Beauty and the Brain

by Duncan, Alice

  “Come on,” he said. “I’ll take you upstairs. Do you have luggage?”

  He could almost see the relief flood through his brother’s solid body. Funny, no one looking at George would take him for a booby. He appeared so solid and stable. What a liar appearances could be.

  “Yes. I left a bag with the man at the desk.” He licked his lips again. “Thanks, Colin. I appreciate you putting me up for the night.”

  “Yes, well, you need somewhere to stay, I suppose until we can figure out what to do with you.”

  “You sound as if you’re having to deal with a stray cat or a mad aunt,” George said cheerlessly.

  “That’s exactly how I feel.” Unkind, Colin. Very unkind. He didn’t apologize.

  Brenda awoke on the second day of filming Indian Love Song feeling tired and somehow dispirited. She wasn’t sure why this should be, unless it was because she was sick of her life. She was tired of never being able to do as she pleased, of always and forever being on display. Even when she went for a casual walk in the park, people recognized her. That was because of the moving pictures. Sometimes she wished she’d stuck to vaudeville and the legitimate stage and never ventured into the pictures.

  But no. She had too many people dependent upon her have passed up the opportunity to make money in this new and exciting industry. And she was making money. Heaps and piles of it. Not only was she a respected comedic actress, but she’d also been asked to model for magazine ads and to endorse products. Now she was not merely an actress and singer, but she was also recognized as the Maiden Dew Skin Lotion girl. There was lots of money be made in commercial advertisements these days.

  Everything she did, though, plastered her face before the public. Sometimes she just wanted to don a pair of her brother’s trousers and go riding in the woods in Vermont or upstate New York, but she couldn’t.

  As sure as she appeared anywhere improperly clad, she’d run into a photographer or a newspaper hound after a story. And people like that loved nothing better than to find a celebrity appearing in public looking disreputable or unkempt. Newspapers and the public thrived on scandal. Which was one of the reasons Brenda had never, ever, not even once, allowed her name to become linked with that of any man. It was also true that she’d not yet met a man with whom she wanted more than a casual friendship.

  Until she met Colin Peters.

  Which was why her ambivalent feelings about Colin troubled her. He could be such a pompous ass sometimes that she wanted to leap on him and scratch his face with her fingernails, just like a cat or an hysterical woman. Invariably, her violent urges were accompanied by the almost unbearable desire to kiss him and make mad, passionate love with him.

  Brenda had never been to bed with a man. She was sure anyone who knew anything at all about the acting life wouldn’t believe it, but it was true. She’d never found a man attractive enough to make her want to jeopardize her reputation and, as a consequence, her family’s welfare. Unfortunately, Brenda, all by herself, constituted her family’s welfare.

  One of these days her brothers would be out of school and earning a good living. And her sister was also headed for a good career although, Brenda knew, the opportunities for women were nowhere near as good as those available for men. It wasn’t fair, but nobody seemed to care about that but her. And Kathy’s health was fragile. She shouldn’t be obliged to work hard, because she had a weak heart.

  “Lord, girl, get a hold of yourself.” She scowled into her mirror, then smiled. Ah, that was better. Even if she didn’t feel like smiling, she looked happy. Nobody but her would ever know.

  Something tickled at the back of her mind, something she ought to remember and which was very interesting, but . . . Oh! That’s right. Colin’s brother. Colin hadn’t been happy to see poor George; it had been obvious from the moment he’d spotted him.

  Brenda’s mood brightened considerably. She was happy George had come, whatever Colin was. In fact, she could hardly wait to talk to him and find out what he was doing here. She wondered if he’d run away from his ever-so-proper home.

  Feeling better about her life and the day, she plopped a straw hat onto her golden curls and left her room. She found George in the dining room at a table with Martin and Colin and hurried to join them, smiling broadly.

  “Good morning, everyone!”

  They all looked up at her. Martin smiled. Colin frowned. George looked smitten. They were all reactions she’d expected. Damn Colin for being such an intolerable stuffed shirt.

  “Hey there, Brenda,” Martin said happily. He was almost always happy. It was because he loved his work. Brenda envied him that.

  Colin, who also loved his work, was different. He managed to stop scowling long enough to say, “Good morning,” but she could tell he wished her elsewhere.

  George had to gulp before he could form words, “Good morning, Miss Fitzpatrick.”

  She gave him a warm, inviting grin, hoping it would help him relax a little bit. When she saw his dark eyes open up as wide as saucers, she guessed she’d overdone the inviting part somewhat.

  George hurriedly stammered, “Y-you look beautiful this morning.” Then he blushed.

  Brenda felt herself go warm and melty inside, both in sympathy and in appreciation. The poor boy couldn’t be more than eighteen or nineteen, and he was in patent distress about something. Even so, he’d managed to pay her a pretty compliment, something his older and probably smarter brother had never done, the wretch. “Thank you very much, George.”

  Martin had risen to hold a chair for her, and she smoothed out her skirt and sat. She did look good. She had to. Looking good was her livelihood. Today she’d chosen her lilac silk with the high, lacy collar. She looked rather like a forest sprite in this dress, which had seemed appropriate to her, considering the location of the lodge.

  A waiter appeared, and she gave him her order for breakfast. The others were lingering over their coffee. Since Colin seemed disinclined to speak to her and looked more than usually gloomy, and since George was evidently tongue-tied, and since Martin was studying a list, presumably of things to do, she decided to initiate a conversation about the picture. It seemed a logical and unexceptionable topic of conversation, and one not even Colin could disapprove of, unless he was even fussier today than he normally was.

  “Is that the shooting schedule, Martin?” Her tea arrived, and she sipped it, grateful to have something to do with her hands.

  Martin looked up from his list. “Yes. We’ve got to get the Indians’ parts finished today, because they’re returning to Arizona tomorrow.”

  She nodded and shot a quick glance at Colin. She half expected him to renew his objections to the Indians, but he didn’t. He looked like a broody hen; probably worrying about his brother. She wondered what George’s situation could be to bring him here, to a brother whose displeasure at his popping up was overt.

  “I hope you’ll enjoy watching this picture being made, George,” she said in an effort to draw him out “It’s not as much like a play as lots of people think.”

  “Sarah Bernhardt was in a picture that was exactly like play,” said Colin in his crabby voice. “They even had a stage and a curtain.”

  Brenda eyed him with disfavor. “Yes, Colin, but no one’s done a picture like that since. Perhaps you haven’t noticed.”

  He glared at her “I noticed.”

  “Then perhaps you failed to notice that the motion picture medium offers a wider range of possibilities as to scenery, movement, and drama than that proscribed by the stage.”

  “Yes,” he said, evidently loath to admit it. “I understand that, too.”

  She nodded sweetly at him. “Ah. From your comment, I’d not got that impression.”

  Martin said hastily, “Here, George, would you like to come with me? Our first scene is going to be one in the Indian village. The only actors will be Indians.”

  George shot a glance at his brother, then rose as if he couldn’t do so fast enough. “I’d like that,
Mr. Tafft. Thank you.” He smiled shyly at Brenda. “Enjoy your breakfast, Miss Fitzpatrick.” Then he blushed, as if he wished he’d been able to think of something more cogent to say.

  “Please,” she said, wishing she could put the boy at his ease, “call me Brenda. I hope we can be friends.”

  He stuttered out something that sounded remotely like thanks and fled, hurrying after Martin as if he feared being left behind. He didn’t say goodbye to his brother.

  Colin muttered, “Good gad,” under his breath. Brenda’s eyes thinned, and she peered at him coldly.

  “Some lousy kind of big brother you are!”

  Chapter Eleven

  Colin felt his eyes narrow, his lips pinch, and his color heighten as his anger rose. Along with anger was another emotion he couldn’t pinpoint, but it didn’t feel good.

  He hated emotions. They were so—so uncomfortable. He much preferred the silent, unsentimental world of academia. He was comfortable there; ever so much more comfortable than when he was forced to confront the unstable whims, fancies, and moods of people like Brenda Fitzpatrick. Or his brother George.

  He lifted his eyebrows in what he hoped was a sardonic expression before saying frostily, “And what, pray, do you know about the kind of brother I am?”

  She sat across from him and looked about as mad as he felt. Her breakfast had not yet been served, and she stabbed at the table in front of her with a slender, beautifully manicured forefinger. “I know because I’ve seen the two of you together. And apart. And that poor boy is terrified of you, in case you couldn’t tell for yourself.”

  Terrified? Again Colin’s eyebrows lifted like larks soaring. “Terrified? Of me? You’re out of your mind. Not to mention a meddling busybody.”

  “Oh, pish! I can’t even imagine what the rest of your family is like if poor George came to you instead of going home when whatever it was happened.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Obviously something happened, and he’s either very sorry or very embarrassed about it. What I don’t understand is why he came to you of all people.”

  “And why shouldn’t he come to me? What do you mean by that?” His sense of outrage was growing by the second.

  “I mean you’re an evil-tempered, unsympathetic brute, is what I mean. I can’t imagine coming to you for help for anything at all, but if George chose you over the other members of your family, they must all be even worse than you, which is almost impossible to imagine, and also must mean that you come from a miserable tribe of trolls and ogres!”

  Her voice had risen, and when she came to the end of her unconscionable condemnation of his family, she sucked in a huge breath, as if trying to cool herself off. Colin was pretty hot himself. He’d opened his mouth to refute her charges when the waiter came with her soft-boiled egg, toast, and sliced orange, and he had to swallow a furious retort.

  It took her only a second to re-conform her face from an expression of wrath—although what she had to be wrathful about, Colin had no idea—to one of serenity. “Thank you so much.” She smiled at the waiter, who looked like he might faint with only a little more encouragement from her.

  Colin snorted, furious that this insufferable woman could have tricked so many people into believing her to be charming.

  Oh, very well, dash it, she was charming. Sometimes. Not this morning. And seldom to him

  She whacked the top off of her egg with a knife as if she wished it were Colin’s head then glared at him. “I have no idea what George has done to earn your disapprobation, but it can’t be all that bad. For heaven’s sake, the boy can’t be more than eighteen or nineteen.”

  “He just turned eighteen,” Colin said, begrudging her the information, since it proved her right about his age, if not a single thing else.

  “Eighteen.” She took a bite of egg and a bite of toast and chewed them, swallowing before she followed up on her statement of George’s age. “Eighteen years old. A child. An infant! And you’re treating him as if he were the Big Bad Wolf and had just eaten all the little piggies, who were probably Navajos masquerading as Apaches in Sioux territory. I can’t imagine anything else that would get you so het up.”

  Colin drew in air, offended almost beyond bearing. “Sarcasm does not become you, Miss Fitzpatrick. Be careful, or your many fans might come to realize you’re not the saint you pretend to be.”

  She swiveled her eyes up and gazed at the ceiling in a God-give-me-patience expression that Colin resented like thunder. “If anyone thinks I’m a saint,” she said, and there seemed to be hot coals burning her words, “it’s not my fault.”

  He snorted again, although he had a niggling feeling she was right. Dash it. “At any rate, you know nothing whatever about my brother, my family, or me, and I’ll thank you to keep your opinions to yourself.”

  She eyed him malevolently. He got an eerie sensation of blue lightning issuing from her gaze, sort of like fiery pitchforks from hell. Because her scrutiny made him uncomfortable, he picked up his coffee cup and drained it. The coffee in it had gone cold and tasted vile.

  “I don’t know a thing about you, your family, or George,” Brenda said in a measured cadence that reminded Colin of a death march. “But I’ve met you and I’ve met George, and I’ve seen the way he looks at you, as if he expects you to take out the horsewhip and flay the hide from his back. If you had any kind of decent relationship with your brother, he wouldn’t look at you like that, and you know it. Why, the poor boy looks as if he’d just confessed to breaking a bone china teacup and is expecting you to shoot him for it.”

  With a feeling of smugness he knew was probably unworthy of a gentleman, Colin snapped, “He did something infinitely more awful than breaking a teacup, as a matter of fact.”

  Her eyes opened wide. Colin had to look away from them. She was so damnably beautiful, and those eyes of hers seemed to suck him in until he was left wallowing in a sea of sensation. He despised sensation almost as much as he despised emotion. Both phenomena were futile and a waste of time, and he neither understood nor approved of them.

  “Oh?” she said. “And exactly what criminal act did he commit? Murder? Mayhem? Calling a tribe by the wrong name?”

  His lips tightened for a second. “No. As a matter of fact, he left school without telling our parents or anyone else.”

  She blinked.

  “He hared away from Pennsylvania and came all the way out here to California without communicating his bolt to a single other person. “

  “That’s it?” She sipped her tea, watching him over the rim of her cup as if she expected him to spring the real story on her any second.

  “That’s it?” He repeated her words incredulously. “That’s it? What do you mean, ‘That’s it’? Isn’t that enough?”

  She didn’t answer immediately, but polished off her egg. When she did speak, her voice was pitched to sound reasonable, and it made Colin’s teeth grind. “Leaving school doesn’t sound like such a terrible infraction to me. Maybe he didn’t like college. Maybe he discovered he wasn’t much of a student. I’m sure that’s an awful catastrophe in your family, but it wouldn’t be for the majority of human beings in the world.”

  If he ground his teeth together for much longer, he’d wear them down to little pearly stubs. He unclenched them with an effort. “I’m sure you place no value on education, since you don’t have one—”

  She sat up as if he’d slapped her. “Oh! Why, you miserable, insensitive brute! Of course I value education! That’s the very reason I’m sending my brothers and sister to college, you rotten snob! But they want to go! If they didn’t, I’d help them find some other type of work.”

  He didn’t like being called a snob. It hit too close to the bone. Nevertheless, he continued in the coldest tone he could manufacture, “My family is and has always been cognizant of the worth of a good education. Not only is an education of inestimable value to the basic character growth of a human being and a sure road to a successful career in any endeavor
, but education has been a highly prized achievement in my family for generations. No one in the whole family has less than a basic college degree.”

  Brenda gazed at him, her lips a thin, tight line. She didn’t look overly impressed, and her attitude infuriated him. He continued, “The fact that George chose to drop out of college without a word to anyone is not something any member of the family will take lightly. It was neither right nor well considered of him, and as far as I’m concerned, he has every reason to feel abashed and ashamed of himself.”

  She bit into her toast savagely and followed it up with a swig of tea. Her anger was so great that she didn’t even bother to appear ladylike, although she did anyway, much to Colin’s disgust. He’d really like her to act like the filthy street urchin she was underneath all her fine trappings, if only just once.

  “All right, Colin. I’ll grant that he was wrong not to have consulted your parents before he made his escape—”

  “Escape!”

  “His escape,” she repeated in a menacing tone. “Because it must have felt like an escape to him or he’d never have bucked family tradition. He was wrong not to tell anyone. But he was undoubtedly fearful of encountering the very condemnation you’ve been heaping on him since he walked into the bar last night. I don’t blame him for it. You’re awful to him. And all because he doesn’t want to continue his higher education.

  “For heaven’s sake, Colin, I know you think you walk on water and that scholarship is the only thing worth a damn in the world, but there are tons of other ways to make a living!” She took a deep breath. “I know you don’t like me, and I know you think I’m silly and ignorant, but I’m not. And I never had the opportunity to get an education! Everything I know I learned from books or people who were kind enough to answer my questions—unlike some people I know. Does that make me a bad person?”