Marilyn's Daughter by John Rechy
Her eyes holding Alberta’s tightening scrutiny, Enid went on to tell about her best performance as Marilyn, a time when she’d recognized Mildred Meadows spying from her limousine while her photographer pursued with clicking camera. “I deliberately backed up against her ugly car—a car I’ll never forget,” she added with a shudder of memory—and her look on Marilyn shared it. “I was so close that I saw her white face behind the dark pane.”
Alberta knew how possible their subterfuge was. There was a unique “sameness” beyond appearance and similiar outline. It must come out of an intense association, known only to them. An idea gained strength. Later, Alberta would wonder to what extent Enid had helped to guide it.
“So Mildred still has the picture,” Alberta said to herself. During silenced moments, she freshened their tea. She brought out a few more of the plump little madeleine cakes she so enjoyed. As she sipped her tea and took a bite of her little cake, Alberta searched for an essential connection—it was already lurking!—from a distant time she had shared with Mildred, a connection to present circumstances. Now she roamed through that time:
Mildred had had a consuming closeness with her exquisitely beautiful daughter, Tarah. When Tarah became pregnant by an actor, a drifter, Mildred contacted him and suggested a meeting to explore “matters of mutual benefit.” At her invitation, they met in her greenhouse—“where we will be assured of privacy”—at the exact time of day that Tarah tended to her rare orchids, a hobby Mildred encouraged. Separated from Tarah by lush vines, Mildred met with the actor, the drifter. She offered him a large amount of money to exit from her daughter’s life. He eagerly accepted. Mildred turned to Tarah, who had heard every word just as Mildred had intended. “He didn’t even barter for more,” Mildred disdained. The drifter got nothing, not a cent. Tarah rejected him with a ferocity Mildred complimented at dinner that night—a celebratory dinner of lobster with the lightest butter sauce and an astonishing Dom Perignon.
Mildred stopped delighting in the evening when Tarah informed her that she intended to have her child. “You’ll destroy your whole life, your reputation, your beauty!” Mildred appealed to logic.
Some time after, Mildred “eerily acquiesced” to the birth. Gaily, she informed Tarah that she had arranged for the child to be born “under the most careful circumstances, and, of course, at the D’Arcy House, under the care of that most trusted Dr. Janus.” Afraid, Tarah turned to the one person beyond reach of her mother’s arteries of power—Alberta Holland. Alberta agreed to contact Dr. Janus, to assure that all was right. Of course it was not. Mildred had been emphatic with Dr. Janus that a stillborn child would be “vastly appreciated and equally rewarded.” Alberta “convinced” the doctor that if he did not reject the terrifying proposition, she would assure him prison.
With Mildred in chilling attendance in the amber-hued room at the D’Arcy House, Tarah gave birth to a live child. Dr. Janus held it out to Mildred, who turned away in disgust. Five years later, driving away in a rage from Mildred’s increasing rampages against the child’s “ugliness,” Tarah crashed in her car. Mildred blamed the death of Tarah on the child, insisting her daughter was always protecting “the ugly little creature,” who, it was true, nestled in fear against her mother at every moment. . . . That violence in Mildred’s past provided a strong undertow to her demands on Marilyn.
Alberta popped another madeleine into her mouth. Suddenly she knew how she would use that sad, ugly incident to protect Marilyn and her child. “We have to convince Mildred that she has seen the demanded abortion!”
Enid held her lighter tensely.
“I couldn’t simulate—” Marilyn shivered with horror.
“Of course not,” Alberta reassured her tenderly.
Now Alberta’s plan formed—so daring, so audacious that it would work. In a few hours, at Mildred’s mansion, as demanded, Enid would inform Mildred that Marilyn had—of course—acquiesced to her “logical demands.” “Mildred believes in the irrefutable logic of evil,” Alberta explained. Enid would provide the woman with all the information on how her insane demand would be carried out, identifying the place of execution—“the D’Arcy House, of course”; she would agree to verify the exact date and time later.
“You must keep saying ‘of course’ in order to plant suspicion,” Alberta advised Enid. Enid would then inform Mildred that Marilyn must be in disguise—of course. “Then,” Alberta instructed Enid, “you must add, very, very quickly, that the disguise will be one she’s familiar with—say it as if to assuage her—a disguise one of her photographers captured on film while she oversaw from her limousine. When she—”
“I wish—” Marilyn sighed. Her own fantasy fought her. It had stopped as Robert was about to introduce her to his mother. Marilyn stood up. “I feel suddenly sad. You and Enid talk, please, and tell me all you said, later.” She placed an appreciative hand on Alberta’s shoulder. “I’d like to lie in the sun.”
But there was no sun.
How alone she seemed, hoping for sun on an increasingly graying day, Alberta thought, placing her own hand over Marilyn’s. For a moment she allowed herself to imagine that she had a daughter, that her daughter was Marilyn.
Marilyn called a cab. She would wait outside, she said, to allow them to continue talking. At the door she turned around, all curves and blonde beauty and outrageous sensuality, and breathed a puff of gratitude: “And thank you, thank you a whole lot, really," she told Alberta.
The gray day turned silver. Alberta imagined Marilyn Monroe standing outside studying the lavender blossoms that fascinated her. Yes, they were like her in that they, too, had a special beauty. But they lasted so briefly; Alberta did not welcome that thought.
Alberta directed her attention back to Enid—startled anew by Enid’s cooler beauty. “Mildred will—” But she had lost her train of thought in the bedazzled moments.
Enid guided her back knowledgeably: “You want me to guide Mildred to the photograph by her limousine.”
“Yes!” Then Alberta conveyed her evolving plan to Enid, “with embellishments to be supplied as required.” It relied on stirring in Mildred a calculated series of associations and suspicions. From that time when the haunting youngwoman had sought her help, Alberta remembered being fascinated by Tarah’s unique mannerisms, the perfection of manners demanded by Mildred in constant quiet war with a desire to rebel against such imposed rigidity. This resulted in quick but graceful movements, as if ceremony must be gotten out of the way: sudden attention to her makeup at odd moments; a soft lifting of the veil of her hat to reveal a new expression. She said “please” often, while her eyes flashed in rejection of pleading. She had asked Alberta whether she might have some sherry—“just three sips,” she’d added automatically, then instantly rejected her own request, explaining that Mildred had come to expect those exact words from her, uttered first when she was only a girl and now cherished as part of a ritual, while they waited for dusk, to watch Mildred’s garden change its shadings.
As Alberta spoke those memories of Tarah, Enid listened attentively, as if already rehearsing what Alberta was only now revealing.
“By suggesting those movements, using a few key words, you must arouse in Mildred her memory of the daughter she destroyed while claiming to love her.” Alberta explained to Enid the horrible parallel between Mildred’s unsuccessful demand on Tarah and the present one on Marilyn. They would use that to their own ends.
Alberta continued to explain: After Enid left the mansion of the hated woman, Mildred would suspect everything that had occurred between them. She always did, believing that one uncovered truth only by discovering lies. She would realize that Enid had intended to guide her to a certain photograph of Marilyn Monroe, to verify the disguise to be employed at the D’Arcy House. She would discover what they wanted her to—that the photograph was of Enid pretending to be Monroe in a dark wig.
Alberta was certain of this: Mildred would then couple her discovery with Enid’s admonishment that sh
“She will be sure it will be me pretending to be Marilyn,” Enid understood, “but it won’t be.”
“Exactly.” When Mildred entered the D’Arcy House, Alberta continued with the excitement of a general about to vanquish another with impeccable strategy based on perfect knowledge of the enemy’s own maneuvers, the systematic disorientation of Mildred, already prepared for, would immediately commence. The time would be set for a certain phase of twilight when visual perception is almost equivocal. From the elaborate windows of the D’Arcy House, refracted shards of light, colored by the stained glass, would slice at Mildred’s eyes. Simultaneously, her confidence would grow as she encountered predictable obstacles—guards, attendants she would accept, thrilled, as part of the charade staged to deceive her. At the exact moment, Enid would run out of a certain room. Mildred’s assumptions would crash. She would be forced into the only conclusion that would not prove her deductions wrong: At the last moment Enid had faced the impossibility of the contrived deceit and so had fled.
But—
When Mildred opened the room she would be triumphantly certain she would find vacated with only the instruments of the simulated operation remaining in judgment of foiled cunning, she would be pitched into a turmoil of memories by a graphic unexpected sight: In the same amber-hued room in which Tarah’s child had been born, she would see a doctor she vaguely recognized, extending to her the mangled proof of the demanded abortion. In shattered moments of jarred perception, images of Tarah in childbirth, Tarah dying, Monroe in the demanded abortion once demanded of Tarah would tangle violently—Tarah, Monroe, Tarah, Monroe, Tarah—Rejecting the unmistakable pursuing face of memory, she would be forced to grasp defensively for that of present reality, convincing herself she had seen Marilyn Monroe.
Enid leaned away from the eerie confidence with which Alberta predicted the expertly manipulated confusion of images that would lead Mildred to the required conclusion.
“But Mildred will have seen another woman in the simulated abortion?” Enid spoke slowly, precisely, but she had not intended to form a question.
“What else?” Alberta said tersely.
With sustained care in her choice of words, Enid said, “It’s all possible, Alberta. I agree that Mildred would be thrown into the terrible confusion your brilliant plan requires, but not by a simulated abortion.” She held her eyes on Alberta’s.
“Then we’ll have to convince her that it isn’t simulated.” Alberta drank her tea.
Enid felt a cold apprehension, because when she spoke those last words, Alberta Holland, for the first time in their conversation, avoided her eyes.
Thirty-Seven
Years later, Normalyn felt that same chill of apprehension. Enid’s fleeing from the secret hospital had been convincingly conveyed as occurring with real panic, beyond the dissimulation intended to confuse Mildred. Had Enid, too, discovered something she had not expected?
“How did Alberta convince Mildred the abortion wasn’t simulated?” Normalyn forced herself not to flinch at her own question.
“An excellent woman was hired,” Mrs. Crouch answered quickly. “We worked on the simulated flesh, the—” Her hands fluttered on her lap.
“What did she see, Dr. Crouch?” Because the old man’s voice had gained vibrant life in roaming over the intrigue, Normalyn pushed her question to ride on the impetus of the narrative, to force a connecting answer.
“She saw the simulated abortion, what else?” Dr. Crouch snapped so quickly the smile was abandoned on his face.
“What did she really see?” Normalyn pursued.
Mrs. Crouch covered her ears. “I know nothing, nothing.”
“We must tell the truth.” Dr. Crouch seemed to be reminding himself of whatever personal summons they were responding to, had momentarily rejected.
“I knew nothing!” Mrs. Crouch pushed away any words of accusation.
“You pretended not to know!” Dr. Crouch scolded.
Normalyn ambushed these moments of alienated guilt: “Tell me now!”
“Mildred saw a real abortion of a woman hired by Stanley Smith.” Dr. Crouch sat erectly in his chair.
And that’s what Enid had discovered only then—a real abortion donated by Stan. “That’s why Enid ran out in real panic,” Normalyn said aloud.
“Alberta knew that only a real abortion performed before Mildred would throw her into the required confusions. And the woman was paid handsomely,” Dr. Crouch added logic of his own.
Normalyn turned away in disgust.
Dr. Crouch extended his logic: “Of course the fact of the real abortion had to be kept secret from Enid and Marilyn—”
“—along with the fact that you and your wife were involved,” Normalyn said with certainty, “because Enid hated both of you—she called you the genial executioners.”
Muffling words of shock, Mrs. Crouch clasped her hands as if about to pray.
“Alberta convinced Enid our talents were essential,” Dr. Crouch asserted proudly. “And she came to respect us, trust us.”
Normalyn would keep that in abeyance. She had tested her power to demand information from them, a power she knew was borrowed from, enhanced by, another source. Perhaps the lavender bouquets, dearheart! . . . But Normalyn felt alienated from Miss Bertha. No, only from Alberta Holland. Yet she had discovered that the tea Miss Bertha had “imagined”—so sweetly remembered—had occurred.
“But listen!” The excited vibrancy returned to Dr. Crouch’s voice. “Listen to why it had to be done as it was! Enid’s encounter with Mildred worked splendidly!”
“Splendidly!” Mrs. Crouch congratulated.
“The deception at the D’Arcy House worked exactly as Alberta had known it would.” Dr. Crouch leaned toward Normalyn. “Mildred informed her readers of the ‘miscarriage.’ And now—”
* * *
—still rationed, hope extended that the extravagant plan could work. Would tomorrow sustain it? Time extended. The letter threatening scandal seemed to have been defused. They lived tensely with the eerie fact of Mildred’s terminated column—only stilled dramatically to announce its greatest scandal?
More hope emboldened the evolving plan: In secure hiding in the nurturing warmth of a secluded desert city, Marilyn Monroe was carefully tended by Teresa de Pilar during the careful period that must be overseen at every moment. Teresa enlisted an American doctor who had hidden with her—and loved her—in the Spanish hills of revolution. He was amply able to cope with any dangers to the pregnancy.
For the birth and care of the child, all necessary equipment was obtained by the doctor. Reasons for the star’s absence from the studio and public view were provided—and verified as required—by the Crouches: suspension for the rebellious movie star; a series of mild illnesses that might become serious if unattended; self-imposed isolation to set her tense life in order. Marilyn made strategic telephone calls, asserting she was well, in hiding. She telephoned two of her ex-husbands. The Kennedys were allowed desired separation. “When lying, it is always advisable to use as much truth as possible so that the made-up parts convince,” Mrs. Crouch stressed when they issued a report that the star was depressed over “a recent love affair.”
At advantageous intervals—fleetingly, in order to emphasize the reported hiding of the star—Enid appeared as “Monroe in disguise.” Reporters were tipped. Once, in the blonde wig—as Marilyn herself—she was spotted by screaming fans as she rushed into a waiting car. Daringly, Enid paused to give an autograph through the window.
It was all proceeding with uncanny ease. Dr. Crouch remarked on that to Mrs. Crouch. Of course he was thrilled by the success of the elaborate deception. Yet, some nights, its very lack of complications to overcome baffled
Success emboldened, expectations firmed. Why shouldn’t this plan work? Hadn’t Dr. and Mrs. Crouch been able to cover up the murder of a king by— . . . Still, that very night, there was the listening silence, alert, sleeping.
Hope reigned. It was possible!
After the birth, Marilyn would be rushed home—with all due care—and reported “recovering from illness and exhaustion requiring quiet and rest.” To add veracity, another woman—who would know nothing of what had transpired— would help care for the “ailing movie star,” replacing Teresa, who would retreat slowly, as required. Taken to another location—an ordinary house already fully equipped to receive it—the child would be in the best of hands, the most deeply devoted and trusted—Enid’s. The American doctor would join her immediately.
Alternatives were allowed as confidence grew. Enid told Alberta that she had connections in Texas. “A powerful, insular state,” Alberta evaluated. Yes. And Enid could “blackmail rich political stepparents into total cooperation”—they had adopted her “illegally,” she told Alberta, “by paying a lot—but not enough—for me.” If necessary to protect the child’s identity, she would retreat there for a period of safety, claiming the child as her own—in constant but guarded touch to assure Marilyn of the child’s well-being.
“I gave birth there to a child of my own,” Enid told Alberta, “away from the fray, in big, sulking Texas.”
“Is your child still there?” Alberta ventured cautiously.
Clicking her lighter as if it were a revolver, Enid did not answer.
Late one night, the telephone rang at the home of Dr. and Mrs. Crouch. In predetermined signal, Enid left a number with Mrs. Crouch, for the doctor to contact her. Dr. Crouch called from a telephone booth. At another booth, Enid told Dr. Crouch to proceed with the next phase—reports of Marilyn’s condition at home.