CHAPTER 6

As Billy was packing his bags to leave Brussels, he looked at the piece of paper. Honorable Discharge, he read. He smiled wryly as he slipped the document into a stiff envelope. Don’t believe everything you see in print.

The next piece of paper he put into the envelope was a letter from his father. His father was happy that he had decided wisely about the army and unhappy that he had decided not to come to Chicago, although he understood the attractions of Europe for a young man. Chicago could wait for a year or two. There was news about his mother, too. She was directing a picture. His father believed Billy should write and congratulate her. Of all things, his father added, one of the leading actors in the movie was Billy’s cousin, Wesley. A sullen boy, Wesley, at least in William Abbott’s opinion. The Jordaches took care of the Jordaches, his father wrote. A pity he, Billy, was not on better terms with his mother.

The next thing Billy put in his bag was a Spanish-English dictionary. A Belgian businessman with whom he had played tennis and who was involved in building a complex of bungalows and condominiums at a place called El Faro near Marbella, in Spain, with six tennis courts, had offered him a contract for a year as a tennis pro. The idea of Spain was attractive after Brussels and it was no contest against Chicago, and after all, the only thing he did well was play tennis and it was a clean and well-paying job, in the open air, so he had said yes. He could stand some sunshine. Beware the señoritas, his father had warned him.

The last piece of paper was undated and signed Heidi. It had been in an unstamped envelope that he had found in his mailbox the night before. “Had to depart suddenly because of the death of a friend. Understand you are not re-enlisting. Leave forwarding address, although I am sure I can find you. We have unfinished business to attend to.”

He did not smile as he read the letter and tore it into small pieces and flushed it down the toilet. He did not leave a forwarding address.

He took the train to Paris. He had sold his car. Monika knew it too well, make, year, license number. Who knew how many people had its description and might be looking for it on the roads of Europe?

He could buy a new car in France. He could afford it. There was a modest but sufficient legacy waiting for him in the vault in the bank on the corner of the Avenue Bosquet in the 7th arrondissement in Paris.

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“Cut,” Gretchen said, and the day’s shooting was over and the hum of conversation suddenly started from the actors and crew members on the set. The scene had been shot in front of a dilapidated mansion that now had a false facade and a fake lawn leading to the street. In the scene Wesley and the girl who played his sister had a violent argument about the way Wesley was leading his life. It had taken all day to shoot. His Uncle Rudolph, who had come up for the day, was on the set, and although he had merely waved at Wesley, his presence had made Wesley a little more self-conscious than usual. But since he played the part of a boy who was supposed to be taciturn and unresponsive and the girl had to do most of the work, it had not mattered too much.

After the first few days, during which Wesley had been stiff and trying to hide his shyness about play-acting in front of so many people, he had caught on to what was wanted from him—his Aunt Gretchen had taken him aside and told him not to try to act—and had begun to enjoy the whole affair. Gretchen had told him he was doing very well, although she had said it in private, with nobody else around to hear her. But he had learned she was not a lady who lied.

He liked the atmosphere of the company. Most of the people were young and friendly, constantly joking, and anxious to be helpful. He had never had many friends who were near his own age, and it was relaxing not to be always on your best behavior just because you were with people who were a lot older than you.

Gretchen allowed him to use the name Wesley Jordan. After all, his father had used the name Jordan professionally before him, so he had half a claim to the title. Originally, he had allowed himself to be cajoled into taking the job mostly because he was getting three thousand dollars for a month’s work, which would mean he could pay Alice back what he owed her and wouldn’t have to depend on his uncle to get to Europe, but now he found himself eager to get on the set each morning, even when he wasn’t due for any scenes himself. The entire business fascinated him, the expertness of the camera, lighting and soundmen, the devotion of the actors, the calm but firm way in which his aunt ran everything. In her manner of handling people she reminded him of his father. According to Frances Miller, the girl who played his sister and who was only about twenty-two but had been in show business since the age of fourteen, not all movie sets were like that by a long shot. Hysteria and temper were more often than not the order of the day, and she’d told Wesley that she’d take Gretchen as a director any time over most of the men she had worked with.

Frances was a beautiful girl in a funny, wild way, freckled, her eyes wide and deep in her sharply angled, moody, youthful face, her body petite and deliciously rounded, her skin an invitation to the most extreme dreams. She was outspoken and occasionally foulmouthed. Occasionally, too, she liked to drink. More often she also liked to make love to him, which she had started early on in Port Philip, when she had come to his room in their hotel to run over the lines for the next day’s shooting and stayed the night. Wesley was dazzled by her beauty and by the idea that she had chosen him. He would never have dared make the first move himself. It had not yet occurred to him that he was an extraordinarily handsome young man. When strange young women stared at him he had the uneasy feeling that somehow he was doing something wrong or that they were disapproving of the way he was dressed. For a while, he had felt guilty, because he had thought that he was in love with Alice Larkin. But Alice Larkin still called him Cousin and he still slept on her couch in the living room when he was in New York. Besides, Frances made love with such happy abandon it was hard to feel guilty about anything in her presence.

Frances was married to a young actor who was in California where she ordinarily lived. Wesley tried to forget about the husband. As far as Wesley knew, nobody in the company had any inkling of what was going on between him and the leading lady. When they were in public she treated him as though he were in fact what he was in the movie—a younger brother.

His Aunt Gretchen had caught on, of course. He had discovered that she caught on to everything. She had had dinner alone with him one night and warned him that when the shooting was over Frances would go back to California and then on to a new picture and would almost certainly sleep with another young man in the new company who caught her fancy, because she was known to do things like that, and that he was not to take it too seriously. “I want this whole thing to be a wonderful experience for you,” Gretchen said. “I don’t want you to hate me for getting you into something you can’t handle.”

“I can handle it,” he said, although he wasn’t sure he could.

“Remember what I said about that girl,” Gretchen said. “She’s messed up the lives of older men than you before this.” What she didn’t say was that she knew Frances Miller had had an affair for six months with Evans Kinsella and that he had asked her to get a divorce and marry him. And that the day after the picture Frances was doing with him was finished, she stopped answering his calls. She also didn’t say that she, Gretchen, was still jealous of Frances and regretted that she was the girl she had thought would be wonderful in the part. You couldn’t cast or not cast a picture out of bedrooms, although many people had done so, to their sorrow. “Just remember,” Gretchen said.

“I’ll remember,” said Wesley.

“You’re dear and vulnerable, Old Toughie,” Gretchen said. She leaned over and kissed his cheek. “Defend yourself. You’re in a much rougher racket than you know.”

That night he had made love to Frances almost the whole night long, brutally, until he had had to smother her face in a pillow so that the entire hotel wouldn’t be awakened by her screams. She was a girl who made no secret about whether she was enjoying herself.

As they both lay side by side, exhausted, he had thought, triumphantly, She’s not going back to anyone after tonight.

At dinner he and the other actors ate together as usual in the hotel dining room. Gretchen and Ida Cohen and Ida Cohen’s uncle, along with the scene designer and Uncle Rudolph, ate upstairs in the living room of Gretchen’s suite. After dinner, Wesley and Frances decided to go for a walk. It was a cool autumn night with a moon that was almost full and they walked arm in arm, like any young couple out on a date.

The main street was almost empty, neon-lit from forlorn store windows. Port Philip watched television and went to bed early. Frances looked idly at the displays in the windows as they passed. “There’s nothing here I’d ever buy,” she said. “Imagine living in a place like this. Ugh.”

“My family comes from here,” Wesley said.

“Oh, my God,” Frances said. “You poor boy.”

“I never lived here. My father, my grandfather …” He stopped himself before he said, my Aunt Gretchen. He hadn’t told Frances or any of the company that Gretchen was his aunt, and Gretchen was careful to treat him like any other novice actor in the company.

“Do you see any of them—” Frances asked. “I mean, your family, while you’re here?”

“There’re none left. They all moved away.”

“I can understand why,” Frances said. “This town must have gone downhill from the first day they put up the post office.”

“My grandmother told my father that when she first came here as a young girl, it was a beautiful place,” Wesley said. He was walking the streets of the town in which his father was born and which had formed him and he didn’t like the idea of its being thought of as a dreary backwater by a girl from California. Somewhere in the town, he thought, his father must have left a mark, a sign that he had been and gone. He had burned a cross here. Theodore Boylan, at least, remembered. He wondered what his father would have thought of his son walking the old same streets arm in arm with a beautiful, almost famous movie actress. And, more than that, making three thousand dollars for four weeks’ work, which was more play than any work his father had ever known. “There were trees everywhere, my grandmother told my father,” Wesley said, “and all those big houses were painted and clean and had big gardens. My father used to swim in the Hudson River—it was clean then—and the riverboats used to stop by and there was great fishing …” He stopped before telling the girl that aside from the boats and the fishing, his grandfather had used the river in which to drown himself.

“Things get worse, don’t they?” Frances said. “I’ll bet there was a lot of screwing in those big gardens then. Nothing else to do in the evening and no motels.”

“I suppose everybody got his share.”

“And her share,” Frances said, laughing. “Like now. It’s too bad you’re on this picture.”

“Why?” Wesley asked, hurt.

“If you weren’t,” she said, “I’d have gone through War and Peace by now, these long nights.”

“Sorry?”

“War and Peace can wait,” she said. She hugged his arm. “By the way, I’ve been meaning to ask you—what drama school did you go to?”

“Me?” He hesitated. “None.”

“You act as though you’ve had years,” she said. “Incidentally, how old are you?”

“Twenty-one,” he said, without hesitation. He had made the mistake of telling Alice how old he was and she treated him as a child. He wasn’t about to make that mistake again.

“How is it you’re not in the army?”

“Football knee,” he said promptly. Since he had come back to America he had learned how to lie at a moment’s notice.

“I see.” She sounded suspicious. “Where’ve you acted before?”

“Me?” he said again, foolishly. “Well … noplace.” Frances was too knowing about things like that to take a chance on lying.

“Not even summer stock?”

“Not even summer stock.”

“How’d you get this job then?”

“Mrs. Burke …” It sounded funny in his ears to talk about his aunt as Mrs. Burke. “She saw me at a friend’s house and asked me if I wanted to test. What’re you asking all these questions for?”

“It’s natural for a girl to want to know a few facts about the man she’s having an affair with, isn’t it?”

“I suppose so.” He was pleased with the word “affair.” It gave him a new sense of maturity. Teenagers had dates or girlfriends, not affairs.

“There’s one thing about me,” Frances said, very definitely. “I can’t go to bed with a man whom I don’t respect.” It embarrassed Wesley when Frances spoke in that offhand, plural way about other men she had known. But, he told himself, she had been an actress since she was fourteen, what could he expect? Still, some day soon, he promised himself, he would tell her to keep her reflections on that particular subject to herself.

“You came as a surprise, I must admit,” she said cheerfully. “I took one look at the list of the cast and said this is going to be chastity-belt time for me.”

“What changed your mind?”

“You.” She laughed. “I knew just about all the others, but Wesley Jordan was a new name for me. I didn’t know you’d be the prize of the litter. By the way, is that your real name?”

“No,” Wesley said, after a pause.

“What is it?”

“It’s long and complicated,” he said evasively. “It would never look good over the title.”

She laughed again. “This is your first picture, but you’re learning fast.”

He grinned. “I’m a quick study.” He was enjoying being in the movies more and more and his vocabulary reflected it.

“What’re you going to do after this picture?”

“Don’t know.” He shrugged. “Go to Europe if I can.”

“You’re awfully good,” she said. “That isn’t only my opinion. Freddie Kahn, the cameraman, has seen all the rushes and he’s raving about you. You going to try Hollywood?”

“Maybe,” he said cautiously.

“Come on out,” she said. “I promise you a warm welcome.”

Wesley took in a big gulp of air. “I understand you’re married,” he said.

“Who told you that?” she asked sharply.

“I don’t remember. Someone. It just came up in the conversation.”

“I wish people would keep their goddamn mouths shut. That’s my business. Does that make any difference to you?”

“What would you say if I said it did?”

“I’d say you’re a fool.”

“Then I won’t say it.”

“That’s better,” she said. “Are you in love with me?”

“Why do you ask that question?”

“Because I like it more when people are in love with me,” she said. “That’s why I’m an actress.”

“All right,” he said, “I’m in love with you.”

“Let’s drink to that,” she said. “There’s a bar on the next block.”

“I’m on the wagon,” he said. He didn’t want to be asked in front of Frances for proof of his age by the bartender.

“I like to drink,” she said, “and I like men who don’t drink. Come on, I’ll buy you a Coke.”

When they went into the bar they saw Rudolph and the set designer, a red-bearded young man by the name of Donnelly, sitting at a booth, absorbed in conversation.

“What ho,” Frances whispered, “the brass.”

Everybody in the cast knew that Rudolph was on the financial end of the undertaking and had been instrumental with the authorities in Port Philip when difficulties had arisen about permits, shooting at night and the use of the town police to block off streets. The cast didn’t know, however, that he was Wesley’s uncle; on the few occasions that Wesley had spoken to Rudolph in public he had addressed him as Mr. Jor-dache, and Rudolph had replied, gravely and courteously, by addressing his nephew as Mr. Jordan.

Frances and Wesley had to pass the booth in which the two men sat. Rudolph looked up and smiled at them and stood up and said, “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.”

Wesley mumbled a greeting, but Frances smiled her most winsome smile and said, “What new plot are you two gentlemen concocting against us poor actors in this noisome den now?”

Wesley winced at the false, girlish smile, the fancy language. Suddenly he realized that Frances had too many different ways of addressing different people.

“We were sitting here praising the performance of you two young people,” Rudolph said.

Frances giggled. “Aren’t you the polite man,” she said. “What a delightful lie.”

Donnelly grunted.

“Do sit down,” Frances said. “In Hollywood nobody ever stands up for the help.”

Again Wesley winced. At certain moments, aside from using her abundant charm, Frances managed to remind people whom she considered important of the bright career she had already put behind her.

The two men sat down, Donnelly staring morosely at the glass in front of him. No one had as yet seen him smile during the course of the shooting.

“Mr. Donnelly,” Frances said, her voice still girlish, “I haven’t dared to tell you this before, but now that the picture’s almost over, I’d like to say that it’s just wonderful what you’ve been doing with the sets. I haven’t seen any of the film yet—” she made a small grimace—“us poor actors aren’t let in on the decisions on who lives and who dies in the projection room, so I don’t know how they look on film, but I do have to tell you that as far as I’m concerned I’ve never been as comfortable moving around in front of the camera as I have in the acting space you’ve designed for us to work in.” She laughed, as though she were a little embarrassed at speaking so boldly.

Donnelly grunted again.

Wesley could see Frances’ jaw set then. “I won’t disturb you any longer while you two gentlemen arrange our fates,” she said. “Young Wesley and I—” Now she made it sound as though Wesley were ten years old—“have some problems in our scene tomorrow that we thought we’d do a little homework on.”

Wesley tugged at her arm, and with a last dazzling smile, she moved off with him. She made a move to sit in the next booth, but Wesley guided her firmly to the last booth in the rear of the bar, well out of earshot of Donnelly and his uncle.

“What a goddamn performance,” he said as they sat down.

“Honey catches more flies than vinegar, darling,” Frances said sweetly. “Who knows when those two nice men will do another picture and have the final say about who’s going to be in it and who’s going to be out on his or her ass?”

“You put on so many acts,” Wesley said, “I bet sometimes you have to call up your mother to find out who you really are.”

“That’s the art, dear,” Frances said coolly. “You’d better learn it if you want to get anyplace.”

“I don’t want to get anyplace at that price,” Wesley said.

“That’s what I used to say,” she said. “When I was fourteen years old. By the time I was fifteen, I changed my mind. You’re just a little retarded, dear.”

“Thank God for that,” Wesley said.

The waiter was standing over them now and Frances ordered for both of them, a gin and tonic for her and a Coke for him.

When the waiter had gone over to the bar Wesley said, “I wish you wouldn’t drink gin.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t like the way your breath smells when you drink gin.”

“There’s no need to worry tonight, dear,” Frances said coldly. “I’m due for an early call with the hairdresser tomorrow and I’m not up to any gymnastics tonight.”

Wesley sat in glum silence until the waiter brought the drinks.

“Anyway, even if you’re so horrendously critical of a few little harmless, girlish tricks,” Frances said, sipping at her gin and tonic, “there are others who find them entrancing. That cute Mr. Jordache, with all that money, for example. His eyes light up like a billboard sign whenever he sees me.”

“I hadn’t noticed,” Wesley said, honestly shocked that anyone could call his uncle that cute Mr. Jordache.

“I have,” Frances said firmly. “I bet he’d be something. That icy Yankee exterior with a volcano underneath. I know the type.”

“He’s old enough to be your father, for God’s sake.”

“Not unless he started awfully young,” Frances said. “And I bet he did.”

Wesley stood up. “I’m not going to sit here and listen to crap like that. I’m going home. See how you get on with that cute Mr. Jordache with all that money.”

“Dear, dear,” Frances said, without moving, “aren’t we the touchy young man this evening.”

“Good night,” Wesley said.

“Good night,” Frances said calmly. “Don’t bother with the check.”

Wesley strode past the booth where his uncle was sitting. Neither of the two men looked up as he passed. He went out into the street, feeling childish, hurt and foolishly emotional.

Five minutes later Frances got up and walked toward the door. She stopped and spoke for a moment to the two men, but they didn’t ask her to join them. When she went back to the hotel she didn’t go down the corridor and open Wesley’s door as she did on all other nights, but continued on to her own room and stared at herself in the mirror over the dressing table for a long time.

Back in the bar, the two men were not talking about making movies. Donnelly was an architect who had drifted into scene designing when he discovered that he was offered only unprofitable commissions for mediocre small buildings which he considered beneath his talent. In the course of the preparations for Restoration Comedy he and Rudolph had become friendly, and at first timidly, then more enthusiastically, he had spoken about an ambitious project that he was involved in but so far had not been able to get financing for. Now he was giving Rudolph the details. “We live in the age of what the British call redundancy,” he was saying, “not only because of new machines or shifts in population, but redundancy because of age. Men retire from business because they’re bored and can afford it, or because they can’t stand the strain or because younger men are called in to fill their jobs. Their children have grown up and moved away. Their houses are suddenly too big for them, the city in which they live frightens them or has exhausted its attraction for them. Their pensions or savings don’t permit them to keep the servants they once had, the neighborhoods where they can afford to find small apartments are crowded with young couples with small children who treat them as invaders from another century, they are separated from friends of their own age who have similar problems but have looked for other solutions in other places—They want to keep their independence but they’re frightened of loneliness. What they need is a new habitat, a new atmosphere that fits their condition—where they’re surrounded by people approximately their own age, with approximately the same problems and needs, people who can be depended upon in an emergency, just as it gives them a sense of their own humanity to know that they’re ready to come to a neighbor’s aid when he needs help.” Donnelly spoke with great urgency, as though he were a general, outlining plans for the relief of a besieged garrison. “It has to be a real community,” he continued, gesturing eloquently with his large hands, as if already he was molding brick, mortar and cement into livable, populated shapes, “shops, movies, a small hotel where they can entertain visitors, a golf course, swimming pools, tennis courts, lecture rooms.… I’m not talking about the poor. I don’t know how they can be taken care of except by the state and I’m not vain enough to think I can rearrange American society. I’m talking about the middle-income group, the ones whose way of life is most drastically affected when the breadwinner stops working.” His voice dropped to bitterness. “I know all about this in the case of my own mother and father. They have a little money and I help some, myself, but from being a hearty, outgoing couple, they’re now a depressed, fretful pair of people, fiddling the last years of their lives away in useless boredom. My idea isn’t so new. It’s been tried and found successful all over the country, but so far I haven’t been able to get any money men interested in it, because there isn’t much profit to be made, if any. What it needs to begin with is to buy a huge piece of land in some pleasant country spot—not too isolated—so that when people want a little city life it’s easily available to them—and build a small, but complete village of modest, well-designed, but cheaply built attached homes, say in groups of four or five, scattered in a parklike landscape, houses that can be handled easily by two aging people. With bus service, doctors and nurses on hand, a congenial but unobtrusive management. It wouldn’t be an old folks’ home, with all the despair that entails—there’d be a constant flow of young people—sons and daughters and grandchildren, hopeful and lively, a view on the future. Your sister has told me that you’re a public-spirited man and that you have access to money and you’re looking for something to occupy your time. From what I’ve seen so far, I don’t think getting mixed up in movies is exactly your idea of public service.…”

Rudolph laughed. “No,” he said, “not exactly.”

“She also said that you’re a born builder,” Donnelly went on, “that when you were young you bulled through the idea of a shopping center in what was then practically a wilderness and made almost a whole small town of it. I went out to look at it the other day, the Calderwood complex near here, and I was deeply impressed—it was way ahead of its time and it showed real imagination—”

“When I was young,” Rudolph said reflectively. He hadn’t shown anything of what he thought as he listened to Donnelly’s speech, but he felt an excitement that was both new and old to him as Donnelly spoke. He had been waiting for something, he hadn’t known what. Perhaps this was what he was waiting for.

“I’ve got whole sets of drawings,” Donnelly said, “models of the sort of houses I want to put up, schedules of approximate costs … everything.…”

“I’d like to take a look at them,” Rudolph said.

“Can you be in New York tomorrow?”

“No reason why not.”

“Good. I’ll show them to you.”

“Of course,” Rudolph said, “the whole thing would depend on just what piece of land you could get, what its suitability was, what the cost would be—all that.”

Donnelly looked around him at the empty bar, as though searching out spies. “I’ve even picked out the spot,” he said, lowering his voice. “It’s a beauty. It’s abandoned, overgrown farmland now and cheap. It’s in Connecticut, rolling hill country, and it’s no more than an hour from New Haven, maybe two from New York. It’s made for something like this.”

“Could you show it to me?”

Donnelly glared at him, as though suddenly suspecting him of some dark purpose. “Are you really interested?”

“I’m really interested.”

“Good,” Donnelly said. “You know something—” His voice was solemn now. “I think it was fate that made me say yes to your sister when she asked me to work on this movie. I’ll drive you out there and you can see for yourself.”

Rudolph left a bill on the table to pay for the drinks. “It’s getting late,” he said as he stood up. “Shall we go back to the hotel?”

“If you don’t mind,” Donnelly said, “I’d rather stay here and get drunk.”

“Take two aspirin before going to bed,” Rudolph said. Donnelly was ordering another whiskey as he went out of the bar, offering a libation to fate, which had brought him and Rudolph Jordache together.

Rudolph walked slowly, alone, down the familiar streets. They had aged since he had pedaled along them, delivering rolls for the family bakery at dawn every morning, but he had the incongruous feeling this night that he was a young man again, with grandiose plans in his head, achievement in his future. Once again, as he had felt on the gravelly strand in Nice, he was tempted to sprint in the darkness, renewing the elation of his youth when he was the best 220 high hurdler in the high school. He even took a few tentative, loping steps, but saw a car’s headlights approaching and relapsed into his usual dignified walk.

He passed the big building which housed the Calderwood Department Store and looked into the windows and remembered the nights he had put in arranging the displays. If his fortune had started at any one place, it had started there. The windows were shabby now, he thought, an old lady putting makeup carelessly on her face, the lipstick awry, the eye shadow sloppy, the simulation of youth weary and unconvincing. Old man Calderwood would have bellowed. A dead man’s life’s work. Useful? Useless?

He remembered, too, marching, playing the trumpet at the head of a column of students on the evening of the day the war had ended, the future a triumphant panorama ahead of him. Yesterday, he had read in the town newspaper, there had been another parade of students, this time to protest the war in Vietnam, the youths chanting obscene slogans, defacing the flag, taunting the police. Eleven students had wound up in jail. Truman then, Nixon now. Decay. He sighed. Better not to remember anything.

When he had suggested to Gretchen that Port Philip would be a good place to shoot her movie—a neglected town, withdrawn from its prosperous and honorable past on the banks of the great river—he had resolved not to have anything to do with the actual machinery of the production or even visit the town. But problems had arisen and Gretchen had called for help and he had reluctantly made the trip, talked to the officials, fearing that they would recall his downfall when the students had turned against him and driven him away.

How beautiful Jean had been in those days.

But the officials had been respectful, eager to accommodate him. Scandals passed. New men arrived. Memories faded.

Donnelly reminded him of himself when he was young—passionate, hopeful, driving, self-centered, sure of his purposes. He wondered what Donnelly would feel ten years from now, many accomplishments behind him, the streets of his native town, wherever it was, changed, everything changed. He liked Donnelly. He knew Gretchen liked him, too. He wondered if there was anything between them. He wondered, too, if Donnelly’s idea was practical, workable. Was Donnelly too young, too ambitious? He cautioned himself to move slowly, check everything, as he thought he himself had checked everything when he was that age.

He would talk it over with Helen Morison. She was a hardheaded woman. She could be depended on. But she was in Washington now. She had been offered a job there on the staff of a congressman whom she admired and she had moved on. He would have to catch up with her somehow.

He thought of Jeanne. There had been a few letters, with less and less to say in each succeeding one, the emotion of the week on the Côte fading. Perhaps when Wesley finally went to France, he would take it as an excuse to visit her. The lawyer in Antibes had finally written that it had been arranged that Wesley could come back, but he hadn’t told Wesley that. He was waiting until the movie was finished. He didn’t want Wesley suddenly to take it into his head to quit the picture and fly across the ocean. Wesley was not a flighty boy, but he was driven, driven by his own ghosts, unpredictable.

He himself had been driven by the ghost of his own father, despairing, a failure, a suicide, drunk on poverty and destroyed hopes, so he could half understand his nephew. Weird, that that subterranean, hidden boy could turn out to be such a touching actor.

There had never been anybody with that kind of talent in the family before, although Gretchen had been briefly on the stage, without success. You never could tell where it comes from, Gretchen had told him after a session in the projection room in which they had watched and marveled at what the boy could do. And it wasn’t only that particular talent. It was every kind of talent. In America especially, no maps to tell where anybody had set out from or what ports they would sail to. No dependable genealogical trees anywhere.

He went into the sleeping hotel and up to his room and undressed and got into the cold bed. He found it difficult to sleep, thought of the pretty, coquettish girl in the bar, her jeans tight across her hips, her professionally inviting smile. What would it be like, he wondered, that perfect young body, open to invitation? Ask my nephew, he thought enviously, he’s probably in bed with her now. A different generation. He had been a virgin, himself, at Wesley’s age. He was ashamed of his envy, although he was sure the boy would suffer later. Was suffering now—he’d left the bar alone. Not used to the tricks. Well, neither was he. You suffered according to your capacity to suffer and there was something about the boy that made you feel his capacity was dangerously great.

He hovered between sleeping and waking, missing the body in the bed beside him. Whose body? Jean’s, Helen’s, Jeanne’s, someone he had never met but who would finally lie beside him? He had not found any answer by the time he fell into a deep slumber.

He was awakened by the sound of drunken singing in the street. He recognized Donnelly’s voice, harsh and tuneless, singing “Boola, Boola.” Donnelly had gone to Yale. Not a typical graduate, Rudolph thought dreamily. The singing stopped. He turned over and went back to sleep.

«  »

In her room, Gretchen was alone, going over the setups she wanted for the next day’s shooting. When she was on the set she made herself seem calm and certain of herself, even at times she wanted to scream in anger or anguish. But when she was alone like this, working by herself, she could sometimes feel her hands shaking in fear and indecision. So many people depended on her and every decision was so final. She had seen the same division of conduct in Colin Burke when he was directing a movie or a play and had wondered how he could manage it. Now she wondered how any human being could survive a whole month at a time, or longer, being cut in half like that. Private faces in public places, in Auden’s phrase, had no part in the business of making movies.

Then she heard Donnelly singing “Boola, Boola” outside the hotel. Sadly, she shook her head at the relation between talent and liquor in the arts in America. There again she thought of Colin Burke, whom she had never seen drunk and who rarely even took a drink. An exception. An exception in many ways. She thought of him often these days, while she worked, trying to imagine how he would set up the camera, what he would say to a balky actor, how direct a complicated scene. If you couldn’t plagiarize a dead husband, she thought defensively, whom could you plagiarize?

The singing outside stopped and she hoped that Donnelly wouldn’t feel too shaken in the morning. For his sake, not for hers—she didn’t need him for the next day’s shooting—but he always looked so shamefaced when he came onto the set after the night before.

She smiled, thinking of the artful, dour, complicated man, who, she thought, looked like a young Confederate cavalry colonel, with his jutting beard and fierce, unsatisfied eyes. She liked him and she could tell he was attracted to her and, despite her vow never to let a younger man touch her again, if she wasn’t so obsessed with the picture, she might …

There was a knock on her door.

“Come in,” she said. She never locked her door.

The door opened and Donnelly came in, walking almost straight.

“Good evening,” she said.

“I have just spent a momentous hour,” he said solemnly, “with your brother. I love your brother. I thought you had to be told.”

She smiled. “I love my brother, too.”

“We are going to engage in grand—grandiloquent undertakings together,” Donnelly said. “We are of the same tribe.”

“Possibly,” Gretchen said good-naturedly; “our mother possibly was Irish, or at least that was what she claimed. Our father was German, though.”

“I respect both the Irish and the Germans,” Donnelly said, leaning against the doorpost for support, “but that is not what I meant. I am talking of the tribe of the spirit. Do I interrupt you?”

“I’d just about finished,” Gretchen said. “If you want to talk don’t you think it would be a good idea to shut the door?”

Slowly, with dignity, Donnelly closed the door behind him and leaned against it.

“Would you like some coffee?” Gretchen indicated the thermos pitcher on her desk. She drank twenty cups a day to keep going.

“People are always offering me coffee,” Donnelly said petishly. “I find it degrading. I despise coffee.”

“I’m afraid I have nothing harder to drink,” Gretchen said, although there was a bottle of Scotch, she knew, in the cupboard.

“I have no need of the drink, madam,” Donnelly said. “I come merely as a messenger.”

“From whom?”

“From David P. Donnelly,” Donnelly said, “himself.”

Gretchen laughed.

“Deliver the message,” she said, “and then I advise bed.”

“I have delivered half the message,” Donnelly said. “I love your brother. The other half is more difficult. I love his sister.”

“You’re drunk.”

“Correct,” he said. “Drunk I love his sister and sober I love his sister.”

“Thank you for the message,” Gretchen said, still seated, although she wanted to stand up and kiss the man.

“You will remember what I have said?” He glowered at her over his beard.

“I’ll remember.”

“In that case,” he said oratorically, “I shall retire for the night. Good night, madam.”

“Good night,” she said. “Sleep well.”

“I promise to toss and turn. Ah, me.”

Gretchen chuckled. “Ah, you.”

If he had stayed another ten seconds she would have sprung from her chair and embraced him. But he waved his arm grandly in salute and went out, almost straight.

She heard him singing “Boola, Boola” as he went down the hallway.

She sat staring at the door, thinking, Why not, why the hell not? She shook her head. Later, later, when the work is over. Perhaps.

She went back to marking her script in the quiet room, which now smelled from whiskey.

«  »

On the floor below, Wesley tried to sleep. He had kept listening for the soft turning of the door handle and the rustle of cloth as Frances came into the darkened room. But the door handle didn’t turn, there was no sound except the complaint of the bedsprings as he turned restlessly under the covers.

He had said he loved her. True, she had more or less forced it out of him, but when he had said it he had meant it. When you loved someone, though, did you notice when she was faking, putting on an act, did you let her know that she was behaving foolishly? People talked about love as though it was all one piece, as though once you said you were in love nothing else mattered. In the movie he was doing the young politician who fell in love with Frances never criticized her for her behavior, which he adored, but only for some of the wilder schemes she concocted to sway the other characters in the script to see things her way. Love is blind, the saying went. Well, he certainly hadn’t been blind that evening. He had felt that the performance Frances had put on in the bar was phony and disgusting and he had told her so. Maybe he had better learn to keep his opinions to himself. If he had, he wouldn’t be in bed alone at two o’clock in the morning.

He ached for the touch of her hand, the softness of her breast as he kissed it. If that wasn’t love, what was it? When she was in bed with him he couldn’t believe she would go back to her husband, be attracted to another man, despite what his aunt had told him. He had enjoyed the women on the Clothilde, while their husbands had slept below or been off at the casino, he had liked what he did with Mrs. Wertham, but he had known, with certainty, that what he was feeling then wasn’t love. You didn’t have to be an experienced man of the world to know the difference between what he had felt then and what he felt with Frances.

He remembered the times when Frances was in his arms in the narrow bed, their bodies entwined in the dark, and Frances had whispered, “I love you.” What had she meant those times? He groaned softly.

He had told Frances to call her mother to find out who she really was. Whom could he call to find out who he really was? His own mother? She would probably say that like his father he was a defiler of decent Christian homes. His uncle? To his uncle he most likely seemed like an inherited nuisance, with no sense of gratitude, who only showed up when he needed something. His Aunt Gretchen? A freak, who by some mysterious trick of nature was gifted with a talent he was too stupid or unambitious to want to use. Alice? A clumsy, unsophisticated boy who needed pity and mothering. Bunny? A good deckhand who would never be anywhere near the man his father was. Kate? Half brother to her son, a painful, living memory of her dead husband. How put all this together and make one whole person out of the parts?

Was it only because he was so young that he felt so split up, so uncertain of himself? Retarded, Frances had said that evening. But other people around his age didn’t seem to suffer, they put themselves together all right. Jimmy, the other delivery boy at the supermarket, with his music and the firm knowledge that his sisters and his mother had a single, uncomplicated opinion of him, and that opinion based on love. His own mother said she loved him but that kind of love was a whole lot worse than hate.

He thought of Healey, the wounded soldier who had come back with Kraler’s son’s body. Healey lived on one certainty, that he was a man who always got a raw deal from the world and that nothing would ever change for him and that the world could go fuck itself.

There was only one thing he was certain of, Wesley thought, he was going to change. Only he had no inkling, as he lay there alone in the dark room, in what direction. He wondered, if by some miracle he could get a glimpse of himself at the age of twenty-one, twenty-five, thirty, what he would think of himself.

Maybe, after he was finished with Frances, he would finally do what his aunt wanted him to do and become an actor. Learn to live with all the different parts of himself and make full use of them, act not only in front of a camera, but like Frances, every minute of the day. Maybe she had it figured out—that’s what the world wanted and that’s what she gave it.

In the morning, he knew, on the set, he would be expected to seem like a savage, irresponsible ruffian. It was an easy role for him to play. Maybe he would try it for a year or two. It was as good a starting point as anyplace else.

When he finally slept he dreamed that he was in Alice’s living room eating a roast beef sandwich and drinking a beer, only it wasn’t Alice across the table from him, but Frances Miller.