I was still chilly a half-hour, crossing the pass to Nopal Valley. Even at its summit the highway was wide and new, rebuilt with somebody’s money. I could smell the source of the money when I slid down into the valley on the other side. It stank like rotten eggs.
The oil wells from which the sulphur gas rose crowded the slopes on both sides of the town. I could see them from the highway as I drove in: the latticed triangles of the derricks where trees had grown, the oil-pumps nodding and clanking where cattle had grazed. Since ’thirty-nine or ’forty, when I had seen it last, the town had grown enormously, like a tumor. It had thrust out shoots in all directions: blocks of match-box houses in raw new housing developments and the real estate shacks to go with them, a half-mile gauntlet of one-story buildings along the highway: veterinarians, chiropractors, beauty shops, marketerias, restaurants, bars, liquor stores. There was a new four-story hotel, a white frame gospel tabernacle, a bowling alley wide enough to house a B-36. The main street had been transformed by glass brick, plastic, neon. A quiet town in a sunny valley had hit the jackpot hard, and didn’t know what to do with itself at all.
More had changed than the face of the buildings, or the number and make of the cars. The people were different and there were too many of them. Crowds of men whose faces were marked by sun and work and boredom walked in the streets and in and out of the bars, looking for fun or trouble. Very few women showed on the main street. The blue-shirted cop on the main corner wore his holster on the front of his hip, with the flap unbuttoned and the gun-butt showing.
Trail Road turned off to the right on the far side of the town, and climbed through the oil fields to a gently sloping mesa which overlooked the valley. As it climbed it dwindled down to a narrow blacktop looping up the side of the sunbaked hill. The mountains rose sheer in front of the nose of my car, starkly shadowed by the declining light. A long, low house half-hidden by giant oaks sat in the middle of the mesa, as indigenous as a boulder. Before I reached it I had to stop and open a gate which barred the road. On either side of it a six-foot cyclone fence topped by strands of barbed wire stretched out of sight.
The road inside the gate was freshly gravelled, and sentineled by twin rows of young palms. There were a couple of cars parked in the circular drive that curved around in front of the house. One was the old Packard sedan I had seen in front of the Quinto Theatre. I left my car beside it and crossed the terraced lawn, dodging the rainbowed spray from a sprinkling system.
The house was built of adobe brick the color of the earth, pressed down to the earth by a heavy red tile roof, and massive as a fortress. A deep veranda ran along its front. I climbed the low concrete steps. A woman in a red sweater and slacks was curled like a scarlet snake in one corner of a green canvas porch swing. Her head was bent over a book, and red harlequin spectacles gave her shadowed face a look of queer concentration. The concentration was real; she gave no sign of hearing me or seeing me until I spoke:
“Excuse me. I’m looking for Mrs. Slocum.”
“Excuse me.” She looked up in real surprise, her eyes refocusing like a sleeper’s, and flicked the spectacles off. It was Cathy Slocum; I hadn’t recognized her until then. The glasses and the look they gave her had added ten years to her age, and the shape of her body was misleading. It was one of those female bodies that bloomed very young. Her eyes were large and deep like her mother’s, and she had better lines. I could understand the chauffeur’s passion for her. But she was very young.
“My name is Archer,” I said.
She gave me a long, cool look, but didn’t know me. “I’m Cathy Slocum. Is it mother or grandmother you want to see?”
“Mother. She asked me to the party.”
“It’s not her party,” she said under her breath to herself. A spoiled-little-girl look made two black vertical lines between her eyebrows. Then she remembered me, and smoothed them out, and asked me very sweetly: “Are you a friend of mother’s, Mr. Archer?”
“A friend of a friend’s. Would you like my Bertillon measurements?”
She was clever enough to get it, and young enough to blush. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be rude—we see so few strangers.” Which might account for her interest in a rough-talking chauffeur named Reavis. “Mother’s just come up from the pool, and she’s dressing, and father hasn’t come home. Would you care to sit down?”
“Thank you.” I followed the tall fine body to the swing, amused by the fact that it contained an adolescent who had to be reminded of her manners. Not a usual adolescent, though. The book in her hand, when she laid it down on the cushion between us, turned out to be a book on psychoanalysis by Karen Horney.
She began to make conversation, swinging the spectacles back and forth by one end: “Father’s rehearsing a play in Quinto, that’s what the party’s about. He’s really a very fine actor, you know.” She said it a little defensively.
“I know. Much better than the play.”
“Have you seen the play?”
“I caught a scene of it this afternoon.”
“And what did you think of it? Isn’t it well written?”
“Well enough,” I said, without enthusiasm.
“But what do you really think of it?”
Her look was so candid and girlish that I told her. “They should jack up the title and build a new play under it and change the title. If what I saw was a fair sample.”
“But everyone who’s seen it thinks it’s a masterpiece. Are you interested in the theatre, Mr. Archer?”
“Do you mean do I know what I’m talking about? Probably not. I work for a man in Hollywood who deals in literary properties. He sent me up to look at it.”
“Oh,” she said. “Hollywood. Father says it’s much too literary for Hollywood, and it’s not written to a formula. Mr. Marvell plans to take it to Broadway. Their standards are much subtler, don’t you think?”
“Much. Who is Mr. Marvell? I know he’s author-director of the play…”
“He’s and English poet. He went to Oxford, and his uncle’s a lord. He’s a good friend of father’s, and father likes his poetry and I tried to read some of it but I couldn’t understand it. It’s awfully difficult and symbolic, like Dylan Thomas.”
The name rang no bell. “Is your father going along, when Marvell takes the play to New York?”
“Oh, no.” The swinging spectacles described a full circle and struck against her knee with an audible tap. She put them on again. They lengthened and aged her face, and gave it piquancy. “Father’s just helping Francis out. He’s putting it on to try and get some backing. Father has no histrionic ambitions, though he is a really fine actor, don’t you think?”
A mediocre amateur, I thought. I said: “No question about it.” When the girl mentioned her father, as she frequently did, her mouth went flower-soft and her hands were still.
But when he mounted the veranda a few minutes later, with Marvell skipping beside him up the steps, she looked at James Slocum as if she were afraid of him. Her fingers interlaced and strained against each other. I noticed that the nails were bitten stubby.
“Hello, father.” The words left her mouth ajar, and the tip of her tongue moved along her upper lip.
He walked toward us purposefully, a middle-sized, thin-chested man who should have had a Greek torso to support his startling head. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you, Cathy.” The sensitive mouth was stern. “I expected you to wait for me at the theatre.”
“Yes, father.” She turned to me. “Do you know my father, Mr. Archer?”
I stood up and said hello. He looked me over with his sad brown eyes, and gave me a limp hand as an afterthought. “Francis,” he said to the blond man at his shoulder: “See if you and Archer can find a drink for yourselves. I’d like to have a moment with Cathy here.”
“Right.” Marvell touched me in the small of the back, ushering me to the front door. Cathy watched us go. Her father stood looking down at her with one hand on his hip, the other at his chin, in an ac
torish pose.
We entered a living-room as dim and cool as a cave. The windows were few and small, masked by Venetian blinds which laid horizontal bars across the light. The barred light fell on a floor of black oak, partly covered with faded Persian rugs. The furniture was heavy and old: a rosewood concert grand at the end of the room, carved elaborately to nineteenth-century taste, stiff-backed chairs of mahogany, a tapestried divan in front of the deep fireplace. The beams that supported the time-stained plaster ceiling were black oak like the floor. A chandelier of yellowing crystal hung down from the central beam like a misshaped stalactite.
“Queer old place, what?” Marvell said to me. “Well, what shall it be, old boy? A Scotch and soda?”
“Fine.”
“I expect I’ll have to look you up some ice.”
“Don’t bother.”
“No bother at all. I know where everything is.” He trotted away, his light hair flying in the wind of his own motion. For the nephew of a lord, he was very obliging. I myself was the nephew of my late Uncle Jake, who once went fifteen rounds with Gunboat Smith, to no decision.
I tried to remember what my Uncle Jake looked like. I could remember the smell of him, compounded of bay rum, hair oil, strong clean masculine sweat and good tobacco, and the taste of the dark chocolate cigarettes he brought me the day my father took me to San Francisco for the first time; but I couldn’t remember his face. My mother never kept his pictures, because she was ashamed to have a professional fighter in the family.
The murmur of voices drew me to a window which open outward onto the veranda. I sat down in a straight chair against the wall, hidden from outside by the heavy drapes and the half-closed blind. Cathy and her father were talking on the swing.
“I didn’t see him afterwards,” she said tensely. “I walked out and got in the car and drove myself home. He wasn’t even in sight.”
“But I know he drove you home. I saw his cap on the front seat of the car just now.”
“He must have left it before. I swear I didn’t see him after.”
“How can I believe you, Cathy?” The man’s voice held genuine torment. “You’ve lied to me before, about him, too. You promised me you’d have nothing to do with him, or any other man, until you were older.”
“But I didn’t! I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“You let him kiss you.”
“He made me. I tried to get away.” A trace of hysteria came into her voice like a thin entering wedge.
“You must have encouraged him in some way. A man doesn’t act like that without a reason, surely. Think about it, Cathy, didn’t you do or say something which might have led him on?” He was trying to be cool and fair, the impersonal cross-examiner, but hurt and rage buzzed like blundering insects in his tone.
“Led him on, father. That’s a hideous thing to say.” The onset of sobbing rocked her words.
“Darling,” he said. “Poor darling.” The swing creaked as he leaned toward her, and the sobs were smothered. “I didn’t mean to hurt you, Cathy, you know that. It’s simply because I love you that I’m so concerned about this—this ugly thing.”
“I love you too, father.” The words were muffled, probably by his shoulder.
“I wish I could believe that,” he said gently.
“But I do, father, I do. I think you’re the best man in the world.”
There was something queer about the conversation, made stranger still by the girl’s extreme urgency. They could have been two lovers, of the same age.
“Oh, Cathy,” he said brokenly. “What am I going to do about you?”
A third voice entered the colloquy: “What are you trying to do to her, James?” It was Maude Slocum’s voice, and it was cold with anger.
“This is no affair of yours,” he answered.
“I should think it is. She is my daughter, you know.”
“I’m well aware of that, my dear. It doesn’t necessarily follow that she can’t have a good, decent life.”
“She won’t have if you go on like this, stirring her up and torturing her nerves.”
“For heaven’s sake, mother.” Cathy spoke as if the older woman were the child. “The way you talk about me, you’d think I was a bone for two dogs to fight over. Why can’t you treat me like a human being?”
“I try to, Cathy. You’ll never listen to me. I know something about these things—” She faltered.
“If you know so much, why don’t you put them into practice? There’ve been nothing but scenes in this family since I was old enough to talk, and I’m sick of it.”
The girl’s footsteps crossed the veranda, and the elder Slocums were silent. A full minute passed before the woman said, in a voice I barely recognized: “Leave her alone, James. I’m warning you.”
The throaty whisper made the short hairs prickle at the back of my neck.
Chapter 4
I moved to the center of the room and leafed through a Theatre Arts magazine that was lying on a table. In a little while Marvell came back with a bowl of ice, glasses, Scotch, and soda, clinking together on a myrtlewood tray. “Excuse the delay, old man. The housekeeper’s busy making canapés, and gave me absolutely no help at all. Do you like it strong?”
“I’ll pour my own, thanks.” I made a tall highball with plenty of soda. It was still early, a few minutes after five by my watch.
Marvell made himself a short one and took it in two gulps, his Adam’s apple bobbing like a soft egg caught in his throat. “The Slocums aren’t inhospitable,” he said, “but they’re nearly always late. One has to fend for oneself. Cathy informs me you’re a literary agent?”
“Of a kind. I work for a man who buys fiction if he thinks it has movie possibilities. Then he tries to interest a producer, or make a package deal with a star.”
“I see. Would I know the gentleman’s name?”
“Probably not. I’m not allowed to use his name, anyway, because it’s worth money. It bids up prices.” I was improvising, but I knew twenty men in the game, and some of them operated like that.
He leaned back in his chair and hitched one thin knee over the other. His legs were pale and hairless above the drooping socks. His pale blond gaze seemed lashless. “You don’t seriously think my play is cinematic? I’ve sought a rather difficult beauty, you know.”
I dipped my embarrassment in whiskey and soda, and waited for it to dissolve. It stayed where it was, a smiling mask on my face. “I never make snap decisions. I’m paid to keep tabs on the summer theaters, and that’s what I do. There’s a lot of young acting-talent floating around. In any case, I’ll have to see all of your play before I can make a report.”
“I noticed you there this afternoon,” he said. “What did happen before that frightful scene between Cathy and her father?”
“I wouldn’t know. I was watching the play.”
He got up for another drink, moving sideways across the room like a shying horse. “The girl’s quite a problem,” he said over his shoulder. “Poor dear James is positively hag-ridden by his womenfolk. A less responsible man would simply decamp.”
“Why?”
“They bleed him emotionally.” He smiled palely over his second drink. “His mother began it when he was a very small boy, and it’s gone on for so many years that he actually doesn’t know he’s being imposed upon. Now his wife and daughter are carrying on the good work. They’re wasting the dear man’s emotional substance.”
He realized then that he was talking too much, and changed the subject abruptly: “I’ve often wondered why his mother chooses to live on a barren slope like this. She could live anywhere, you know, absolutely anywhere. But she chooses to wither away in this dreadful sun.”
“Some people like it,” I said. “I’m a native Californian myself.”
“But don’t you ever weary of the soul-destroying monotony of the weather?”
Only of phonies, I thought. Of the soul-destroying monotony of phonies I wearied something awful. But I explained, fo
r the hundredth time, that Southern California had two seasons, like any Mediterranean climate, and that people who couldn’t tell the difference lacked one or more of the five senses.
“Oh, quite, quite,” he told me, and poured himself another stiff drink, while I was still sipping the dregs of my first. The whisky didn’t seem to affect him at all. He was an aging Peter Pan, glib, bland and eccentric, and all I had really found out was that he was fond of James Slocum. Everything he said and did was so stylized that I couldn’t get at his center, or even guess where it was.
I was glad when Maude Slocum came into the room, her straight white smile gleaming in the amber light from the windows. She had left her emotions on the veranda, and seemed in control of herself. But her eyes looked past me, and far beyond the room.
“Hello, Francis.” He half rose from his chair, and slumped back into it. “You really must forgive me, Mr. Archer, I’m a most unsatisfactory hostess—”
“On the contrary.” She was dressed to attract attention in a black-and-white striped linen dress with a plunging neckline and a very close waist. I gave her attention.
“Francis,” she said sweetly, “would you see if you can find James for me? He’s somewhere out front.”
“Right, darling.” Marvell seemed pleased with the excuse to get away, and trotted out of the room. Nearly every family of a certain class had at least one hanger-on like him, dutiful and useless and untied. But unless Maude Slocum and he were smooth actors, Marvell wasn’t the apex of her triangle.
I offered to make her a drink but she poured her own, straight. She wrinkled her nose over the glass. “I hate Scotch, but James so loves to make the cocktails himself. Well, Mr. Archer, have you been probing the household secrets, rattling the family skeletons and so on?” The question was humorously put, but she wanted an answer.
I glanced at the open window and answered in a lower tone: “Hardly, I’ve had some talk with Marvell, and some with Cathy. No light. No skeletons.” But there was electric tension in the house.
The drowning pool lan-2 Page 3
