Silver Screen (Jun-Oct 1940)

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Gerda had refused to tell anyone about the baby or that she was going away and her sudden and unexplained absence became one of those mysteries that kept Hollywood guessing and speculating for a week. And then in the way Hollywood has of doing, it forgot her completely. I'll never forget the week-end I went up to see them when her picture was playing at the small neighborhood theatre up there. Gerda sat through that picture tense and forlorn. It was almost as if she were shutting herself away from Charlie and from me and from the audience murmuring its approval of her. I know it only made things harder for her knowing she had gone over so well and I saw her hands clench desperately in her lap as she sat there. But she didn't say anything at all when we came out. Gerda was trying awfully hard to adjust herself to the new pattern of her life. But she couldn't do it. A few weeks later her son was born and I drove up to see her. The nurse had just brought the baby into Gerda's room and he was lying in the curve of her arm, his fuzzy little head pressing against her breast and there were tears in her eyes as she looked down at him. Then suddenly she motioned the nurse to take him and she lay there, her eyes brooding. "He's cute, isn't he?" she said after the nurse had carried him out of the room. 'And I do love him, but sometimes the things he has cost me sweep over me and I feel myself hardening in spite of everything. You know I've done a lot of thinking in these months. And I've decided I'm going on just as if he hadn't come at all. Mary, she's Charlie's sister, you know, hasn't any children and she adores them and I'm going to let her take him and bring him up. After all I can do more for him if I'm a success, can't I? And he'll be much better off growing up in a real home atmosphere. Can you see me coming back to Hollywood with a baby? Why my rating with the studios and the fans would go down to zero." I tried to laugh her out of that. "Why don't you just be happy and stop struggling against yourself," I told her. "Do you know I don't think the fans care a hoot about all the things you think are so serious. Hollywood is too concerned about glamour and all that sort of thing and I have a sneaking hunch all the fans give a hoot about is whether or not a person can act." Time, of course, was to prove me right. But Gerda couldn't see it at all then. I didn't see much of Gerda in the next few years even though she came back to Hollywood. Sometimes, I felt like a fair weather friend not seeking her out oftener for Gerda wasn't doing so well anymore. But it made me unhappy when I was with her and Charlie, seeing the way things had changed between them. All the old camaraderie, the old tenderness was gone. They had become one of those bickering couples every one tries to avoid. Charlie was the one who was doing well now. His novel had come out and it had made enough of a success to get I him a scenario job. That was all Charlie needed, just a start. His pictures were the kind that made box-office history. But you wouldn't think Gerda was the wife of a successful man who could give her anything in the world she wanted to see her scurrying around the studios trying to get any part at all. Something had happened to Gerda. Her buoyant youthfulness was gone. Gerda was bitter about that. She thought it was having the baby that had taken it away from her. But of course it wasn't. The fresh, young quality that had served her so well had gone with her happiness. "I don't see how Charlie stands her," one of their friends said to me once. "Another man would have left her long ago." But Charlie told me why he stayed, one evening he was driving me home after a particularly awful evening. "You see I know the real Gerda is waiting somewhere," he said. "And I love her. She's the only woman who will ever matter to me. And sometime she'll come back again. I know that." "Don't you think it might be a good idea to bring little Charlie home?" I suggested. "It wouldn't be fair to him," the man said and, looking at his eyes, I saw the effort it cost him to say it. "Mary adores him and he's happy with her. And I don't know how happy he would be with us. Even now, when we go up to see him, Gerda is so restrained with him that the child feels uncomfortable. It's almost as if she's afraid to let herself go when she's around him. It's the boy I'm thinking of. Not Gerda." But life has a way of settling things for itself and so in the end little Charlie did come home after all. It all came about when Mary's husband, who is an engineer, was offered a big job in China. I'll never forget the day the boy came home. He was eight years old then and he was a boy any mother would adore. But Gerda forced herself to be aloof and impersonal. "I hope you'll like living with your aunt and uncle," she said. The boy didn't say anything for a minute and then I was appalled to see his eyes fill with tears. "You're not my aunt," he said slowly. "You're my mother." Gerda looked at him and I saw there was something in her eyes reaching out to the boy, something sweet and tender and maternal. But her mouth tightening in that straight line denied the things her eyes were saying. "How could I be the mother of a great, big boy like you?" she laughed, looking apprehensively at the maid who had come into the room to announce lunch. "Why it's ridiculous. My name is Gerda. That's what I want you to call me. Gerda. Remember." It's funny, but somehow I hadn't thought of how much older Gerda had grown to look until she said that. Now I could see how she had really changed and how all the ridiculous little subterfuges she had been using to hide that change only made her seem the older. She couldn't have been more than twentynine or thirty then, but the rinse she had been using on her hair had made it too bright so that it accentuated the circles