the set screeching something Faye couldn't discern. For a moment, panic registered on a number of faces, and then shock, and then there were tears, and Faye still hadn't heard what had happened. She pulled anxiously at Chris Arnold's sleeve, her eyes anxious. “What did he say … ? What … ?” Chris was speaking to someone to his right, and Faye was straining to hear above the din.
“My God …” He turned to her with a look of amazement. And then without thinking he pressed her to him in a huge hug again, and she could hear his voice tremble when he spoke to her. “It's all over, Faye … the war is over. The Japanese have surrendered.” It had ended in Europe only months before, and now finally it was all over. Tears sprang to her eyes, and she was crying as she hugged him back. Suddenly everyone on the set was crying and laughing, others had joined them, and fresh cases of champagne were opened. Everyone was shouting now. “It's over! It's over!” No longer the film.,. but the war.
It felt like hours before she left the set to go back to her house in Beverly Hills, and the pain of finishing the movie was long since gone. It had been totally eclipsed by her joy that the war was over. It seemed amazing. She had been twenty-one years old when Pearl Harbor was bombed, and now here she was twenty-five years old, grown up, a woman, at the summit of her career.
This had to be the summit, she told herself that every year. She couldn't imagine anything improving from this point on. How could it? And yet it had. The roles got better and bigger and more important, the praise more lavish, the money more unbelievable each year. The only blemish in it all came when her parents died. It made her sad that her parents were no longer alive to enjoy it with her. They had both died the previous year. Her father of cancer, her mother in a car accident on an icy Pennsylvania road near Youngstown. She had tried to get her to come out to live in California with her, after her father died, but her mother hadn't wanted to give up her home. So now she had no one. The little house in Grove City, Pennsylvania, had been sold the year before. She had no sisters or brothers. And other than the faithful couple who worked for her in the small handsome house she had bought in Beverly Hills, Faye Price was alone. She seldom felt lonely though, there were too many people around her for that. She enjoyed her work and her friends. And yet, it was odd not having any family now. No one she “belonged” to. It still surprised her that she had become so successful, and her life had become so lavish in such a short time. Even at twenty-one, when the war had broken out, her life had been different. But now, ever since her last USO tour two years before, things had settled down. She had bought the house, made six pictures in two years, and although she had intended to go on tour again, she had never had the time. Life seemed to be an endless round of premieres and publicity pictures and press parties, and when she wasn't doing that, she was getting up at five o'clock in the morning and going to work on a film. Her next picture was scheduled to start in five weeks, and she was already reading the script for hours every night before she went to sleep, and now that she had just finished the movie she'd been working on, she could really get down to work. The new one was a sure Oscar for her, her agent had told her. But she always laughed when he said that … it was a ridiculous thought … except that she had already won one, and been nominated two other times. But Abe insisted this film would be a big one, and Faye believed him. In an odd way, he had become a father figure for her.
She turned her car right on Summit Drive, past Pickfair and the Chaplins, and a moment later reached her own home as the man who spent his days in the little gate house, opening the gate for deliveries and friends, or Miss Price herself, ran out with a smile for her.