Great Big Beautiful Life(84)
“Oh, that’s right,” Margaret said. “I’m sure he’s pomading his hair right up until showtime.”
And this earned a real belly laugh from Laura. “I know, you think he’s ridiculous.”
“Of course I do,” Margaret allowed. “But most men are. Look at our father.”
Laura gave her an amused yet reproachful look, but she didn’t disagree. After a second, she said, “Roy’s not ridiculous.”
“No, no he’s not,” Margaret agreed of their stepfather. “But then, Roy’s not the sort of man they let up on a stage with a microphone.”
Laura tittered. “Can you imagine?”
“I can, and it’s a tragedy, Laura.” The picture of their mother’s even-keeled and soft-spoken husband wailing on a guitar, a lock of Cosmo-style hair falling across his forehead, made them both howl with laughter. “More than that, picture Mom watching him from the audience.”
It was too easy to imagine the highly practical Doris Bernhardt observing the spectacle, horrified.
When Laura’s laughter finally settled and she wiped the tears from her eyes, she said thoughtfully, “Although…I suppose Dad’s always been a bit of a showman. And she loved him once, didn’t she?”
It made Margaret’s heart ache, to realize her sister didn’t have those precious memories from the early years that meant so much to Margaret herself. That she couldn’t recall the day she’d first toddled across the grass and Freddy, Bernie, and Margaret cheered on the smallest of their band.
They’d eaten ice cream sundaes, down in one of the kitchens, to celebrate, the girls sitting up on the long oak prep table.
“Not that she doesn’t love him now,” Laura added. “I only mean, they were in love, weren’t they?”
“I think so, yes,” Margaret said. “And if they weren’t, they were still happy.”
The truth was, Margaret wasn’t sure she knew precisely what love was. Sometimes she lay awake late at night, thinking about the word until it came apart like little bits of alphabet soup, the letters drifting off in opposite directions and the meaning lost somewhere in the gaps.
She knew she felt an almost feral protectiveness of her sister.
She knew she admired her mother, thought her quite possibly the loveliest woman in the world, though she’d heard and read enough to know the world at large didn’t agree with this assessment.
And she knew that though she no longer felt close to her father—not deeply known by or deeply knowledgeable of him—she’d felt a kind of peace every time she’d sat opposite him in the drawing room, playing chess while the fire popped and crackled in the grate.
She knew what it was to have fun drinking and dancing with a man, and that occasionally there was a fair amount of pleasure to be had doing other things with one, but love…
She didn’t know what it was, and she couldn’t imagine being in it, the way people described.
And the joy of having two parents who were not only ludicrously wealthy but also extremely eccentric was that no one in her family minded much whether she fell in love and got married or not. Look at Aunt Francine—she was fifty-three years old and had never been married, and then there was Great-Aunt Gigi, who at seventy-five had never bothered to remarry after her first husband’s death, instead spending most weekends during Margaret’s youth either at the ballet or entertaining some attractive male ballet dancer or another in her rooms at the house.
And Bernie had certainly never pushed either of her daughters toward matrimony. If anything, Margaret had occasionally felt as though her mother hoped Margaret might fall in love with filmmaking the way Bernie herself had, but even that romance evaded her.
She and Laura finished their burgers and shakes in a thoughtful quiet, then walked down the street to hail a cab. As long as they’d lived, they’d had a dedicated driver, and lifting her hand as she stepped off the curb triggered a delicious thrill in Margaret’s chest.
She felt, for the first time in a long time, the distinct possibility of getting it wrong. Of trying something new in a world that wouldn’t bend for you. In the back seat of the cab, the sisters grinned at each other and clasped each other’s hands tightly, and Margaret knew Laura felt it too.
It made her feel young again. She wasn’t a socialite. Wasn’t the Tabloid Princess. She was one of two giggly sisters playing make-believe, or hatching a prank on their good-spirited father, like the time they’d filled his shoes with eggs and hidden around the corner to watch the moment he stuffed his foot into the leather.
They made it to the Pan Pacific without a hitch and joined the mass of people pouring toward the recently opened doors of the green-and-white building. Laura tensed again, but the thrill in Margaret’s chest only renewed.
Had she ever waited in line before? Not that this was a line, per se. It was more like a thousand different lines, all colliding and dividing in every direction, as the crowd jostled forward.
Margaret could sense Laura’s nerves, but she thought she could feel her excitement too.
The Ives sisters might possibly have been the richest people in that room of thousands, but they were far from the most famous, the private boxes packed with movie stars and professional ballplayers, other singers.
And no one seemed interested in craning their necks to catch a glimpse of anyone other than the one person they’d come to see.