Great Big Beautiful Life(83)
She sighs, like the thought exhausts her, and I wonder for the millionth time why she agreed to this, if she’s genuinely still considering my original proposition or if she’s already checked out. “How are you feeling? About the interview process?”
“I’ve been dreading today.”
“Really? Why?” I ask.
“Because,” she says with a small shrug, “we’re coming up on all my greatest mistakes.”
I frown. Is that how she’d categorize it? Her epic, highly documented love story?
“Guess we might as well get to it,” she says. “But keep working while we talk. There’s plenty more shit in the creek.”
“I’m not sure that’s how the saying goes,” I say.
“Should be, though, shouldn’t it?”
The Story
Their version: In 1958, as Gerald Ives lay dying, his granddaughters were out drinking and dancing until the sun came up.
* * *
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Her version: One perfect night. That was what Margaret needed to give Laura to shake her out of her isolation, to bring her out of the gilded tomb that was the House of Ives and into the land of the living.
It started with the head gardener. Daniel lived on the Ives property, but he had a truck, and it wasn’t uncommon for him to make deliveries and pickups from nurseries between the glimmering coast, where the House of Ives sat perched, and downtown Los Angeles.
Leaving with Margaret’s usual car and driver was out of the question. That thing had become a press magnet, and while ordinarily she figured the cameras would find her no matter what so she might as well cut to the chase and pose, she knew that sort of attention would send Laura skittering home, more determined than ever to hide from life.
So Margaret’s driver, Darrin, was out. Daniel the gardener was in.
“He’ll take us off property in the back of his truck,” she told her sister. “We’ll wear disguises and everything, like we’re spies.”
Laura was hesitant, but when wasn’t she these days?
“Gerald isn’t doing well,” she said, because the girls had been raised to call their grandfather by his first name rather than a more affectionate nickname. “I don’t know about leaving him alone.”
“He won’t be alone,” Margaret said, which was true, because there were always people in the house, even if primarily those people were staff.
“He doesn’t like anyone else, really,” Laura pointed out.
“And they don’t like him either,” Margaret said. “A match made in heaven.”
At that, Laura gave a begrudging laugh. It made Margaret’s heart leap with hope. “We’ll ask Mom to come sit with him for a while. He likes Mom.” An exaggeration, but only slightly.
Gerald had disapproved of his son’s marriage, but disapproved far more of his divorce, and in the years since, he’d adamantly refused to learn any of Freddy’s partners’ names and showed a clear preference for Bernie over his son during family dinners.
“One night,” Margaret whispered eagerly, clasping Laura’s hands in hers.
She saw the moment she won her sister over. She had a knack for that sort of thing—reading people. In her mind, she was already celebrating before Laura ever said the breathless, exhilarated words, “I wonder what he’s like in person.”
He of course being Cosmo Sinclair, whose concert they’d be attending.
Margaret fought a powerful urge to roll her eyes. She’d had plenty of gentlemen friends over the years, had plenty of fun with them even, but she knew Cosmo Sinclair’s type.
Preening, self-important, and with enough sparkle to hide the fact that his skull was more or less a wind tunnel. But that didn’t matter. Cosmo was a means to an end, and that means had just done its job.
She got the wigs from her mother’s studio, and as for the clothes they’d wear, she’d asked the housekeeper to buy them each a dress straight off the rack at Bullock’s. Something pink for Laura, because it would bring out the glow in her cheeks, and something drab for Margaret, because anything too colorful or glamorous might too clearly read Peggy Ives, rather than anonymous concertgoer.
On the night of the concert, the two lay in the bed of Daniel’s truck with a scratchy wool blanket pulled over them, and they rumbled off the property, right past the row of not-so-patiently-waiting photographers who’d started gathering outside their tall iron gates.
A friend of his, handsomely paid for his discretion, met the girls on the side of a road and drove them toward Pan Pacific. Not to. Toward. It felt like overkill to Margaret, treating themselves like Audrey Hepburn’s Princess Ann in Roman Holiday, but the subterfuge was both a fun game and a way to make Laura feel more comfortable. Maybe, she thought, this could even become a tradition of theirs.
Daniel’s friend dropped them at a burger joint, and Laura hovered close to Margaret’s shoulder, intimidated rather than comforted by the excess of rowdy young people eating and socializing at the counter.
“It’s too crowded,” Laura whimpered. “Someone will recognize us.”
“Why would they?” Margaret said. “We’ve never been anywhere like this in our lives.”
They ate their burgers and drank their shakes in a corner booth. Laura was quiet and watchful at first, but when Margaret bumped her ankle to her sister’s and said, “What do you think Cosmo is doing right now?” Laura gave a meek smile.