“What a strange thing to say—that it could free her or destroy her. How can that be possible after all these years?”
She shrugged her shoulders and returned to the trunk, the red dress still over one arm. “I suppose it’s a matter of blame. I suppose there’s some sense of guilt for her in what happened. Two men who quarreled over her, perhaps. I’ve heard her say that she blames herself.” Irene gestured toward the portrait which hung with its face toward the wall. “When she does wild things, perhaps they are because she blames herself for her own past actions. She must punish herself for the past.”
“Why do you turn the portrait to the wall?” I asked. “How long has that been going on?”
“Since her marriage,” Irene said. “She thinks her husband cannot love her as he once did because she no longer looks like that. One night we found her here weeping before the picture. He turned it to the wall himself, and I’ve kept it that way.”
As she rose from placing a stack of garments in the trunk, she crossed the room deliberately to turn its face once more to the wall. Now, more than ever, the picture needed to be hidden from view.
“Sometimes,” Irene said, “I’ve been afraid that she may turn some punishment upon herself. That’s one reason why I agreed with Mr. Thoresen that you should come here. In some ways you seem to have done her good. In others, I’m not sure. You have your own reasons for being here.”
I said nothing, and she shook out the red dress again, examining it with care for any tears in the material, any decorative button that might be missing, any sign of moth damage in the bands of caracul. Then she began to fold it up.
“Don’t,” I said on sudden impulse. “Don’t put it away. That dress fascinates me. I’ve seen the film of The Whisperer more than once—and—do you suppose she would mind very much if I tried on that dress?”
Irene regarded me in some surprise before her expression softened. “It isn’t necessary for her to know. I’ll air the gown and press it for you. You’ll look well in it, I think.”
I thanked her and went to work again, kneeling on the floor beside the trunk. I was not sure what reason lay behind the impulse that had moved me. I only knew that I had a strange wish to see myself in that red gown which Laura had worn so marvelously in the picture made from my father’s book. The dress had originated in his book. He had even called it Venetian red. And when the picture was made, Laura Worth had insisted that she wear a similar gown in the scene where she came down the staircase and into the parlor to find her husband dead. Because she knew the story so well, the dress must have lent verisimilitude to the scene, even though it was being filmed in black and white.
Without my being aware of what they did, my hands had picked up a sheaf of letters which lay scattered on the floor. An open sheet caught my eye—the words, “My Darling Laura—” written in my father’s hand. I looked quickly away from the page and began to fold it up. When I glanced at Irene, I found her watching me with that unexpected softening toward me still in her face.
“You can read them, if you like,” she said.
I gathered the letters together hurriedly and slipped the packet deep into the trunk. “I don’t want to! They’re not mine to read.”
She contradicted me. “They’re yours. You came from the two people concerned, didn’t you?”
“I can’t read them without her permission,” I said. “Even then, I’m not sure I’d want to read what he said to her. It might make me all the more angry with her.”
Her suspicion was quick to rise. “You’re angry with her?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“You are both too much afraid of the past. Perhaps it’s good for her to acknowledge having a daughter.”
“Have you read the letters?” I challenged her.
She did not seem to mind. Her attitude toward me had become more gentle, and for the first time she seemed to accept me with more liking and trust.
“I haven’t read them,” she said. “I’m concerned only with the present. As long as I’ve known her, she’s never looked at those letters. But she doesn’t throw them away.”
I gathered the few remaining things from the floor near me and dropped them into the trunk. “I’d better go upstairs. She’ll be waiting for me.”
“Yes,” Irene said. “I’ll finish here. And I’ll have the dress for you later today.”
But I didn’t rise from my knees at once. Something was troubling me. Something I should remember about the trunk. I had the odd feeling that something was missing. It came to me suddenly.
“Where is the candlestick?”
“Candlestick?”
“Yes—the candlestick with the fanged dragon coiled around the stem. It was wrapped in that red dress when I took it out of the trunk yesterday. I saw Laura herself put it back in the trunk. The sight of it seemed to disturb her. But it’s not here now.”
“Perhaps Mrs. Jaffe has taken it away,” Irene said. Her tone was low, restrained, as though she held something back. She put away the rest of the things and closed the lid of the trunk.
“Why would Mrs. Jaffe want that candlestick?” I asked.
Again there was that slight shrug of thin shoulders. “Miss Hollins, you’d better go upstairs to Miss Worth. She sometimes becomes impatient if she’s made to wait too long.”
Irene knew something about the candlestick and why Donia Jaffe had taken it, I felt sure. But she didn’t mean to tell me her thoughts, and I asked no more questions. I left her and went quickly upstairs to Laura’s bright bedroom.
She was waiting for me, stretched in the chaise longue, her shoes kicked off, and she seemed to have put aside both her shock at seeing the scarred portrait and her annoyance with Donia over the trunk.
“What a lovely morning we’ve had,” she said when I came in.
I stared in the direction of the picture window. “It’s already been mended!”
“Of course. I asked Irene to have it taken care of before I went out. I’m glad we didn’t heed to wait. I don’t like to be reminded of such a performance.”
I didn’t want to be reminded of my own performance.
She did not question me about the trunk, or about Donia Jaffe, and I told her nothing of my exchange with Irene. We were meeting on a totally different plane, and I let it go at that. The unpleasant things must be returned to, but I would let her be free of them now.
“What sort of plan will you follow for your chapter about me?” she asked.
“A plan will come later. I like to collect my material first, and then see what sort of form presents itself. And of course I try to think of what the public will want to know about you.”
“Do you really think anyone cares?”
I saw that she was not being coy. She really did not know what her name still meant in America.
“At home you’re a legend,” I said. “Like Garbo. There will be a lot of interest if you break your silence, and excitement if you ever agree to make another picture.”
The thought made her laugh softly. “I would like to believe you. So tell me what this supposed public would want to know about me.”
“They’ll want to know how you look, of course. And what your life is like now. Whether you miss the days when you were famous and popular. Perhaps we can start with that. Do you miss them?”
She closed her eyes. “I stopped missing that life a long time ago. It was very hard work, you know. A good deal of it was tedious and frustrating. One spent so much of the time being prepared for a scene—the dressing, the makeup, the hair. And then there was the endless waiting for a scene to be shot. Most of the time there were several takes while the director tried to bring out exactly what he wanted in the actors. And there were always the jealousies, the petty rivalries.”
She sounded as if she talked to convince herself.
“I should think it would be hard to get into the right mood under such circumstances—with all that battery of a work force around you to furnish distraction.”
“I learned to shut it out. But I’ve seen good actors from the stage go to pieces under the strain of trying to concentrate and react properly under a camera’s eye. Of course I used to insist on absolute silence on the set when we were rehearsing any scene I was in. I didn’t mind having people around, if they would just be still and let me get ready for a scene. I suppose I had the faculty of slipping into a character quickly and summoning the emotion I wanted. Or at least the outward evidence of it. I never belonged to the method actor’s school. Of course one must study the character, understand it, but a good actor knows how to portray what he wants to portray. He has to feel what he’s doing, but part of him has to stay watchful, and in control, or the performance can become maudlin. There are those who say that if you really cry, no one else will. By the time they shouted, ‘Quiet everybody—this is a take,’ I was always ready for the real performance. Unless something had really upset me.”
She was silent, undoubtedly remembering occasions when she had been upset.
“That happened when you were making The Whisperer, didn’t it? The news accounts said Miles was in the studio that afternoon, and that he quarreled with Cass Alroy.”
“He had no reason to like or trust Cass,” Laura said unguardedly. “And Cass was treating me dreadfully that afternoon. Nothing I did pleased him. When we saw the rushes, we knew the scene would have to be shot over the next day.”
“Do you know why Cass came to the studio that night?”
“Because he knew I was there, of course. But that, my sly young reporter, is as far as I mean to take you.”
I switched promptly to another topic. At least she had taken me a step closer to my objective.
“Do you remember any particularly difficult scene you played—are there any stories about them? About other directors and actors?”
She began to talk quite freely and for the first time we were at ease with each other. I could do my job, and she could do hers without the conflicts and strains that had existed between us previously. Perhaps we had Gunnar’s outing up the mountain to thank for that. He had freed us for a little while, enabled us to be at ease with each other on this professional plane. The other plane was submerged for the time being. All that area which held a night in Stockholm, Victor Hollins’s letters, the birth of a baby had sunk below the surface.
She talked to me easily while I made busy notes and she seemed to enjoy the talking. She summoned old stories out of her memory—stories I had never seen in print—and she bestowed them upon me. There was an occasion when her company had gone on location in the desert while making Sands of Fortune, and she’d had a terrible quarrel with her leading man. Her eyes grew rapt with memory as she lost herself in a mixture of amusement and indignation. There was her evident satisfaction too in working well, and her resentment when she felt a director misdirected her. What a marvelous face she had for portraying every shading of emotion. Yet it was all done with the restraint of the film actress. On a stage one had to be larger than life. In the movies there must be an underplaying that would keep the large screen from making the slightest expression an exaggeration. One played to the camera, never beyond it.
She was using all her skill now as she talked to me, playing bits and pieces of roles for me, showing me the human side of being an actress, as well as the professional. Sometimes my pencil forgot to move because she held me so completely. I was the perfect audience.
When she stopped for breath, I leaned forward in my chair. “You ought to go back! They’re waiting for you out there. You’d be marvelous on a screen again. The country would flock to see you. The world would pour in through theater doors.”
She stared at me out of her dark, slightly sunken eyes, her lips parted, her breath coming quickly. For a moment she was visualizing such a return. Then she shook her head.
“It’s all over. I’m too old to go back.”
“You’re as old as it pleases you to be. You’re Laura Worth. You’ll never be old!” I could hear the fervent belief in my own voice.
Her smile was wistful and I saw that the old longing was still alive. Perhaps no dedicated actress ever lost it completely. In Laura the fires had only been banked.
“Last night when I stayed in your room downstairs,” I told her, “I found the blue shoes you wore in the desert scene in Sands of Fortune. There were still grains of sand clinging inside them. The past isn’t so far away.”
Her eyes were swimming with tears. “You make me feel that I may still be alive, after all. But I mustn’t listen to you. I know how impossible such a dream would be.”
By this time I was carried away by my own passion. I walked about the room, gesturing and talking, arguing. According to me, it would all be so easy. A word dropped here and there, the electrifying of the public, the offers coming in. Why—she could undoubtedly pick and choose her picture company. There were new directors who would still revere her work and respect her talent. They would be eager to work with her.
I paused before the picture Gunnar Thoresen had painted, my attention momentarily caught by the tossing ship, rock-bound coast, the stormy skies and spume-wreathed waves—but it was suddenly Gunnar’s face I was seeing, his voice I was hearing.
“What are you doing? What mad thing are you doing to a woman who has already been beaten by life to an extent she can hardly bear? What do you think would happen if she went back into films and failed—as she almost surely would in today’s picturemaking?”
The words died on my lips and I dropped my enthusiastically moving hands. When I turned about slowly and stared at her across the room, her eyes were closed again—as though she watched a dream, and there was a touch of high color in her cheeks. I remembered who she was. Not Laura Worth, the actress, whom I could honestly admire, but the woman whom Victor Hollins had loved, and who had pushed him away because of her ambition. The woman who had refused to keep her own child—a woman greedy for fame and success and a career. Heartless when it came to others. Even, perhaps, with a death upon her conscience.
She opened her eyes and looked at me and her words came tremulously. “You almost make me believe it’s possible, Leigh. What a strange thing if you should be the one to send me back into films.”
I turned away from the painting and returned to my chair, picked up my notebook, made a great business of writing something in its pages. Quite dreadful possibilities had opened before my eyes. If I were the one to persuade her to go back, to pick up her career again—and she failed, as something told me she very well might—I would have managed a punishment for her greater than any I could have imagined when I left New York, so grimly determined.
But I couldn’t be as base as that. I couldn’t be!
Or could I?
“Tell me about the time when you were making Maggie Thornton,” I said. “Everyone remembers that picture. It’s one of the greats. Did Victor Hollins like what you and the director were doing? Did you have any arguments?”
She left her new dream and went back to the old one. Her face glowed as she talked about that time. Arguments? There had been battles, apparently. Victor, who was not very temperamental, had nevertheless fought for his story—fought Laura and fought the director. There had been compromise in the end, and perhaps the picture was the better for it. Either extreme might have been wrong.
“When it was over, we needed that trip to Scandinavia,” she said. “There were wounds to be healed.”
And a new wound to be dealt. There was confusion in me again, that old tearing between love and hate. I was glad there was an interruption when Miles Fletcher tapped on the door and came into the room. His black hair was sleekly combed across the top of his head, and I could imagine him giving it his concentrated care. As usual the thick mustache on his upper lip hid the expression of his mouth, and his shoulders were slightly hunched as he came toward us.
He gave me a barely courteous greeting and crossed the room to kiss his wife’s cheek.
“You’re looking better,” he sa
id to her. “There’s color in your face.”
She touched his hand with affection. “Because of my daughter! She admires my work. She thinks there is still a place for me in films. She believes the public wants me back, and that there are directors who would ask for me if I were available.”
From where I sat I could sense the anger rising in him. He turned his head to look at me directly, and I was slightly shaken by the fury in his eyes.
“What idiocy is this?”
So challenged, I defended my position. “There’s nothing idiotic about it. For some reason I don’t understand, Laura has cut herself off from the thing she does best. She is still a great actress. That hasn’t changed. Why shouldn’t she go back?”
When he would have answered me, Laura rose quickly from her chair and leaned against his shoulder, gently pleading.
“No—don’t be angry with her. This is only dreaming. She knows that too. It’s far too late for me to pick up a career again. The women of my age who are still acting have done so all along. For me there’s been a hiatus. But Leigh has been good for me. You can see that. She’s better for me than any medication. We’re beginning to fill her notebook with material. I didn’t know how much I had to tell her.”
Somehow I felt enormously relieved. Laura could look realistically at the matter of returning to Hollywood. She had already put my siren words out of her mind. A danger—for me, as well as for her—had been removed.
Miles slipped an arm about her and he withheld whatever outburst he might have intended for me.
“You’re overexcited,” he told his wife. “That’s not good either. There’s false energy in that—and collapse later. How long are these interviews to take?”
“Oh, very long!” she answered him lightly. “Isn’t that true, Leigh?”
I nodded agreement. “It’s true enough. Perhaps I won’t stop at one chapter in a book. Perhaps I could do a complete biography of Laura Worth. There’s never been one, and it’s certainly time.”
“What a lovely idea!” She was plainly delighted.
Listen for the Whisperer Page 16
