The Gilded Life Of Matilda Duplaine

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One (#ulink_f58787e8-b46c-5505-b073-9ed7f89eb116)

The tinkle of an antique servant bell announced my arrival.

The shop was so cluttered with priceless art and centuries-old furniture that maneuvering among them was impossible. I stood in place, hoping someone would come to my rescue. Sixty seconds later, she did. I did not hear the opening or closing of a door, and there was nothing to indicate how she had entered the room. Had she been watching me from behind the ceiling-height Asian room divider she would have seen me grasping for distractions—my cell phone, my reporter’s notebook, a feigned interest in a chalk drawing that hung on the wall.

Nothing I had read could do Lily Goldman justice. She was in her midfifties, but she could have passed for forty-five. Her eyebrows were tweezed in an arched manner, and her blond hair was expertly coiffed in a tame bouffant that looked as if she had come from a salon. Her face was small and refined save for a prominent nose that belonged on a woman twice her size. It was her most striking feature, one that a less self-confident woman of means would have done away with years ago through plastic surgery.

“May I help you?” Lily asked. Her voice was surprisingly low, and it had a hint of a lady who smoked too much—though I was certain Lily had never picked up a cigarette in her life. Her breeding was too fine for that.

I discreetly rubbed my right hand on my pant leg, hoping to dry it. I reached over an antique oak writing desk, where my proffered hand hung in the air. She looked at it blankly.

“Yes, I’m Thomas Cleary. I’m a reporter, for the Times.”

For the first time she made eye contact, and I thought I detected a slightly favorable response, but then:

“I hate reporters. I never speak to the press,” she said.

“You must be Ms. Goldman.” Phil Rubenstein, my editor, had warned me about Lily Goldman’s disdain for journalists before sending me on this mission. I got the distinct impression he thought it would be fruitless.

She looked away, focusing on a bronze candlestick in the shape of a bird. She rotated the bird one hundred eighty degrees.

“Birds don’t migrate north, they migrate south. It is autumn, after all. This place is such a mess. I need to speak to the staff. Where did you go to school, Mr. Cleary?”

“You can call me Thomas. I went to Harvard.”

“At Harvard I bet they taught you that birds migrate south for the winter, north for the summer.”

“I recall picking up that tidbit at St. Mary’s, my grade school in Milwaukee.”

“A Catholic boy,” she said with a wry smile.

She waited for me to respond, but I didn’t. I was nervous because I was on what I hoped was my big-break assignment. It was my first and only story on the entertainment beat—a short retrospective on Joel Goldman, who had just passed away.

Despite the fact that we were only steps away from one of Los Angeles’s most bustling intersections, it was strangely quiet in Lily’s shop. I had come here straight from the paper, which was alive with phones ringing, keyboards clicking and frantic deadlines being met. Here, there hadn’t been a single phone call, not a single customer. No car had passed. There was a formal English garden in front, but its chaises were bare, and its birdbath and trees were devoid of birds.

“Were you taught by nuns in Milwaukee? I hear they can be terrible on the self-confidence,” Lily said.

“I was,” I said, nervously shifting my position. The reclaimed wood beneath me creaked. “It was Harvard that wiped away the self-confidence, though. The nuns weren’t so bad in comparison.”

“Milwaukee to Harvard. Quite the journey. Let’s just hope it was a one-way ticket out.”

“That’s still uncertain,” I replied—a gross understatement.

“And Los Angeles? Is this another layover or your final destination?”

“Yet to be determined, as well.”

Lily fixed her eyes directly on me. They were deep set and an extraordinary shade of green.

“Do your parents miss you?”

“My mother passed away a year ago.” The memory was still fresh and I forced down the lump that formed in my throat. “And, yes, my dad misses me. I’m an only child. He wants me to come home and work for the local paper. But a hundred thousand in student loans later I can’t bear to take a U-turn like that.”

“I’m sorry to hear about your mother...and the student loans.”

I detected no judgment in Lily Goldman’s words, but I suddenly felt embarrassed by the fact that I had referenced the death of my mother and my student loans in the same sentence.

“How old are you?” she asked.

“Twenty-six.”

“She died young, then?”

“She was forty-eight. Pancreatic cancer.”

“It must have been devastating.”

Few people had taken this level of interest in my life since my mom had died, and I almost forgot why I was there to see her. I wanted to sit down in the distressed leather chair to my right, light a cigarette and tell Lily Goldman everything—about my mother, who shriveled into a skeleton while I toiled on inconsequential stories thousands of miles away in Los Angeles, a city I hated; about my grade school piano teacher, Sister Cecilia, who whacked my knuckles with an iron ruler; about the kids who used to pick me last for Red Rover.

And I wanted to tell her about Manhattan. What had happened there.

Professor Grandy’s Journalism Rule Number One: Never let your subject change the subject.

“Enough about my situation. I apologize for taking so much of your time,” I said. Even as a young boy I had always shunned attention, particularly from strangers, and here I was escorting Lily into the dark corners of my life rather than visiting hers. “I’m very sorry to hear of your father’s passing. We’re doing a piece on him, and I was hoping you could give me a quote or an anecdote, something that will make the reader know him better—something to remember him by.”

“Ah, yes, my father.”

At first that was all she said. I didn’t blame her, because he was that kind of man. Joel Goldman’s story was as legendary and epic as the movies he had brought to the screen. He had grown up in Nazi-occupied Poland, escaped the gas chamber, passed through Ellis Island as a boy with only a nickel in his pocket and within ten years catapulted his way from reading scripts in RKO’s story department to creating one of the big movie studios.

According to Joel Goldman’s former business associates, Joel had been known for his micromanagement, and that was putting it kindly. When he stepped on set—which he did almost daily—he practiced lines with his leading ladies, he whispered in his directors’ ears, he berated craft services for everything from dry strudel to weak coffee. In the age of typewriters, Joel had been known to tear up entire first acts and shred them to the floor while horrified scriptwriters looked on. He scoured expenses to the penny and had been a ruthless negotiator. As a former studio chairman had anonymously told me over the phone that afternoon, “If Joel Goldman sat across from you and you dropped a penny on the floor, he would pick it up and put it in his own pocket and consider himself the luckier for it.”

My strongest trait as a journalist was not in asking, but in listening. So I waited.

“A hell of a man, my father,” Lily finally said. “The first man to produce a movie that made a hundred million dollars. Can you believe it? He started a movie studio when he was only twenty-eight years old. That’s unimaginable. Nowadays boys your age are pushing mail carts at talent agencies, not winning Academy Awards. That was the golden age of the cinema, of Hollywood. Bogie and Bacall used to come to our house in Cap d’Antibes for tea.”

She smiled at the memory, and then I lost her behind the Asian screen. “Have you been to Antibes?” she called.

“I can’t say I have.”

Lily reemerged. She stared at an imaginary point in the distance through heavily leaded antique glass that distorted the outside garden. “We used to sit on the veranda, watch the boats and sip tea with rum. I know it sounds awful, but it’s the most delightful drink. It was there that Bette Davis auditioned for What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? The sea there is incredible, so green—so different than the sea in Los Angeles.”

“It sounds wonderful,” I said.

“The most exciting time of my life. I often think—well, it sounds silly—but I often think that if we go to Heaven we’ll be allowed to live our lives again, fast-forwarding through the bad times, of course.” She looked away, as if she might have revealed too much to a stranger. “I would go back there. To those times with my father in the South of France. I have no use for Hollywood. I only care for what it bought us.”