before,” Lola said. “She didn’t even know there was such a thing. And I was so unconscious, I just did it without thinking. Because I couldn’t conceive of what being poor meant – or even lower middle class. We always had Fraulein to do everything for us before we asked.”

“Well,” I said, “Goldie sure must know what breakfast in bed is now, thanks to you.”

“You know who knew all about being rich? Before anyone had to tell her, she just knew? Goldie’s sister, the younger one.”

“You mean Aunt Helen?”

“Helen knew everything,” Lola nodded. “Just everything. And she sang like an angel. What a voice that gorgeous beauty had, what richness – everything about her just had a glow – golden, that’s how she was. And she knew it.”

“Before she moved to New Jersey,” I said, “and ruined the whole thing.”

“These things happen,” Lola said philosophically.

“To dumb people, not Helen,” I said. “Every time she comes to visit us, you know what she says? She is driving up La Cienega to our house from the airport – you know La Cienega, that hideous street filled with ugly Lowry’s Prime Rib restaurants? – and she lets out this musical note sigh like a bell. ‘Ooooooo,’ she says, ‘I’d forgotten how green and beautiful L.A. is.’ She says that when we’re not even anywhere green and beautiful yet. She should get a divorce.”

“You selfish girl.” Lola casually shrugged.

“Well, she should,” I insisted.

Lola looked up toward the entrance to the park where Bronson Canyon now lay before us. A thin buzzing mass of sound came twisting from that direction.

“What is that?” Lola asked.

“Bagpipes,” I said. “A guy practices his bagpipes here because he can’t in his apartment, his landlord won’t let him. So he practices here.”

“Well,” Lola said, a birdlike alertness on her intently focused face as she listened for a moment, “he sure does need it.”