A Week in Winter(45)
‘Why didn’t you tell me sooner?’ he seemed full of love.
‘I didn’t want to destroy your dream.’
‘Now I have two dreams: a family and a movie career,’ he said.
They were married three weeks later, and Monica moved in over the laundromat. They found even more work to keep up their funds. Acting lessons cost a lot of money, and people told them that having a baby didn’t come cheap either.
By the time that Maria Rosa was born, Corry Salinas had an agent and had been cast as one of three singing waiters in a big musical comedy. Not a great role, his agent had explained, but it would get him on the ladder. It was a vehicle for an ageing and difficult actress who was going to make life hell for everyone during the shoot. And if they liked him, who knew what could follow?
Corry made sure they liked him. He was attentive and endlessly patient for long, long days of work. He treated the First Assistant Director as if he were God. He made special fresh juices for the difficult movie star. She told everyone that he was cute.
The other two singing waiters might let their irritation show, but Corry never did. His ready smile and willingness to please paid off. By the time the shoot was over he had been offered a part in another movie.
Maria Rosa was the most beautiful baby in the world.
Monica’s family did a great deal to help as they waited hopefully for Monica’s husband to get a serious job that paid properly. Corry had no family to help them out but he often wheeled the baby up to the orphanage where he had been raised, and got a great welcome. He always asked if they could tell him anything at all about his own natural parents, and always they said no. He had been left at the gates of the orphanage aged about three weeks with a letter in Italian begging them to look after him and give him a good life.
‘And you did give me a good life,’ Corry always told them. The nuns loved him in the orphanage. So many of their charges had left bitter and saddened, resentful that they had spent their youth in an institution. Times had changed now, and nuns could go out to movies and theatres. They promised Corry they would go to everything he appeared in and even start a fan club for him.
Monica said it was going to be very hard getting the baby buggy up and down the stairs over the laundromat, but Corry said they couldn’t move yet. Acting was a perilous career. They would indeed have a lovely home for the baby, but not at the moment.
The second movie, where Corry played a troubled teenager and the ageing, difficult actress played his stepmother, was written off as a movie too far for the diva. Her time was over, the reviewer said, her day was done. The boy, however! Now here was a talent! And so the offers started coming in.
Corry bought the house that Monica had longed for. But by the time Maria Rosa was three, everything had begun to fall apart. He spent more and more time in the bachelor apartment the studio had provided for him. He had to be seen at receptions and night clubs and at benefit nights.
Monica read that his name was coupled with Heidi, his co-star in the latest film. The next weekend when he had come home for a whole two days, she asked him directly was there any truth in what the gossip columns were saying.
Corry tried to explain that the publicity people demanded this kind of circus.
‘But is there anything in it?’ Monica asked.
‘Well, I’m sleeping with her, yes, but it’s not important, not compared to you and Maria Rosa,’ he said.
The divorce was swift, and he could see Maria Rosa every Saturday and for a ten-day vacation each year.
Corry Salinas did not marry Heidi, as had been confidently predicted in the gossip columns. Heidi behaved badly about it. She got a lot of publicity as the victim of a love rat.
Monica remained silent and gave no interviews. She was never in the house when Corry arrived to pick up Maria Rosa for his Saturday visit; either her father or mother would hand over the child with few words, a look of resentment and disappointment.
Sometimes Corry was lonely and tried to ask Monica to review the situation. The answer was always the same.
‘I bear you no ill will, but please contact me only through the lawyers.’
The parts were getting better; the years rolled by.
He married Sylvia when he was twenty-eight. A very different wedding day to his first one. Sylvia was from a very wealthy family that had made several fortunes in the hotel business. She was a beautiful and much-indulged daughter who had been denied nothing, and when she had insisted on a giant society wedding as her twenty-first birthday present, she got that as well.
Corry was stunned that this dazzling girl wanted him so much. He went along with all the arrangements that Sylvia’s family suggested. One request, that his own ten-year-old daughter, Maria Rosa, be one of the flower girls was refused point-blank. So firmly that he did not mention it again.
Sylvia’s lawyers arranged a series of prenup agreements with Corry’s lawyers. The publicity for the wedding was intense and the photographic rights hotly fought over.
The day itself passed in a blur. If Corry remembered, a little wistfully, the small wedding party when he and Monica were eighteen and full of hope, then he put the thought far from his mind. That was then, this was now.
Now did not last long. Corry was needed for long hours at the studio, for costume fittings, for publicity tours, for foreign movie festivals. Sylvia was bored. She played a lot of tennis and raised money for charities.
For Corry’s thirtieth birthday Sylvia planned another lavish event. It came at a time when he was very much in the public eye with his latest film, where he played a troubled doctor with a difficult moral choice to make. Posters were everywhere showing Corry’s sensitive face pondering what he was to do. Women longed to meet him and take the tortured look from his eyes.