Page 16 of A Map to Paradise
15
Eva’s days had been different since Max’s visit to the Blankenship house and since Melanie’s nephew had arrived.
Now that June’s back was nearly healed, Eva spent most of her time at the Blankenships’ upstairs in Elwood’s office, refamiliarizing herself with a typewriter. Every afternoon June gave her a stack of documents to retype—old scripts, recipes from magazines, articles from the newspaper, handwritten notes and other correspondence from Elwood’s many files, and pages from books. The Nazis in occupied Kyiv had expected absolute perfection when she was tasked—as a Russian-speaking German—with translating and typing for the Reich. But she’d never been taught how to do it. She was amazed at how much better she was getting at speed and precision when she was being coached instead of yelled at.
Secondly, her morning hours at Melanie’s were finally being spent actually cleaning—life with an almost-five-year-old was messy—as well as helping Melanie keep Nicky entertained and happy. There’d been no word from Alex, not even a phone call to check in and make sure his son was doing all right. The little boy was adjusting fairly well to his new surroundings and caregivers as far as Eva could tell, though there’d been a tantrum or two and several I want my daddy breakdowns.
She supposed that was to be expected.
Those first few fits had thrown Melanie for a loop but she seemed to have adapted as well, though she didn’t want anyone to know, except for June, that Nicky was there. Especially not Carson. When he’d called a few days after Nicky had been left with Melanie, she’d hand motioned for Eva to take him into the backyard so that Carson wouldn’t hear Nicky laugh or yell or maybe throw something. Eva wasn’t exactly sure of the reason for the secrecy other than maybe Melanie had an image to keep up when it came to Carson, and mothering a little boy wasn’t part of it.
Or perhaps it was because Carson was paying her grocery bill, and now there was another mouth to feed?
Eva had heard Melanie say to Irving when he stopped by with her mail that Carson seemed to be growing tired of financially supporting her. The conversation with the man from Washington the previous week hadn’t resulted in additional scrutiny, most likely because Melanie hadn’t offered any helpful information. What Carson had wanted and needed her to do she had apparently dutifully done. Eva overheard Melanie tell her agent that Carson wouldn’t speculate when he’d be back in California and that he had said maybe she needed to think about going home to Nebraska after the first of the year.
“But I’m not going,” Melanie had said, her voice firm.
And Irving had said if Carson stopped paying the rent on the Gilberts’ house, she might just have to. She would need money if she wanted to stay in California. No production company he worked with wanted to hire a tainted star, not even that one advertising company for whom she had once done a silly toothpaste commercial. He also didn’t want her further destroying her résumé by taking substandard bookings should he even be able to get one for her.
Melanie’s going home to Nebraska would take care of Eva’s problem, to be sure, but not in a good way for Melanie.
Lastly, it was becoming increasingly bizarre to pretend to Melanie that Elwood was leaving his clothes and mail lying around, smoking his pipe, and—judging by his empty plate in the sink—enjoying the meals Eva was making.
“Do you know how his screenplay is going?” Melanie asked one morning. “I know he’s writing one.”
Eva, who’d initially looked up from scraping breakfast bowls, dropped her gaze back to the sudsy water in the sink. Melanie clearly had no idea June pretty much did all of Elwood’s writing. “I guess it’s going fine.”
June was now tapping away alongside Eva at a second typewriter in Elwood’s office in the afternoons rather than spending hours prone on the sofa with the heating pad. The current screenplay was due to the studio at the end of the year, June had said, and she couldn’t be late with it.
It seemed to Eva, however, that June was having trouble with the writing, especially now that a time limit had been imposed on her concerning Elwood. June only had until the day after Christmas before Max would expect to speak to her brother-in-law face-to-face. A week had already passed, and Eva could tell June was worried about that looming deadline, too. She would often stop typing and just stare at the keys, as if willing for them to start moving again on their own. Sometimes June would get up from her chair, excuse herself, and head to Elwood’s bedroom for a few minutes. Eva would pause in her own typing at these times, for as long as she dared, to listen for the sound of voices coming from the room down the hall. But she was too far away from that closed door. She never heard anything.
Eva supposed it wasn’t just the ticking clock that was impeding June’s progress on the script. It was also what would happen when the ticking stopped. If Elwood was indeed in the house, it could get ugly. Difficult. Men in white coats coming to the house and carting him away, perhaps. If he wasn’t, June would have to come clean as to where he had gone.
Knowing everything was surely about to radically change was perhaps why June had taken to offering random comments about Elwood a couple times a day, while they were typing and even when they weren’t, as if replying to a question Eva had asked about him.
As she did just then, while Eva was rinsing out June’s percolator.
June was sitting at the kitchen table with stacks of typed script and a red pen, making marks and notations on the margins as she read the pages.
“You know, there’s a name for what Elwood has,” June offered from out of nowhere. “It has a name.”
“Pardon?” Eva said. The two of them were expecting Melanie and Nicky any minute so that Melanie could go into Santa Monica to buy some Christmas presents for her nephew. The little boy was likely going to have nothing if she didn’t. Eva had offered her and June’s help with minding Nicky while she went, and June had been amenable. Eva wanted the kitchen cleaned up before they came.
“The doctor that came to the house when Elwood first refused to leave it said there was a term for that kind of reaction to a trauma. Agoraphobia.”
“Agora—what?”
“Agoraphobia. That’s what doctors say a person has if they can’t step outside their own house,” June said. “We didn’t know he had it those first few weeks after we moved in to take care of him. He was so banged up and so despondent over Ruthie’s death, we didn’t see it. But after six weeks, when he refused to get into the car to have the cast on his leg removed, we knew we had a problem.”
“So…did Elwood say why he wouldn’t get in the car?” Eva asked, wondering if June actually wanted to continue the conversation.
She apparently did.
“He just said he wasn’t leaving the house,” June replied. “And he said it just like that. ‘I’m not leaving the house.’ As in, ever. Frank asked for a leave of absence from the studio but they wouldn’t give it to him. That’s when I offered to be the one to stay with Elwood until he got over it. I didn’t get a leave of absence, either, but I didn’t care. By then I really didn’t like my job anymore.”
“I thought you did,” Eva said, remembering June telling her that she loved working in the film editing department and watching what fell to the floor as not-the-movie and seeing what was kept, and what an amazing thing it was to instinctively know what the movie needed for the audience to love the story and what it did not.
“I got to do a lot of the editing during the war years when most of the men were gone, and it was hard to go back to being an assistant who never touched the footage except to sweep up what had been cut out. Anyway, I was a better cook than Frank and it made sense for me to stay at home with Elwood and care for him. And I wanted to do it.”
“So may I ask…is that when it started?” Eva asked gently, leaving the dish towel she had in her hands on the countertop and taking a seat across from June at the table. “I mean, is that when you started to have deeper feelings for Elwood?”
June smiled weakly. “Ah, yes, I was pretty sure you’d figured that out. I’m surprised you’re not appalled that I was in love with my husband’s brother.”
“It’s hard to stop loving someone,” Eva said. “Especially if you don’t want to stop. And you were caring for Elwood, doing so much for him. And he needed you.”
“To be honest, I think it began well before that; I just never wanted to think about it. It seemed wrong. And unkind to Frank, who I did love. I really did. It was a very confusing time when I loved them both.”
“So Frank didn’t know.”
“No.” June shook her head. “When Frank was home he wanted to be the one to care for Elwood. He gave him his sponge baths, shaved his beard, and trimmed his hair and nails. Frank would help him get dressed in the morning and get him ready for bed at the end of the day until his injuries healed. Frank would do all of these things thinking I was ready for a break from the nursing and caregiving when I actually wasn’t. I’m glad he had no idea.”
Eva waited to see if June would continue to lay bare things she had probably never told anyone. After a moment, she did.
“You know, the first time I found myself daydreaming about what it would have been like if I had met Elwood first, I thought, Who does that? What kind of woman fantasizes about being with her husband’s brother? But those thoughts would return to me whenever I wasn’t holding them at bay. It was too enthralling to think that if I’d met Elwood first, this beautiful house by the beach would be mine, not that dump of a trailer Frank and I had been living in at the time of the accident. I could be the one entertaining guests on Elwood’s lovely patio and serving them cocktails from that crystal pitcher. And it was impossible not to imagine that if I’d married Elwood instead, I might’ve had a child. I might have discovered I had it within me to be a good mother even though I wasn’t raised by one.”
June had been speaking as if to the room just then, but now she turned to Eva. “But do you know what is the most painful thought that plays itself over and over in my mind?”
Eva shook her head.
“If I had married Elwood instead of Frank, he wouldn’t have been in that car with Ruthie Brink that night. He would have been home with me. I loved Frank. Honestly, I did. But if I had married Elwood instead of Frank, he wouldn’t have been disappearing right before our eyes with no way of stopping it. I could see something inside him was shattered, and those broken pieces were changing who he was. He barely touched his roses after the accident. And he loved those roses. He didn’t even want to sit down at his typewriter and write. The producers of the movie took back the screenplay Elwood had been working on and gave it to another writer. They kept asking him when he would return to work. He kept saying he didn’t know.”
“This doctor who told you the name of this condition—what did he say about how long it lasts? Did he tell you it would never go away?” Eva asked.
“That doctor didn’t know. He wasn’t a psychiatrist. So we called one in. Elwood was polite to that man but he didn’t want to talk about why he insisted on staying inside. The psychiatrist wanted to help Elwood regain a sense of security about being in the outside world and to get back behind the wheel of a car. But Elwood refused. He told him he wasn’t going to get back behind the wheel of a car. Or leave the house. Ever. And then that psychiatrist quietly suggested Frank petition a court for legal responsibility for his brother so that he could get Elwood the inpatient care he needed.”
“What is inpatient care?” Eva asked.
“It would’ve meant becoming a patient in a mental hospital. Frank was livid at the idea that this doctor thought Elwood was nuts. The doc didn’t say that, but that’s what Frank heard. He nearly threw him out of the house.”
“How awful for all of you.”
“We tried another psychiatrist a few weeks later who wanted to prescribe a slew of medications to alleviate Elwood’s anxiety. Elwood said no to that, too. Except for sleeping pills. Those he agreed to. After that, there were no more visits by psychiatrists. Elwood demanded it. It was his life to live as he chose to live it, he said. If Frank and I didn’t like it, we didn’t have to stay. He’d hire a housekeeper and gardener.”
“But you didn’t go.”
“No. Frank asked Elwood if he wanted us to and he said he didn’t. He liked having us there. But he didn’t want to live life any differently than how he was living it. It was nobody’s business but his own.”
“Did he think something bad would happen again if he went out?”
June thought for a moment. “That was really only a small part of it. And the more I was around Elwood and watching him and attending him, the more I understood it was guilt keeping him inside. He had made a prison for himself for killing Ruthie. He saw himself as a murderer and he was serving the time. It wasn’t true, Elwood hadn’t killed her, but it was no good to try to convince Elwood of that.”
“But at some point he did start working again, yes?” Eva asked.
“It was a long while after the accident. MGM continued to call with project offers and Max kept urging Elwood to sign on to one of them. It was a good two years later when Elwood was asked to adapt a bestselling novel about two young girls who meet on an orphan train heading west. MGM didn’t want to give this project to another writer; Elwood was who they wanted. But they told Max if Elwood turned it down, they would give it to someone else. And if that happened, they would unfortunately have to cut their ties and be done with him. I remember the day Max came to the house and told him this. Elwood was only fifty-one. He’d made some good money, Max said, but it wasn’t going to last forever. Max begged him to take that job. I sat down next to him after Max left and told him he’d be wonderful on this screenplay. I’d read the book it would be based on. He was perfect for it.”
“What did he say?”
“He said he didn’t think he could do it. And I said I was sure he could. He was born to write. Not only that, but that I would help him. I could type while he spoke the words so he didn’t have to feel overwhelmed. I told him I was a good typist, and that I knew from working with the cutters what a great story looks like and feels like. I could be his sounding board there, too. That’s when I saw a glimmer of happiness cross his face.”
“Ah. And that’s when he agreed,” Eva said.
“No. That’s when I finally understood fully why he’d shut himself away in this house. That joy I saw on his face was the thought of writing again, but then he remembered he didn’t deserve to be happy. Because of what he’d done to those boys. Ruthie’s boys. I wanted to shake him and yell that he did in fact deserve to be happy but I knew he’d pull back at those words. I had to make this about giving back to those boys somehow. So I told him he could use a portion of what the studio paid him to set up college funds for those boys. That would be a nice thing to do for them. A very nice thing. And he finally agreed.”
“He still wanted your help, though.”
“He most certainly did. And in truth, he needed it. Elwood was at the top of his game before the accident. He really was. But after it, he struggled creatively. It took him a long while to get back in the groove. I’d thought that the more I helped him, the more he’d settle back into his old life and the less he’d need my help.”
“But that’s not what happened.”
“No. The more I assisted him, the more he seemed to need me to. It was almost as if his well was going dry and with every screenplay we worked on there was less and less water.”
“That seems so sad. What did your husband think about all this?”
“Frank was happy Elwood was writing again but irked that I was contributing to those scripts and getting zero credit for them. Elwood wasn’t too keen about it either, but when he brought up the matter to Max, he’d said the studio wouldn’t want to hear that Elwood’s sister-in-law who types his screenplays for him wants a screen credit.”
June was quiet for a moment.
“The thing is,” she continued, “nobody knew how much I was changing what Elwood was creating. Even he didn’t. After Elwood would say we were finished I’d keep the script for a few more days and make all kinds of changes. Elwood never knew I was doing that. He didn’t need to know. MGM told Max that Elwood’s scripts were getting better all the time and how pleased they were he was finally coming out of his slump. It made me feel so good to know I was writing as well or better than Elwood Blankenship. Everyone was getting what they wanted.”
“Were you, though?” Eva asked. It seemed to her that the arrangement was highly unfair to June.
“In a way. Elwood was nearly Elwood again. Except for not leaving the house. And Frank died suddenly a couple of years after that, and when that happened all I had was Elwood, this house, and the writing. I loved them all. In my own way.”
“It must have been hard to lose Frank even so,” Eva said.
“Oh, it was awful. For both El and me. I know it sounds ridiculous to say it but I was faithful to Frank. I loved his brother, yes, but that didn’t mean I loved Frank any less. I felt hollowed out those first few days he was gone. Max helped me make the arrangements and drove me to the funeral since Elwood couldn’t. Max stood by my side at Frank’s graveside for the same reason.”
“And when Elwood asked you to stay on, you said yes.”
“Not exactly. He told me I didn’t need to waste the rest of my life holed up at his house when I could still have a life outside it. He still wanted my help as a writing assistant, but he’d pay me a decent hourly wage and also my gas money to come out to the house once or twice a week. He’d hire a gardener and handyman to do things Frank had been doing, and a housekeeper for the laundry and cleaning and such. He told me he was grateful for all that I had done for him, but that he wanted me to know I was free to move on.”
June looked away from Eva then, to the patio door, open to let in the unseasonably warm air.
“It was hard for me to hear those words,” June continued a moment later. “We were both so sad about losing Frank. El was devastated, too, at Frank’s passing. The last thing I wanted to do was leave Malibu, leave El. Leave the life I had here. I thought Elwood might beg me to stay. I actually wanted him to. It hurt when he didn’t.”
“But you stayed.”
“I did. El was just being El. Wise and careful. I think he knew that I was in love with him. But in telling me I was free to go, he was saying in as gentle a way as he could that his affection for me was no greater than that for a sister. And never would be.”
June blinked and two tears traveled down her cheeks.
“You are sure that’s what he meant?” Eva asked.
June shrugged and wiped her face with her sleeve. “It’s what I heard in his words. If he’d loved me like I loved him, would he have encouraged me to leave?”
The two of them were quiet for a moment.
“In the end, I really had nowhere else to go,” June continued. “I mean, there was nowhere else I wanted to go. So I asked Elwood if I could stay just as we’d been when Frank was alive. He said, ‘Whatever you would like, June.’ He paid two set workers to move his writing room to the upstairs guest room where Frank and I had slept, and he gave me his former office by the kitchen for a bedroom.”
June turned to Eva. “The thing is, my world had shrunk to the size of Elwood’s companionship, writing for him, and making this house my home. And I was fine with that, but Frank’s death showed me how fragile it all was. I started wondering if Elwood had provided for me in his will as his last living relative and friend. I hoped he had but I didn’t know and it’s not the kind of thing you ask someone. The only thing I really wanted was this house. It had become my home and I let myself believe surely he knew this. I knew he didn’t love me like I loved him, but I thought he loved me as his sister at least, especially after all I had done for him. Given up for him.”
June paused a moment and Eva waited for her to continue.
When she did, it was as if a dark cloud had fallen across her.
“But I came across his will not too long ago when I was straightening up the top of his desk. I was just putting everything into neater piles. I didn’t mean to snoop, but I saw that one of the sets of papers was the draft of an updated will. Elwood’s will. I heard him coming down the hall from his bedroom, and I only had time to glance at it quickly. I saw all that I needed to see on the first page.”
Eva stared at June. Waited for her to tell her.
“He left everything—including this house—to Ruthie Brink’s sons.”