Land of Dreams: A Novel by Kate Kerrigan

Author:Kate Kerrigan [Kerrigan, Kate]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780062340542
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2014-10-07T00:00:00+00:00

Part Three

Los Feliz

1943

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Christmas came and went.

It did not feel like winter in California. Without the routines of bad weather, clearing the snow, unpacking our boots and sweaters, it was as if time had stood still.

Leo started filming Five Graves to Cairo at Paramount Studios in early January and the producers estimated it would take three months to film, maybe longer. It was a war film, set during the ongoing World War Two and starring Franchot Tone, Anne Baxter and Erich von Stroheim. Leo was cast as a young soldier who gets wounded and is tended by a young female nurse who falls in love with him. All through Christmas he had talked of nothing else, reading and rereading the script until he knew the whole thing by heart.

I was pleased to see him happy, but was starting to find his incessant acting both obsessional and wearing.

Bridie, on the other hand, was a bottomless pit of admiration. “You’ll end up in the lead role yet!”

“I have a speaking part—you know? None of the other boys in my group have a speaking part.”

“That’s because you’re a special boy,” Bridie said, “you were born to it. Read me that bit again . . .”

“I don’t know why you’re indulging him,” I chided her when Leo was out of the room. “We’ll never get back to New York at this rate.”

“Sure, what does it matter where we are, as long as they’re happy,” she said, nodding over to Tom, who was sitting on a stool in the garden doing his schoolwork. “He wouldn’t be doing that in January in New York, and sure, look at him there—sure, he loves being outside—he’s in heaven!”

Los Angeles had caused a notable transformation in Bridie. She had not complained once of her usual aches and pains and, while her sharp tongue would never be curbed, she was generally in a better humor than I had ever seen in her before.

The same could not be said for me. Leo was out of the house filming most days, with Freddie and the studio ferrying him back and forth. I had enrolled Tom in the local school, where he had quickly made friends with all the neighbors’ children and—charming scallywag that he was—with most of their parents too, which meant that he was freely wandering in and out of gardens all along our street. Tom was thriving so much in his new environment that I felt guilty for the time I had deprived him of the company of other children by taking him to Fire Island.

This meant that I now had the time and the freedom to paint—but none of the impetus, which was making me cranky and dissatisfied. I looked for distraction around the house, washing windows and polishing floors, and insisting to myself that Bridie was too old to be doing heavy housework (which she was). All the same, I knew I was just making work for myself to keep me from facing the fear that I might never find it in me to paint again.

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