Free Getting Garbo by Jerry Ludwig Page B

little old Polish lady.
    When I was calm again, Pam O’Mara asked if I wanted them to take me to the police station. I said no, because then my mother’d find out. So how was I going to explain this mess? I’d tell mother that I fell down the subway steps in Brooklyn on my way home. “If she knows what really happened, she’ll never let me come collecting again.” They said they understood and they walked me to the subway and told me they hoped I’d feel better and they’d see me next week.
    That was the big lesson I learned. Something good can come out of something bad. I’d lost Daddy’s special ring. But after that I wasn’t an outsider among the autograph hunters anymore. I was part of the Group.
    March 16, 1951.
    The day I became a woman.
    The day I stopped being a crumb collector.
    â€¢ • •
    â€œHey, good lookin’,” I say with a wink at Roy’s glossy framed image in the center of my bedroom shelf. I’m stretched out on my cot, looking up at the so-called altar, feeling pretty bad.
    I picked up a copy of the early edition of tomorrow’s L.A. Times and read it on the bus on the way home tonight. There’s a story on the bottom of page one saying that Roy and Adrienne Darnell have been granted an interlocutory divorce decree that will become official in a few months.
    Seeing Roy today shooting out on the location, even though I couldn’t get close enough to talk to him or even that treacherous lout Killer Lomax, I knew there was something wrong. He must’ve known already and was taking it hard.
    He tries to cover up his feelings a lot of the time, but I can usually read him. There are so many different Roys: the happy kid, the holy terror, the sad sack, the wild man, the dreamer, the screamer. I guess I’ve seen them all by now, on screen and off. He can change in a blink. Once, outside Toots Shor’s in New York, after he was starring in Jack Havoc, he got into this violent hassle with the doorman for giving away his cab to someone else, and I don’t know what came over me but I got in between them, to keep Roy, who was pretty looped, from getting into trouble. For a split second I thought for sure he was gonna punch me out, but then he focused and saw it was me, and all the rage vanished. He winked at me, then turned to the doorman and said, “You oughta thank Reva, she just saved you a busted schnoz.” And he kissed me on my cheek. So much for Mother and her astrology predictions.
    It’s time for my evening ritual. I go into the closet and kneel, moving aside a stack of old magazines, and pry at a floorboard, pulling it out to reveal a sturdy wooden box. Even if Mother finds this hiding place, as she’s found others in the past, I’ve got the only key to this padlock, too. I unlock the box, revealing the stack of precious journals that I’ve been confiding my innermost thoughts to since I was thirteen.
    I look up at the shelf. Right in front of the big portrait of Roy, there’s a black leather glove, hole ripped in the thumb, that he tossed away on Fifth Avenue in front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral after slipping on the icy pavement and tearing it. It was a Sunday in March, there’d been a huge snow storm the night before, and the snowplows hadn’t cleared Fifth Avenue yet so there were no cars or buses running, just people walking down the center of the street, like a winter wonderland. One guy actually whooshed by on a pair of skis.
    I’d spotted Roy and Addie coming out of the church, don’t know why I didn’t go up to them and say hello, I guess maybe I thought it’d be sacrilegious or something, although the Group had successfully staked out Loretta Young and Irene Dunne together once at St. Paddy’s Easter Mass, but they were superstars and quite rare in New York. Anyway, once I saw Roy slip on the ice, I thought it’d be embarrassing, so I just picked