Joan said she’d been poring over the Taj Mahal picturebook, and it would be nice to make the trip to Agra when she got better. Marj couldn’t believe what she was hearing; it overjoyed her. Joan had even spoken to Trudy, who said that by the time her mother was ready to travel, the monsoons would have passed. Joan said Trudy was a sweet woman and had been devastated to hear what had happened. She wanted to stop by for a visit but Joan sardonically told the Travel Gal to “put it in idle”—a phrase her adopted father had loved, and whose employment she knew her mom would get a kick out of.
Marjorie’s dreams became vivid and strange. She was taking Restoril for sleep and the doctor said sometimes that was a side effect, but the old woman liked the dreams; they were so marvelously detailed and wildly colorful, yet cozy and intimate at the same time. She dreamt of Lucas Weyerhauser and Bonita Billingsley, Agent Marone and the woman who accompanied him from the bank. Sometimes the pretty hostess from Spago seemed to be in her room, poised to escort Marj to her table. There wasn’t anything frightening about the visitations — in fact, though she would never admit it to her daughter or the detectives, she missed them in her waking life. They had to have been desperate, and don’t desperate characters do desperate things? Who could cast a stone and say they had never acted out of desperation? They were all the children of moms and dads, had experienced the slights and heartbreaks that children do, and the slights and heartbreak of being grown-up. They were very creative people, no one could say they weren’t, albeit their talents had been used for bad. Even Joanie—and the detectives — had marveled at the worlds-within-worlds they’d created. In her heart, Marj didn’t think that Lucas or Bonita or any of “her gang”—that’s how the old woman thought of them, “her gang”—she just couldn’t imagine a connection to the terrible person who attacked her. That would have had to be a whole different group.
During the day, while reading a book or magazine or taking her lunch through a straw (the caregiver watching TV or listening to the radio), Marj remembered her time with them. Yes of course they were criminals and she hoped they’d be caught so that no one else would have to undergo such an ordeal — though part of her hoped they would get away, and realize on their own the harm they had caused, and be better, stronger people for it — but still she remembered what fun she’d had, the excitement of Lucas’s visits, their Chinese dinner together, her shopping spree in Beverly Hills…all of the beautiful certificates and papers she’d been given, and the planning she’d made for the trip to New York; she could almost feel herself stepping onto the private airline. She put the bad things out of her mind — wasn’t that what people did? Forget the bad and remember the good? How else could one survive? What was the point of feeling like a victim? Dr Phil and Oprah were loaded with them. But that wasn’t her, that wasn’t Marjie Herlihy. Not for a minute! At the strangest times, she could even smell Agent Marone’s aftershave — and he did look like Jeff Chandler. She smiled when she thought of him. Now she remembered what comforted about that scent: it somehow evoked her 1st husband.
All manner of things flitted through her mind, memories of her parents too: the pungent Jungle Gardenia (there was Mr Kipling again — the lure of the jungle) that her mother wore and ambient recollections of the hospital room where she’d lain the weeks before she died; the flowers her father brought that only the nurses seemed to appreciate, always bright red peonies. She remembered when Dad said she had passed, and Marj wanted to know if they could bring home the peonies and he told her they’d already been given away by the nurses to children in the sickward. That stung afresh. Sitting in the living room with Ambara, half listening to Oprah, she recalled the lesson she’d learned when her father said the flowers were gone — things happen so quickly, one day her mother was well and the next, so it seemed, she was dead, even the flowers in her room handed off with dispatch like batons in a relay race. Life was a whirlwind!
Within the next year, the whirlwind blew her all the way to India. When she saw the beggarchildren and poverty and disease, she told her father she was going to be a missionary and return one day. He was so happy with this declaration that he cried, though in reflecting from her daychair on this windblown Beverlywood afternoon, breathing through her nostrils, metal-braced mouth filled with warm pea soup, the old woman began to remember all the times, or most of the times that her father cried, and saw them connected to her mother and not so much with any charmingly resolute pronouncements his daughter might have made. When he became a widower, she, little Marjorie Morningstar, numinous remnant of the woman he had loved with all his heart and soul, well, she must have lit up his life just like the incandescent peonies left to grace hapless children’s rooms. Idly, she wondered if the nurses had actually taken them to sickwards or had brought them home. She pushed the cynical thought from her head — why would it have mattered, if they gave someone pleasure? As long as they weren’t thrown away, which she doubted. In those days, people weren’t so quick to throw things out.
Suchwise did Marjorie spend her hours, startled to saunter through a decorous, riotous jungle of gardenias and fiery peonies, unhurried perambulation and inventory of her life, and as even-tide came, she remembered Raymond and their courtship, a kind of whirlwind (or whirlpool!) too. He was the 1st man she had been with. She wouldn’t let him do everything he wanted unless they married, and — another thing she’d never tell her kids — that was why she had finally relented and agreed to the union, knowing Dad was initially opposed. (There was an item in the paper about a starlet who eloped to Bakersfield and that’s where Ray got the idea.) She wanted to experience the world of sensual pleasure “full-throttle,” blushing even now as the phrase floated up and danced its burlesque like the debauched cypress silhouettes before her bedcurtains. She remembered the delirious pressure between them as they had their public dance, 1st time she felt a man press up against her like that. At the end of the night she pried herself from the backseat, every window wet as a sauna. The physical side — she and Ray never had a spiritual side; that was something more with Hamilton, though still a spiritualism shared “half-throttle”—was glorious, even though it didn’t last but a year or so. When the children were born, it died on the vine. Maybe that was her fault. There were always things a woman could do. There were things a woman should do to keep her man—the passing of the flowers, to sickbeds, wards, and private apartments. Perhaps to lovenests long since picked apart and scattered to the 4 winds: Love is just around the corner. The passing of the peonies and the angry thoughtless handing off of batons. She didn’t feel she was at all done with flowers and footraces but she had to have those kids and then suddenly it was over then suddenly he was gone
…she had night-thoughts and day-thoughts, night terrors and daydreams — bright and dark and shiny, she could reach out and grab them like at carnival, manipulating the machine that picked out prizes with a small steel claw. Get whatever she wanted: sights and sighs and sounds and smells overwhelming: secret joys and languid stillness.