Their version: In 1958, as Gerald Ives lay dying, his granddaughters were out drinking and dancing until the sun came up.
Her version: One perfect night. That was what Margaret needed to give Laura to shake her out of her isolation, to bring her out of the gilded tomb that was the House of Ives and into the land of the living.
It started with the head gardener. Daniel lived on the Ives property, but he had a truck, and it wasn’t uncommon for him to make deliveries and pickups from nurseries between the glimmering coast, where the House of Ives sat perched, and downtown Los Angeles.
Leaving with Margaret’s usual car and driver was out of the question. That thing had become a press magnet, and while ordinarily she figured the cameras would find her no matter what so she might as well cut to the chase and pose, she knew that sort of attention would send Laura skittering home, more determined than ever to hide from life.
So Margaret’s driver, Darrin, was out. Daniel the gardener was in.
“He’ll take us off property in the back of his truck,” she told her sister. “We’ll wear disguises and everything, like we’re spies.”
Laura was hesitant, but when wasn’t she these days?
“Gerald isn’t doing well,” she said, because the girls had been raised to call their grandfather by his first name rather than a more affectionate nickname. “I don’t know about leaving him alone.”
“He won’t be alone,” Margaret said, which was true, because there were always people in the house, even if primarily those people were staff.
“He doesn’t like anyone else, really,” Laura pointed out.
“And they don’t like him either,” Margaret said. “A match made in heaven.”
At that, Laura gave a begrudging laugh. It made Margaret’s heart leap with hope. “We’ll ask Mom to come sit with him for a while. He likes Mom.” An exaggeration, but only slightly.
Gerald had disapproved of his son’s marriage, but disapproved far more of his divorce, and in the years since, he’d adamantly refused to learn any of Freddy’s partners’ names and showed a clear preference for Bernie over his son during family dinners.
“One night,” Margaret whispered eagerly, clasping Laura’s hands in hers.
She saw the moment she won her sister over. She had a knack for that sort of thing—reading people. In her mind, she was already celebrating before Laura ever said the breathless, exhilarated words, “I wonder what he’s like in person.”
He of course being Cosmo Sinclair, whose concert they’d be attending.
Margaret fought a powerful urge to roll her eyes. She’d had plenty of gentlemen friends over the years, had plenty of fun with them even, but she knew Cosmo Sinclair’s type.
Preening, self-important, and with enough sparkle to hide the fact that his skull was more or less a wind tunnel. But that didn’t matter. Cosmo was a means to an end, and that means had just done its job.
She got the wigs from her mother’s studio, and as for the clothes they’d wear, she’d asked the housekeeper to buy them each a dress straight off the rack at Bullock’s. Something pink for Laura, because it would bring out the glow in her cheeks, and something drab for Margaret, because anything too colorful or glamorous might too clearly read Peggy Ives, rather than anonymous concertgoer.
On the night of the concert, the two lay in the bed of Daniel’s truck with a scratchy wool blanket pulled over them, and they rumbled off the property, right past the row of not-so-patiently-waiting photographers who’d started gathering outside their tall iron gates.
A friend of his, handsomely paid for his discretion, met the girls on the side of a road and drove them toward Pan Pacific. Not to. Toward. It felt like overkill to Margaret, treating themselves like Audrey Hepburn’s Princess Ann in Roman Holiday, but the subterfuge was both a fun game and a way to make Laura feel more comfortable. Maybe, she thought, this could even become a tradition of theirs.
Daniel’s friend dropped them at a burger joint, and Laura hovered close to Margaret’s shoulder, intimidated rather than comforted by the excess of rowdy young people eating and socializing at the counter.
“It’s too crowded,” Laura whimpered. “Someone will recognize us.”
“Why would they?” Margaret said. “We’ve never been anywhere like this in our lives.”
They ate their burgers and drank their shakes in a corner booth. Laura was quiet and watchful at first, but when Margaret bumped her ankle to her sister’s and said, “What do you think Cosmo is doing right now?” Laura gave a meek smile.
“Oh, that’s right,” Margaret said. “I’m sure he’s pomading his hair right up until showtime.”
And this earned a real belly laugh from Laura. “I know, you think he’s ridiculous.”
“Of course I do,” Margaret allowed. “But most men are. Look at our father.”
Laura gave her an amused yet reproachful look, but she didn’t disagree. After a second, she said, “Roy’s not ridiculous.”
“No, no he’s not,” Margaret agreed of their stepfather. “But then, Roy’s not the sort of man they let up on a stage with a microphone.”
Laura tittered. “Can you imagine?”
“I can, and it’s a tragedy, Laura.” The picture of their mother’s even-keeled and soft-spoken husband wailing on a guitar, a lock of Cosmo-style hair falling across his forehead, made them both howl with laughter. “More than that, picture Mom watching him from the audience.”
It was too easy to imagine the highly practical Doris Bernhardt observing the spectacle, horrified.
When Laura’s laughter finally settled and she wiped the tears from her eyes, she said thoughtfully, “Although…I suppose Dad’s always been a bit of a showman. And she loved him once, didn’t she?”
It made Margaret’s heart ache, to realize her sister didn’t have those precious memories from the early years that meant so much to Margaret herself. That she couldn’t recall the day she’d first toddled across the grass and Freddy, Bernie, and Margaret cheered on the smallest of their band.
They’d eaten ice cream sundaes, down in one of the kitchens, to celebrate, the girls sitting up on the long oak prep table.
“Not that she doesn’t love him now,” Laura added. “I only mean, they were in love, weren’t they?”
“I think so, yes,” Margaret said. “And if they weren’t, they were still happy.”
The truth was, Margaret wasn’t sure she knew precisely what love was. Sometimes she lay awake late at night, thinking about the word until it came apart like little bits of alphabet soup, the letters drifting off in opposite directions and the meaning lost somewhere in the gaps.
She knew she felt an almost feral protectiveness of her sister.
She knew she admired her mother, thought her quite possibly the loveliest woman in the world, though she’d heard and read enough to know the world at large didn’t agree with this assessment.
And she knew that though she no longer felt close to her father—not deeply known by or deeply knowledgeable of him—she’d felt a kind of peace every time she’d sat opposite him in the drawing room, playing chess while the fire popped and crackled in the grate.
She knew what it was to have fun drinking and dancing with a man, and that occasionally there was a fair amount of pleasure to be had doing other things with one, but love…
She didn’t know what it was, and she couldn’t imagine being in it, the way people described.
And the joy of having two parents who were not only ludicrously wealthy but also extremely eccentric was that no one in her family minded much whether she fell in love and got married or not. Look at Aunt Francine—she was fifty-three years old and had never been married, and then there was Great-Aunt Gigi, who at seventy-five had never bothered to remarry after her first husband’s death, instead spending most weekends during Margaret’s youth either at the ballet or entertaining some attractive male ballet dancer or another in her rooms at the house.
And Bernie had certainly never pushed either of her daughters toward matrimony. If anything, Margaret had occasionally felt as though her mother hoped Margaret might fall in love with filmmaking the way Bernie herself had, but even that romance evaded her.
She and Laura finished their burgers and shakes in a thoughtful quiet, then walked down the street to hail a cab. As long as they’d lived, they’d had a dedicated driver, and lifting her hand as she stepped off the curb triggered a delicious thrill in Margaret’s chest.
She felt, for the first time in a long time, the distinct possibility of getting it wrong. Of trying something new in a world that wouldn’t bend for you. In the back seat of the cab, the sisters grinned at each other and clasped each other’s hands tightly, and Margaret knew Laura felt it too.
It made her feel young again. She wasn’t a socialite. Wasn’t the Tabloid Princess. She was one of two giggly sisters playing make-believe, or hatching a prank on their good-spirited father, like the time they’d filled his shoes with eggs and hidden around the corner to watch the moment he stuffed his foot into the leather.
They made it to the Pan Pacific without a hitch and joined the mass of people pouring toward the recently opened doors of the green-and-white building. Laura tensed again, but the thrill in Margaret’s chest only renewed.
Had she ever waited in line before? Not that this was a line, per se. It was more like a thousand different lines, all colliding and dividing in every direction, as the crowd jostled forward.
Margaret could sense Laura’s nerves, but she thought she could feel her excitement too.
The Ives sisters might possibly have been the richest people in that room of thousands, but they were far from the most famous, the private boxes packed with movie stars and professional ballplayers, other singers.
And no one seemed interested in craning their necks to catch a glimpse of anyone other than the one person they’d come to see.
Even Margaret got caught up in the energy of the crowd. The whole first half of the show was dedicated to a series of opening acts, and while the audience didn’t seem interested, she noted the way the entire crowd kept their eyes bouncing between the stage and the wings.
She caught herself doing the same, watching for Cosmo, wondering how he could ever live up to the myth and legend.
How would thousands of people not leave here tonight disappointed?
She couldn’t imagine it ending any other way.
Every time one of the openers asked some variation of the question “Who here’s excited about seeing Mr. Cosmo Sinclair?” the audience response rivaled the roar of a jet engine. The floor trembled.
When the last group had played and left the stage, the lights dimmed, as they had between each of the acts, and then the dim melted into outright jet-black darkness.
The screaming of the audience started up again. This time, it didn’t sound so much like excitement as sheer desperation, as if the need had grown too much to bear. A joy that verged on terror.
Her whole body erupted into goose pimples.
And then a fierce white light flared out, and a coyly smirking man in all black came into focus at a microphone dead center of the stage.
Margaret had never heard anything like the overwhelming screech of the thousands of people in that room. She realized Laura was screaming too, her eyes saucer wide, one splayed hand pressed over her lips but doing nothing to stop the sound. Margaret let herself join in.
Laughing and screaming and laughing some more. She felt as if they’d all been caught in the same riptide. Like her emotions didn’t belong to her, but she didn’t mind. It was fun, to feel so much.
Behind Cosmo, the band started to play, and she marveled that she hadn’t noticed them, when they were dressed in vibrant red satin, whereas he was little more than a shadow in his black suit.
She and her sister hung on to each other.
He opened his mouth and the first note came out. For a split second, it was as if the audience had been turned off, just the flip of a switch, to let his low clear voice ring out, and then the screaming was back, ratcheted up.
Margaret could barely hear a word of that song, or the next. It hardly mattered. She was swept away in the magic, the charisma of the man at the center of it.
Entranced.
The opening ballad melted into a raucous, playful number, his careful restraint giving way to a frenzy of movement. At one point, he ran down the length of the stage, still singing, then stopped, tossed the microphone up, caught it behind him, and whipped it back to his lips to pick up singing like nothing had happened.
Margaret waited for the energy in the room to wane. It didn’t.
Every time Laura looked at Margaret, her eyes alight, her wig slightly askew and cheeks flushed, one or both of them burst out laughing. They danced ferociously, sweat blooming under the synthetic fibers of their department store dresses. Margaret had brought a flask in her bag, and to her utter shock, Laura took her up on a few gulps when she held it out in offering.
Once, when Cosmo did a particularly salacious swirl of his hips, Margaret leaned over and shouted against Laura’s ear, “ROY,” and that alone was enough to set them off again. She couldn’t hear her little sister’s laughter over all that noise, but she could feel it in her chest. Like an animal rousing from hibernation.
How long had it been since she’d seen such reckless joy on Laura’s face? Had she ever?
Laura leaned in, arms around her sister’s sweaty neck, and kissed the side of her face. “THANK YOU,” she shouted, and suddenly, Margaret thought she might cry. Not those little leaking drips that came with laughter either.
She thought she might crack open and sob, but she couldn’t let herself, so she just danced, hand in hand with her little sister, screaming and laughing and passing the flask between them as the best night of her entire life unfolded around her.
Eight songs in, Cosmo finally played the song everyone had been waiting for. His biggest hit yet. “A Girl Back Home.”
Margaret had never seen anything like the fever that spread through the room as he danced and thrashed and yelped the song:
Ain’t got no girl
back home
No place in this world
to call my own
But darling
For tonight
Maybe we don’t
have to be alone.
He slid forward on his knees, right to the edge of the stage, and those first few rows erupted, gushing up toward him like a volcanic blast, their arms outstretched to him. Somehow, the screaming amped up further. Laura and Margaret pushed up on tiptoe, trying to get a look at what was happening.
Cosmo had taken one girl’s hand and was holding it in his while he sang. He lifted it and rubbed it against his cheek, and suddenly, all down the length of the stage, people were trying to climb up to him.
In an instant, the energy in the room changed. There was a swell in the crowd behind them, like a typhoon moving from back to front, bodies pushing in tighter, people clamoring to get closer to him.
Laura was knocked off balance, her shriek disappearing into the wall of sound. Margaret tried to move sideways to catch her sister by the arm, but there were already people moving between them, trying to shove their way closer to the stage.
Anxiety knotted up her throat as she tried to push through. Instead she was caught in the stampede, half carried deeper into the writhing throng. She screamed her sister’s name as the tide of bodies pushed her farther from where she’d been. An errant elbow connected with her eye, and pain flared through her head, her vision blurring behind tears, all sense of balance lost to the dark.
She had to fight just to stay upright as the crowd jostled her back and forth, and real panic filled her up when she realized how easy it would be to be crushed underfoot.
She blinked away the tears in her left eye. Her right was already swelling. She reached up to her temple, and her hand came away with blood.
Screaming for Laura, again and again, she tried to fight her way back toward where they’d been standing, but she was turned around now, had traveled so far. The band had stopped playing, police were moving in from the outside edges of the room, but the chaos wasn’t dying down.
She saw a flash of pink fabric in between the tightly packed bodies and struggled toward it, still screaming her sister’s name. She pushed. She shoved. Some people pushed back. Her wig was yanked off.
She didn’t care. None of it mattered.
The only thing that mattered was getting to that flash of pink before anything bad happened.
She didn’t yet know that something already had.
Hands clamped down on her arms and she struggled uselessly against the firm grip until she realized it was yanking her toward the side of the room, the man bulky enough to cut a path through the pandemonium.
And then—there she was!
Laura, slumped against the wall, clutching the sides of her nose, her wig crooked and blood dribbled down her collar, cheeks stained with tears. Margaret’s heart plummeted into her stomach. She shook off her attacker and ran toward her sister. “Are you okay?” she asked, clutching her sister’s cheeks.
“I’m fine, I’m fine,” she croaked, but it was clearly a lie.
“Ms. Ives,” someone shouted behind her, and she whirled back to face the man who’d hauled her over here. A security guard. And beside him, Darrin, the Ives family’s driver.
“What are you doing here?” she demanded.
“We need to get you both outside, Ms. Ives,” he said with a terse politeness, reaching for her arm. She shook him off and went back to fretting over her sister.
“Let me see,” she said, pulling on Laura’s wrists to remove her hands from her face, taking in the swollen bloody mass of her nose, and then, more disconcertingly, the teary blankness of her eyes. Did she have a concussion? Why did she look like that?
“Ms. Ives,” Darrin said, more forcefully this time. “We have to go now.”
She looked between her sister and him desperately. She wanted so badly to say, No, we’re not going, we’re staying here, in this perfect night. But the perfect night had blasted apart in a millisecond, turned into an outright brawl all around them.
She gave Darrin a nod, and he guided Laura from the wall, in against his side, with a grim look as he and the security guard rushed them toward a discreet side door.
But on a night like that, there was no such thing as discreet.
As soon as they stepped out into the night, the flashes of cameras popped all around them, voices shouting over one another, trying to get answers about what was happening inside, why people were fleeing while, simultaneously, police were streaming in.
The security guard, who’d surely been generously compensated for his cooperation, tried to fend them off as Darrin led the sisters to his car, but Laura was in such a daze that she lifted her head and blinked sorrowfully right as a flash went off. In a rage, Margaret stormed toward the man, demanding the film, going so far as to reach for his camera when he refused.
Next thing she knew, there were a dozen more flashes going off in her face, and Darrin’s arms were dragging her back to the car, stuffing her inside with her sister. Her purse had gone flying at some point, but Darrin threw that in after her before slamming the door shut. The flask was gone—she prayed she’d dropped it inside, not during the scrape with the photographer.
Only once they were driving away did it all really hit her.
“How did you find us?” she asked Darrin. He didn’t answer, merely kept his eyes on the dark road ahead of them. “Did Daniel tell you?”
Beside her, Laura, who’d been hanging her head in shame, looked up, that startled blankness still splashed across her face. “Laur? What is it?”
Her eyes shifted from the rearview mirror to Margaret guiltily. She swallowed. “I told Gerald.”
“You told Gerald…?” It didn’t sink in right away. When it did, she didn’t get a chance to chastise Laura.
“He wouldn’t have just sent for us like that unless it was important,” Laura insisted. “I know he wouldn’t.” She looked toward the mirror again as if for backup.
Darrin kept his gaze astutely forward. Something new came over Laura’s face. It went slack, her mouth opening. “Darrin?” she said in a small, strained voice.
He didn’t meet her eyes. Dread gathered in Margaret’s stomach now. “Darrin?” Laura said more sharply.
“Yes, Ms. Ives?” he replied.
“What’s happened?” Margaret asked. Beside her, Laura began to weep, even before the words left Darrin’s mouth.
“I’m sorry, miss,” he said. “Your grandfather doesn’t have long.”
“I shouldn’t have gone,” Laura wheezed jaggedly. “I knew I shouldn’t have gone.” A sob scraped out of her, and Margaret pulled her in close, careful not to bump her bleeding face as she broke down fully in Margaret’s lap.
The world whirred furiously past the car windows, but still, the drive seemed to last forever.
They pulled up to the front of the house as the team of doctors was leaving.
For some inane reason, Margaret took that as a good sign—trouble averted, pain schooled into submission by the iron grip of the Ives patriarch. Laura knew better.
She collapsed in the driveway at the sight of those white coats descending the steps.
Margaret sank down in the gravel beside her, holding her sister as she trembled.
Twenty minutes. That was how long he had been dead already. Margaret’s first thought had been a selfish one: She’ll never forgive me.
But she was wrong. That very night, her younger sister had slept beside her in her bed—or not slept, rather, but cried and hiccuped and cried some more—while Margaret stroked her hair and tried to think of soothing words that wouldn’t be outright lies.
It will be okay didn’t feel right. Neither did he’s in a better place now, because who was she kidding? She had no idea if that was true.
Instead, she murmured “I’m here,” over and over again, like a prayer, until Laura’s breathing finally evened out into the rhythm of sleep, just before sunrise.
The headlines were horrible. She shouldn’t have gone looking, and ordinarily she wouldn’t have, but since this was about Laura, she felt it was her duty.
Socialite Sisters Cavort at Cosmo’s “Rock ’n’ Brawl” as Grandfather Dies, one rag proclaimed, beside a picture of the scene that had unfolded outside the arena, between her and the photographer who’d taken Laura’s picture.
One spot of luck was that, in Margaret’s efforts to take the man’s camera, she’d become the shiny object at which all the others pointed their lenses, her face hideous in her fury, her hair slicked to her head so that it could fit beneath her wig, and her right eye nearly swollen shut.
Another spot of luck: She and Laura were just one story after a night full of them. Most of the news Margaret pored over with her morning tea was more concerned with the melee of the concert and the “sheer depravity” of Cosmo’s performance, which supposedly brought it on.
The low, guttural singing. The wild dancing. And the moment he’d touched one concertgoer’s hand to his cheek, which she’d seen every paper describe in its own wildly different way, including one confident assertion that he’d licked the woman’s palm.
On the one hand, there was a comfort in seeing the media criticizing someone other than her or her sister. On the other, now that she’d escaped last night’s trance, the scales had abruptly fallen from her eyes concerning Cosmo Sinclair.
She felt furious with him for his part in how everything had gone. One concerned clergyman had been quoted in an article calling him a pied piper, leading young ladies to their doom, and while ordinarily this would’ve struck her as ridiculous, now she thought that uptight puritan might’ve been onto something.
She’d been stewing on this when Briggs, their butler, came into the breakfast room to inform her that she had a visitor.
“I don’t have anything on my calendar,” she told him.
“I know, ma’am,” Briggs replied.
“Then why did they let someone through the gate?”
Briggs’s face went red. “I’m not sure he knew what else to do. Mr. Sinclair was adamant.”
“Mr. Sin—” She dropped off, backtracked while she asked herself the question, He couldn’t possibly mean that Sinclair, could he?
By the tiny dip of Briggs’s chin, yes, yes, he did mean that Mr. Sinclair.
She didn’t remember standing, but she was standing nonetheless. “What does he want?”
“I’m not sure, ma’am,” Briggs said.
She wavered for a moment, unsure what the best course of action would be. Then she remembered Laura sleeping up in her bed and had a thought.
“Show him to the library,” she told Briggs. “We’ll be down shortly.”
Only several minutes later, as she sat on the edge of her bed, Laura—whose nose had been reset by a doctor last night and looked all the worse for it today—drew her legs up to her chest, wound her arms around them, and said, “I’m not going down there.”
“Oh, come on, Laur,” Margaret said. “You look fine. Much better than me.” She waved a hand at her black eye, but Laura shook her head and lay back down.
“It’s not about that,” she said. “I just—I don’t want to see Cosmo Sinclair. I don’t want to think about him. I don’t even want to listen to him anymore. For the rest of my life, that song will make me sick to my stomach. All he’ll ever remind me of now is the night I lost my dearest friend.”
Oh, how that made her chest keen.
There had been a time when Margaret had been Laura’s best friend, but that didn’t sting nearly so bad as the rest, the fact that her younger sister was now almost totally alone.
“Oh, sweetie,” she cooed, smoothing one hand over Laura’s head.
“Just get rid of him, will you?” Laura said quietly.
“Of course.”
And Margaret went downstairs to do just that.
