Hollywood Read Free Page A

as—worldliness. Dark gifts. Amongst them, that of prophecy. I was, I thought, happily married. With two beautiful children. My husband, Dr. Champrey, had an excellent practice, specializing in the lower lumbar region and, of course, the entire renal system. But the spirits spoke to Gipsy Oliver.
She
spoke to me. Beware of the turkey, she said one day. I thought she was joking. I laughed—more fool I!
What
turkey? I asked. I know turkeys, and don’t much care to eat them—so dry, always, unless you have the knack of basting, which fate has denied me. Well, lo! and behold the next month, November it was, I was preparing a Thanksgiving dinner for my loved ones, when Dr. Champrey said, ‘I’ll go buy us a turkey.’ I remember now a shiver come over me. A chill, like a ghost’s hand upon me.”
    Jess shivered in the stuffy room. This was the real thing, all right. No doubt of that.
    “I said, ‘Horace, I’m not partial to turkey, as you know. Just a boiled chicken will do.’ ” She exhaled. Jess inhaled and smelled boiled chicken, old sandalwood. “ ‘Why not splurge?’ he said. Then he was gone. He never,” Madame Marcia’s bloodshot eyes glared at Jess, “came back.”
    “Killed?” Jess had always known that he himself would one day die violently. Roxy said he was mad as a hatter. But Jess
knew;
and so he was never alone in an empty street or alleyway or, for that matter, bed, if he could help it. When George did not sleep with him, one of the clerks from his emporium would oblige. In Washington he always shared a room with Daugherty, next to the room of the invalid Mrs. Daugherty. Whatever town Jess was in, he cultivated policemen. He read every detective story he could get his hands on to find out how to survive the city jungle with its wild killings, human swarm, dark alleys.
    “Who knows? The son-of-a-bitch,” she added, suddenly soulful. “Anyway, I had had my call.” She indicated the Spiritualist Church diploma. “I don’t need
any
man, I’m happy to say, except when I feel we’ve known one another in an earlier life.” She smiled at Jess, who blushed and took off his thick glasses so that her face might blur; he adored women but, what with one thing and another—like his weight problem and diabetes—what was the point? as Roxy had said in the third month of their marriage. Jess had wept. She was firm, yet loving. Roxy would never go for a turkey and not return. She justwent for a divorce, and as Jess was worth even then a small fortune, more than one hundred thousand dollars, he could keep them both in high style. Today they were better friends than ever, each devoted to gossip; each able to remember almost to the week when a couple was married so that when the first baby was born they could—she without fingers, he with—work out the time of conception and whether or not it was blessed in the Lord’s eyes. Each delighted secretly in the fact that the Duchess’s son by her first husband was born six months after the wedding which was to end in divorce six years later. Roxy shared Jess’s high pleasure in this sort of knowledge, proving that there were, Jess decided, blessings yet to be counted, particularly if Roxy should end up in Hollywood as a photo-play star, their common dream—for her.
    The Duchess was in the room. “I let myself in.” The voice was dry and nasal and whenever a word had an “r” in it the Duchess made that poor letter go through her thin dry lips, over and over again, as if she were French. But she was quintessentially a Midwesterner of German extraction, born Florence Kling. The head was large, the body small. The Duchess suffered from what Madame Marcia would call renal problems, and her ankles were often swollen while her sallow normal color was often dull gray with illness. She had only one kidney, which obliged her to drink quantities of water. Often bedded with a hot-water bottle on even the most stifling of summer days, she would try, sometimes in