An April Afternoon

by Philip Wylie

  That left the servants, and I had some fun. A new dress for Anne and a scandalous collection of anecdotes about high society. A pipe for Berry and a subscription to Ballyhoo. . . .

  I caught the six o'clock and was late for dinner.

  At dinner I broke the news:

  ' Whom do you think I ran into while I was in Saks this morning?"

  Neither Virginia nor John could think of whom I ran into at Saks.

  ' The Weyburns!"

  John made his demitasse say, "Who the devil are the Weyburns?"

  Virginia supplied the data. "I know! He's your boy-scout classmate who married a girl scout! Remember, John? They week-ended here a couple of years ago with the Howards? Wore out all the horses, ate all our food, took ten years off the parquet in the living room teaching us how to truck, and went away with a hullabaloo that didn't die out until they reached Greenwich?"

  I nodded. "That's the Weyburns."

  "What people! I bet they don't turn out the electric lights when they go to bed. I bet they blow them out like candles! What were they doing in New York? Pushing over buildings?"

  "Unh-unh. Getting ready to spend the holidays at their ranch in Wyoming. They asked me to go, and I said I would."

  "For Christmas?" John's voice was startled.

  This was the crucial moment. "For Christmas. I know it seems like abandoning ship--but I thought maybe you'd understand the impulse that made me accept. Larry and Ivan will be here and--"

  John avoided my eyes. "Frankie, if you think what's happened is going to open up any schism here at home--"

  "It's not that, John. I just felt that I couldn't stick it here around Christmas. It's selfish, but I want to get out and bust around in the snow with people who don't have anything on their minds more emotional than what's for dinner." I looked at Virginia.

  "Bill will be here, too."

  She glanced at her father and then at me. She spoke softly. "I understand that, don't you, John? Frankie's been sitting like a rock through all this, and we ought to give him a leave of absence."

  "Hell," John said after a moment, "we'd give him a solid gold submarine if he wanted it." He turned to me and his face shone warmly. "We'll stock you up with buffalo robes and foot-heaters and Indian guides and send you off with our blessing."

  It was as easy as that.

  Five days later I was on my way.

  I stayed along enough to establish my alibi. Then I started for California.

  CHAPTER XIII

  The Weyburns put me on the train. They would have liked to have "poured" me on, and they might well have carried me on, but I succeeded in dodging the majority of their stirrup-cups and I had been abstemious to some degree in the matter of outdoor sports. The word "sport," in fact, is an odd one to apply to activities which are always exhausting, generally dangerous, and frequently painful. It has been my observation that some people are made of tougher protoplasm than others--and that the nervous systems of the hardier few record only very grave injury. Thus I find myself quite conscious of such minor damages as bruises, wrenches, strains, abrasions, floor-burns, blisters, cuts, scratches, scrapes, bumps, black eyes, loosened teeth, broken nails, slivers, thorns, ivy poison, bee stings, spider bites, chilblains, frost bites, and also hangovers--but the Weyburns and others of their ilk suffer pain from nothing less than a compound fracture.

  It is my hunch, furthermore, that a great many of those heroes who have carried important dispatches in their saddle-bags, and, at the same time, arrows in their loins, had ganglia like the Weyburns. I was worse for the wear, beyond peradventure, but I had had a pretty good time.

  Perhaps I may have given a wrong impression of myself in these anfractuous memoirs. I've spoken often about my lameness and about its psychical effect upon me.

  Then I've said that I swam well, and I was now on the point of recounting my adventures while skiing and snowshoeing with my Wyoming host and hostess. If I have implied a paradox, it was unintentional.

  Maybe my consciousness of imperfection is overdetermined. If so, it is due, first, to memories of my youth, when I used crutches--and second, to my deep feeling for Virginia who is as near to perfection as a mortal may be. My right leg, which never completely recovered, is neither shorter nor smaller than my left, but it tires more easily and co-ordinates less exactly, so that, although many people insist that my limp has become negligible, and although it seldom inhibits my participation in any event, I am forever aware of it.

  I note also that there are thousands of estimable people who would regard that self-consciousness as absurd--who would not only ignore such an affliction as mine but forget it. The attitude has often been forcefully urged on me, and my only answer is that I am different--my philosophy of life is different.

  Anyway, the Weyburns put me aboard a Pullman and threw snowballs at my window when the train pulled out.

  I shut the door of my compartment and went through the rite of transforming myself from a muffled nomad on the white Wyoming slopes to a tentative adventurer in human relations. My reservations at the Desert Flower Inn were under the name of Smith.

  Naturally I would have to be incognito while I was in California. My face is not so familiar to the public that I was in any fear of being recognized, but my name is well enough known so that I would not dare register it at a hotel.

  I had not told Connie that I was coming. I reached Palm Springs before dawn on the nineteenth of December.

  It is a dramatic place. Above the patterned carpet of the surrounding desert--vast, vertical, frost-headed--rises Mount San Jacinto. Because its draws and gullies are lost in its immensity, the desert seems flat. And it is not bare--upon it grow greasewood, smoke trees, willows, palms, sagebrush, mesquite, and everywhere the tortured nodes and lumps of cacti. Beyond all those are lesser mountains which, at the two extremities of day, turn lavender, pink, purple, chocolate, beige--a tumultuous edge of the world, down which blue canyon systems run like the veins of leaves.

  Between the chill of night and the first hot thrust of the sun there is no interval, and as I was driven from the train to the hotel, the transformation occurred. The lunar land around me had been cool, pungent, and pastel-colored. The sun came, and it was a crucible. We sped through the awakening town--a thousand red tile roofs, Spanish façades, a big bell in a white stucco tower, archways, water rushing from the mountain through an irrigation ditch with a sound like a vibraphone, eucalyptus smoke, and the smell of waffles and coffee, a bicycle bell, and jazz music from a radio in a house hanging high above the dusty road among henna boulders.

  I liked it. It was stunningly beautiful; the air was charged and stimulating; the people looked friendly; and in spite of bicycle bells and waffle smells, it seemed raw and vivid--a jumping-off place--old, historic--and romantic as the devil.

  My rooms in the Desert Flower Inn might well have stood upon a spot where eighty-five years ago some covered wagon expedition was scalped to a man or perished of thirst. But they contained, nevertheless, the quintessence of today's American elegance: many windows, thick carpets, tall mirrors, sleek and efficient bureaus and vanities, closets lined with cedar, beds that expressed sleep by their very touch, elaborate fixtures of chrome steel and colored vitreous materials, indirect lights, half-hidden vents for conditioned air--which was chilled when the sun blazed and warmed on crystalline nights, framed paintings bought in Mexico by a decorator who had taste and imagination, an open fireplace and a basket of prepared wood, a desk, tables, luggage racks, and telephones--all that is meant by modernity--the world waiting for a button-push.

  I tipped the bellboy and went out on the balcony. Below me was a patio, full of flowers, flagstones, and little bridges which crossed a miniature arrangement of ornamental canals. A Jap was weeding the flowers. Two men with hoses were scrubbing the flagstones. A bellboy in a green and gold uniform was hurrying through the bright fragrance of the place.

  I whistled and he looked up. "Can you get a waiter to bring me some orange juice an
d coffee?"

  "You bet."

  I grinned at that. You bet. It was, indeed, the West. When I had finished my coffee, I unpacked. Then I bathed. I dawdled over closets and bureau drawers and over my ablutions too. It was nine o'clock before I allowed myself to phone the Yucca Inn and ask for Barney Colby's apartment.

  Connie answered the phone.

  I said, "Hello, Connie. This is Frankie."

  I could hear my heart beat.

  She spoke after a long silence and in a whisper. "Frankie! Where are you? What's happened? What's wrong?"

  I felt as expansive and as ecstatic inside myself as it was outdoors. "Nothing's wrong, Connie! And I'm in Palm Springs! At the Desert Flower Inn, under the name of Franklyn Smith. Same initials--"

  "Frankie," she said softly, "you darling! Oh, you darling!"

  "It's certainly a beautiful place you have out here. I hope Barney isn't going to mind this trick I've pulled--"

  "--I thought sometimes you'd do something like this, and then I thought how silly I was to think it! You'll have to pardon me for being a little inarticulate, but I'm just this side of fainting! Of course Barney won't mind--he'll love it!--"

  Then we got talking simultaneously, and neither made much sense of what the other said, but it didn't matter.

  Ten minutes later we met at a restaurant on the main street for a second breakfast, both for them and for me. They had had their first meal at seven o'clock on a breakfast ride. I should have realized that an explorer would be an early riser. It would have saved a lot of that dawdling.

  I was standing under a palm tree. They drove up in a yellow roadster. Connie just jumped out and grabbed me and cried. Barney parked the car and came up, holding out his right hand and smiling. I looked at that smile with attention, but it was all right.

  When finally he had a chance to speak, his voice was as sound as a new dollar:

  "This is just the thing Connie--and that means both of us--needed to make it all perfect!

  Frankie, we're going to give you an honorary degree in heroic diplomacy and see what we can do about a post for you abroad."

  "Tell me," Connie said, "everything."

  So we sat while the sunshine became hotter and I told them everything. That is, almost everything. Not too much about Bill Bush and Virginia, and of course I didn't amplify what I had put in my letters about the attitudes of John and the others.

  We sampled the waffles I had smelled and over them conducted one of those breathless, dactylic conversations which an outsider would have found incomprehensible.

  An outsider would have known instantly, however, that the lovely woman involved in our talk was being made very happy by it. John's business, Larry's Wheezie, Ivan's enthusiasm about his professors of medicine, when Fall had come at Fort Sheffield, what Martha had to say about Connie's running away--we covered a hundred topics.

  And for the time being, I just reported things and watched them. There wasn't a change in Connie superficially. Whether or not there was a deeper change I could decide only by longer observation. She had always been radiant; she was now. And Barney was his imperturbable self: I will never get out of my mind that picture of him standing over a dead rhinoceros. Even in slacks, a sport shirt, a homespun coat, and immaculate sport shoes, he looks as if he should be holding in his hand a high-powered rifle with telescopic sights and standing on something big and dead.

  They were both as tan as prospectors.

  It was nearly twelve when we stopped talking. . . .

  Early afternoon found us sitting on a terrace beside a swimming pool. At one end a fountain played continually. At the other were steel cross-struts and horizontal diving boards, from which a succession of young men and women flung themselves into the air.

  They whirled, twisted, arched, floated, and always entered the water with identically out-stretched hands and pointed toes. The luncheon concert being mellifluously rendered under the painted beams of the dining room in the Yucca Inn was rebroadcast over the tinkling monotone of the fountain. Waiters came up to the pool in diminutive motor trucks and served meals from hot aluminum containers. A plane circled and descended where, with only machetes, an airport had been made on the sand. San Jacinto glittered above us:--sun, snow, green trees against an inverse blue abyss.

  "It's just like heaven," Connie said.

  Barney grinned. "The first people that came across this desert must have thought the opposite."

  ' I'll bet they did. Imagine this without any water--"

  "You don't need to imagine. All you need to do is drive about a mile out of town and you're in it. Then think of walking hundreds of miles through it."

  "It's a wonder that they got here at all."

  He picked up an iced raw carrot and bit it. "Most of them didn't."

  "No." Connie shut her eyes and drew a breath and opened them again, erasing from her mind the picture of those who had failed to cross the desert--those whose bones were even now occasionally found in bleached testimony of disaster.

  A child with a familiar face walked down the steps into the pool, tossed back a heavy curl, and threw herself gleefully into the water. For a moment I thought that I knew the child, and my memory began to search for parents to identify it. The same thing happened to Connie.

  Then we realized with exclamations that the excited little girl in the water was not the daughter of a friend, but a famous moving picture star--familiar because her face laughed from a thousand billboards and looked charmingly from ten thousand advertisements. The child appeared to be alone, but presently we discovered her mother, watching and knitting. She was a woman with a quiet and somewhat humorous face, who kept a mother's eye upon the girl. We noticed more. Beside an orange tree, lounging in seeming indolence but actually alert, was a tall, thick-shouldered man--a bodyguard.

  Connie explained the scene to Barney. And Barney did not believe it at first. But the little girl swam to the edge of the pool near us.

  "Hello," she said.

  We said, "Hello."

  "You ought to come in swimming."

  "We're just eating our lunch." Connie replied.

  "Oh--but it's very late for that."

  "I know. You see, we didn't get up until late."

  The child nodded. She looked steadfastly at Barney, as any other child would look. "How did you get so very tan? I don't know what to call you. My name's Dorothy."

  The naïvete and naturalness had brought sudden tears to Connie's eyes.

  Barney answered. "Well, Dorothy, this tan of mine's a cumulative tan."

  "Is that the darkest kind?"

  His eyes twinkled. "In a sense. You see, I got one layer of it in Africa, and one in India, and another in a place called Komodo--"

  Dorothy giggled. "That's a funny name! Africa's where lions come from. Did you see any lions?"

  "Hundreds," Barney said off-handedly--as a man should say such a thing for such a little girl.

  "Did you shoot any?"

  "Several."

  "I thought you did," Dorothy replied somewhat inexplicably. "Jim's got a gun, but I don't believe he ever shot a lion with it. Do you want to see Jim's gun?"

  "Who's Jim?"

  "My bodyguard," she said in a matter-of-fact way. "You see, I'm in moving pictures, and people might want to get too close to me, and I'm very little, so I have to have a bodyguard all the time. I didn't tell you I was in moving pictures, because most everybody guesses right away."

  "How old are you?" Connie asked suddenly.

  "Seven and a half." She looked at Barney. "What's your name?"

  "Barney."

  "Mr. Barney?"

  "No, Barney Colby. Only we call everybody by their first names, pretty much.

  This is Connie, Dorothy. And this is Frankie."

  "That's a funny way for grown-up people to do!" The little girl realized that her statement had been rude. "I guess I'd like it, though. But I don't know if my mother would allow me to call you by your first names." She thought that over.
Then a new idea came into her head. Rather, an old one returned. She yelled, "Hey, Jim! Come over here! I got some friends! They want to see your revolver."

  Jim walked, somewhat embarrassedly, from under the orange-laden tree and said,

  "How are you?" to us. Then he turned to Dorothy. "Don't you reckon these people have seen lots of revolvers, Dorothy?"

  She was faintly disappointed. "Yes, I guess so, Jim."

  An instant later, her eyes lighted up. "Barney's been to Africa. He's shot lions.

  Will you tell me a story about lions some day, Barney? Do you shoot bullets clear through them, or do the bullets stop inside? Maybe if you'll come over to our villa at half-past four, Mother will give you a cocktail. I'll ask her. You can come, too, Connie. You also, Frankie." She swam away in the direction of her mother, saying in a loud voice,

  "Lions and tigers! Lions and tigers! Lions and tigers!"

  Connie turned toward the detective. "She's amazing! I don't know why, but I've always imagined that such a child would be hopelessly spoiled."

  He nodded thoughtfully at her. "Some of 'em are. Depends on the parents, don't it?"

  Her eyes strayed out over the golf course where men were murmuring and walking, and the click of a shot sometimes attracted one's gaze to a white speck, magically soaring above palm trees and cedars against the pale blue sky.

  I knew what she was thinking: The child's bodyguard had said, "Depends on the parents, don't it?" It had made her wonder what sort of parent she had shown herself to be. I realized that all through Connie's future, she would encounter accidental mnemonics--inadvertent critiques--unlucky wounds.

  Sometime after lunch, I began to feel drowsy and lay back in my chair with my eyes shut, thinking less about Connie and more about Barney. He seemed like a kindly and even gentle man, and I suppose Connie thought of him in that way. But behind his seeming, I could detect a harder personality--a personality that was dangerous because it was immature and therefore capable of excesses both generous and destructive. As if my thinking of him brought the devil up, an incident took place right at that moment which showed not a present function but a past act of Barney's in that very category of behavior.