Melting the Snow on Hester Street. Daisy Waugh

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      1

      Santa Monica, 17 October 1929

      ‘What did he say, Charlie? Did he say it was gonna be just f-fine? Did he say it was OK?’

      She was sitting at her dressing table, watching Charlie’s approach with anxious eyes, blue as the sapphires round her throat. But Charlie didn’t reply at once. He was thinking how graceful it was, the line of her neck: the nape, did they call it? He was sauntering towards her, across perhaps the most opulent bedroom in America. The sound of softly lapping waves filtered through the open windows and, beyond them, a long white beach gleamed in the early evening moonlight. Not bad, Charlie thought, as he often did. Not bad for a workhouse boy. And a chorus girl not so young as she pretended.

      Beneath the sweet smells of her innumerable lotions, and the particular perfume, flown in from the fragrant hills of Tuscany, there was still a faint whiff of newness to the room: new fabrics and paints; new draperies and furniture … Marion’s beachside house (if you could call it a house) was only recently completed. One hundred and eighteen rooms in all, her lover had built for her. Thirty-five bedrooms, fifty-five bathrooms, a brace of swimming pools, a private movie theatre … everything, really, a woman’s heart could desire, so her lover believed. Wanted to believe.

      And somehow Marion pulled it off: transformed this preposterous white elephant, into – not a home, exactly, but a place of merriment and warmth. A place where, despite the marble and the gold and the high ceilings and important stairways curling this direction СКАЧАТЬ