Things in Glocca Morra

by Peter Collier

  “I sent a kid out here from Paramount,” he said brusquely, looking around for Jack. “Did he tell you what happened?”

  “Yes.” I looked at his bandage. “Are you all right?”

  He fingered the gauze reflectively: “There was only one shot. It hit the windshield and I got whacked by a piece of glass. Believe it or not, they pulled it out with needle-nose pliers. It was bang bang and over in two seconds. No big deal. Already in the rearview mirror.”

  “Was Molly driving?”

  He gave a distracted nod.

  “Was he hurt?”

  “He smacked his shoulder a little when we ran into a fire hydrant. They took him to the hospital with me. He’s probably still there, but nothing’s broken and he’s okay too. Don’t worry about Molly. He’s strong as an ox.”

  Then he asked where Jack was.

  “Looking for you.”

  “Goddamn it! I told the kid to tell him to stay put.”

  “He was worried about you.”

  The Old Man’s anger softened. “None of my kids ever do what I tell them.”

  The response was so mild I wondered if he might have expected that Jack wouldn’t be here and had another reason for coming. I thought he’d get to the point immediately, as he usually did, but instead he sat down heavily on the sofa and stared down at the floor between his splayed legs.

  “Who did it?” I asked.

  He looked away. “Who knows? It was one guy standing there by the gate waiting for us, not a firing squad. Maybe one of those lunatics from Selkirk’s union.”

  “Why them?”

  “Because they know I’ve been helping the studios figure out a way to deal with them,” he said irascibly. “And because they’re fucking Communists. Anyway, whoever it was will be dealt with, don’t you worry about that. In the meantime, let’s talk about something else.”

  “What?”

  He studied his fingernails for a moment to mark a transition. “This girl of Jack’s…”

  “Val.” It irked me that he didn’t say her name after having oppressed her with his attention all this time.

  “Yes, Val. She’s nice enough, but you know she’s a little unstable. All those Europeans are. There’s something wrong with all of them because of the war, but she’s also a Jewish person and what they went through leaves a particular mark, you know. You can see how experiencing all that might make someone go off the deep end. I know Jack is all tangled up with her emotionally and probably isn’t rational where she’s concerned, so I count on you to make sure he has perspective about things.”

  “Things?”

  “Yeah, things. You know, things she might say or do. Things that cause trouble. Things that might absolutely need to be taken with a grain of salt. Things.”

  He sat there for a while looking at me—not one of his usual X-ray stares intended to make you confess or submit, but a pensive, almost vulnerable expression.

  “You may think of it as my ‘tomorrow the world’ thinking,” he finally said, “but I know Jack has a future. I know it in my bones. He’s not like his brother. I can’t think of Joseph Jr. without hurting. That boy would have walked through fire for me. Jack is different. He has always marched to his own drumbeat and always looked for ways to operate outside my authority. We’re very different. I know that. But I also know he has great abilities and the sky’s the limit for him if we play our cards right. But if he makes a mistake right now at the beginning of things, it will follow him forever. You and I are the ones who care about him most. We’ve got to keep things on the right track. Can I count on you, Lemoyne? Can I count on you look to past appearances and focus on what’s important?”

  I nodded hesitantly.

  “Fine. I thought so.” He got up to leave, but paused at the door. “By the way, you haven’t seen Beaufort, have you?”

  “No.”

  “I know he came over here awhile back,” he said with no hint of apology, “and I thought you might have run into him again.”

  I shook my head.

  “Doesn’t matter.” His voice had an unpleasant undertone. “When Molly is on the job again he’ll find him.”

  Jack returned a couple of hours later. He had spent half the day looking for his father, first at the hospital and then at the police station, before running him down at the Biltmore.

  “He was out here looking for you,” I told him. “It’s like musical cars today.”

  “He told me he talked to you, then gave me hell for ten minutes for not staying put as he ordered.” Jack was still agitated. “I spend hours trying to figure out if he’s okay, and when I finally find him the first thing he does is rip me. And then he won’t even tell me anything about what happened. I told him that one of the detectives I talked to at the station said he thought it might have been a warning shot rather than a genuine assassination attempt, because the shooter was so close he shouldn’t have missed. Dad wasn’t interested. He just sloughs it off with one of his what’s-done-is-done looks and starts interrogating me for the five-hundredth time about what I’m going to do with my life.”

  He paced back and forth in the living room for a long time before I got him to start up our gin rummy game again. The cards flew out of his hands like startled birds when he tried to riffle them after shuffling. “Son of a bitch,” he shook his head.

  He had calmed down by the time Val phoned to say she had another early call the next morning and had to stay at her apartment again that night. Again, he offered to drive over and be with her, but she put him off, claiming that Talbert was shooting her death scene the following morning and she needed solitude to prepare for it.

  “What the hell’s going on here?” he gave me a disoriented look after hanging up the receiver. “First they’re shooting at the Old Man and now Val is pulling this Garbo act again.”

  He had been sidestepping the efforts of Len Thom, his ensign on P-109, to meet up while he was in town for a few days. But now he called Thom and set up an early dinner. He wanted me to come along, but I didn’t want to listen to their recycled combat stories and complaints about what an asshole Douglas MacArthur was, so I asked him to drop me off in Hollywood. He was silent on the drive in from the beach, and the sense of foreboding washing over me was so strong that I didn’t say much either.

  I got out at the Pantages and walked across the street to the Hitching Post Theatre, a minor Hollywood landmark that showed only westerns, along with a new chapter of a cowboy serial every day featuring Wild Bill Elliott, Hoot Gibson, Johnny Mack Brown and other white hats. There was an actual hitching post on the sidewalk in front of the cashier’s cage. The ushers dressed in cowboy gear and so did the kids who showed up at all times of the day, most of them wearing holsters with cap pistols they drew and started shooting when the bad guys appeared on the screen.

  I probably would have bought a ticket, even though I was feeling blue, if the day’s feature, Pioneer Justice, had starred someone other than Lash LaRue, who always struck me as a bogus cowboy hero—dressed in black, speaking in a bowery Bogart voice that made him more an easterner than a westerner, using a bullwhip rather than a manly six-shooter. So I continued strolling back down toward Highland.

  A knot of people was forming a few doors down on Wilcox, and I allowed a large elderly woman also headed in that direction to run interference for me as I went to see what was happening.

  A man with wild matted hair was down on his hands and knees on the sidewalk drawing with colored chalk. Lost somewhere in middle age, he wore a layering of ragged clothes, each stratum visible through the tears in the one on top of it. The skin under one ear was discolored and corrugated from a burn scar. He talked to himself and drooled slightly as he created labyrinthine diagrams that spilled off the curb and onto the asphalt like Dali’s clock face.

  The work was dime-store surrealism, but it had an alarming vehemence—elaborate cabalistic spider-web designs showing swastikas next to U.S. flags at rocket sites; the USSR bleeding into China; Africans bei
ng injected with drugs by Europeans. Small hooked-nose figures in top hats with sacks of money on their hump backs watched from their battlements at the four corners of this disjointed world. Hanging above all these details was the canopy of an atomic cloud.

  “He only comes once every week or so,” the elderly woman told me. “Nobody knows when he’s going to show up. And nobody knows who he is.”

  The crowd heckled and encouraged the artist and called out questions and comments. He ignored them, working rapidly with his face close to the pavement. Then someone behind me tossed a dime onto his design. He scrambled on hands and knees to get it, angrily threw it back, stood up and did a fierce little war dance to smudge his work with the flapping soles of his overripe tennis shoes. Then he picked up his box of chalk sticks and stalked off.

  This handmade vision of the apocalypse pressed down on me while I walked back up to Hollywood Boulevard, integrating itself into the meta physical lurch I felt we’d all taken the past week and the sense we now had that we were all only characters at the mercy of the plot.

  I went into the Pig ’N Whistle soda fountain, sat at the counter and ordered a chocolate malt. Above the fountain with its prancing, flute-playing pig was an ornate mirror fixed to the hand-painted tiles. The face that stared back at me from it was so unhappy and disoriented that I put down a half dollar and left before the malt arrived, and headed down to Sunset to catch a bus for the beach.

  When I got back to the house, I knew Val was there by her scent even before I saw her standing spellbound in the living room scratching at her arm and looking out at the ocean through the bay window. Shadows had settled under her eyes, and rapid weight loss had sharpened the angles of her face. Afraid of startling her, I walked into the periphery of her vision instead of coming up behind.

  “You’re here,” I said.

  “Yes. This place is not easy to get to but there are very many comings and goings.”

  Before I could reply, she said abruptly, “I can’t stay tonight either. I already told that to Gianni. But it has been too long without seeing him so I came. But he isn’t here and now I will miss him.”

  I joined her at the window and took a chance: “I’ve been feeling lately that our house is being blown down.”

  It took her a moment to get my meaning. “Yes, blown down.” She gave a heavy nod. “I do as well.”

  “What is the matter? Can you tell me?”

  She appeared to be struggling to form a response, then shook her head and walked out onto the deck to gather herself, closing the slider behind her. Even though she seemed personally depleted, her body, outlined by the breeze flattening her clothes, was lithe and vigilant.

  She came back inside a few minutes later and resumed her station at the window.

  “Dietrologia,” she finally said.

  “What’s that?” I wasn’t sure she was speaking to me.

  “An Italian word.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “Dietro means behind.” She took a small step backward. “Dietrologia is the word some Italians use to mean the real truth, the deep truth they believe stands behind what only seems to be the truth. I think my father is one of those people. They don’t accept anything they are told. They think the truth is always beneath the surface or behind the curtain, or standing at the end of that hall with all the mirrors, and you must use your intuition to discover it because those who control things will create a false truth to serve their purposes.”

  “How would you say it in English?”

  She gave it some thought: “It’s very hard to translate. Maybe it would be easier if there had been Borgias in America.”

  “Conspiracy theory?” It was a term I’d heard for the first time at a Hyannis get-together early in 1942 when James Forrestal, the secretary of the Navy, used it to smack down the Old Man’s claim that FDR had allowed the attack on Pearl Harbor to get us into the European war.

  “Dietrologia is not theory,” Val shook her head. “For people who see the world in this way, it is fact. Very deep fact. Such people believe that the official explanation given is always manufactured and the truth is always dietro, behind the lies that powerful people tell and the illusions they create. It is not really a philosophy but a disposition of the mind.”

  After a pause, she suggested, “Maybe behindness? Is there even such a word?”

  “Why do you mention this word now?” I asked.

  “I never considered it seriously before, because it is not the way I think. But now that it seems our house is being blown down, as you say, it may be time for me to think differently.”

  I would have pursued the question further, but we heard the Zephyr pull up outside. The minute Jack stepped inside, Val grabbed him and buried her head in his chest for such a long time that he finally had to gently peel her away.

  “I came here today because I wanted to see your face and touch your body,” she said when he tilted her head back.

  “Well, God knows I’m glad to touch yours.” He was happy again as he ran his hands down her back and cupped her buttocks. “I’ve been talking about the war for two hours and I’m ready to get back to peace time.”

  She looked away: “But as I already said, I will not be able to be with you tonight.”

  There was something so bottom-heavy in the words that Jack didn’t even contest them.

  “I just needed to have my eyes on you for one moment,” she said.

  After that, the silence in the house was like a migraine. Jack went into the bathroom and brushed his teeth for a long time while Val sat at the kitchen table violently pushing back her cuticles with her thumbnails.

  When her cab honked, she started out but then stopped suddenly. “No, I won’t,” she said with a wild look, as if speaking to someone not in the house. Then she went out to dismiss the driver.

  The rest of the evening, Jack and I tried to act as if things were back to normal. Val played along, acting vivacious all through dinner. At one point she pulled her hair down on one side of her face in imitation of Veronica Lake and peeped out to deliver in Lake’s slightly asthmatic voice some of her silliest lines in Tomorrow, including this gem: “I loved you before I knew you. I’ll love you after I’m dead.” Saying it, she laughed until tears slipped out of her eyes.

  When she and Jack were in bed and I was lying on the sofa mulling the coercive illogic of behindness, I heard Val murmur, as she always did just before nodding off, “Don’t go to sleep before I do, Gianni.”

  EIGHTEEN

  At breakfast the next morning Jack said, “Let’s not hang around here today waiting to see what happens…”

  “Or who,” Val interjected. She didn’t look refreshed from her sleep, but seemed determined to outrun whatever had been dogging her.

  “Exactly,” he agreed. “We need a little getaway and I think we should spend the day at Hollywood Park.”

  “We will make a picnic in the park?”

  “This is not a park for making the pique-a-nique,” Jack lightly mocked her accent. “This is a park where they make the horsie race.”

  She frowned, and then clapped her hands: “Oh yes, I see. A day at the races. We will have fun like those crazy brothers.”

  Soon we were in the car on the Pacific Coast Highway, feeling stealthy even though no one seemed to be following us. Val was wearing a white bishop-sleeve dress and a Gainesboro gray homburg. She had found a white feather somewhere and stuck it into the hat, where it stood like a tongue of ice.

  The breeze coming in off the ocean was shoving the clouds around in a way that momentarily tamed the harsh October light. The salt air had a mentholated tang and felt newly made. It seemed possible that we might get out from under the fist that had been pressing down on us and that everything might yet work out.

  Val chattered happily beside Jack in the front seat. He had an arm around her shoulders and was slowly rolling strands of her hair in his fingertips.

  She had been to a horse race only once, she said, bef
ore the war, when she and her mother and brother had traveled to Siena to see the Palio. “There the horse riders beat each other as they ride. It is more like war than racing. Horses fall and legs break. Their eyes become very big with pain. Riders bleed from the face and arms. It is a gang of hoodlums on horseback doing bad things to each other.”

  “The people we’ll see today aren’t violent,” Jack replied. “They’re religious. They think that the racetrack is heaven on earth.”

  Hollywood Park had been constructed in the mid-Thirties by a group of showbiz personalities, led by the Warner brothers, who wanted a track closer than Santa Anita and wanted a place that actually looked like a park. The sweeping buildings were arranged around promenades, and a series of small lakes at the center of the track had swans swimming in them. There was a “privacy driveway” for the chauffeured cars of the stars and high-rollers that Hedda Hopper had in mind when she famously wrote that someone who bought a ticket could expect to see “a celebrity in every box.” The park had been closed during the war but was now reopened on a limited basis, in part to raise money for Los Angeles public schools.

  The atmosphere was like a country fair: people crowding the concessions and strolling around the grounds arm in arm. Val was giddy with excitement as we took our seats in the grandstand. She studied the horses through the opera glasses she’d brought, and insisted that betting be based on which horse was the prettiest or which jockey had the most stylish silks.

  The horse we all agreed to back in the first race, a magnificent roan named Greatheart, came in third from last.

  When everyone began to rip up their losing tickets, Val said with alarm, “What if they are making an error and some of these tickets are winning ones? Should we pick them up and see?”

  Jack laughed, “Believe me, these people know whether or not they’ve won.”