Trick of Light
Page 17
Tuesday morning: Finding an address in the San Francisco phone book for Mrs. Chaplin D. Fontaine, I walk over to the 2400 block of Vallejo in Pacific Heights to check out her building.
It's an elegant, late 1920s high-rise with what must be magnificent views from the upper floors. A courtly uniformed black doorman with pencil-line mustache stands beneath an awning, guarding the gilded lobby behind.
He looks friendly so I nod to him and approach. His name's Sam, and, he kindly tells me, there're no current vacancies in the building, but, as there're quite a few aging tenants, apartments do occasionally come up.
"With a building as nice as this," Sam says, "when they move out it's usually feet-first."
Just then one of the aforementioned elderly, a short natty gentleman wearing a checked suit, ascot and fedora, exits the lobby accompanied by a high-strung Jack Russell terrier on a leash. He gives Sam a hearty "Good morning," but before Sam can respond the little dog yanks the man around the corner, then starts to drag him down the hill.
I ask Sam about Mrs. Fontaine. He tells me she lives in the penthouse and that her late husband's firm owns the building.
"In this job you meet lots of different kinds of folks," Sam says. "We're not allowed to talk about our tenants, but I can tell you this—Mrs. Fontaine is a kind and classy lady. Everyone who works here likes her a lot."
Which could mean that Mrs. Fontaine is genuinely nice, or a good tipper, or that Sam would say the same no matter whom I asked about.
After more talk, about how rents are soaring in the neighborhood, I tell him I'd like to talk to Mrs. Fontaine but am shy about calling her.
"If you've got a good reason," Sam advises, "call her up and give it to her straight. She'll probably see you, but even if she blows you off she'll do it so nice you won't even know it's happening."
I wait till noon to give her a call. A housekeeper answers, "Fontaine residence," asks my name, then puts me on hold. A minute later Mrs. Fontaine picks up. There's a slight tremble in her voice as she asks how she may help.
I introduce myself as a photojournalist working on a story. I tell her I know that her late husband was a founder of the Goddess Gun Club, and ask if she'd be willing to talk to me about his involvement.
A pause. When she speaks again, her voice is filled with hauteur.
"Who did you say you were?"
I tell her more about myself, mentioning my books and photographs which have recently appeared in the Bay Area News. She says she saw my pictures of the landing of illegals in the Presidio, but doesn't understand the connection to the G.G.C.
I tell her there is no connection, that it's a different story altogether and I'd prefer to explain my interest face-to-face.
Another pause. "You're an independent journalist?"
I assure her I'm independent, that at the moment I'm pursuing background information, and if she agrees to an interview I'll give my word that anything she tells me will be held in strictest confidence.
"That's nice," she says, "but since we haven't met, how do I know I can trust you?"
"Meet me, look into my eyes," I suggest. "Isn't that the best way? It's what I always do."
"All right," she answers finally. "I'll take you up on that. Come over for tea at five, I'll look into your eyes and then we'll see what we shall see."
She does have something to tell me, I think.
Sam's still on duty when I turn up. He gives me a wink.
"She's expecting you," he says, guiding me to the elevator. "I'll run you up."
On the way to the penthouse he tells me Mrs. Fontaine told him that if she decides her five o'clock visitor is unwelcome, he's to stand by to assist in putting me out.
"Oh, Sam! She thinks I wouldn't leave?"
"Just a security precaution," Sam says. "Some folks prey on the elderly, you know."
The elevator opens directly onto a lavishly decorated foyer. There's a tapestry on the wall depicting ladies and gentlemen in medieval dress, a richly patterned Oriental rug on the checkerboard marble floor, and two Louis XVI chairs that look like they belong in a period room at the de Young Museum.
Suddenly feeling underdressed, I glance back at Sam. He smiles encouragement.
"Ring the bell," he suggests.
There's only one apartment on the floor. I ring. A uniformed maid responds. She listens to my name, then politely asks me to wait. Feeling like a schoolgirl called up to the principal's office, I turn again toward Sam. He gives me another smile. I give him one back. Then I hear footsteps and turn to face my examiner. The woman who approaches is slim, wears a single-strand graduated pearl necklace and a well-cut designer suit, has precision-cut white hair parted at the side and a pale yet handsome face. She walks straight up to me with great assurance and peers intently into my eyes.
"Why, you're just a child," she says merrily. "A very nice one too, I imagine." She addresses Sam over my shoulder. "Thanks, Sam. That'll be all for now."
Agnes Fontaine and I sit side by side on a couch opposite a stone fireplace in her huge, drop-dead living room furnished in a mix of Chinese and European antiques. Two large paintings, one by Helen Frankenthaler, the other by Willem de Kooning, hang on one of the walls. On the other are several pairs of French doors leading to an apartment-length terrace facing north. Through the glass I can see San Francisco Bay, the Golden Gate Bridge, Mount Tamalpais, San Pablo Bay and the lagoons and hills beyond.
While I peer about, she pours us each a cup of tea, then sits back as if to reappraise me. Her eyes aren't as sharp or laserlike as Maddy's, but they're plenty powerful enough. Though I don't see colors, I guess they're icy blue.
"I bought your books this afternoon," she says, gesturing toward copies of Transgressions and Exposures on a side table. "Impressive work for one so young. I hope you don't mind my saying that, but at my age . . . well . . ." She smiles slightly to herself.
She continues: "There was a time, long ago, when I too wanted to be an artist. I went to art school back east, then spent a year in Florence and another in Paris taking life-drawing classes at the École des Beaux-Arts. I got so I could draw pretty well"—she sniffs—"in an academic sort of way. But I didn't have what it takes to be a real artist. Luckily I knew it. So I came back to San Francisco, married, had children, got involved in volunteer work, most of it for arts institutions—all the conventional things women of my generation did because there was really nothing else for us, certainly not the possibility of careers."
She pauses. "Still, I always liked artists, liked having them around. Chap and I often entertained them here." She glances around the room. "Part of that was to give them a place to come where they'd find a sympathetic ear. I've bought a lot of contemporary art over the past thirty-five years. If an artist was invited here, he could be pretty certain I'd buy an example of his work. I've got loads of art in the apartment and more in three storage rooms downstairs. Some of it's good, a lot of it isn't, but quality was never the point. The purpose was to support people brave enough to try to make something out of nothing. Which is what you people do, isn't it? That's why I envy you. Not just because you make art, but because you dare to make it. I don't know where you get the courage."
Listening to her, I'm nonplussed. What is she trying to tell me? That she envies me for daring to do what she could not? I think it's not that simple. Perhaps she's saying she wishes she could have been an artist because artists give to the world, and, because she found another way to give, she doesn't feel sorry for herself for lacking talent. But why, I wonder, is she setting up this context for a conversation she knows is going to be about her husband, guns and death? If she wants to gain my attention, she's succeeded very well.
"I just want you to understand," she says, "why it was important for me to view your work before we spoke. I was prepared not to like what I saw in your eyes. But of course it's not what I might see in them that would tell me whether I could trust you. Many people fake sincerity. Rather it's what I could see through your eyes
that would tell me who you were. In your books I saw what you saw. I saw the truth. It was then I decided I'd talk to you."
She waits for me to speak. I think a moment before I do. What she's said is extremely flattering. I decide to be direct.
"I'm searching," I tell her, "for answers to questions you'd probably rather not think about. If I ask about something too personal, please tell me and I'll go on to something else."
She smiles, refills our teacups, then repositions herself on the couch. "Ask me anything you like."
My first question is stunningly brazen.
"There's a rumor your husband was killed by Ramsey Carson in a duel. Is that true?"
She flinches slightly, then sets her features. Again, I'm impressed by how handsome she is, her superb bone structure and slightly sunken cheeks.
"I've heard the rumor. I don't know if it's true. I do know it could be."
"Please tell me more."
She sits back. "Chap and Ram were partners. Chap took Ram into his business when Ram was young, taught him to deal in real estate, helped make him rich. I'm not saying Ram didn't work for it. He did. He was a brilliant investor. Chap always said so. But without Chap, Ram would never have achieved so much. For years they were close. People said Chap treated Ram like a kid brother. Then, in the last year of my husband's life, there was a falling-out. We stopped seeing each other socially. The trouble wasn't over business, but over something that happened up at the club."
She visited the Goddess Gun Club only a few times, for the annual bring-along-the-wives picnic each spring. Shooting and hunting didn't interest her, but that didn't matter since the G.G.C. was set up as a sporting club solely for men.
The club was Ram's idea. Ram was the shooter. Chap liked to hunt once in a while, but it was Ram who adored shooting and guns. Some said he was obsessed, which was probably true considering the safaris he went on, the fortune he spent collecting firearms and the way he caressed them when he showed them off. There were, of course, his historical-association pieces, guns that had belonged to famous personages in the past. The coveting of these weapons she could understand. Then there were the erotic guns, guns embellished with erotic engravings and motifs, which Ram collected more avidly than anyone in the world. These she did not like at all.
"I found them pitiful," Agnes says. "But he loved to show them off, so what could one do except turn away and giggle and pretend they were too naughty to look at . . . which, I guess, was what he wanted. We'd humor him about them—me, Chap, their other partner, Orrin Jennett, his wife Laura, others in our circle. 'Oh, Ram—how could you!' That kind of thing. Truth is they bored me silly. Chap too. We just didn't get it. Phallus-shaped rear sights and triggers. Front sights made to look like a woman's . . . whatever they call it these days. And then the engravings, so elaborate—people doing all these things with one another. I want you to know I'm no kind of prude. The nude human figure has been a great subject for artists. When I studied art I often drew male and female nudes from living models. But what was depicted on some of Ram's erotic guns went beyond anything I've ever seen in art. It was pornography. There's no other word for it. Yet he so loved those guns, they were such a part of his life, there was nothing negative you could say without giving offense."
There was another aspect to Ram Carson, a hardness she felt in him. He could be courtly, as gallant as any man she knew. Aside from showing off his erotic guns, he was never vulgar in her presence. Yet she felt a kind of menace hidden beneath the veneer of good manners and dashing good looks. Like Hemingway, perhaps, if one can believe the tales of his bullying and brutality.
"We spoke earlier," she tells me, "about peering into people's eyes. Sometimes when I looked into Ram's, I'd see this terrible dark thing. It was like looking at a tree with a leopard hidden in the branches. Even though you can't see the creature, you know he's there. It was that way with Ram, though no one ever mentioned it. Certainly not Chap, an excellent judge of character. I think Ram knew I saw something dark in him, for he was wary with me, cautious about what he said."
There was another thing, whispers about something sinister in Ram's past, nothing she paid attention to until after Chap's death when the rumor started that Ram had killed Chap in a duel. Then she remembered and tried to track the old whispers down. She didn't get anywhere. No one she asked would admit to having heard them. And since she couldn't remember herself, she had no choice but to let the matter drop.
"What kind of whispers?" I ask.
She looks past me at the Bay.
"That long ago, when Ram was young, he killed a man. Most particularly, killed him in a duel."
When she looks at me again, her face is contorted by a smile, a poor attempt to hide her pain.
"Preposterous, isn't it? Ram's now . . . what? Sixty-four. Born a few years before World War Two. Assuming this duel took place at the earliest when he was, say, twenty-one years old, that would mean it was fought in 1956. A pistol duel fought during the Eisenhower years! Who would believe such a thing?"
But from the way she looks at me, I understand she does believe it, and that she believes Ramsey Carson killed her husband the same way.
Distraught, she turns away. I sense her trying to maintain composure. Suddenly she rises, excuses herself, then rushes from the room. After she's gone, I walk over to the contemporary paintings to take a closer look.
The Frankenthaler doesn't do much for me. She's an important artist, just as Rothko is, but their work, like the work of Morris Louis and others of the abstract color-field school, is too color-dependent for my eyes. I'm attracted far more to painters who draw or work abstractly with line. The de Kooning reads well to me, a female figure rendered in edgy slashing calligraphic strokes.
When Agnes returns she's carrying a leather-bound photo album. "Come, let's sit," she says. "I have some pictures to show you."
This time, as we approach the couch, the sky has darkened sufficiently for me to take in the view.
"Glorious, isn't it?" Agnes says. "I try to sit here every afternoon at sunset. I like seeing the lights come on in the buildings, the night-city come alive. There's a lot of night in your photographs, Kay. You love the night, don't you?"
I tell her I do, explain about my vision, how I lack cone function and thus cannot see colors. Night, I tell her, is the time when I see best. She nods to show me she understands.
"This was Chap's," she says, opening the album, "where he kept pictures taken up at the club. I brought it out so you could see their faces—Chap's and Ram's of course, and the other men as well."
Most of the pictures are what I'd expect—group portraits of men dressed in hunting gear posing together with their guns. In some shots the poses are formal, the men lined up, as in team photographs, grinning at the lens, beside trophies of their hunt—boars' carcasses displayed head-up on the ground or killed deer suspended by their feet from the limbs of nearby trees. The hunters' faces bear grins of triumph: How proud we are on account of what we've slain. These are sportsmen's pictures taken to memorialize a shared experience, times spent tramping the woods tracking a quarry or waiting patiently in a blind.
The canny expressions of hunters who have outsmarted wild beasts—I've seen shots like these many times. Normally my eyes would glide easily across them. But these photographs are different. There are secrets here, secrets hidden in the faces. I study them as Agnes reels off the names.
"There's Chap with Ram beside him. There's Orrin Jennett, Frank Howard, Jack Stadpole and the director, Hoyt Hoge, up from Hollywood. Hank London, John Holmes, Rob and Gus Leavitt. Tuck Chubet, Carter Dixon, Dean Laneese, Chauncey Chase."
The names fly by me, male names, a roll call of Teds, Marks, Peters, Norms, an occasional Chris, a Caleb, even a Saul . . . though most are classically WASP. Chap Fontaine and Ram Carson are in most every photograph, almost always together, their friendship evident in the way they nearly touch.
Fontaine has a smooth, contented winner's look. A temperate, round-f
aced, good-looking man with glossy combed-back silver hair, he never fails to grin, but his grin is never too exuberant. He's also a man so perfectly groomed that no matter the toils of the hunt, he never shows a smudge of dirt nor a single hair out of place.
Carson is also good-looking, but on another level—matinee-idol handsome with chiseled chin and nose, and a dark Byronic shock of windswept hair. Peering at his eyes in search of the darkness Agnes described, I catch only a glimpse of emptiness. Carson also shows the lascivious I'll-love-you-to-death grin of a swain, a rake, a beau, a gallant. It's the old Clark Gable lady-killer smile, the leonine kind that makes women go weak in the knees. I've been a sucker for it too—the dandy's smile, the smile of the heartbreaker, the guy who loves you so easy and so well. He'll love you, leave you, break your heart, but when he reappears, shows you that incredible smile, you forgive him and again throw yourself into his arms.
Ram Carson is simply incandescently handsome, and the camera loves him . . . which means he knows how to play to it. Also how to position himself. In nearly all the pictures he's in the center, the one about whom the others coalesce. Ram and Chap, Chap and Ram—there they are, always together, sportsmen and hunters, founders and leaders. They, the pictures tell me, are the G.G.C.
There are action shots in the album too, men dressed in hunting jackets with quilted patches at the shoulder, shooting sporting clays. Also combat side-arm shooting, under the guidance of a man I recognize as Vincent Carroll, in which club members in black T-shirts and camouflage fatigue pants take aim at human-form targets. These shots are scary, giving the lie to the aristocratic-sportsman look. This isn't conventional shooting club activity, it's pure militia stuff.
I ask Agnes about it. She agrees it doesn't fit with the rest of the pictures. She points out too that I won't find Chap among the sidearm shooters.
"That was Ram's project," she tells me. "He felt that as long as they had a place to shoot, they should offer combat training to members who were interested."