The production studio where the test would be done was in Culver City, just off the San Diego Freeway South, near the airport. The limo picked us up at six. Our driver this morning was not Jesus, but a dark, impassive man who might have been a Pakistani, or from another Middle Eastern nation. He did not speak except to confirm our destination, and we did not, either. Much of the shine was gone from the limo when Jesus was not at the wheel.
Despite the lateness of the hour when we went to bed, neither Glynn nor I slept well. Overexcitement did that to her, I knew, and her restless tossing set the waterbed to rolling like a frail craft in a nasty sea. I clung to my side of the mattress and tried for oblivion; I knew that the next day would be hard for us. The excitement of the test and the proximity to the world of casual glamour and unreality that Caleb Pringle commanded, the rush to make the noon plane, and the meeting, at last, with Pom all lay ahead, stuffed into this one day like sausage into a casing. Add to all that the shuffling specter of Mommee and jet lag, and the mere thought of the next twenty-four hours stunned me with fatigue and a lassitude that seemed to settle in my very bones like some Victorian malaise. There was no way to know what it did to Glynn. Like a young bride on the eve of her wedding, she could not see past the altar of the screen test.
We were up before five, padding blindly around the kitchen for juice and toast and coffee, bumping into each other in Stuart’s tiny coral and aqua bathroom. I pulled on the much-derided blue pantsuit and hastily packed my few things, tossing the jeans and T-shirt I had worn into Stuart’s washing machine and hanging up his tux jacket. Laura had said she would come back to the apartment and wash and dry the things we had borrowed, and his linens. Glynn had been living out of her duffel, so she had little to pack. She would be made up at the studio, Caleb had said, so she needed no makeup, and I, weary of the last two day’s ersatz Merritt, wore none, either. By the time the heat-grayed morning came sliding in from the east we were sitting on the little balcony, watching Sunset Boulevard come wearily alive and sipping coffee. Humidity was thick in the air and the heat was already shimmering off the hazy towers of Century City and downtown. It was going to be a smoggy, broiling day. I thought of Atlanta, and the heat and thickness we had left behind us, and sighed. The vision of the Penobscot Boy cottage superimposed itself over the scene below. Cool, sharp, resinous, clean, clear—that was what I needed. Clarity. I was starved for starkness and clarity.
“Do you think they made it up last night?” Glynn said in the rusty voice of early morning.
“Who?”
“Oh, Mom. Aunt Laura and Caleb. You know she didn’t come in. The sofa bed wasn’t out. She had to have spent the night with him.”
“I thought they already had pretty much made it up,” I said. I did not trouble to pretend that I thought Laura had spent the night anywhere but with Caleb Pringle. Of course she had. I had seen her face last night at Spago when she looked at him. Laura was in love with him. Spending the night was what she did when she was in love, or thought herself to be.
I thought that it was not much of an example to set for an unworldly sixteen-year-old niece, but Glynn had seemed, on this trip, far older than sixteen much of the time. There was a perceptiveness, an adult insight and tolerance in her that we did not see in Atlanta. But then we did not see much of anything about Glynn there except her carefully guarded, post-Mommee demeanor. How much richness were we missing in our daughter, I wondered wearily. Well, that would stop, too. Mommee would be gone, and Glynn would have room and air to become whoever she might. In the sun of her father’s undivided attention, we just might see the last of the starving child who haunted the house by the river. Already, out here, she was eating far more. I hated the thought of the looming confrontation, but resolved that it would come soon. I did not want to lose this budding wholeness of Glynn’s.
“What do you think of him?” Glynn said.
“Caleb? Well, he’s certainly attractive, and he’s being lovely to us. And he seems to be very fond of your Aunt Laura. I don’t really know what I think yet. I don’t know any other film directors to compare him to. What do you think?”
“I think he’s wonderful. He’s funny and not at all stuck-up, and he doesn’t make me feel like a silly kid. He treats me like someone he enjoys listening to and being around. I hope Aunt Laura marries him. I’d love to have him for an uncle,” Glynn said.
I could not see Caleb Pringle as anyone’s uncle, not, come to that, anyone’s husband, though I knew he had been married twice before. I did not think he was or ever could be a creature of the thousand lilliputian tendrils with which marriage and children bound you. But then, neither could I see Laura trussed with them. We were, Glynn and I, far away from home and out of our milieu altogether. Without my context, I found it hard to catch the sense of the people I met. I had never stopped to think how much I depended on simple familiarity.
“I wouldn’t count on that,” I said. “I think they’d have an alternative relationship at best.”
“You mean like just a long affair or living together all their lives but never marrying?”
“Something like that,” I said. “This place just doesn’t seem set up for plain old garden-variety marriages.”
“Well, that would be okay, too,” my child said placidly. “As long as I got to see him every now and then.”
“Don’t you go getting a crush on Caleb Pringle,” I said. “The percentage in that is less than zero.”
“I don’t get crushes anymore,” she said loftily. The limo came then, saving me from wondering when she ever had. I had seen little evidence of them, except the occasional almost obligatory infatuation with untouchable celebrities like this troublesome Rocky MacPherson about whom I had heard so much. Pom had said once, almost wistfully, that it looked as though he was never going to have to run off some obnoxious, lovesick little punk.
We got to the studio about six-thirty. It was a large, sprawling, one-story brick and aluminum building that looked vaguely like a warehouse, sitting in the middle of an asphalt parking lot that, I thought, would be worse than Death Valley at midday. There was a high wire fence around the whole complex, topped with barbed wire, and a heavy steel gate with a guardhouse. It manages to be both forbidding and banal, far removed from the fabled Hollywood studios that had lived always in my mind.
There were few cars in the lot. The limo’s driver lowered the silky, whispering window and said a few words to the guard, who consulted a clipboard and nodded. The driver followed his pointing finger around to the back of the building, which was even barer and less attractive than the front, and pulled up to a plain steel door next to a loading ramp. Glynn looked up at me and rolled her eyes.
“So much for A Star Is Born,” I said, ruffling her silky hair. She had washed it and blown it dry, and it seemed to drift around her face, never quite settling. She wore the same tunic she had worn last night, and the leggings and boots. Caleb Pringle had asked specifically for them.
“I wasn’t expecting all that old silent-movie stuff,” she said. “I know they don’t do that anymore. It would have been fun, though, wouldn’t it?”
The driver opened the door and we went inside. A young woman who seemed hardly older than Glynn was waiting for us. She wore blue jeans and a sweatshirt and enormous, clunking Birkenstock sandals over thick ragg socks, and had a head of glorious, improbable, Dolly Parton hair. Over her tiny mouse’s face it looked so incongruous that Glynn and I both grinned.
“It’s one of the wigs Laura wore in Right Time,” she grinned back. “I’ve always wanted to try it on. I don’t think the effect is quite the same. I’m Molly Shumaker, Caleb’s gofer. He and Laura are waiting for you on the set.”
On the set. Waiting for you on the set. The words ran down my spine like little spiders, and I felt Glynn, beside me, shiver. I could just begin, dimly, to understand the magic in those words, feel the glue that held my sister out here, when the Eastern stage was so much more obviously her metier.
“After you, Miss Fowler,” I said, and Glynn gave me her I’m-having-second-thoughts-about-this smile.
“I’m not sure this was such a hot idea,” she said in a tiny voice.
“Well, it’s too late to back out now,” I said. “Besides, you’d lose your home-court advantage over Marcie and Jess.”
“Right. Let’s do it, then,” she said, and squared her thin shoulders, and marched ahead of me behind Molly Shumaker.
We followed her through a labyrinth of dark halls with closed doors on either side, past a dimly lit canteen, through an empty, cavernous sound stage where cameras stood like sleeping dinosaurs and cables snaked across the floor, and into a second huge room. It was brightly lit from banks of ceiling lights and standing floor lamps, and in front of a large white screen at the far end a group of people fiddled with equipment and drank coffee. Among them were Laura and Caleb Pringle. They were obviously talking and laughing with the crew, but the room was so large that we could not hear them. We went toward them, and I realized that both Glynn and I were walking on tiptoe. Leonard Margolies was nowhere to be seen.
Laura turned and saw us, and came running over and gave us twin hugs. She smelled of soap and lotion and wore a gray leotard and tights with red running shorts over them, and running shoes. They were obviously her own, and I thought that she must have left some of her clothes at Caleb Pringle’s house. He was in running clothes, too, sweatpants and a T-shirt that said The Right Time. The baseball cap on his still-damp dark hair said the same thing. He smiled, and stood waiting for us.
“Isn’t this exciting?” squealed Laura. “Isn’t it a beautiful day? Did you sleep at all? I wish you weren’t going home today; there’s so much else I want you to see…”
She sounded so much like she had when she was a teenager and things were, for a moment, right in her world that I smiled. I had not seen her this exuberant in a long time, not since before she left for Hollywood. The tautness was completely gone from her face; the thin angles were smoothed, and her skin shone with soap and health and something else entirely, which I knew was sheer happiness. I had seen that before, too, if only rarely.
“Yes to all the above except going home. No more discussion about that,” I said. “I don’t have to ask if you slept well. No, don’t answer that.”
She hugged herself with glee and did a little dance step.
“Can’t you see the answer?” she sang. “Oh, Met, he’s back one hundred and ten percent; last night was just—incredible! How could I ever have doubted him? Oh, it’s going to work out, it is…”
I shivered. “Listen, Pie, don’t rush it too much,” I said. “Please. Hold just a little back till you’re sure…”
Beside me Glynn said nothing, only studied her aunt gravely.
“I am sure,” Laura laughed. “You’re just being a big sister. Be my friend for a change! Be happy with me!”
“I am,” I said, smiling. But I wasn’t; not really. There was something about her that reminded me of an out-of-control toddler rushing toward a cliff. Laura, being Laura once again.
Caleb came over.
“Listen, you guys, let’s get this show on the road so there’ll be time to make a tape for the purpose of gloating,” he said. “This is what we’re going to do. John Metter there behind the camera will shoot it; he’s the best I know, and shot Burn and Right Time for me. We’re editing the final cut of Right Time so he was here anyway. You’ll have the crème de la crème, Glynn; he wins big-time awards, Oscars. We’re going to do a very short scene from Arc—one where the young Joan sees for the first time the shape of things to come, you might say. It’s just a few lines, and you’ll just read them off the TelePromp Ter—very simply. Don’t try to act. Just think about the words and say them. We’ll do it in front of this backdrop, because I want the focus to be on you. John will come in close at the end; don’t mind him. Just think about the words. It’ll be just you, but I need another female voice to read a few lines off-camera, and a woman’s arm and hand. I’ve asked Laura to do the honors there. Let her get a head start on feeling her way into Joan. I’ll be in back of the camera with John and I’ll give you a few simple instructions, nothing you’ll mind. Don’t be nervous. It’ll be fun. You look perfect, by the way; I don’t think we’re going to do much to you, but our makeup person is waiting to fluff you up a little. Molly will take you back there. Any questions?”
“I…no. I guess not,” Glynn mumbled through dry lips, and I thought with dread that she was going to freeze, and then she would castigate herself mercilessly for months. This had not been a good idea after all; my instinct had been right about that. She didn’t need anymore self-doubt.
“I don’t know about this, Caleb,” I began, but he held up a finger and smiled at me and said, “Trust me. I won’t scare her. It’s really simple. Piece of cake. That little bit of shyness and tentativeness is just what I want.”
I fell silent. Caleb nodded at Molly, and she touched Glynn’s arm and the two girls went out of the room. I looked from Laura to Glynn.
“I’m really worried about it,” I said. “She’s been having a go-round with an eating disorder and her sense of self-worth is in the basement right now, and then there’s been a difficult time with her father and grandmother…if this doesn’t turn out, she’s going to be more than embarrassed.”
“Laura told me a little about things at home,” Caleb Pringle said. “Don’t worry about her, Merritt. Even if she’s awful—and I don’t think for a minute she will be—we can make her look fabulous. This guy is a wizard. And she’s a very beautiful girl. I have an idea that the camera is going to love her. That’s everything.”
“I told you how good he was with kids,” Laura said, putting her arm around me. “He wouldn’t do anything to hurt her. I wouldn’t let him. I’ll take care of her. It won’t take long. You’ll be glad you let her do it; the tape is going to be a treasure.”
I raised my hands and then dropped them. I was trying hard not to hover over Glynn; the therapist had been adamant about that.
“Good,” Caleb said. “Laura and I thought it would be easier for Glynn if you waited in the canteen while we’re shooting. I’ve always found that parents on the set spook young actors. You can stay if you like, of course, but it’ll be more effective if you see the finished product on the monitor.”
“Whatever’s best for her,” I said helplessly.
“This is, I think,” he said. “By the way, Leonard sends his regrets; he had an unexpected morning meeting with somebody from back East. He’d like to give you the full studio tour and dinner if you could possibly stay over, or if not, maybe you’ll come back soon. He’s really taken with both of you. Laura too. Leonard doesn’t get taken too often.”
“Thank him for us,” I said. “Maybe we can come back sometime.”
Molly came back with Glynn. I stared at my daughter. Nothing seemed to have changed about her, and yet everything had; I could not tell what the makeup artist had done, beyond hang a heavy, rough-cast metal cross on a primitive chain about her neck, but her face had been altered. Her eyes seemed larger, her cheekbones even more prominent, and there were tender shadows in places I had never seen shadows before. Her skin literally shone; it seemed as translucent as alabaster over the bones of her face, although there did not seem to be any makeup or powder on it. Someone had drawn her hair back so that from the front it looked cropped at the nape, and the hair at her hairline had been feathered into silky bangs that brushed her eyebrows. She looked young and frightened and somehow stricken and almost completely medieval in the tunic and tights and the big cross. I could see now why Caleb Pringle had wanted her to wear them. Her wrists looked impossibly thin, and there were red marks around them that manacles might have left. My heart lurched with pity and fear for her; I had never seen anyone look so vulnerable.
She grinned at me then, and crossed her eyes, and the tortured child fled and she was Glynn again, and it was all right.
“Don’t you know enough to genuflect in the presence of a saint?” she said.
“If you’re going to develop temperament before they even shoot this thing, I’m snatching you out of here,” I said, laughing.
She made a pantomime of gagging, putting her forefinger into her open mouth, and Caleb Pringle laughed, too.
“The whole course of history might have changed if little Joan had had the wit to do that to the Dauphin,” he said. “You ready? Molly, Mrs. Fowler is going to wait and see the final on the monitor. Take her and give her some coffee and a sweet roll, will you? I’ll send for you when we’re done.”
The last thing I saw before the door closed behind me and Molly Shumaker was Caleb Pringle bending intently over my daughter, who sat with her face raised to him and her eyes closed. In the white light flooding down on her she looked again unearthly and ephemeral, doomed. But he said something to her and she smiled. I let the door swing shut.
“I don’t know why I’m so nervous,” I said to Molly.
“You’re great,” she said over her shoulder. “You ought to see some of the mothers we get. The poor kid who was in Right Time; God! We got to the point where we were seriously thinking about drugging his mother’s coffee. She was a terror.”
The time seemed to drag torturously, though in actuality it was only a little over an hour when Laura came for us.
“How did it go?” I said, following her back through the maze of corridors.
She gave me her three-cornered kitten’s smile over her shoulder, the one she had always worn when she knew a secret or had been into something forbidden.
“You’ll see,” she said.
They were waiting for us in a tiny studio with padded swivel seats and a large, incomprehensible control board and banks of television monitors mounted overhead. There was a large central screen, and Caleb Pringle was sliding a tape into a slot on the board below it. He turned and gave me an enigmatic nod. Glynn sat in the back row of seats, hunched over, her fists knotted, one atop the other. She had been crying, and would not look at me.
“What is it, sweetie pie?” I said, sinking into the seat beside her and glaring up at Laura. Laura—why did I listen to her? I always ended up coming to some sort of grief when I let her persuade me to do something my instincts cried out against. Why had I thought that would change?
Glynn did not reply. She shook her head. She still would not look at me.
“It was pretty intense,” Laura said. “I had no idea she could tap into that so soon. It took me months to learn to do it. These are just release tears, aren’t they, Punkin?”
She ruffled the bangs on Glynn’s forehead. From the machine, Caleb Pringle said, “This is quite…extraordinary. See it before you decide to report us to the child abuse squad.”
I sank back against my cushion, squeezing Glynn’s cold hand, and waited. I had every intention of giving my sister and her lover as fierce a tongue-lashing as I could muster. But I would, in fairness, wait until I had seen the test.
The screen flickered with light and numbers rolled past and a voice I did not know said, “Test for Glynn Fowler, Arc, June 1995. Take three.” There was a bit more flickering, and then there was Glynn, sitting on a wooden stool against a stark, shadowy backdrop. She sat with her knees together and her hands loosely clasped on her lap, and her head dropped onto her chest. Light fell on her from above, as from an opening in a ceiling; otherwise the set was very dark. The camera came in on her, very slowly, until I could see only her head and shoulders and the great cross lying against her tunic. The angle of her head was heartbreaking. She did not move.
From off camera a woman’s voice whispered, “Joan. Little Joan,” and Glynn raised her head slowly and looked in the direction of the voice. I drew in my breath. It was not Glynn who sat there, but someone who had taken her over, moved into her body. The feeling it gave me was terrible, near nausea but not quite that. This was what possession must look like.
The voice spoke again, louder, and I recognized it as Laura’s, but her voice as I had never heard it: low, caressing, sly, somehow as evil as the hiss of a snake.
“What do your voices say now?” Laura’s corrupted voice said.
Glynn dropped her eyes back to her hands. Slowly they picked up the great cross and caressed it, a soft, unconscious, washing motion. The camera moved in further, as slowly and softly as fog.
“Nothing. They say nothing,” she whispered.
I had never heard such sorrow in my daughter’s voice, never such bewilderment. Never such despair, but despair as quiet as a sigh, or a little wind.
She lifted her face again, and the light caught it, and the camera came on. Her face filled the screen now. Her eyes looked out as if at empty space, and they were blind. Her face was awful, beautiful, lost. I held my breath.
“They say nothing,” she said again. I felt tears spring into my eyes. Glynn’s hand tightened in mine, but I could not look at her.
“There is another way,” Laura’s low, dreadful voice said. “There is another voice that will speak, if only you will listen, and your heart will sing with it, and your body burn.”
Without moving her eyes, Glynn said, “All my life it has been my passion to serve France and my Lord. Only these. But now my voices tell me nothing and my Lord is silent and my passion is cold in this cold place. If there is another voice to make my heart sing, for sweet Jesus’ sake, Lady, tell me it.”
Two great tears gathered in her eyes, and her lips trembled suddenly, and she looked down. The tears slid from beneath her lashes and tracked down her face. She sat silent. Laura’s voice was silent, too.
Very slowly Laura’s white hand came into the frame and reached over. Her finger caught a tear that trembled on Glynn’s chin, and so slowly that it seemed to take whole minutes, her finger traced the tear over to Glynn’s lips, and brushed the wetness across them. Glynn’s lashes dropped still; they shuttered her eyes, but the slow crystal tears continued, one by one.
“You hear it now,” Laura said.
The camera froze on the closeup of Glynn’s face with Laura’s finger on her lips, and then the screen went blank.
For a long moment no one spoke. I could not find the breath to breathe, much less to speak. The little moment was heartbreaking, terrible, and so pregnant with both innocence and evil that it did not seem to me there could be words for it. I hated it. I felt horror and terror and furious rage; how dare he make this of my daughter? How dare Laura? But even as I sat paralyzed, trying to find breath and words, I knew that the test was, as Caleb Pringle had said, extraordinary.
The lights came up and Caleb said, matter-of-factly, “I’ve never seen a first test like it. She is incredible. You do see that, don’t you?”
“I see it. I also see that it is depraved, and evil, and if I had known it would be like this I would never on earth have—”
“But that is just how it should be,” he said softly and patiently, as if he were talking to a child. “She has caught completely that awful innocence at the moment of corruption; seen the snake as it enters Eden. If she were not your daughter you would see.”
I knew he was right. If I had seen this moment in a theater and not known Glynn, I would have been struck silent with its sheer power, instead of with horror and rage.
I took a deep breath and looked at Glynn. She was looking back at me with a simple, whole-souled desire to please; it was a look I saw practically every day at home.
“Well, I do see. And I’m totally impressed,” I said as lightly as I could, and smiled at her. “It was a beautiful job, Tink. How on earth did you do that? Seem so frightened? Cry like that? I didn’t know you’d ever felt like acting might be something you’d like to try—”
“I wasn’t acting,” she said earnestly. “I don’t know what happened, quite. I was sitting there, scared out of my skull and sure I was going to throw up, or stammer, or something, and then I heard Aunt Laura’s voice and it was so…I don’t know how to say it, but it made me feel so…bad. It was like something exploded behind my eyes. I started to cry, and I couldn’t stop, and I was scared of her; I forgot completely it was only Aunt Laura—”
“That is acting,” Caleb Pringle said, smiling at her. “That’s just what acting is. On your part and your Aunt Laura’s. She called it out, maybe, but you’re the one who let it go. I don’t know what else you’d call it if it wasn’t acting. Too bad you can’t stay and be our Joan.”
He spoke to her, lightly, but cut his eyes toward me.
“Don’t even think it,” I said.
“Mom…” Glynn began, her voice pleading, rising.
“Met, listen…” Laura began.
I got up out of my seat.
“The test is wonderful and Glynn will love having the tape, and you were kind, and that is that,” I said. “There will be no talk now or ever about her doing Joan or any other movie at any time. We are going to the airport now and catch our plane, which is something we should have done a long time ago.”
“Met, don’t you realize what this means? There’s going to be a nationwide talent search; it’s the role of the century for a new actress!” Laura cried. “How can you say no? Let her do it this once; she doesn’t necessarily have to have an acting career, just this one role—there’ll never be another young Joan as good as what you just saw. Pring will tell you that.”
“Laura, what part of no is it you don’t understand?” I said. “Besides, it’s Mr. Margolies’s decision; how can you just assume—”
“Margolies would say yes,” Caleb Pringle said mildly. “Margolies is going to go right through the roof of his Turkish bath-house when he sees this. He thought we had our Joan last night, didn’t you know? You saw how he looked at Glynn. But you have to test; sometimes the camera just kills them. That obviously isn’t the case here.”
“I don’t care what the case here is,” I said. “You can show him the test or not. But Glynn is not doing this movie. Get your things together, Tink; we’ve got to make tracks.”
She did not argue with me, but she did not move from the seat, either. She stared at her hands. Then she looked up.
“Daddy would be so proud,” she said softly.
I felt as though she had hit me in the stomach. Was that it? Something of her own, something that was, without any doubt in the world, on any level you chose to regard it, extraordinary, to show her father? Something he would have no choice but to notice? Either that, or the subtlest form of manipulation, and one of the oldest. The child’s ultimate weapon: Daddy would let me.
“You know good and well Daddy would hate it,” I said tightly. “Now come on. Let’s go.”
“Your mother’s right,” Caleb Pringle said to her. “It’s probably no role for a sixteen-year-old. I thought all along we’d have to use an older girl for Joan, but I just wanted to see…I never meant to cause a family rift. Tell you what. Why don’t you go in my office and call your friends back in Atlanta? Gloat unforgivably. Tell them you were offered the part in the movie but you turned it down. Rub it in six ways to Sunday.”
Glynn broke into a slow smile.
“Can I, Mom?”
“Be my guest,” I said. “Gloat till you drop.”
She followed the cheerful Molly Shumaker out of the room, and I turned to him.
“Thanks for that,” I said. “I’d have ended up as the world’s heaviest heavy.”
“It was my fault,” he said. “I should have run this idea by you before. Frankly, I was hoping the test would convince you. But I don’t push people; it never works out.”
“She’s just too young,” I said, feeling defensive and a little foolish, a lioness who had charged what she thought to be a threat to her cub, and found it a shadow.
“It’s not the kind of world we want for her or that she could handle. Some young women could, with one hand tied behind them, but not Glynn. You must see that we’ve got a fight with anorexia on our hands.”
“Yeah, I noticed,” he said. “We see a lot of it out here. Of course to a filmmaker it usually just means that the victim will film like a dream. You’re right; it’s a dangerous world for some youngsters. She could well be one. I sensed a pretty sound armature under there, though.”
“I hope you’re right,” I said. “Sometimes she just seems so fragile.”
Glynn came back, her slowed steps speaking of disappointment.
“You can’t tell me they weren’t impressed,” Laura said.
“They weren’t there,” Glynn said softly. “They’re out here. Up north somewhere. Marcia’s dad wanted her to come spend some time with him, and she hates his second wife, so her mother let her ask Jess. I think it’s Palo Alto or somewhere; I know it’s a long way away from here. They’re going to stay a month.”
Poor Glynn, I thought miserably. Jess is really gone now. How on earth can she replace a best friend?
“Palo Alto,” Caleb Pringle said. “Really? I have a vacation place not thirty miles from there. Up in the Santa Cruz mountains, in a place called Big Basin. It’s really something, if I do say so myself. Up there in those redwoods, it’s like being right under the eye of God. And the air is so clear you can taste it, and the quiet so deep you can hear it. It saves what’s left of my sanity. Listen, why don’t you all drive up there and spend a little time? Glynn can see her friends and wave the tape in their faces, and you and Laura can kick back and relax, and I’ll come up in a few days and we can hike and sightsee and spend some quality time together. Eat; we’ll eat till we drop. I’m a great cook. I’ve got to recharge before we start Arc or I’ll fall apart in midfilm, and Laura could use some rest before she goes into it, and I’d love to show all of you that part of the country. God, but it’s beautiful.”
“Mom,” Glynn cried. “Please say yes! I could go stay with Marcie and Jess; her dad has a pool, and they belong to this marina club thing, and Marcie says there are some of the coolest guys there, and there are two whole weeks before I have to leave for camp—”
“No,” I said.
“Met,” Laura whispered, a soft, anguished sound.
“We can’t, Laura. How many times can I say it? Don’t tease about it.”
“Well, some other time,” Caleb Pringle said pleasantly. “It’ll be there when you come back.”
“Met,” Laura said carefully and precisely, “I’ve got something in my bra poking me in back. Come see if you can find it for me, will you?”
“If you’re wearing a bra I’m wearing a wet suit,” I said, but I followed her out of the studio toward the ladies’ room. Better the session I knew was awaiting me be conducted in private.
She held the door for me and I went in and turned to face her. She leaned against it, head down, hands clasped over her breast, and then lifted her face to me. I was expecting one of her finer histrionic performances, but I saw instantly that this was to be no performance. Her face was white except for hectic red splotches on her cheekbones, and her mouth trembled uncontrollably, so that for a moment she could not speak. Tears were running down her face.
“Oh, baby,” I began, but she held up her hand and I stopped. I watched as she struggled to control her lips, and then she said, as carefully as she could through her ragged breath, “Met. Please. Please just listen to me until I’m finished. Can you do that?”
“Laura, tell me what’s the matter.…”
She looked at me mutely and I fell silent.
She nodded and took a deep breath and went on.
“You cannot possibly know what it would mean to me for you all to go up to the lodge with me. It’s the rest of my life, Met; it’s no less than that. Last night…last night was the springboard, but the lodge would cement everything; the lodge would give me time…the lodge would mean that I could spend another whole movie with him, and by that time I know that we would be together for good. I know that, Met. He’s never asked me up there before, and I can’t just say, well, my sister and niece have to go home but I’ll come, because it wasn’t just me that he asked.”
“But why not?” I said, honestly baffled. “Why can’t you? It isn’t Glynn and me he’s in love with, God forbid—”
“You have to be there because Glynn has to be there,” she cried softly, chafing her hands in distress.
“Why on earth does Glynn have to be there? I don’t understand any of this, Laura,” I said.
“Oh, God, Met, can’t you see how much he wants her for Joan? He’s hoping that you all will stay around long enough for him to show Margolies the test and convince you to let her do the picture; I know how he thinks. He said as much. I know he wants me to get you to stay. Listen, Met, without Glynn there may well not be any Arc at all, because Margolies was going to pull the plug on it this morning when they had breakfast; Pring was sure of that. He hated the new stuff Pring did on Right Time. And then he saw Glynn.…Met, it’s my only real guarantee, that film. I have to do it; I have to be with Pring through it. I have to know that that’s going to happen. He’ll marry me after Arc; I know he will, if not before. But Arc has to happen and it’s Glynn that Margolies is going to want.…”
I went over and put my hands on her shoulder and looked into her face.
“Baby, you must listen to me now,” I said. “I am not going to let Glynn come out here and do that movie. That is not ever, ever going to happen. If there was any other way I could help this…relationship…happen, I would do it, if you want it this badly. But Glynn will not do Joan and I will not let Caleb Pringle think I’m going to change my mind, because I’m not. And I’m not going to let Glynn think that, either. Or Mr. Margolies. It’s horribly, awfully dishonest; it’s playing games with people’s lives, my daughter’s chief among them. Surely you must see that.”
“I didn’t mean you had to change your mind about it,” she murmured. “But what’s so wrong with letting him think he just might have a chance? Just for this tiny little bit of time, Glynn would never have to know. In fact you’d never even have to mention it again; your going up there would be all he wanted. You could still tell him no after a day or two. Glynn wants to go stay with her friends, anyway—she wouldn’t even be around him. That way we could have a day or two together, you and I and Pring, then I could say well, I’ll stay a little while after Met and Glynn leave, and it would be a natural thing to do, and we’d be alone, and I could…it would work out. If not the movie, then Met, please, please, let me have the time at the lodge.”
She looked at me and saw the refusal in my face and put hers into her hands and began to cry. Her shoulders heaved and her hands shook, but the sobs were silent and terrible. I put my arms around her and held her against me. How many times, I thought dully, her pain seeping into the very core of me, had we stood like this? She impaled on her pain; I trying to absorb it.
“I don’t understand why the lodge is so important to you,” I said against her hair. “Can’t you stay in L.A. and see him? What is it that’s so special about the lodge?”
“Because it’s the place where he’s happiest, the place he loves most in the world. I want him to think of me in it; I want him to see me there and remember how it was, how good, how well I fit. And I have something I have to tell him, and I want it to be there; otherwise I don’t know…”
A coldness settled around my heart.
“What is it you have to tell him, Laura?” I said.
She shook her head against me, and then she looked up at me and it came out.
“I’m pregnant,” she said, beginning to cry again. “It’s his. I want this child, but I want him. I want him and me and the baby to be together, a real family, and I’m afraid.…I have to have some kind of insurance when I tell him. I know he loves kids, but I don’t know just how one will fit into his life now, and I’m scared. I cannot lose him, Met; it would kill me; I would die. That month that he didn’t call…I was already dead and in hell. I can tell him up there, in his place. Especially if he thinks there still might be a chance for Arc. Can you possibly, possibly see?”
I stared at her more in grief and an old, sucking despair than shock. The pregnancy was not a shock. I had always been surprised and grateful that it had not happened before. Or perhaps it had.
“Oh, Pie,” I said, my own tears beginning. “What on earth is going to happen to you?”
“That’s up to you,” she whispered. “That’s entirely up to you. Can’t you trade just one week of your life for the rest of mine? I’d be off your hands then.…Oh, dear God, I need this so much. I want this so much.”
I held her and rocked her, staring over her head at the blank steel door of the studio washroom, not seeing it. I want. I need. Only you, Met. Only you, Mom. Only you, Merritt. Help me. Fix it. Take care of me.…
Suddenly and violently I was sick of it, sick with the weight of all those cries, all those years. I was tired beyond thinking, tired beyond even the effort to speak. To speak, to explain, to say, once again, no. No, it isn’t good for you, no it isn’t good for Glynn, no.
I thought of Caleb Pringle’s words: “Up there in those redwoods it’s like being right under the eye of God…and the silence is so deep you can hear it.”
A week, I thought. A week in that healing silence and solitude. Days alone with my sister, days in which to make her see that a man who needed to be tricked was no man to hang a life on, to entrust a child’s life to. Days in which to find another answer.
And I thought of what we were headed back to, Glynn and I.
“Yes,” I said faintly. “All right. We’ll go. We’ll go and we’ll figure out something about the baby, you and I. But first we’ll sit down and look at the trees and just be very, very quiet, and we’ll do that for a long time.”
The sobs began again, and she hugged me so hard that I lost my breath.
“You’ll never do anything else for me as important as this,” she hiccuped. “I will love you for the rest of my life. I will love you beyond that.”
“Fix your face and come on back,” I said, wrapped close in this new shroud of tiredness and the stupid-simple peace that comes after a decision, any decision, is made.
“I have to go and call Pom. We have to call Marcie’s folks in Palo Alto and see if it’s all right for Glynn to visit.”
She nodded and I left. Through the door she called after me, “Don’t let him beat up on you, Met. Don’t let him punish you for this. When was the last time you had some time just for yourself? Don’t let him talk you out of that.”
I did not reply. I walked steadily back through the still-dim corridors toward the studio, thinking what I might possibly say to my husband. Nothing came. Probably, I thought, it was because I had never, since I married him, made a decision that did not have his best interests, or Glynn’s, at the core of it. I did not know how to explain my own need. And, I realized with amazement, I did not care. Pom had coped this far. He could cope for another week. I did not expect that he would embrace the decision, but perhaps he would begin to see that sometime over the past week one of the primary rules by which we operated our lives had changed, had had to.
And maybe he would not. All I felt at the moment was a simple curiosity to see which it would be and a need to get beyond the phone call that was so great it almost felt like labor, like childbirth.
Amy answered Pom’s private line.
“Oh, Merritt. Well, the prodigal wife at last,” she chortled merrily, or with what passed, with Amy, for merriment. “Was it Doctor you wanted? I’ll take a message, Doctor’s in a meeting until—”
“Get him, Amy,” I said. “Now.”
There was a long pause, and I heard her dialing Pom, and then his voice. “Merritt,” he said.
It was his voice, of course, but it sounded so flat and without affect that for a moment I thought Amy must have connected me with another office.
“Pom?” I said witlessly.
“Yes.”
“I’ve been trying to reach you. I left a number—”
“I got it, Met. I just didn’t call it.”
I knew then that he was still very angry with me, and that this conversation would have no good ending. But there was something else under his voice, a frailty or injury of some sort, that I had never heard before. Alarm flooded me, and pity, and the old, helpless love that Pom in trouble always called out. Could Mommee after all…
“I sincerely hope that you’re calling from the airport, Merritt,” he said, and the pity and love receded, along with most of the alarm. If Mommee had come to serious harm he would not resort to sarcasm.
“No.”
“Ah,” he said, and waited.
“Pom, I wanted to tell you that we’re going to spend another week in California,” I said, speaking rapidly and, I hoped, firmly. “Laura’s friend has offered us his lodge in the Santa Cruz mountains, south of San Francisco, and Glynn’s friends Marcie and Jessica are visiting Marcie’s father over in Palo Alto, and it’s very close to the lodge, and I’ve always wanted Glynn to see the redwood country, and so much has happened that I need to be still and sort it all out—”
“A lot has happened indeed,” he said. His tone was still level.
I could put it off no longer.
“Mommee…is Mommee all right?”
“No, Merritt, Mommee is out of her mind and as of tonight she’s out of the one decent place that would take her on short notice, and since you will be visiting the redwood country for another week I have no idea on God’s earth what will happen to her now. That’s how Mommee is.”
Guilt leaped and anger flared higher. Pity was still there.
“I’m sorry,” I said, meaning it. “I know she isn’t easy. Do you want to tell me?”
“Would it get you home?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Well, then, no. I don’t think I’ll bother. Oh, hell, Merritt, it’s just that…I went to see her this morning before work and she didn’t know who I was. She didn’t know me, Merritt. She’s been so traumatized by all this bouncing around, and all the unfamiliar people, that she’s gone into this kind of crazy fugue state; nobody can reach her. And they won’t keep her there—”
“Where’s there?”
“Lenox Meadows. That high-rise place in Brookhaven, the one all the Buckhead old people go to. I called Bob Scully, the director, a couple of days ago and as a favor to me they took her right in, and if I do say so myself it’s a nice place. It has everything, even a sunroom that’s been fixed up exactly like the one at the Cloister, you know, where the birdcages are? A lot of the people there are confused, and they think they’re back at Sea Island when they see it, and they settle right down.…Anyway, it seemed like the perfect solution. All sorts of services and frills: a hair styling salon and a pool and sauna and a nice restaurant and a private limo to shopping and the symphony and the arts center, you know…but it upset her so to be away from her family and her room that she just sort of flipped out, and she got into the sunroom and opened the birds’ cages and let them all out, and then at dinner she threw soup at the waitress. So I’ve got to move her by tonight. I was counting on you to bring her home this afternoon, Merritt. Now I don’t know what I’m going to do. My God, she actually thought I was going to hurt her! She didn’t know me—”
“Pom, I’m sorry. But you must see that Mommee’s gone beyond home care now. The sooner you can get her into a place that specializes in Alzheimer’s and senility, the better off she’ll be. Not we’ll be, Pom, she’ll be. You don’t need me to do that. I couldn’t admit her, anyway. You’d have to authorize it—”
“I don’t know any places like that,” he said, sounding lost and querulous.
Annoyance and the old pity warred in me; annoyance, for the moment, won.
“Pom, you’ve got a five-page list of places like that in your office right this minute. The social worker has it; I’ve seen it. Your office sends people there every day of the week; it’s part of the outreach and resources program, or whatever you call it. All you’ve got to do is pick up a phone. You don’t even have to do it; Amy would love to do it for you. You know good and well that if this Lenox Meadows place would take her immediately as a favor to you, any one of those places will. You’ve supported them for ages. You could have her in a nice room by the end of the workday. Amy would pick her up and take her, I’ll bet, if you sent a nurse along. Or maybe the limo could take her…”
There was a long silence. In it I had a picture of Mommee, roaring and careening around in the back of a huge limo, tiny finches darting in an agitated cloud about her head. At the wheel was Jesus. When he decanted her tenderly from the limo he would say, “You tell Orion O’Neill Jesus say ’allo, hah?” I thought for one desperate moment I was going to burst into idiot laughter.
“I’m not going to put my mother in one of those places,” Pom said, and the picture dissolved.
“Only poor people, huh?” I said in exasperation. “Pom, Mommee is way, way past noticing where she is. She isn’t going to know a new place from her old room. She isn’t going to know you from a…a turnip. The reason she doesn’t recognize you isn’t that she’s upset and traumatized or that you’ve hurt her, it’s that she has Alzheimer’s disease and that’s what eventually happens to people who have it. You’re a doctor, you know that. You see it every day. She isn’t going to get better if you bring her back home and we try again to look after her, and suddenly recognize you, and embrace you, and get back to normal. It doesn’t happen like that. You’re putting off the day she gets the kind of care that really can help her, and you’re condemning Glynn and me to another season in hell in the bargain. Without Ina I couldn’t manage it five minutes. Even with Ina, I couldn’t do the Mommee thing anymore. It’s killing our daughter. She’s so much better out here; you’d love seeing how well she is, and oh, Pom, so many wonderful things have happened to her, and she’s so anxious to tell you about them, and good things are coming up for Laura, too—”
“How nice,” he said coldly, “that you’re all having such a good time.”
“Pom, do you want your wife and daughter to be miserable? Is that it? How would that help things?” I said. My voice was trembling. Why couldn’t I get through to him? What would it take? Whatever, I obviously was not going to be able to do it over long distance, not when he was still torn with anger at us and terror and pity for his mother.
But I was past helping him there.
“There’s another reason, too,” I said. “Laura’s got sort of a problem. I think it can be settled in a week, and I feel sure I can help her work it out if I have some quiet time alone with her. But she’s not in very good shape right now, and I’m the only one who can—”
“I cannot remember a time in my life since I was acquainted with Laura that she did not have sort of a problem,” Pom broke in coldly. “What is it this time, booze again? Drugs? AIDS? What? What terrible calamity has befallen poor Laura that only you can fix up for her, Merritt? Whatever it is, I’m not going to have it spilling all over Glynn. I don’t know what the hell you’re thinking of. I want Glynn back here today, on that noon plane. I’m still not sure I’m not going to punish her for her attitude toward Mommee; I’m damned if I’m going to finance a grand tour for her right now. If you want to stay I can’t stop you, but I will not have Glynn—”
“I’ll call you from the lodge and give you the number when we get there,” I said over his escalating voice. It was not, now, Pom’s voice. “I’ll leave a message on the machine if you’re not in. We will be back in about a week. I am sorry about Mommee, sorrier than I can say, but you are the only one who can help her now. Sooner or later, Pom, you’ve got to cast your vote with the living. You don’t know how much I pray it’s sooner. I’ve missed you, and so has Glynn. We love you.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I can tell how much even over the phone.”
I let a beat or two go by, and then I said, not knowing until I spoke that I was going to say it, “Pom, did you have an affair with that Jamaican doctor you had on staff a few years ago? I forget her name—”
“I don’t know who you are anymore,” he said, and hung up.
I don’t either, I said to the dead phone, and put it back into its cradle. I went out into the little studio where everyone was waiting for me, bright-faced with anticipation.
“Marcie’s stepmother said for me to come ahead by all means,” Glynn caroled. “And Jess and Marcie are simply having shitfits about the screen test. ’Scuse me. I’m sorry. Did Dad…is it, you know, okay?”
“No problem,” I said. “Redwoods, here we come.”
Laura looked keenly at me and started to speak and then didn’t. Later, I would tell her all about it, and she would say something funny and awful and absolutely right, and put everything back into perspective, and the sly, thick sickness of the fight with Pom would melt out of my heart like rotting old ice. She could always do that. And in turn I would help her sort things out.
Meanwhile, to the north, the great trees waited, and the silence that was as deep and pure and old as the sea, and the sun burning through the morning fog to warm the thin air and touch our faces.…
“Let’s get this show on the road,” I said.
As I was hugging Caleb Pringle good-bye the earth beneath the parking lot gave a fishlike flop and a dolphin’s roll. I froze, clinging to Caleb, waiting. The tremor did not come again.
“Did the earth move for you?” he smiled down at me.
“No, but I’ll bet it would if we did that again,” I said lightly, my heart pounding in slow, dragging beats.
He laughed and hugged me once more, hard.
“What would I have done if Laura’s big sister hadn’t turned out to be a babe?” he said.
“Put her in a horror movie and made a gajillion dollars,” I smiled back. “See? I’m catching on.”
We got to Caleb Pringle’s mountain retreat long past dark, so I really did not see any of the surrounding country until the next day. But all the way through the tangle of suburban streets that stretched from San Jose to Saratoga I could feel the presence of the mountains to our west. Once we began to climb them, threading our way through the bewildering maze of small roads and trails that led up and over their crest and down into the Big Basin area, the unseen spires of the great redwoods seemed to lean so close over us in the little red car that we automatically spoke in near-whispers. Fog or low clouds augmented the darkness; it was like making our way through an endless tunnel whose walls were swirling gray. The silence was so dense and total that it seemed to have its own monolithic shape. Only the close-brushing branches of unfamiliar undergrowth broke the fog wall, and occasionally the red flash of wild watching eyes, or the ghostly shape of an animal whisking across the road in front of us. Twice we saw deer, and once a fox, and once something low and solid and scurrying that none of us could put a name to. By that time we were not speaking much. The darkness and the silence were oppressive, as was the growing sense that we were hopelessly lost in an alien moonscape where only inhuman things and towering, implacable giants tracked us.
We had met the dense June coastal fog just outside San Luis Obispo. It was scarcely past noon; we had left at nine and made remarkably good time up Highway 1, the old coast road. It had been Laura’s plan to drive up that way, taking our time and stopping wherever along the spectacular coast our fancy dictated. It would be, she said, a drive we would never forget: San Simeon, Big Sur, Carmel, Monterey. Perhaps we would break the trip for the night at Carmel, where a friend of hers had, she knew, an empty guest house, and then cut inland at Santa Cruz and follow Highways 9 and 236 up into the Big Basin area. Caleb Pringle’s private road snaked off there, up near the Santa Cruz County border.
I was as eager as a child to be on the road, sun and wind in my face and the cold blue sea always to our left. I thought of the magical flight through the desert and expected more of that, but somehow it did not happen. The sea, from Santa Monica on up, was wild and beautiful, and the low, empty hills to our right were sharp and clear and still green with the spring rains, and often blanketed so thickly with wildflowers that they looked like a pointillistic landscape, but somehow they failed to call out the wings in my heart as the desert had done. We made the first three hours in a jittering miasma born of something I could not put a name to. Occasionally I thought I could catch the shape of it, out of the corner of my eye, but it always eluded me. Gradually we stopped our forced chatter and singing and Laura found a faltering classical station on the radio, and we sank into it, taking our demons with us. My thoughts were as circular as a hamster’s treadmill: Pregnant. Laura is pregnant. Pregnant and in love with a man who is not going to marry her; I don’t know how I know that, but I do. Pregnant. What are we going to do about the baby? What is going to happen to her? How can I help her? Glynn: How can I help her keep some of this new fire and surety and not fall into all that phony movie stuff? I know I should get her away from here now, but how can I take her home while Pom is…the way he is? While there’s still Mommee hovering over us?
Pom: What can I say to Pom? How can I get him to change his mind about all this? How can I tell him how I’ve changed? How have I changed?
What is going to happen to Pom and me?
I did not know precisely what treadmills Laura and Glynn rode, but they were sufficient to silence them for long stretches of time. When we hit the fog and stopped for lunch, Laura called the local television station and found that the fog was solid up to San Francisco and not apt to lift for another twenty-four hours. “Let’s cut over to 101 and blitz it up to San Jose and on over from there.” she said. “There’s no fog inland. We can make it tonight easily; it might be after dark, but Pring gave me a good map and we can ask if we need to. I don’t know about you all, but I just want to be there.”
Glynn and I cried, “Let’s do it,” almost in unison, and we all three laughed in something like relief. I realized then that the old trees were calling them, too, with a voice that was as strong as a beat in the blood. We finished our abalone salad in haste and got back into the car. Laura put the top up against the damp chill of the fog and we were off again. Oddly, bowling inland along the flat, empty Carmel valley behind the coast range, the giddiness and hilarity came back, and the singing began again.
But now, bumping along the minimal little mountain roads, with me trying to read Caleb’s map by the dash light and Laura tight-lipped with concentration and Glynn silent as a stone in the backseat, hilarity had long since fled.
Finally, after we had inched along Highway 9 through the blackness for so long that I could not remember when we had last made a turn or seen a light, I said, “Maybe we should go back and ask somebody. If we’ve missed Caleb’s road and we run out of gas or something, we could never walk back to civilization.”
Laura turned her head to answer me and from the back-seat Glynn said, “There it is.”
And there it was, the upended log with the battered mail-box atop it that said “Pringle.” If Glynn had not seen it I doubt if we would have; the road was merely a narrow dirt track snaking off into the thick undergrowth. It might have been an old logging road, or no road at all.
“Good girl,” I said, relief flooding me. “You get the first shower.”
“We can all take showers at the same time,” Laura laughed, too. “There are four baths and a hot tub. This ain’t Green Acres, I don’t think.”
For a long time the track bumped along through under-growth and fog, climbing and dropping, climbing and dropping. There was no break at all in the wall of green and gray on either side of us. Then we passed a clearing on the right, and I could just make out the base of some sort of rough tower, rearing itself up into the fog, with a clutter of small lean-tos and a rough veranda at its base. The shape of some sort of big vehicle emerged from the swirling whiteness and then was lost again, and it seemed to me that there was a lot of equipment of some sort littered about the tower’s base. Far up in the fog a lone light burned yellow, as if it might have been cast by a lantern.
“The lair of the hermit,” Laura said. “The lodge ought to be on down the trail here.”
“The hall of the Mountain King,” Glynn said dreamily from the backseat.
“It could be, couldn’t it?” I said. “I think I like the lair of the hermit even better than I’m going to like the lodge. Can you just imagine what you’d see from the top there?”
“Can you just imagine climbing up those steps with a load of groceries or every time you had to go to the bathroom?” Laura said.
“Why would you do that?” Glynn said curiously. “I’d just pee in the woods. Who’d know?”
“I’ve been in the city way too long,” Laura laughed. “I need to pee in the woods. We all do. We’ll pee in the woods every chance we get. Give the hermit a thrill or two.”
The road dropped rapidly from the crest where the tower stood, and made a sharp turn, and we saw the lodge ahead, clinging to the side of a hill so steep that it looked like a cliff. Lights blazed through the fog, and I could see that it was large and rambling and fell down the cliff as if it had spilled there, or grown. In front of it was only a sea of drifting gray-white, but I sensed, rather than saw, immense space.
“Oh, Lord,” I said. “I take it back about the tower.”
No one spoke when we opened the door and walked into Caleb Pringle’s lodge. But I felt my breath stop in my throat and my heart rise up in the kind of joy I remember feeling on Christmas mornings, in those good years before my mother died. All around us light leaped and poured and ran as if melted down log walls and off great beams high in the cathedral ceiling and spread over the stones of a hearth as large as many motel rooms I had seen. It seemed to have many sources: the fire that roared in the hearth with a whispering bellow like a great wind; the immense copper hanging lamps; the old, smoky gold of the wood and log walls themselves; outsized leather sofas and chairs the color of maple syrup; the glowing Indian rugs that hung from the railing of a gallery that ringed the top floor, leaving the entire bottom floor one vast, open space. More jeweled rugs lay on the wide burnished boards of the floor, and the walls were hung midway up with a forest of antlers and the massive bleached skeletons of who-knew-what. One side of the big room was lined with furniture and paintings and bookcases and doors obviously leading to other rooms. The other was one sweep of small-paned glass in which all the light swarmed and pooled and danced. Curtains were drawn back so that you would see the entire panorama of whatever lay outside, but tonight, beyond the light, only fog lay there.
Then Glynn said, in a small voice, “Cool,” and Laura gave a whoop of sheer delight, and I laughed aloud with the radiance and energy and sheer, joyous excess of it.
“Welcome to hard times,” I said, and we flopped down into the lustrous swamp of the leather sofas and laughed and laughed and laughed.
We were still laughing when a man came out of one of the doors on the opposite wall of the room. We all stopped laughing as one and drew in a great collective breath. I pulled Glynn against me reflexively and prepared to thrust her behind me if he made so much as a move toward us. Laura made a small sound deep in her throat.
He was an apparition, a grotesque, something out of a pagan legend older than the earth of this young mountain range. He seemed, in the flickering firelight and reflected radiance of the window wall, taller than any normal being could possibly be, and darker, and as impassively inhuman as if he had been carved out of basalt. His skin was the color of old rawhide and he had thick black hair hanging over heavy brows and an enormous bush of black beard, and features so attenuated they might have been done by a medieval limner: long chin, long nose, high-ridged cheekbones, sharp brows. He looked like an El Greco painting of an American Indian, and he was literally covered in flowers.
Then he smiled, and white teeth split the black beard, and everything changed. I saw that he wore crooked wire-rimmed glasses on his nose, mended with what looked to be friction tape, and had small black coal-chips of eyes that danced with light when he smiled, and the beard was not a wild bush, after all, but a neatly trimmed felting that covered his jutting jaw like sleek fur. I smiled back, involuntarily. The white grin in all that darkness was utterly disarming.
“Hey,” he said.
“You must be Caleb’s hermit,” I said.
“You got it,” he said, and his voice had so much of the thick Mississippi River delta in it that my grin turned into a giggle. How could you not be safe in the presence of that voice? It was the very music of home.
“God, you scared us to death,” Laura snapped. “Couldn’t you have called out? Do you always just let yourself into Pring’s house whenever you want to? For all we knew you might be a murderer or a rapist or something—”
“I’m both flattered and sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know when you all would be getting in, and these posies came for you by way of the pissedest FedEx driver I have ever seen, and I thought I’d bring ’em on down here and put ’em in water for you, and then I heard your car and thought, well, I’ll light the fire and turn on the lights for them, welcome them, you know. I really am sorry. Caleb told me to take especially good care of you, too.”
“Well…okay. Thanks. That was nice of you,” Laura said, and walked toward him, holding out her arms for the flowers. Before she reached them she gave a short, sharp scream and backed up hastily.
“Jesus Christ, is that a rat on your shoulder?” she squeaked.
I looked, harder. It was. From a perch on his shoulder, leering foolishly from among the masses of larkspur and stock and baby’s breath, was…
“Rattus rattus!” I yelled. “I’d know that face anywhere! Excuse me, Mr.…whoever you are, but did you know you had a European black rat on your shoulder?”
He reached up and felt, and the rat ran up to his neck and nestled there, peering now from directly under his ear. It was not a small rat, either; this Rattus rattus had, as my beloved Felicia back in Baton Rouge used to say, undoubtedly, seen the elephant and heard the owl. He was big, fat, sleek, and obviously as comfortably at home on this man’s shoulder as he would have been in my woods at home.
“Goddamn, Forrest, I thought you were bedded down for the night,” the man said mildly, and shrugged his shoulder, and the rat disappeared from his shoulder. Through the flowers I saw it wriggle into his shirt pocket and settle there.
“Pardon us both, ladies. Again,” he said. “I’m used to him, but I know most people don’t like them. It’s not like they were cute little mice or ground squirrels. He’ll stay put now, and I’ve got to get on back. I’ll see he stays home from now on. I’m T.C. Bridgewater, by the way, Caleb’s hermit, as this lady has already noted.”
His smile widened, and I gave way to the laughter that was tickling at my mouth.
“Rattus rattus,” I gasped. “I feel absolutely at home. Do you know, I go swimming with them almost every day of my life? I live in a house by the river back home, and I’m supposed to take them down there and drown them, but instead I let them go, and they make for the water like Labrador retrievers, and there we all are, skinny-dipping in the Chattahoochee.”
I stopped laughing and blushed. Glynn and Laura and T. C. Bridgewater were all staring at me.
“Mom, do you really? I never knew that,” breathed Glynn. Laura said nothing, just stared from me to T. C. Bridgewater, who began to laugh. It was an infectious sound, deep and flat-out and young. It sounded younger than I thought he was: He looked, in the firelight, to be about Laura’s age. Maybe forty.
“Swim with the rats,” he said. “Forget the goddamn dolphins; go South and swim with the rats.”
All of a sudden he and I both were laughing so hard that we could not get our breath, gasping and bending at the waist, holding ourselves. Stopping and wiping our eyes and starting again. The sloped, distinctly untrustworthy head of Rattus rattus appeared over the flowers, nose quivering, and bobbed back down again. His pocket nest must be bouncing uncontrollably. I dissolved into a fresh gust of laughter.
When we finally stopped, Laura said sourly, “Well, now that the floor show is over, perhaps we can collect our flowers and let you and your rat be on your way, Mr.…Bridgewater, I think you said? We’ve had a long, long day.”
“Of course. Are you Ms. Mason? Laura Mason? There’s a package for you in the kitchen, too, and one for Miss Glynn Fowler.”
“I am,” Laura said. “The young, beautiful one is my niece, Glynn, and this crazy woman is my big sister, Merritt Fowler. The ratwoman of Atlanta. Thank you for the delivery and the fire and the welcome, and good night.”
He handed her the flowers and nodded to all of us and said, “I brought you down a pot of chili in case you didn’t stop for groceries. I can pick up whatever you need in the morning; I’ve got to go into town. Just bring me up a list before nine. And you know there’s a phone up at my place, too. Good night and once again, we apologize, Forrest and I. If you hear a dog barking don’t worry, it’s my Lab, Curtis. Good watchdog…”
“Good night, Mr. Bridgewater,” Laura said.
He opened the door and disappeared into the swirling fog. I heard him laughing all the way up to where, I thought, the trail turned. Then night and fog swallowed the sound.
“I hope he isn’t going to be the man who came to dinner,” Laura said. “God, these are gorgeous. Look, they’re to all of us, from Pring. What a darling.”
She smiled and buried her face in the blossoms.
“I never got any flowers before,” Glynn said. “They’re neat. So is the rat. And a dog…I’m glad there’s a dog.”
“Me, too. Maybe he’ll come sleep with you,” I said, hugging her, delight at nothing at all bubbling along my veins like champagne. The joy I had missed on the trip had lain up here all along, waiting for me.
Laura went into the kitchen and came back with two parcels wrapped in silver paper and tied with silver stretch cord. She was still smiling, a misty, tender smile. She looked very young. She handed one of the packages to Glynn and began to open the other.
“Pring does it in style when he does it,” she said.
“It’s not from Caleb,” Glynn said. She had ripped her package open and stood staring at the contents of the flat box. “It’s from Mr. Margolies. Mom; oh, Mom, look!”
I looked into her box. The cross that she had worn that morning in the screen test lay nested in cotton, with a card that said, “For the only Joan who should ever wear it. I hope she will. Regards, Leonard Margolies.”
“Mom, does he mean…” she lifted a radiant face to me.
“He only means that he thought you were very good,” I said. “But what a nice thing to do. It looked just right with your tunic. You can wear it with that.”
“Mama—”
“I’m not going to discuss this movie business anymore, now or ever, Glynn,” I said, and she saw in my face that I was not. She walked over and sank down into the sofa, fingering the cross, her eyes faraway. But she did not pursue it.
Damn that man, I thought fervently. Damn him and Caleb Pringle, too. I should take her home.
I looked over at Laura. “So what did he give you, Pie?” I said.
She did not answer. She sat holding something in her hands, her face still and blank. Then she looked up.
“He thinks I’m playing the Dauphine,” she said in a low, stricken voice. “He’s sent me this silver crown pin from Cartier, and a note that says ‘Vive la’dauphine and vive Arc!’ He’s got it all wrong; I’m sure Pring’s told him I’m doing the adult Joan. Oh, I’ve got to set this straight right now! I can’t let him think I’m playing that monster; not even for one more night.”
She scrambled to her feet.
“Where are you going?” I said. “It doesn’t matter, Pie; you know it’s just a misunderstanding. It can wait until morning. You can call him then or call Caleb. I don’t want you scrambling up that trail in this fog and dark, and climbing all the way to the top of that tower, it’s not safe—”
“I’m going,” she said in a tight, thin voice, and she grabbed up a leather jacket that hung on a peg beside the great front door and went out into the fog, the door banging behind her. Glynn and I sat and stared at each other, listening until her sliding, scrambling footsteps faded away completely. She still wore the soft, soleless driving moccasins she had slipped on that morning. I was afraid that she would fall on the treacherous path.
I was afraid of something else, too, but I would not let it into my mind, or put a name to it. I got up and helped Glynn bring our bags in, and stowed them into the bedrooms we chose off the main room—low-ceilinged, beamed, dark, intimate, places to nest in all the wilderness…and then we went into the kitchen and I heated up the chili and made coffee and cocoa for Glynn. We waited and waited, and finally we ate, sitting at the huge, scrubbed trestle table. Food, I thought mindlessly, and then a long, hot shower, and then bed.
I did not hear the front door open, and only when she stood there did I look up suddenly and notice Laura. She was misted all over with droplets of fog; they stood in her hair and on the scarred, buttery old leather of the jacket she wore. Her feet were wet with black mud and there were smears on both hands and the knee of her jeans, as if she had slipped on the path and caught herself on her palms. There was a thin scratch across her cheek, shockingly red against the pallor. I knew that a branch had whipped her face. Her eyes looked like the eyes of someone who had just been taken from deep, cold water after a long time: black-pupiled, blind.
“Laura?” I said tentatively. The fear roared alive like a brush fire.
“It wasn’t a mistake,” she said tonelessly. “I’m the Dauphine. I’m playing the monster in Arc. I’m both Pring’s and Margolies’s choice. They decided after they saw Glynn’s test. Or so Pring said. I think he always meant me to be the monster. He doesn’t make casting mistakes. Margolies’s tootsie is going to be the older Joan. Interesting idea, isn’t it? To have me seduce my own niece?”
Glynn looked from me to Laura, and back.
“Mama?” she said doubtfully. Her face, too, was white, and her eyes huge.
“There isn’t any question of your doing this movie, so don’t worry about it,” I said as calmly as I could. “I want you to go get your bath and get into bed now. I need to talk to Aunt Laura. We’ll sort it all out in the morning; it’s a mistake and nothing more. Go on, now, Tink.”
“Please don’t call me that,” she said, but she went. I turned back to Laura.
“Come and have some coffee, at least, and let’s talk about this,” I said, holding out my hands to her. “There’s got to be some misunderstanding; he wouldn’t put you in that part—”
“He has. He did. He just told me on the phone. He said there were extenuating circumstances, but that it was a much meatier part than Joan, and it could turn out to be the role of a lifetime for me, and he’d make it all okay this weekend.”
“Then let’s get some rest and have a lovely, mindless, utterly worthless two or three days just bumming around, and he’ll do just that when he comes,” I said soothingly, not believing it. My head pounded with her pain.
“I don’t want any dinner,” she said, still not raising her voice. “I’m tired and I want to go to bed. No, Met, I don’t want to talk anymore, can’t you understand that? Just…no more.”
“At least have a glass of milk. You need to eat now, Laura—”
“Yeah,” she said, smiling a truly terrible smile. “The monster’s baby needs its nourishment, doesn’t it? Otherwise its daddy won’t love it.”
And she went into her bedroom and shut the door. A moment later I heard the sound of the lock. I stood listening, but there were no more sounds. Finally I looked in on Glynn, who was fast asleep, and went into the kitchen to put our dinner things into the dishwasher.
Tomorrow, I thought. Tomorrow the sun will be shining and everything will look different, and we will find that this whole ugly, awful business is a mistake.
And when I woke the next morning, after a night of roiling, sweating dreams, so early that only the first sleepy twitters from birds I did not yet know broke the old sea silence, the sun was indeed fingering its way down through the crowns of the great trees, and the little grassy area outside my window, where we had parked, was as clear as if every blade and leaf had been traced in silver. But the red car was gone from it, and when I looked into my sister’s bedroom, she was gone, too.