The Property of a Lady - Elizabeth Adler [193]
Rosa’s middle daughter, Hannah, was as pretty as her sister, but at twenty she had given up her acting ambitions in favor of a job at a casting agency, where she was constantly in trouble for allowing her sympathies to affect her judgment and sending obvious needy misfits for jobs. The eldest daughter, Sonia, was twenty-two and a teacher in San Francisco, already engaged to be married to a young man from a nice middle-class Jewish family. And Rosa had been seeing a hardware manufacturer from Pittsburgh, Sam Brockman, on a regular basis—which meant whenever he was in town—for three years now. But the romance was, as she put it, “on ice.”
“Once bitten, twice shy,” she quoted to Missie. “So? How do I know he’s not another Meyer Perelman?” Of course, in her heart she knew he was not, but she liked her life the way it was: The boardinghouses were flourishing and romance was available on a monthly basis, with flowers and candlelit dinners and the occasional trip to Catalina Island. And she was still her own woman. No man was going to boss Rosa Perelman around again.
But it was Missie’s romance with C. Z. that was riveting Hollywood. The private man’s intimate life was being discussed in every studio and every restaurant in town. There were even pictures of him in movie magazines. “Magic’s C. Z. Abrams with his constant companion Missie O’Hara arriving for the premiere of his latest epic,” they said, or “Beautiful Missie O’Hara hosting a dinner for C. Z. at the Cocoanut Grove to celebrate the completion of Calamity Kids.”
Dick Nevern thought the funny thing was that C. Z. didn’t seem to object. In fact, one morning he had walked into his office and caught him smiling at a picture of himself and Missie in a magazine. “‘Constant companion,’” C. Z. had said. “Half the nation must be wondering what that implies.”
Dick hadn’t liked to ask what he meant, but he could see that, for once, C. Z. didn’t mind the attention from the press. Maybe he thought his new image as a ladies’ man was good for business, some said cynically, but Dick knew better. He could see he was a happy man. And Rosa noticed the difference in Missie.
“How do you get that way?” she demanded one evening as Missie was dressing to meet C. Z. “All shining and excited because you are going to see him? You look different. With O’Hara you were soft, smiling, content. But for Zev Abramski you are a young girl again. Anyone could tell from fifty paces you’re a woman in love.”
“I loved O’Hara in a different way,” Missie answered quietly. “He was the strong one and I was weak and wounded. Every time he took me in his arms I felt safe. O’Hara was a special man; he had a sort of joyousness about him that made life sunny. I still love him and I will never forget him. But what I feel for Zev has got nothing to do with what I felt for him.” She stared at Rosa guiltily. “Is it wrong for me to love Zev the way I do, then?”
Rosa shook her head. “Only you know how you love him and that’s the way it should be. And after all that’s happened in your life, you should grab every chance of happiness you get.”
Missie thought about Zev as she drove to his house in Beverly Hills in the new dark-blue de Courmont roadster he had given her. She had been amazed to see him behind that grand desk the morning she had gone to Magic to talk about Azaylee’s contract. And even more amazed by his transformation—the frail, sallow, withdrawn young pawnbroker had been replaced by a slender, starkly handsome, well-dressed man. Only his eyes were the same, still with that lonely, yearning look she remembered. When he had held his arms wide like that and said, “I did it all for you, Missie,” the eight turbulent years since she had last seen him had melted away. She was back in the dark little pawnshop on