4
Los Angeles, California * 1924—1934
There had, of course, existed a time before Ava and her mother joined the traveling barnstorming spectacle. When she thought even further back, Ava could remember a time before they lived like vagabonds out of a caravan, a time before the view out her window changed weekly, a time before the sound of biplanes constantly droned overhead.
When she closed her eyes and concentrated, Ava could remember all the way back to a little Spanish-style bungalow in Los Angeles. She remembered the bright green of the small, sloped lawn, how the afternoon light burnished the house in gold and how bougainvillea crept along the champagne-colored stucco, enveloping the arched doorway in fuchsia flames. She remembered how ripe oranges materialized in winter: Giant, heavy globes, they bent the limbs of a tree in the backyard, bobbing on the branches like Christmas ornaments. A suit of armor stood at attention in one of the hallways inside the house—a prop auctioned off by a movie studio and the sort of faux-medieval décor preferred in those days by plenty of respectable Angelenos, who seemed bent on creating their own mythologies and coats of arms.
For the first five or six years of Ava’s childhood in that house, the atmosphere was routine, cheerful. Her mother left the radio switched on all day while she puttered about doing chores; Helen Kane chastised folks to “button up your overcoat” and Cole Porter insisted, “Let’s misbehave!!!” as her mother hummed along and pinned laundry to a line outside. It was difficult to remember rain ever falling during her childhood—in that backyard, or upon that roof, or even in Los Angeles more generally; it seemed the sun shone every day, except in June, when a dull fog rolled in off the Pacific and hung persistently in the air, thick and shapeless, gray as a dull nickel.
Ava remembered her father—red-haired, like Ava herself—as he sat bent over a desk, doing calculations while wearing a green banker’s visor. Ava was still quite young, but she possessed a dim understanding that the visor fit in with her father’s profession somehow. His job had something to do with the banks; it seemed he was always on the telephone to New York. He worked in an office downtown, a tall-ceilinged, mahogany-paneled space that was perpetually hazy with cigarette smoke, the blinds partially drawn against the brash glare of the blinding Los Angeles sunshine outside. Ava’s mother took Ava to visit him there a handful of times, and her father had always looked busy, distracted. He kept very early hours, often rising before the sun to work, but he also finished early. Bankers’ hours, he called them. In the evenings he sometimes took Ava and her mother to a baseball game, or else a picture show. If they were bound for the movie house, her mother liked to dress up, to set her dark hair in pin waves. More often than not, she even reached for the garden scissors and clipped a pair of camellias from one of the shrubs that grew on their front lawn, insisting they each tuck one over an ear.
Ava’s father, usually a fairly serious man, would laugh, and grin, and wolf-whistle at the two of them, and say things like What a pair of movie stars! How’d a fella like me ever get so lucky to be surrounded by two such gorgeous dolls?
Perhaps all little girls believe their mothers are glamorous, but Ava suspected hers was more glamorous than most. Ava’s mother’s name, Cleo, was short for Cleopatra. Her mother looked the part: a full red mouth, regal cheekbones, and thick, black, silky hair—the opposite of Ava, whose pale pink lips made a small, demure bow, and whose red hair sprouted from her head like a flame. Cleo also possessed the kind of hourglass figure that was difficult to hide, no matter what she wore. It was difficult not to notice the way people reacted to her mother. Even when she was only running simple errands, men and women alike constantly threw looks at her mother.
Unfortunately, Ava’s mother was fickle when it came to the kind of attention she received: Sometimes she liked it, but more often than not it proved too much for her to bear. The contradiction puzzled Ava. Her mother had a fanciful nature and loved to dress up, yet she could be painfully withdrawn. Finally, one day, it dawned on Ava: Her mother wasn’t dressing to attract notice; she was “playing dress-up.” Too much attention gave Cleo clammy hands and a tight feeling behind her eyes. When life made demands on her, Cleo got terrible headaches. During such times, she retreated to her bed and drew the curtains, transforming day into night.
Let’s allow your mother to rest, Ava’s father would say if he was home when Cleo got one of her headaches. He would take Ava for a walk or buy her an ice cream, and by the time they returned, her mother would be back on her feet, humming a quiet tune and cooking some supper.
The Great Crash of ’29 happened on a Tuesday, around the time of Halloween. Ava remembered the three pumpkins they had carved and set out on the terra-cotta steps that led up to their little Spanish bungalow. Ava had arranged the pumpkins in descending size to resemble her family: a daddy, a mommy, and a baby.
That afternoon, Ava’s mother walked to the kindergarten schoolyard to fetch Ava once school was out, and on the walk home they stopped at the corner store to buy a few groceries. When they approached their house, Ava noticed her father’s Ford coupe parked at the curb, indicating he’d finished the workday and come home. This wasn’t terribly unusual: Ava figured he was keeping “bankers’ hours,” just as he said. Recently he’d explained to Ava, too, that clocks kept different time in New York, so that while it was one time here, it was a different time there.
She skipped happily enough up the steps, but as she passed the three pumpkins, Ava felt a curious chill.
Inside, all was quiet. Ava went to her room to play. She assumed her mother would pop her head into her father’s office to chirp out a quick greeting, then stow the market items in the kitchen icebox. Only a minute or so had passed when Ava heard the bloodcurdling scream. She dropped the hard plastic horse figurine she was holding and ran toward her mother’s cries.
A half dozen eggs were splattered on the hallway floor just outside her father’s office, yolks oozing from their broken shells. Her mother had fled to the front parlor and sat sniveling on the settee, shuddering as though the bullet had ripped through her, too. Black mascara was already beginning to run down her face. No one stopped Ava from looking into the office, and so she did, just to check. Her father’s forehead was slumped over his desk, lifeless. His hand still clutched the revolver. Ava was five at the time—much too young to understand what she was seeing. And yet, somehow, she did.
Seeing her father, his head tipped upon the desk, his skull looking as fragile as one of the eggshells lying in a shattered heap on the floor, Ava only understood one thing: Something had broken her father, and as a consequence he had gone someplace she and her mother could not follow. He was no longer in the room, and he was not coming back anytime soon.
They remained in the little Spanish bungalow for a time. Policemen came and went and her father’s body was taken away, but there was little way for life to resume as it had been before. When Ava’s mother learned that her husband had died with not a penny to his name and owing debts, she contracted one of her terrible headaches and retreated to her bedroom. When Ava checked on her, Cleo was curled up in bed like a child. Ava remembered peeking through a crack in the door and staring at the curve of her mother’s back, her mother’s birdlike bones showing through her satin nightgown, the ridges of her spine like a sagging string of pearls.
Ava turned six. Unable to rouse her mother from bed in the mornings, Ava found the jar where her mother kept grocery money, purchased milk and white bread from the corner store, and walked herself to and from school. But she sensed even this arrangement—reduced as it was—could not hold up for very long. Unopened mail was piling up at their house. Notices appeared, tacked up to their front door. Collectors began knocking, while Ava’s mother only burrowed deeper under the bedsheets, hiding like a frightened animal, until finally one day the collectors returned with the police.
The officers put them out on the street with only what they could carry. Ava felt a pang to realize yet another of her mother’s mistakes: Perhaps they might’ve sold their possessions. Fake Hollywood prop or not, she wondered what the suit of armor might’ve fetched in price.
All they had left now was the cash Ava’s mother had long ago squirreled away in an old hatbox. They found an apartment for rent by the week, but by the second week it was already too expensive, so they moved to a seedier apartment, in a seedier neighborhood, and then still a third apartment, in an even worse part of town. It became obvious to them both that Cleo would have to look for a job, some way to make an income. Ava knew her mother was terrified; she had never worked a day in her life, and felt qualified for nothing.
Fortunately, there was one industry that continued to boom in Los Angeles in spite of the Depression, and that was the movie industry. Cleo was able to get work on one of the studio lots as an extra, and she became a pretty face floating in the background of Sherwood Forest, scurrying along the bustling streets of New York, even—ironically—posed amid Queen Cleopatra’s court. Once or twice, she even got to speak a line. At one point, a studio executive caught a glimpse of her legs and thought she might make a good chorus girl, but Cleo’s stint there was short-lived. It turned out her legs were nice to look at but not very coordinated, and her singing voice was a weak, nervous whisper. Back to the pool of stock extras she went.
None of it paid very much, and they were still painfully poor. Ava turned seven, then eight. They managed to squeak by—but sometimes with a little help from a new habit Ava had begun to cultivate. She began to go on short outings alone, returning to whatever dingy apartment they were living in with a couple of apples or a can of soup.
“However did you afford these?” her mother would ask, biting into a Red Delicious.
“I found some loose change in the lining of the hatbox,” Ava lied. She reused that lie several times, and her mother never questioned it. Never mind that the hatbox would have had to have some distant relation to the fairy-tale goose that laid the golden egg for it to be true.
Ava had learned: There were certain advantages to being a scrawny, invisible eight-year-old girl. She knew she ought to be ashamed of herself. She also knew she was hardly the only hungry waif in those days to develop a case of sticky fingers. Times were tough.
As she grew, Ava found other ways to help them squeak by, coming up with small tasks she could do. By the time she was nine years old, she had begun taking in other people’s ironing for a few extra nickels here and there. When her tenth birthday approached, her mother began to worry that Ava was growing up without a proper childhood. It made her sad to see her daughter concentrating so hard on other people’s laundry when she should be outside, playing with other children.
And so, one day, when Ava’s mother overheard a gaggle of girls talking on the studio lot about a carnival that had popped up on the beach near the Santa Monica Pier, her ears perked up. Perhaps a visit to a carnival would lighten her daughter’s heavy mind. Children liked carnivals, didn’t they?
“I spent less than I would have at the actual pier, and I had twice as much fun,” one of the girls said.
“Well, that math sounds good to me,” a second girl agreed, snickering.
“And you know what else? They sold the most marvelous bags of caramel corn for only a penny,” the first girl said.
Cleo, a woman who had always possessed a highly suggestible sweet tooth, felt her mouth water. She made up her mind. A visit to a carnival! Ava would be thrilled, she thought.
When she came home that evening and announced to her daughter that they would take the Red Car over to Santa Monica and see the carnival on Sunday, Ava was not particularly tickled. But Ava saw the expression on her mother’s pretty, hopeful face and bit her tongue. Perhaps a carnival would ease her mother’s worries and lift her spirits. Cleo had recently begun to revert to the habits she’d adopted just after the death of Ava’s father: sleeping in quite late, avoiding the pile of bills that were accumulating in a corner of their shabby one-room apartment.
“All right, we’ll go,” Ava agreed to her mother’s invitation, sounding like an adult succumbing to the will of a child.
Ava resumed her ironing. Neither of them gave a thought to how a single visit to a makeshift carnival might in fact change their lives.