Harry feigned insult. “You mean you’d rather a double date with those bores than a romantic afternoon with a motion picture star?”
“If it means cooling off a little, yes.” Bess stood on her toes and kissed the side of Harry’s neck. He smelled different in California. The California air was nothing like New York air. It was cleaner here; they had lemon trees in their yard. And Harry was happier, too, doing his stunts for film as an established movie celebrity, although it had been difficult to get him to agree to leave New York. When he was first offered a leading role in a picture, he had been in a lengthy and dark depression, even though no one who’d seen him perform would have suspected. He had made a five-ton elephant vanish at the New York Hippodrome—the pinnacle of his career—and the papers had had a field day with the trick afterward, quoting Harry’s quip, “Fellows, even the elephant does not know how it is done!” But afterward, instead of sleeping, he would retreat to the fireplace in the library and attempt another failed communication with his mother. The house where they had all lived together became a venue for these one-way communications—every mirror a place where she might appear, every Victrola record an opportunity for her voice to come through. But Mrs. Weiss never appeared, and she never spoke to him. Every morning Harry would stare at her photograph and say, “Well, Mama, I have not heard from you. I have not heard.” He knew she was his one avenue to prove that the afterlife existed, and he desperately wanted to know what was on the other side.
One evening he came rushing out of the bathroom, his face lathered in shaving cream. “Bess, come quick!” He was nearly delirious with excitement. “I think my mother is trying to reach me!” Bess tossed her needlework aside and ran into the bathroom.
“Listen,” he whispered. They stood silently side by side, until Bess began to hear a muted, erratic tapping noise. “It’s some kind of code,” Harry said.
Bess followed the origin of the noise to the window, and pulled open the shade. Outside, the shutter was hanging loose from its hinges, and the wood was knocking against the house. It almost broke her heart to tell him; for a moment she considered letting him believe, but in the end, she could not.
Harry’s face fell. He laughed a little. “How ridiculous of me,” he said at last and went back to shaving.
Then the offer from Ben Rolfe at Octagon Films came for Harry to film The Master Mystery. Bess begged Harry to do it. California, she knew, could be a new start for them. But it was only after she had convinced John Sargent, Jim Vickery, Jim Collins, and two more men from Harry’s crew to come with them that Harry gave in. The men adored Harry, despite his fiery outbursts, the occasions on which he would fire them, then greet them the next morning as if nothing had happened. Periodically, they would raise their own salaries, as Harry always forgot to address such issues. When Bess looked at the books and questioned Harry about the raises, he defended them. “Of course it’s okay!” he told her, indignant. “Think of the high cost of living!”
So they were swept into the chaos of Hollywoodland—the poolside parties, the champagne on silver trays, the catered lunches behind painted wooden sets. It was a different world of celebrity from the one they had enjoyed in New York. The enchanted city was, essentially, a desert town, dusty and mountainous, that had been transformed into a kind of fairy tale—a self-made utopia. Everyone was there. They went to places like the El Fay Club and lived large—visiting Rudolph Valentino at Falcon Lair and William Randolph Hearst at San Simeon, his estate enormous with Gothic fireplaces, sundecks, pipe organs, pagodas, and projection rooms.
A month before their departure westward, Harry had surprised Bess with a weekend in Coney Island at the Brighton Beach Hotel. It was as extravagant as she had remembered, gold-gilded and marbled and salt-aired. But it also felt worn-out. Oddly, she had left feeling not nostalgic but indifferent, as if that part of her life had belonged to someone she barely knew, someone she might pass on the street with only a flicker of recognition. California, on the other hand, seemed fraught with glitz and energy, the hotels even more opulent than the Brighton Beach.