CHAPTER 40

Funding had flowed almost immediately from the Devereaux Foundation into Alcott Adams’s new film production. Emma Devereaux was enthusiastic about this latest project, especially as everyone kept telling her that it might be their last one. Mr. Frankl had been right—he always was—when he said they shouldn’t have him chair the seminar meeting. Now Edmond was threatening to have her declared incapacitated and the newspapers were calling for the government to come in and look at their books! As though every penny’s fate were not recorded there, duly and properly! As though their programs were not published in press releases just as soon as they were funded, and in all their annual reports as well! But Mr. Frankl, although he was always looking so tired lately, promised to stand by her, so come what may, she would not resign. Indeed, if she hadn’t learned never to disagree with Mr. Frankl, Miss Devereaux might not be quite as worried about all this as he was. He was such a worrier. But as none of them had done anything even remotely wrong, what could be the problem? And since she was not at all incapacitated, why should she fear Edmond?

Now, feeling anxiously ambitious for the new film, Miss Devereaux did allow herself to hope that it wouldn’t be cold or dark or cruel or incomprehensible, as were the works of other young filmmakers who used to apply for their grants. Miss Devereaux wished that movies could become more the way they used to be—say, like Brief Encounter or His Girl Friday. Hilda had said that the one Alcott Adams wished to make was worth a chance, but she hadn’t looked Miss Devereaux in the eye when she said it. Miss Devereaux knew very well that this meant that Hilda liked it but thought Miss Devereaux would not. Still, Miss Devereaux was sanguine, for Hilda had found the young man through Peter Frankl’s lovely daughter, a remarkable young woman who was devoted to the study of Renaissance music and, according to Hilda, played Bach on the piano like an angel. What better recommendation could there be? Mr. Frankl’s brilliant daughter thought the film quite worthwhile, and that should be good enough for any of them.

Early one cold, bright morning in November, Miss Devereaux had the idea that Hilda should visit the set and see how things were coming. They had been filming for several weeks, according to Hilda’s reports, often in Morningside Heights where Hilda lived. Miss Devereaux called Hilda and said that, if it was not inconvenient, Hilda should spend some time observing the production and let her know if it was going all right. If things looked bad, perhaps Hilda could guide them a bit. Or perhaps Hilda could bring Mr. Frankl’s daughter along, and she could influence them. Yes, decided Miss Devereaux as she spoke with Hilda on the telephone. Could Hilda please arrange to bring Susan Frankl with her? If so, she would send a car to pick up Susan in the Village.

Hilda felt no alarm about the necessity of observing a filming and having to speak to the people involved. In fact, surprisingly, she felt a great wish to do just that. It would be a happy change of pace from sending job résumés out into the abyss of the job market, in anticipation of her firing by Edmond Lockhart. She got Susan’s new number from Peter, whose voice became strained when giving it. He certainly disliked Susan’s having moved in with this fellow.

Susan and Chris, at 10:30 A.M., were both still fast asleep when Hilda called, and Chris answered groggily. He managed to convey contempt for the caller, Hilda thought, in very few words. Susan, however, sounded glad to hear from her.

“Go to the site? But are you sure they’re filming today?”

It had never occurred to Hilda that they might not be. She readily agreed when Susan, who had all the cell phone numbers, volunteered to call Alcott and find out if they were filming, where, and whether a visit would be agreeable. Wouldn’t this be better than showing up unannounced?

“Much better. Yes, Susan. Find all that out, and call me back.”

Susan called back within the half hour. They were indeed filming—and in Morningside Heights, near the corner of Riverside and 115th, and it was lucky they had called, because there would probably be almost no filming left to be done after today. They had been able to salvage a great deal from their earlier efforts. Perhaps they could all go for dinner later, someplace in the neighborhood, and have a good talk then? Susan would try to set it up with Alcott and Sylvie and some of the other people. Hilda, far from feeling panic at this suggestion, was instead inclined to feel delighted with it. Susan herself was all too happy to abandon her struggles with her thesis and join this expedition. The only thing that kept her spirits from soaring at the chance to get away from her desk and be amused, in fact, was the feeling that she was responsible, at least indirectly, for the Devereaux Foundation’s handing a few hundred thousand dollars to Alcott. What if the film was a dud?

Susan had hardly spoken to her father since she had moved into Chris’s loft three weeks ago. Several times, she had gone so far as to pick up the telephone, but she didn’t know how to talk to him now that, for the first time, they had less than perfect amity. Instead, she chose to wait and to communicate through her calls to her mother, unpleasant as these were. Susan had to admit that while she was enraged with her father’s slightest error, she easily tolerated her mother’s sins. Because her father was good, she demanded a great deal of him, but she made no demands on her amoral, indifferent mother. Her mother did not disapprove in the slightest of her moving in with Chris. She had even come to visit and had praised the apartment, which was thoroughly, cleverly, downtown. In fact, Lesley had been so pleasant that Chris had said afterward he couldn’t believe she was the woman Susan was always complaining about.

Susan arranged a dinner meeting with Hilda and Sylvie, who said that Alcott and several others might or might not join them, depending on how things went. It occurred to her then that she might invite her father, too. With Hilda and the others there, the tensions would be diluted and perhaps she and Peter could ease their way back into friendly relations. She called her father at his office.

“Daddy, it’s Susan.”

“Why are you speaking to me?” he said, and she laughed.

“I’m not,” she replied. “This is purely a business call.”

Peter agreed to meet them for dinner that evening, not mentioning that this would mean canceling dinner with a client. He wouldn’t tell Lesley either, because he wanted to see his daughter without her. He used not to be underhanded like this, but now it seemed the lesser evil.

Chris was at Susan’s side as she hung up.

“What’re all these phone calls about?” he asked. He was annoyed at having been woken.

“Sorry, sweetheart, but I’m arranging to spend the day out. I’m going to visit Alcott’s set with someone from the Devereaux Foundation. They asked me to, for some reason. And then I’m going to meet my father and Sylvie and maybe some other people at dinner.”

“And you don’t want me to come, obviously.”

“Let me make friends with him again. Then we’ll arrange something a little less haphazard, with Mom, too. Don’t you think that would be better?”

“What makes you think I care if I ever see either of your parents again?” Chris said, and Susan realized that of course Chris was bothered by her seeing their mutual friends, not her father, without him. She had been aware for some time, as well, that he was deeply envious of Alcott having found money, while his own chances of getting something produced any time soon seemed to grow more remote every day. Of course, this whole expedition, which promised to bring her so much pleasure, was galling to him. She had been insensitive.

“How come you know these people at the Devereaux Foundation?” Chris demanded. “What on earth do you have to do with Alcott’s film?”

“I told you. My father is—maybe was—on their board, and the woman who really has the say over who gets money lives in my building. I met her through Daddy, and we got to be friends. She’s eccentric, but I like her.”

Susan’s heart was sinking as she spoke, for all at once the fact that Alcott, and not Chris, had gotten Devereaux money began to seem an enormous betrayal on her part. Why had she never mentioned to Chris her role in putting them in touch with each other? Why hadn’t she simply begged Hilda to look at Chris’s script or just sent it to her? She was so sure that Hilda would dislike it. Now it would look as though Susan had schemed behind his back and shut him out purposely, when in fact she had been astonished to learn that Hilda had actually called Alcott Adams after hearing Susan mention his name. Then Susan remembered that she had done more than mention his name. She had said he was a major talent, with a kind of genius. At the time, she had not thought of this as disloyalty to Chris. She had had no idea when she said it that Hilda was fishing for names of people to contact. Did she owe it to Chris to think, or to tell Hilda, that he was a kind of genius? Perhaps she did owe him a chance to capitalize on her connection with Hilda.

“So she found Alcott through you, didn’t she.” Chris had followed her thoughts through the emotions he had watched cross her face.

“So it seems. I just mentioned him to her once, and then one day she told me that she’d called him. I didn’t tell her to. The thought never crossed my mind. I mentioned you, too.” But this sounded defensive and shouted of things unsaid. She had, in fact, told Hilda that her boyfriend was a playwright, but she had voiced no enthusiasm for his work. “Chris, my father told me that this foundation is really, really old-fashioned, conventional, and hidebound. They usually fund things like classical ballet and early music festivals and rhyming poetry in sonnet form about love and nature. They would never have been interested in stuff like yours.”

“But they’re interested in Alcott’s, which isn’t any of those things.”

“It has occurred to me that they just don’t really understand that.” Susan saw, however, that this simply raised the question whether they might not have had a similarly happy misunderstanding of Chris’s work—if she had praised his play instead of Alcott’s film.

“Why didn’t you ever tell me about this?”

“I had other things on my mind. It wasn’t any big deal,” Susan said, hearing her own voice involuntarily confessing that she had wronged him, although, she protested to herself, she hadn’t really. She hadn’t!

“Well, the little good girl isn’t necessarily always so nice, is she,” said Chris. He sounded gloomy and sarcastic, but not enraged. Surely, though, if he thought her guilty of this, wasn’t his reaction inappropriate? Why wasn’t he angry?

“You don’t believe that,” she said firmly.

“What don’t I believe? That you helped Alcott get a grant instead of me? Of course that’s what you did. Otherwise you would have told me all about it.”

“But if you believe that, you should hate me. You should throw me out. We can’t live with something horrible like that between us.”

“What are you talking about? And you’re the one who’s always insisting on learning how to forgive and forget, and sticking things through.”

Chris dressed quickly and pulled on a coat. “I’ll see you later, I guess,” he said, and he was gone—unshaved, unfriendly. He sounded just as he had when he left yesterday, with almost the same words. Although he believed she had betrayed him, he felt nothing more than annoyance. Susan’s moral sense was offended. He should believe in her innocence. But, granted that he didn’t, then he should demand, or at least want, remorse and repentance from her. Chris didn’t care whether she was good or not. That didn’t mean anything to him. Susan found this incomprehensible.

It was already past 2:00 when Miss Devereaux’s car delivered Susan to Hilda’s. The two of them grasped hands affectionately and agreed that they had best proceed immediately to the corner of Riverside and 115th, for it was likely that the filming would stop once it grew dark, in a couple of hours. Hilda put on a stylish coat—very long, of fine black wool—a slouchy hat and tight leather gloves and wound a velvety black scarf around her neck. Susan was curious why, at last, the old pilled seventies’ hounds-tooth had been retired. How different Hilda looked wearing such good-looking things. Hilda saw Susan’s appreciation. “My new clothes for job hunting,” she explained, pretending to be unembarrassed.

“Do you think he’ll have those enormous white trucks,” Hilda asked Susan as they walked to Riverside Drive, “and tables of food, and all that stuff you see when they’re making movies?”

“I doubt it will be anywhere near so elaborate. My guess is one white truck, or maybe a van with some coffee thermoses.”

“I wonder if Alcott Adams will have a moral to his story.”

“Well, the film won’t be amoral. But I don’t expect a story with a clear moral point. I hope that’s okay.”

“I don’t really have any expectations one way or the other. Just curious.”

Hilda’s question unnerved Susan slightly, so recently had she found herself disturbed by what seemed amorality in Chris. Here again, a comparison between Chris and Alcott was called for, and as before, Alcott came off better. Susan knew that Alcott was intensely moral, even moralistic. She recalled hearing an outraged tirade against his former girlfriend, whom he had called a Salome.

They found the production crew just where it was supposed to be. There were no white trucks—just three vans, one of which was Alcott’s own. Cords snaked along sidewalks and gutters. Lights were rigged at the stoop of a brownstone. Several people were eating sandwiches, standing at the open door of one of the vans, and Susan detected Alcott’s voice, rising out of a jumble of voices, “How can his nose still be red, for God’s sake?”

Alexei, wrapped in a blanket, appeared at the door of another van.

“Why are you blaming me,” he said, “when you ask me to stand there thirty minutes for no reason, before there’s even a camera?” How odd, Susan thought, that Alexei of all people would insist that he’s too cold to come out and work—and when everyone else is bearing it.

“He’s not blaming you,” said Sylvie, who was standing behind Alexei. “Don’t be irritable, Alexei. He’s just impatient to get rolling. You know what? If we don’t finish, tomorrow I’ll bring you one of those ski mask–type hats that go over the nose. Okay?”

“I’m not half as irritable as he is,” said Alexei.

“Sorry,” said Alcott, trotting up to the van. “Very sorry. Look, I’m tense. Come on—we’re ready.”

This was a great deal of bending on the part of Alcott. Susan wouldn’t have known he had it in him. She was struck by this catering to Alexei.

Just then Alexei saw Susan and gave her a quick, curious smile. He wasn’t angry at all, Susan realized. He was just making sure Alcott didn’t start throwing his weight around. But she was still confused about what was going on. It sounded as though Alcott were intending to film Alexei, which would be very odd.

Alexei threw the blanket into the van and walked into the frigid air wearing only a thin jacket. He took the steps two at a time and waited on the stoop while Alcott shouted directions preparatory to shooting: Alexei was certainly acting in the scene. The cameras were pointing at him. A woman, between forty and fifty, opened the door of the brownstone. Alexei was speaking; the crew was keyed up. Then the tension let down, and everyone slouched and lounged and moved around again. Another break, Susan and Hilda guessed. They had no idea what the action was.

“They’ve cast Alexei in a part,” said Susan, in her excitement squeezing Hilda’s hand. “I’m so pleased. I’m so happy.”

Hilda stood on her toes, trying to get a good look at the man Susan was speaking of. “That handsome one on the steps is Alexei? Is he good?”

“He’s actually a singer,” said Susan, “an extraordinary singer in my opinion, but it doesn’t surprise me that they gave him a part because he probably can act, too. Opera singers can often act, can’t they? Not that he’s actually ever sung in an opera—it’s a long story. I’ll tell you all about him when this is over. I know him a little.”

“It doesn’t surprise me, either,” said Hilda, “because he’s so good-looking.”

Hearing the note of appreciation in these words, Susan was touched; how sweet of this middle-aged gay woman to take what she imagined was Susan’s view of an attractive young man. Alexei was standing at the head of the stairs, shoulders hunched against the cold, hands in his pockets, concentrating very intensely and staring at the ground, occasionally muttering a word to himself, suddenly looking odd and foreign, the way he had struck her before she knew him.

Susan remembered the surge of affection she had felt for Alexei the last time they were together—the night she had decided to move in with Chris. Since then she had spoken to him just a few times, briefly, on the telephone, when she had called with questions her adviser had asked about some part of what Alexei had told her. Seeing him here, in these apparently happy circumstances, made her feel that same warmth toward him. She recalled with satisfaction their date next week to attend the Braithwaites’ Thanksgiving dinner and resolved to find an opportunity to talk with him before the day was over. It was just as well that Chris had not come.

Sylvie appeared beside them, the curves of her figure obscured by a thick down coat and her face covered by a scarf wrapped up to her eyes, which, however, showed a smile quite as clearly as the concealed features could have done. Susan introduced her to Hilda, who shook hands cordially.

“This is the script,” said Sylvie through the scarf. She stood next to Hilda so that Hilda could read the tattered typescript, on which various lines were struck and rewritten in ink.

“Did you write the script, Ms. Kimura?” asked Hilda.

“Rewrote it with Alcott,” said Sylvie.

“What’s Alexei’s part, Sylvie?” asked Susan.

But at that moment filming resumed, and Sylvie trotted to Alcott’s side beside the stoop. “You can look at this if you’d like,” she said as she ran off, handing the script to Hilda, who read:

GAYLIN: It’s me.

CHRISTA: I see it’s you.

GAYLIN: Aren’t you going to ask me to come in?

CHRISTA: Go away, Gaylin. I don’t want you here.

GAYLIN: I’m having a hard time. I’m sick. . . .

CHRISTA: Get out.

GAYLIN: Mother, please. . . .

“Oh my,” said Hilda, distressed for Gaylin’s sake and reading with difficulty in the cold wind. Sylvie reappeared in a moment and, after apologizing politely, asked if Hilda would mind letting her take back the script after all. She had to change something. Handing it to her, Hilda said, “It seems rather a sad story.”

“Parts are,” said Sylvie. “Overall, no.”

“Gaylin’s not at the center of things?”

“That bit is nothing you can judge by. Would you like to meet Alexei and Naomi?”

Susan and Hilda met a half-dozen actors and actresses. Alexei broke into a broad smile at Susan’s approach and gave her a quick hug. He likes me, she thought with a melting feeling. I should get out and see people more often. Later, she and Hilda read a few more snippets of the script, heard about various scenes finished and one yet to be done, and when it was dark left the crew at work, with plans to meet several of them for dinner on Broadway at 8:30. In the meantime, Hilda would return home and Susan would go to her old apartment to warm up. The two of them agreed as they walked home that despite elements of disorganization and little quarrels that seemed continually to erupt, the group as a whole inspired confidence and hope. Susan, feeling vindicated, confessed to Hilda how she had worried that the whole thing would not meet her expectations.

“Oh, you shouldn’t have worried about that,” said Hilda. “It wasn’t your idea to give them the grant. You have no responsibility at all. We didn’t give the money expecting that the film would be a success, although we hope it will. We just wanted him to have a chance to try.”

Back in her old apartment, Susan took a hot bath and fell asleep on the sofa for over an hour, with the feeling of collapse that comes on returning home after long traveling. When she awoke, she couldn’t face going back downtown later that night. She called Chris and left the message that she would see him tomorrow.