Frank Sinatra was not in a good mood. I knew that because, though I’d not seen his face yet, the back of his neck was crimson, his shoulders were hunched, and he was tapping his right foot nervously on the floor. Ava faced him, unsmiling. As the maitre d’ escorted me to their table, she looked past him toward me and attempted a welcoming smile. The tapping of the right foot stopped suddenly.
The taxi had just dropped me off at Don the Beachcomber on North McCadden Place, and I imagined myself deposited, reluctantly, onto a movie set for some Busby Berkeley pineapple-and-luau extravaganza. Garish spotlights, some revolving from the rooftop, illuminated massive palm trees silhouetted against an ocean-blue backdrop touted as the “island of Mahuukona.” Worse, the maitre d’ who grasped my elbow, an obsequious gentleman who was obviously expecting me, was dressed in a flowing Hawaiian shirt so ostentatiously decorated with blood-red hibiscus blooms that it brought to mind ancient blood-letting and savage sacrifice. Maidens hurled willy-nilly into the mouth of a seething volcano, lava steaming. Yet he spoke in a flat Brooklyn accent and smelled of cheap cigars.
Ava rushed to embrace me but held on too long, whispering something in my ear I didn’t catch. Frank stood, turned, that enormous toothy grin switched on; he extended his hand, performed a half-bow. He pulled a chair out for me.
“Edna, I was worried you’d abandon us,” Ava said.
“Not a chance. I’m certain to be featured in some gossip sheet by morning.”
Only Ava laughed. “And Alice and Max are late. After all, it’s his birthday dinner.”
They’d been drinking, I could tell, and two ashtrays already held snubbed-out cigarette butts, though a passing waiter seamlessly made both disappear, each replaced with a sparkling clean one. Frank immediately started talking of an encounter earlier with a pesky photographer as they’d pulled up in his Cadillac convertible. “You see, Miss Ferber, he was hiding behind that trellis of bougainvillea, like a night prowler, and jumped out, scaring us to death.” Still seething, he sputtered to a stop.
Ava added, “Francis yelled, ‘Beat it, you crumbs,’ and knocked the camera out of his hand, and they…tussled. Francis scraped a knuckle.” Frank held out his hand to prove she wasn’t lying. Ava glanced at him. “I don’t know why you have to grapple with them. It only makes it worse, you know.”
Spitfire words, furious. “They’re bums. All of them.”
“Still…”
“Ava, not now, doll.”
She shrugged. “Quite the place, no, Edna?”
My eyes swept the cavernous room. Plastic palm trees, a virtual forest of green disaster. Bizarrely, there were stuffed pudgy monkeys hidden among the lacy fronds. “Beautiful.”
“They have the best rum zombies here,” Ava told me.
“Zombies? Like the living dead? Why am I not surprised? That’s all of Hollywood, no?”
Frank shot me a look as though I’d lapsed into dialectical Farsi. He downed his drink and brusquely signaled the waiter for another. When the waiter neared, Frank stuck a cigarette between his lips and demanded, “Match me.” The waiter hurriedly lit the cigarette.
He was rubbing his bruised knuckle. I saw a trace of blood there, broken skin.
“I should sue that damn photographer hack. My knuckle’s gonna swell up tomorrow, you know…”
Ava ignored him. “Edna, what are you drinking? A zombie? They got this drink they invented called the mai tai. Rum is king here.”
“So I gather from the garish placards outside. I’ll have a glass of red wine.”
Ava insisted. “The zombies are…”
Frank rapped his good knuckle on the table. “You and those goddamned zombies. The woman can choose her own drink, Ava. Christ.”
“I’m only suggesting…”
“Leave her alone.”
I ordered a glass of wine.
Ava smiled at me. “We do love each other, Edna. You have to believe that.”
“Thank God for that. No one else would have either one of you.”
Both Ava and Frank stared at me, though Ava smiled. “Christ,” Frank muttered. And I swear he mouthed something about old crazy broads.
“All right, Francis dear, let’s have a pleasant evening.”
“Yes,” I added, “dining with stuffed monkeys watching me will be a sobering experience.”
Frank seemed to notice the monkeys populating the plastic palms for the first time. “This place is a dump.”
“I like the booze here,” Ava said.
“You like the booze everywhere.”
Somehow, through some sleight of hand I’d missed, my glass of wine appeared before me. “Cheers,” Ava toasted. “To Show Boat.”
Frank smiled. “Life on the wicked stage.”
Ava checked the entrance. “Where are they?”
I bristled, ready to leave this boorish young man-and, I suppose, boorish young woman-both wreathed in noxious clouds of cigarette smoke, their voices strangled with whiskey. All a bit wearying, if familiar. Old ladies should be spared the sight of the next generation sinking into a quagmire of dissolution. Sort of saps one’s faith in the progress of humankind.
Ava, I quietly concluded, was a tantalizing dish best savored away from the whiskey chaser that was her smarmy boyfriend.
Frank excused himself. “Call of Hoboken nature.”
Ava began apologizing. “We bring out the worst in each other, Edna. But, trust me, also the best. We’re so much alike-wild, jealous, craving the nightlife. Hot-headed fools, you know. We’re two insomniacs, lonely night animals wandering the desert. But I didn’t want you to see this. It’s just that…that photographer set Francis off, and that set me off and…”
I sipped my wine. “It’s all right, Ava. Years back I weathered the besotted members of the Algonquin Club in New York. After that experience-can you imagine Dottie Parker inebriated, her mouth running in top gear? — anything is bearable.” I batted my eyes. “Even you…and Francis.”
Frank returned, stopping to light a cigarette from one of the blazing tiki torches that speckled the room.
“Miss me?”
“We never stopped talking about you,” I noted.
“I’ll bet.” He narrowed his eyes.
For a while the squabble subsided, a sticky truce in which both drank too much, smoking incessantly, voices subdued but edgy. Unhappy, I snatched a Chesterfield from Ava, and Frank gallantly lit it. His fingertips were stained yellow. In the flickering candlelight of the table, I noted scars on his neck and cheek. A scrapper, I concluded. The Hoboken one-hundred pound runt bullied in the schoolyard who learned the most effective offense is cruelty and crooning.
“You look gorgeous,” Ava told me.
With a rose-colored shawl draped over my shoulders, accenting a polka dot black-and-white dress, I felt like someone’s visiting aunt.
But of course she was the gorgeous one, dressed in a slinky cocktail dress of lavender-toned marquisette with a strapless top of shimmering green taffeta, an oversized turquoise brooch pinned on the bodice, drop earrings that went on and on, cut emeralds mounted in filigreed silver cascades that caught the glint and flash of overhead lights. Frank wore a powder blue Norfolk suit with a scarlet bow tie; his hair was slicked back, oiled.
Max and Alice bustled in, apologizing. Max was waving what he announced was a clipping from the morning’s Examiner. “The paper has a photo of me and Ava and you having lunch yesterday. They mentioned you by name, Edna.”
“What does it say?”
“No article, just a photo with a long caption. You, readers are informed, won the Pulitzer Prize for So Big back in 1924. I am identified as a ‘Hollywood insider currently under a cloud.’” His face animated and yet ashen, he kept tapping the torn sheet.
Ava broke in. “Happy birthday, Max.” She stood and approached him, enveloping him in a bear hug. “Let’s be happy tonight.”
He grinned back at her, but I noticed he didn’t put the clipping away. He simply laid it on the table, face up, next to an ashtray.
We ordered a tableful of grotesque dishes no one seemed eager to eat, plates of Cantonese specialties that had migrated too far from the Chinese homeland: Bo Lo Gai Kew with sweet and sour sauce, chicken chow mein with water chestnuts, sesame beef with bell peppers, almond duck. Column A and column B. And everything garnished or disguised or simply destroyed with chunks of pineapple, for me the least interesting of tropical fruits.
Frank skewered a chunk of pineapple at the end of a knife, and then dropped it. It plopped onto the carpet and, again, by some magical sleight of hand, when I glanced down at the spot, the offending fruit had disappeared. Tiki voodoo, I supposed. Frank retreated into his own thoughts, his eyes scanning the room, and I noticed Ava sometimes followed his hazy gaze. If his eyes rested too long on some fluttery young beauty batting her kohl-rimmed eyelids-and they seemed to be generously positioned throughout the room like opening-night spotlights-Ava bit her lip and groaned.
I’d heard stories.
Ava moved her chair closer to mine and smiled. “Max, if you’ll forgive me, I want Edna to see one more…omen.”
Dramatically, she reached under her chair and brought up a small black velvet box. For a second she cradled it against her chest, lovingly. She opened it as though it were a Christmas present. In her palm she displayed a pair of green satin shoes, worn, tattered, the heels blackened.
“Edna, my sister Bappie won these at a charity auction in New York years ago. When she visited back home, she gave them to me. ‘These will take you to Hollywood.’ Her exact words. Irene Dunne wore them when she played Magnolia in the 1936 Show Boat.” She thrust them at me, but I didn’t take them: two scuffed, dirty shoes, doubtless a wonderful talisman for her, but, to me, nothing more than someone’s old and bacterial slippers.
“Beautiful.” I figured that would be the operative word for this doomed evening. Beautiful. Just plain beautiful.
Ava was going on about Bappie’s husband, a Manhattan photographer who’d taken the first photo of her, displaying it in his Fifth Avenue window where it was spotted by some scout. Ava as virginal country girl, with sunbonnet and a faraway look in her eyes. MGM offices, located in Times Square, called for a screen test and…and a Hollywood contract. Fifty dollars a week, Ava and Bappie traveling west by bus. The dream began.
Suddenly Frank’s hand swept across the table and sent the shoes flying. They landed at the foot of a blazing tiki torch.
Ava screamed. “Damn you.” Leaning across the table, she slapped Frank’s face, and he recoiled, rubbing the scarlet patch on his cheek. Immediately Ava crumbled. “Oh, Max, this is not the evening I planned for you.”
I said nothing.
Welcome to Hollywood.
Frank was unrepentant. “Ava, for Christ’s sake, do I gotta listen to that story again? You drag out those…those moldy shoes in a restaurant…like…I don’t know. It’s…boring. Remember that night you babbled about showboats and tobacco fields and your mama’s cooking to Louis B. Mayer? Christ, his eyes glazed over.” He inhaled his cigarette. “I wanna get you on a showboat to China.” He must have thought the line uproariously witty because he guffawed-and then sang it out, trilling the cadences. I wanna get you on a showboat to China. He rubbed his cheek.
Everyone in the restaurant was staring. Quietly, a waiter returned her shoes, and Ava tucked them away.
“Edna understands my…omens.”
“The past is over.”
“As good a definition of ‘past’ as I’ve heard,” I sniped. He glared at me.
“Omens, my ass.” He was still staring at me. “You think some old lady cares a damn for this claptrap.”
I sat up, spine erect. “I certainly do, young man. I make my living going into the past.”
Frank ignored me, though his look suggested I was a foolish old ninny, out to final pasture.
Silence, uncomfortable, the room settling back to normal, glasses clinking, laughter across the room, sporadic tinkling ukulele music suddenly piped in and obviously amplified. Tiki magic, again.
Over coffee Max picked up the clipping from the Examiner, but now he was smiling. “I don’t like being photographed from this angle. Did you know that Hedda Hopper recently called me a nervous ferret?”
I could tell he wanted to discuss the violation. His fingers drummed the sheet.
“Perhaps we shouldn’t discuss it now.” Alice tapped his sleeve affectionately.
Ava smiled thinly and half-waved at me, shrugging her shoulders. It was a gesture suggesting fatalism, the price you paid for living out here; but in the next moment she reached across the table and gently touched Max on the cheek. Immediately he quieted, grinned sheepishly, and closed his eyes dreamily. Lord, I thought: Circe and her exquisite charms. The ravishing Lorelei leading men to rapturous shipwreck.
The last time I touched a man’s cheek it was, unfortunately, a crackerjack slap. The offending cheek was Aleck Woollcott’s chubby one, just after he informed the dinner guests that one needn’t call a dog a bitch when Edna Ferber was in town. Of course, I’d begun the conflagration by calling him, this three-hundred-pound mountain of sarcasm and salt-water taffy, a New Jersey Nero who mistook his pinafore for a toga. Ah, the old days at the Algonquin when our frivolous battles and repartee were chronicled in F.P.A.’s “The Conning Tower.” Now my name appeared in Hollywood gossip sheets as an East Coast busybody. And Commie sympathizer, at that.
Ava’s sensual touch was something I’d never acquired-nor, frankly, wanted.
“This is all getting to Max,” Alice said. “I’ve suggested we go to New York for a visit. See friends. Some theater.”
I stared into Max’s beaten face, his eyes red-rimmed and tired.
“Well, I’m here another week. Fly back with me, you two. We can do theater…”
Max spoke quickly. “No. I can’t leave my friends.”
Frank sneered. “Why not? They’ve all left you.”
Ava pointed her cigarette at him. “Francis, be nice.”
He gave her a sickly-sweet grin and actually winked, some conspiratorial gesture that elicited a groan from her.
“I could care less about any of this nonsense in the gossip columns, especially Hedda Hopper’s twaddle,” I began. “The woman is trying to sell newspapers, having already surrendered her soul. What alarmed me was today’s front-page article in the Los Angeles Times that discussed the ratcheting up going on in Washington now. Did you read that? And now this Joseph McCarthy yammering about Red infiltration in government offices. I feel as though the country I love-know to my marrow-is in danger of irreparable transgression. More transgression. Lord, we weathered that madman Hitler and the concentration camps and the A-bomb and now…” I waved a hand in the air, helpless.
“Does anyone really care about Hollywood?” Alice asked.
“I don’t,” Ava announced, midway through lighting a cigarette.
I reached for a cigarette and Frank cavalierly lit it for me. As he leaned in, I smelled musky cologne that reminded me of wood shavings. The blue-gray smoke oddly calmed me as I went on. “According to the article, when the Hollywood Ten went to Washington in 1947, they left L.A. with a crowd cheering them on at the airport but, arrived there, they realized how alone they were in Washington, once removed from this…this celluloid cocoon out here. The rest of America-all those Saturday Evening Post and Coronet readers in the heartland-think Hollywood and imagine scandal, deception, intrigue, unbridled sex, infiltration, Commie this, pinko that.”
“If you want to know what I think…” Ava started.
But I wasn’t finished and raised my voice. “But it’s a contradiction, don’t you see? Hollywood is, perversely, America itself. The studios invent an America for the world to look at. Not a real place but a movie hall oasis-The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind, John Wayne’s Rio Grande, the Busby Berkeley dance spectaculars. Cinderella. Even Show Boat, a fantastic portrait of an America that’s sugar-coated and inviting.” I stopped. “The capital of the United States is not Washington D.C. In some bizarre sense it’s Hollywood.” I crushed out my cigarette and sat back.
Listening to me, Frank sat back, a cigarette bobbing between his lips. He had a wise-guy smirk on that skinny face, and those marble-blue eyes twinkled. Suddenly, mockingly, he began a slow handclap: one two three four. Space between each resounding clap.
Ava squirmed. “Francis, for God’s sake.”
“I think it’s a bang-up speech,” he protested. “Worthy of that bastard Louis B. Mayer. Jack Warner couldn’t have topped it-better than that weepy apology he delivered before the HUAC, in fact.”
Max looked at me with utter admiration. “You said it, sister.”
I roared. Max’s clipped voice, exaggerated now with a squeak in it, had the same amused tone he’d employed, years before, at the National Theater in Washington D.C. at the Show Boat tryout. Echoes of: “This is all your fault, Madame Show Boat.” At that moment we must have been thinking the same thing, for he mouthed the very words at me: Madame Show Boat. Only I noticed. I tilted back my head and winked at him.
Ava turned to Alice and nodded toward us. “Darling, those two have something going on.”
“I hope so,” Alice answered. “And I’m happy about it.”
Ava put down the cigarette she’d been toying with for a minute or so. “This’ll all blow over.”
“What will?” Frank asked, testily.
“You know, this Commie stuff. Every so often a bunch of dizzy gnats swirl around the picnic table, irritating everyone, making everyone think it’s a plague of Biblical locusts. Then the sun shines and they’re gone. America is like that-we got good people here.”
“Yeah, Ava.” Frank sucked in his cheeks. Unexpectedly, he got reflective. “My agent told me to back off public statements. In fact, he said it’s time to join a pro-America organization. You know, Red Channels will remove your name from their list of pinkos if you publicly take a loyalty oath and join, say, some flag-waving group.”
Max groaned. “You’re not serious, Frank.”
“I’m just saying…”
I drew my tongue into my cheek, waited a moment. “Have you considered the Daughters of the American Revolution?”
“The Sons of Italy,” Ava giggled.
Frank was taking this all too seriously. “No, it’s got to have ‘America’ in the name.”
“You’re kidding.” From Alice.
Ava chuckled. ‘The American Sons of the Italian Revolution.”
Everyone laughed, especially Frank, laughing at himself.
The conversation drifted away from the explosive topic as Ava shared an anecdote about Howard Keel sneaking tequila into his dressing room. Keel, I gathered, a show-business trooper with matinee-idol looks, was a bit of a character, a rollicking scamp who enjoyed his late-night revelries.
I nursed my glass of merlot, while Ava and Frank finished off their zombies. But what alarmed me was that Max, famously an infrequent drinker, a man who joked that he got tipsy on rum cake, seemed hell-bent on getting drunk. Not pretty, that picture, though I sensed that the morning’s photograph in the Examiner had wound him up. Here was the birthday boy in the land of the zombies. Avoiding Alice’s disapproving eye, he kept signaling for another drink. At one point he sloshed liquor onto the tablecloth and seemed surprised that someone had behaved so indecorously.
The mood at the table shifted when Louella Parsons led an entourage to a nearby table. The Hearst gossip columnist glared at our table as she passed, and she emitted a raspy harrumph that would do justice to the hectoring Parthenia Hawks as she watched the sleight-of-hand gambler Gaylord Ravenal step onto the showboat. Max laughed out loud, a hiccoughed titter, and seemed unable to stop.
Dressed in a muddy red dress that exaggerated her small, chunky build, Louella Parsons kept looking over, particularly at me, the shrinking violet at the table; and I wondered whether she knew who I was. Doubtless, given my photo in the Examiner, chummy with Ava and the Commie. Perhaps she was feeling scooped, and now, perforce, was hoping I’d execute some egregious faux pas-an unseemly belch, a toppling onto the floor, swooning at Frank’s knee and revived by ammonia salts held under my nose-that would enliven tomorrow’s mean-spirited diatribe for the Hearst readership.
On my best behavior-I do have a few of those moments, Aleck Woollcott notwithstanding-I smiled back at her, even tilted my head. The dreadful tyrant-a squat fireplug wrapped in that ill-chosen dress, perching on a chair and sipping some grotesque concoction that looked like cough medicine-shared a second, though sotto voce, harrumph, and turned away. I was immensely happy.
I didn’t notice the young man approaching our table. Ava, of course, did, attuned as she most likely always was to the serendipitous attention of all the men in the world, whether he was a hayseed boy or a tottering codger. Men zigzagged through her life, giddy and ready to blather inanities at her. So Ava had already turned, the huge smile at the ready, as the young man tentatively neared. Perhaps late twenties or early thirties, he was a dark-complected man in a pristine Army uniform, his cap held tightly in his hand. On his face a puppyish grin, two pinpoints of red dotting his cheeks. He looked the wholesome farm boy, athletic and sturdy, that new American breed, the extra for a World War Two propaganda newsreel.
“Miss Gardner,” he stammered. “I hate to disturb you but…” He stopped, and from under the Army cap he withdraw a slip of paper and a pen. His hand shook. “I’m rude, I know, but…” The sloppy Peck’s bad boy grin. Andy Hardy from the front lines. D-Day boy, now delivered safely home.
Ava waved him closer. “You’re not disturbing me, handsome.”
The man shuffled close to her and he was visibly trembling, which amused me. Who was this Hollywood Helen of Troy who could easily topple the topless towers of Ilium and make men immortal with a kiss? Which, to my horror, she did. She quietly signed her name, handed it back, but as he bent forward, she half-rose and cupped his face between her hands. She kissed his forehead lightly. “What’s your name?”
“Harold Porter, Junior.” But the space between “Porter” and “Junior” was so long-I swear it had to be five seconds-that she laughed. We all did, and his face got beet red, as he tried to back away.
“Were you in the war?” she asked him.
He nodded.
“That’s why I kissed you. You’re a hero.”
“I ain’t a hero. I just served.”
“No, you’re a hero.” But she had already turned away, and Harold Porter (space) Junior was himself backing away, delirious and punch drunk. For me, watching, rapt, it was an illuminating moment, and a touching one. With a seamlessly graceful gesture, Ava the sultry siren became, for one moment, the girl next door.
Frank glared at her. “Was that necessary, Ava?”
“Of course.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Not now, Francis.”
“If I kissed a girl…like the waitress…”
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” she blurted out.
“It seems to me…”
“Not now, Francis.”
He reached for his pack of cigarettes, angrily tapped one out, and it flipped off the table onto the carpet. While we watched, mesmerized by his jerky movements, he ground it under his shoe. He lit another and puffs of smoke clouded the table. One hand was a fist, the knuckles white. We sat there, silent, silent.
Alice cleared her throat. For some reason, she started talking about Sol Remnick in a twittering, birdlike voice. “Sol mentioned that Larry Calhoun wants to sell his shares in the property they all own together…He needs cash. He knows Max won’t give him money and…” She breathed in. “Sol said…” She stopped, looked down.
No one was listening.
Well, I was, of course, but something else was happening at the table. The cigarette vender, a pretty girl in a colorful Polynesian wrap, her case suspended around her neck, had paused at the table, but was waved off. As she moved away, Frank grasped her arm. For a second she paused, uncertain, because Frank’s touch lingered a little too long. She turned, smiled vacuously at him, and then, rattled, scurried away.
Ava burst out laughing. “Now we’re even, Francis.”
“Christ, Ava.”
From a table some yards away, the young man we now knew as Harold Porter (space) Junior was passing around the autograph, preening before an older couple I assumed were his smiling parents. Now and then he glanced over, as though to make certain he’d actually met the goddess, or, perhaps, to imprint the magical image on his lifelong memory. I smiled, tickled. I doubted whether my autograph, sometimes requested, though not so much any more, garnered such attention. I doubted it.
Max had been mumbling, but I couldn’t understand him, his words running together, swallowed. His hand slipped on the glass he held. Alice watched him, concern and fear in her eyes. This was not the Max any of us knew, this suddenly libidinous man, giggling and hiccoughing, downing glass after glass of the sinful zombies. His face was flushed, with half-shut lazy eyes, his movements slow and languid. A turned-over glass.
Frank kept twisting in his chair, scanning the room, his eyes narrowed. When he spoke, he slurred his words. He breathed with short, quick gasps that reminded me of a scolded child. None of us at the table mattered, I realized, save the beautiful Ava. A man possessed, intoxicated, paralyzed by a stunning woman-a man cowed and yet emboldened by a fierce and awful jealousy. The spotlight focused solely on Ava and her unpardonable transgression.
For a moment, startled, I let my mind play with images of Julie and Steve and Pete on the showboat. Julie, the beautiful mulatto with the melodious voice, a doomed woman, hungered after by men like Pete, a lowlife towboat worker, himself haunted and driven. And Steve, the possessive husband, jealous of any man’s attention to his wife, pledging a love that was to last forever but would crumble on the mean Chicago streets after exile from the Cotton Blossom. Two men, maddened by jealousy and lust. Pete who squeals to the local sheriff to punish her-punish them. He would destroy her if he can’t have her. Frank and Ava, jealous and possessive and…destructive.
Ava singing her dirge as night shadows covered her. Can’t stop lovin’ dat man of mine…fish gotta swim…birds gotta…
I came out of this idle reverie with a start: something was happening at the table. Max, tipsy, was flirting stupidly with Ava, half-serious and a little self-mocking. He rolled back and forth in his seat, a pale dervish, and babbled something about Harold Porter (space…now ten seconds, though no one laughed) Junior getting a chaste kiss from Ava, a young man who fantasized about kissing the screen goddess.
“Dreams to last a lifetime,” he babbled.
Ava looked amused, though she kept shaking her head. “Max, what’s got into you?” She tapped the back of his wrist.
Alice whispered, “Okay, Max, you’ve had enough to drink.” Idly, she fiddled with her purse, snapping it open and shut.
And then, bouncing in his seat, Max whooped like a moon-besotted Indian and leaned over and kissed Ava on the mouth. It happened so suddenly that nothing seemed to register immediately. Watching the violation, I thought how innocent it was, passionless, perfunctory, the ah-shucks apple-cheeked boy kissing the pretty girl in school on a frivolous dare.
Ava pulled back, wide-eyed, and waved a schoolmarm finger at him. She giggled, “Now, now, young man, do I have to tell your mother?” She winked at Alice.
I was laughing.
Max slumped back into his seat, eyes nearly closed now, a simpering smile plastered to his face. I thought he’d drifted off into a catnap.
A sudden grunt, mean, thick, as Frank shot out of his seat and lurched around the table, his arm brushing my sleeve. He hovered over the drowsy Max as Ava squealed, “Francis, what are…”
She got no further. Another coarse grunt as Frank’s fist flew out, a missile, and slammed hard into Max’s jaw. The crack of bone on bone. Max’s head revolved like a puppet’s head unhinged. A spurt of purple blood splattered on the white tablecloth.
Alice screamed. She started to stand but slipped back into her seat.
Surprised and wounded, Max toppled backwards, the chair crashing onto the floor and spilling him onto the carpet. He lay in an ungainly heap, doubled over, his hands cupping the bleeding jaw. He hunched there, looking up at Frank who rocked back and forth, his eyes flashing, his hard blue eyes now brilliant purple. He hadn’t unclenched his fist, smeared now with blood.
“I never liked you,” Frank sputtered.
Max opened his mouth to speak but he dissolved into a fit of nonsense giggling. Blood oozed through his fingers, down his neck, onto his shirt. “Thump thump thump,” he burbled. I had no idea what that meant. He gave a drunkard’s idiotic smile. “Happy birthday to me. Happy birthday to me.”
Thump thump thump.
Giggling.
Alice and Ava crouched on the floor next to him. Whimpering, Alice cradled his head in her lap while Ava dabbed the blood with a linen napkin. Ava’s fingertips glistened with Max’s blood.
“Damn you, Francis.” She looked up at him.
Silence in the restaurant.
Someone screamed, a woman, hysterical.
Frank looked around, his eyes zooming in on the screaming woman.
He looked down at Max.
“I could kill you in a heartbeat.”
“Francis…”
“A goddamn heartbeat.”
He stormed away.
At the nearby table the anonymous woman screamed and screamed. And Louella Parsons smiled.