“Don’t kid me,” the general said, “you knew it was coming. Listen to what I’ve written: ‘And now I must close, Myrtle. Tom Harrow—I told you I had him with me, didn’t I? The one who wrote the play you and I saw in New York back in ’39—is with me, and we’re going to have a little snort. Pinky Greenway tried to take Harrow from me last week but he didn’t. Tom sends you his regards and wishes you were here. Right?”
“Right, sir,” Tom Harrow said.
“You know,” the general said, “for a civilian you’re a good Joe. Here’s looking at you, Tom.”
The pain left him for a moment.
“Why, thanks a lot, sir,” he said.
“Don’t kid me,” the general said. “Say, before we go to the mess, I might tell you I was Up There half an hour ago, and got what I wanted.”
There was a good reason to be startled because what the general said indicated an ending of an episode.
“Congratulations, sir,” Tom said.
“Thanks,” the general said. “It will be nice to be dragging out of here. I’ll be going up Casablanca way the day after tomorrow. I’m taking Pugsy White with me. If you weren’t married to such a lovely girl, I’d put in for you, too. Pour me out a little more.”
It was a time to pour the drinks carefully.
“Sir,” he said, “I’d like to be in the show.”
“You did all right, son,” the general said, “at Oran, but this may be the business this time.”
Tom found himself clearing his throat.
“If you want me, sir,” he said, “I know a little Italian, and I’d like to see the show.”
The thing had been on a professional basis and he hoped that he had paid his way. His mind had been on the Dumas Musketeers back there in the general’s quarters. When he looked out of the window and saw the orange trees and the bougainvillaea, the curtain of unreality dropped down. He was Raoul setting forth with the Duc de Beaufort now that the king had taken away de la Vallière. The difficulty was that neither God nor Dumas had made Tom as capable as Raoul, but his mind was off his troubles.
XXVI
You Always Fell Down Somewhere When Running Through the Script
When he had gone out to Hollywood to do a treatment of Little Liar, Antoine Lasalle, who had been proud to admit that he had been born on New York’s East Side, at that particular time was one of the greatest producers on any lot. Tom Harrow had made a great hit with Mr. Lasalle and still called him ‘Tony’. In fact, they had got on so well together that Mr. Lasalle had insisted that he and Rhoda come out from New York at his expense and stay as his guest personally at his Beverly Hills home, Château Lasalle, and, as Tony had said, the swimming pool was so long that if you swam the length of it, you had to have the personal gym instructor, who was always on duty, take you back in a wheelchair to the bar. The occasion for the invitation was the World Première of the film Little Liar; and Antoine was an artist in those days, having done that movie, Women Without Men, which had grossed five million—and if that wasn’t art, what was? In fact, Tony was in a position to wear an opera cloak to the World Première of Little Liar, and Fifi Lasalle’s string of pearls had snapped just when they were all putting their feet on moist concrete to commemorate the event, but who gave a damn, as Tony said? There were lots of other oysters, and new shoes and slippers had been supplied for everyone. Somehow Rhoda had never got into the spirit of the occasion, and she had worried all that night about how to get concrete off pearls, not that they were hers, but Tom had enjoyed himself that night.
The studio crowd had wanted to do something nice in honor of Mr. Antoine. The plan was to give him a surprise at the party he was going to throw at the château after the opening, and the thought was to get a little skit together and there was a lot of acting talent around happy to be in it. The main problem was to get someone to write the skit and he had been asked to do it and had whipped the whole thing out in two hours. The idea was amusing at the time. In some respects he had been a new Milton, writing Comus for the benefit of royalty. It was a long way from the great Puritan to the bathing cabañas at the far end of the château swimming pool, and Milton himself would never have dreamed of the lighting and equipment that had come up from the studio. Naturally a different, non-Comus tempo was required at Beverly Hills, but the Comus plot had not gone badly when translated into the Brown Derby vernacular and the saving of the virtue of Melesande Miller, who had played the conscience in the Little Liar film, had been something that brought down the house for any one of a number of reasons and most of the reasons were right there in the audience.
There was no reason to have thought of this ancient and somewhat bawdy occasion, which marked the height of Hollywood greatness, if it had not been for a lyric he had written sung by Percival Rodney who had played the part of Comus. Percival had been the fashionable funny man in those days, although he was now a sad hermit, living somewhere near Palm Springs, who ate only Indio dates and yoghurt. Percy had never been funnier than when he had sung a lyric called “Running through the Script.” It was a pity that most of it had long ago evaded Tom Harrow’s memory, but he could remember the chorus as he lay staring into the dark. The music had a happy lilt; it had been written by Joe Bushkin in the studio, who could think up ten tunes an hour back in those days.
If a body meet a body [some of the patter went]
running through the script,
Should a body blame a body, if a body slipped?
Running through the script [was the way the chorus went],
Running through the script—
Be careful; don’t fall on your ass, while running
through the script.
Rhoda had said that night that the whole thing was vulgar, and she was shocked that anyone in his position should pander to such a boor as this Lasalle, which certainly was a made-up name, and when were they going to get out of the château? No doubt he had always been too pliable, too affable, and no doubt he possessed a vulgar streak. Yet if she had wanted financial comparisons, as he had told her back there in the château, Tony could stack up with Hertime any day, and why were they always playing around the Hertimes? It had not helped that Rhoda had begun to cry when he made this remark, but this was beside the point at present. A snatch of the chorus persistently kept moving through his mind: Running through the script—Be careful; don’t fall on your ass, while running through the script.
His life had been, in its final version, the running through of a series of scripts written by Providence instead of by himself, and of the two, he believed he was the better writer. His life was one long script that already contained hints of the ending and also a painful series of pratfalls. The studio in which it had been directed and the stages had been his world with limitations not unlike those in Culver City. There were the same sort of scenes made overnight with nothing but two-by-fours supporting the fronts of imposing buildings. The art departments and technicians were remarkable. Give them a few hours’ notice and they could whip up a street in London, Paris or Peking, and a crowd of extras could bring the scenes to life, and time could be moved back and forward. Most of one’s actual life was consumed in walking past similar stage sets. You were always on some lot or other, and you were forever acting out a script, listening to directions hurled at you by conscience or the subconscious. Actually, he had had surprisingly little to do with preparing the life script that he had acted. His name was on it as clear as the carving on a tombstone, but this did not alter the fact that the whole business had been ghostwritten so badly that most of it could not possibly hold attention.
That dingy, inexpert production was now moving into its final act. There had been an interminable quality surrounding every part of the progression, but when the action was over he had the impression that everything had moved with remarkable celerity. The time lag seemed incredibly short from childhood until the present, and the intermissions were confusing. His life with Rhoda seemed closer to yesterday than the true yesterdays that had i
ntervened, and there were unrealities so inartistic that they left no permanent conviction, like Rhoda’s letter and the war. These were interpolations which no one in his senses would have used, and yet they, too, were speeded up in recollection. One was always running, never walking through the script and only when you were getting through with it did you know that time had ticked like a clock without a pendulum.
It was hard to pick out Sicily in the script, since incidents there had no particular relationship to past or future and all that held them together was a struggle for survival that had often placed physical fatigue above actual danger.
That sequence had begun and ended so quickly that its sharper fears were dulled. The interlude now had a spurious sunset aspect, enabling him to return to some of its moments wistfully. He had never been so well physically or so intensely aware of everything around him. Part of this awareness must have been due to apprehension, but he had not broken under strain. In place of the weight he had lost, the rest of him was tougher. By the time he reached Palermo, it had seemed a lifetime since Algiers, and his face had reflected the life. Its bone structure was more pronounced and humor had left his lips, and it could have been that Hopedale had been right about him when he had met her there in Palermo.
“You never looked this way before,” she said. “You’re wonderful.”
This was one of those inconsequential and badly balanced speeches characteristic of the script. He had met her at a USO show to which he had gone without knowing who would be in the troupe. It had been a hot night outside the city and he had stood in the dark among several thousand officers and enlisted men, all lonely, all drawn there to catch a glimpse of what might approximate the life they had left behind. The stage as usual was a boxing ring, cut from the surrounding blackness by powerful, inartistically arranged lights. The sound of the generators that made them operate added to the confusion, and as always happened, the microphones were not functioning.
He had to hand it to Hopedale when, in spite of the handicaps, the crowd had been right with her from the start, and she had always been and still was an excellent mimic, and she always possessed an arrogant nerve that could make her go through with anything. He respected her performance, but, during the first minutes he saw her on that dazzlingly lighted platform, his only thought was of incredulity that he should be seeing in Palermo any woman he had known in his other life.
The chance of having a few minutes alone with anyone like Laura Hopedale, when it was necessary to compete with all the high brass, was almost nil in Palermo. He had not forgotten the amazed looks of some outstanding military figures at the party afterwards. She was dressed in a practical uniform that was mandatory for war theatres, but Hopedale could always give style to anything. She was talking to a three-star general when she saw him, and, as she said later, the general was a dull and concupiscent old man.
“Tom,” she called as soon as she saw him, “think of seeing you in a rat race like this.”
As she had told him later, she had always liked men, but not so many men. She had never been able to get on with women, but she really felt a new desire to try, she said, after her stay in Palermo.
“My God,” she whispered, “you look wonderful.”
“So do you,” he said, “but then, of course there’s no standard of comparison.”
“That’s the beauty of it,” she said. “Its the only place I’ve ever been where there are no standards whatsoever. How is dear Rhoda?”
“Oh,” he said. “That’s so, Rhoda.”
“What do you mean by that?” she asked.
“Nothing much,” he said. “Did you say you were without any standards?”
“No,” she said, “I only said there weren’t any standards, and it’s not my fault.”
“No,” he said, “of course it isn’t, as long as you don’t blame it on me.”
“Harrow,” she said, “I’m not blaming anything on you. My God, you look wonderful. There’s so much I want to tell you.”
“Dear Laura,” he said. “I don’t suppose it would be possible, but I’d like to do some talking myself. I feel like Othello tonight. I could tell you a lot of stories if you were Desdemona.”
“I’ve always wondered what it would be like to be alone with you,” she said, “but we never had a half a chance, did we? Your face is awfully tanned, but you’re not as dark as a Moor. Okay, I’ll be Desdemona.”
“Where?” he asked.
“That’s a good, intelligent question,” she said. “Do you really want an intelligent answer? Soldier, are you really lonely?”
“Yes,” he said, “I’m really pretty lonely.”
“Well,” she said, “what would Rhoda say?”
He still was gratified that she had wanted him over all the competition.
“Rhoda’s interest would only be academic, as things stand,” he said.
“Poor dear,” she said, “do you mean what I think you mean? You ought to tell me about it. You ought to tell someone everything.”
“I agree,” he said, “but where?”
“Oh, well,” she said, “they keep knocking on my door. They always do all night, but you can take me home. I’ll have to explain it to that dirty-minded old man I was talking to. God, it’s tiresome when three thousand sex-starved officers try to make you simultaneously every time the plane hits the runway, and then in the air there’s the pilot.”
“I’m just another,” he said. “I’m trying to make you, dear.”
“Yes,” she said, “but you don’t try so intensely. You lack the West Point training.”
“That’s what I hear all day long,” he said, “but I wish you wouldn’t tell me, too, that I’m not West Point.”
“Thank God you never went to that place,” she said. “I’ve always loved you. I never knew how much until right now.”
“Values get magnified in a place like this,” he said. “Not that I care—I merely bring it up.”
“Harrow,” she said, “I’m going to make you care. I’ll have to go now, but wait around and you can take me home—I mean to that hotel.”
He was sometimes disturbed by dreams which, though formless afterwards, had been so eloquent that they would awaken him from deep sleep and leave him uncertain as to where he was. In Sicily, where regular sleep had been denied him for long periods and where what there was of it could only be snatched at intervals, as someone overcome with hunger might snatch at food, he had been adjusted to those uncertain moments. He had awakened in jeeps and in strange rooms in shell-torn hill towns. There was usually a moment on waking when the past was comfortably around him and when he thought he was in New York or at least in Washington. He could still remember with a sharp embarrassment that had never left him, waking that night in Palermo and knowing that he was not alone. There was, incidentally, one thing he could say for Laura Hopedale, not that he could not have added a number of others: she was what one might call a graceful sleeper, never wakeful, never restless. If her sleep was not the sleep of the just, it was more attractive than sheer justice. It had a serenity of its own, the reason for which, he had grown to understand, arose from Laura’s belief in herself.
“Rhoda,” he said, “is that you?”
He realized where he was directly after he had spoken, and he hoped frantically that his voice had not awakened her, but it had. Laura had a way of always waking when she knew she ought, and she always knew exactly where she was.
“Try again,” she said, and she began to laugh, and he could not blame her.
“I’m awfully sorry,” he said. “It’s just conditioned reflex, ingrained habit.”
“Oh well,” she said, “I hoped I’d broken you of the habit already. Never mind, I’ll keep on trying.”
“It won’t be difficult,” he said, “almost no trouble at all.”
He had said it because it was high time he said something of a complimentary nature, and the memory of her answer still startled him.
“I know it won’t,” she s
aid. “She’s not the type that would be good in bed.”
“Listen,” he told her, “I know it’s all over, and nobody has to remind me of it and I know I shouldn’t have brought up her name, particularly under the circumstances, but simply out of justice, Laura, I really ought to say that Rhoda’s the sort of person who’s good at anything.”
It was difficult to imagine a more indelicate conversation or one that could have made him more disturbed; yet he was always glad that he had made this speech about Rhoda, for he had made the record clear, and, curiously, Hopedale was not annoyed.
“Tom, dear,” she said, “I love it when you’re loyal.”
He had not known her so well then, of course, as he had later. There was never anyone he had known, man or woman, who possessed the same sort of indestructibility. In a woman’s college it might have been called “quality of leadership”; in the theatre, most markedly among the critics, it was usually called “presence”; it was something that had always made her noticed, no matter how terrible the play. It was an assurance that still made her one of the glamorous figures on the Coast, who could compete with the youngsters regardless of age. It was only after one got to know her that one realized her assurance had the hardness and sharpness of obsidian, but then, there was no use in going on about Hopedale. It had all been a mistake, for which he was to blame more than she.
He had seen his lawyer in New York shortly after V-E Day. The land was swarming now with internal revenue agents, social security agents, farm and veterans’ agents, not to mention secret agents representing foreign powers, but in spite of proliferation, the great professions still existed that had formed the background of his life, the keystone of the arch, that trinity who, more than love, had made his world go around—the dentist, the doctor, and the lawyer.
Curiously, his reactions to these professions remained constant. In spite of the marked fallibility of individuals, he still believed that doctors, lawyers, and dentists were endowed with an infallibility greater than that of common men in that they were selfless individuals. Try as he might, whenever he entered a dentist’s office timidity would seize him, not so much because of apprehension as because of respect for the white-jumpered man whose nimble fingers would never admit error and who could converse brightly and sometimes sing while performing feats more intricate than any accomplishment of a watchmaker. It was different in a doctor’s office. There one put aside confections and trinkets like detachable gold bridges and faced antiseptically the facts of eventual dissolution—not that this fact would occur immediately. The doctor behind his desk and the pretty receptionist would keep you on your feet a while longer. “Well, well, Tom,” the doctor would say, “excuse me for keeping you waiting, but I’ve been performing a tonsillectomy, an appendectomy and a couple of hysterectomies.” He could still feel the graciousness of this confiding camaraderie and still feel himself, in spite of some disillusions, in the presence of something beyond his world.
Women and Thomas Harrow Page 45
