But like a female Icarus, she was punished for her moxie and died young.
On YouTube, I download the movie that launched Veronica’s career. She’d been in Hollywood for several years and played many parts, mostly in the jungle-girl realm. But when sound arrived on the scene, Veronica was cast in the role of a vixen, unapologetically ambitious and beautiful, and the sparks flew between her and her costar. There’s a famous kiss and a dress so sheer and clinging that she might as well have been naked.
Watching, I’m shocked at the liberal tone of the script and the saucy, tongue-in-cheek way Veronica played the part. Her body in the famous dress is incendiary—a slipping lacy bodice that gives the illusion of nipples, or is it that it’s nipples giving the illusion of lace?—curvy hips, slim arms and waist.
The big surprise is the intelligence of both script and actress, plus the fact that this cheeky vixen actually wins at the end. It’s as if someone turned the rule book on its head.
Clicking around, I find more info on the era—very short-lived, called Pre-Code. For a brief five years, between the establishment of the sound movie industry and the 1934 enforcement of the Hays Code, there were no morality guidelines, and moviemakers took full advantage. Dozens of movies were made, often with overtly sexual themes and often with women in roles that acknowledged their sexuality and their ambition.
It startles me that there was so much freedom of story, of power in women’s hands, such a long time ago. For the space of a few breaths, I wonder how life would be different for women if those stories had been allowed, embraced. Even celebrated.
Veronica Parker, with her elegant long limbs and sexy voice, had made her name there. In five years, she’d made thirteen movies, nearly three a year, and she’d been paid handsomely for it, $110,000 a year. It sounds like a lot of money for the early thirties, Depression years, and I look up the equivalent to now, roughly $1.5 million a year. Clearly enough to build a beautiful house that she barely had a chance to live in.
Post Code, Veronica was not able to land parts in Hollywood as freely, and a director in New Zealand lured her home with promises of starring in a tragic romance, but the movie was never made. According to Wikipedia, the director, Peter Voos, was involved in dozens of scandals around women. His photo shows a handsome blond man with an arrogant brow. I can’t find the reason the movie wasn’t made, aside from “creative differences.” Veronica found work in smaller parts, always as the vamp or dangerous Other Woman.
Curled in my blanket, I wonder how that felt for her, to rise to such heights and then fall out of favor when she was still so young and had so much to give. Melancholy creeps under my skin, and I close the laptop. “I’m off to bed,” I say to Simon, and kiss his head. “Don’t stay up too late.”
“No, no. I’ll be up soon.”
I make a mental note to find some more of her movies and watch them. Maybe Gweneth will want to join me. She’s going to flat-out faint when she finds out we bought Sapphire House.
Chapter Seven
Kit
Jet lag wakes me at four a.m., and I try for a time to go back to sleep, but it’s no use.
The curtains are open. Office buildings stand between my balcony and the harbor, but the water lies in inky blackness between the edge of the downtown area and what seems to be an island on the other side. Little lights sparkle there, quiet middle-of-the-night kind of lights. I lie on my side and imagine my sister in a house out there, fast asleep, the same moon shining on her that is shining on me. I imagine that she gets up to go to the bathroom and stops at the window, drawn by my intense gaze, and looks out toward the central business district and my window, invisible amid all the others. She feels me. She knows I’m here.
When we were quite small, before Dylan arrived, we had our own rooms, but I was five when that ended, and up until I left for college, we shared. First the room that looked out over the ocean, when an open window meant the sound of the waves rocked us to sleep, then in the master bedroom of the apartment in Salinas. It took me a long time to get used to the emptiness of a room that contained only my breathing. One of the things I love about Hobo is that he is company at night, curling up against the crook of my knees or creeping onto my pillow to rest his face against my head, as if we are two cats. I ache for him at those moments, and I wonder where his mother went, what terrible things he endured before I brought him into my house and let him stay.
The thought of my cat makes me check the time. It’s nearly eight a.m. in Santa Cruz. My mom will be awake by now. I punch her number as I pad toward the little strip of kitchen by the door and fill the kettle. On the other end, the phone rings so long I think she’s not going to pick up. A familiar sense of disappointment and worry fills me; she has let me down and hasn’t gone to stay with Hobo after all. I think of my poor cat, who trusts only me and was so battered by the world before I took him in, alone in my house—
At the very last minute, she answers, breathless. “Kit! I’m here!”
“You’re there? At my house?”
A slight beat of quiet. She knows I don’t trust her. “I’m here, Kit. I was just out in the backyard watering your plants and forgot I left my phone inside.”
“Did Hobo come outside with you?”
“Oh, no. He hasn’t even come out from under the bed.”
My stomach squeezes. I can see his black face so clearly, his tufted toes. “You slept there?”
“Yes. I swear. He is eating and using the litter box when I leave. I think he peed on your tennis shoes, though. You left them by the door.”
“He’s probably claiming me. Keep your stuff in the closet.”
“I am. We’re fine, Kitten.” The nickname is rare, and sweet enough. “Promise. I’ve had a cat or two in my life.”
“Okay.”
“It’s only been a couple of days. He’ll be fine.”
“Just make absolutely sure he doesn’t get out. I don’t want him to come looking for me.”
“I promise,” she says in a very reasonable voice, and I realize I’m freaking out a little over a situation I can’t control.
Shocking.
I take a breath and let it go. “Okay. I believe you.”
“Thanks. Now tell me about everything. What’s it like? Is it beautiful?”
I walk back to the sliding door and pull it open, letting in a waft of muggy air, and step out to the concrete balcony eighteen stories above the street. “It’s amazing. The water and the hills and these strange trees—it’s gorgeous. I’ll send you some pictures later today.”
“I’d love that.” Instead of rushing in with questions or comments, she waits for me to keep talking, a listening trick she learned at AA that would have made my childhood ten thousand times better.
“I visited the nightclub site,” I say. “It’s hard to imagine what she would have been doing there, honestly. It seems like a club that was frequented by very young Asians, not middle-aged white ladies.”
“Oh, she’d hardly be considered middle-aged.”
I raise my eyebrows. “If she’s really still alive, she’s almost forty-three. Once you cross the line of forty, I think you have to admit to middle-aged.”