A cop catches me straddling the rope. “What you doing, Bub?”
“I’ve got to get over to the theatre,” I tell him.
“Sure you do,” the cop says.
“I’ve got tickets.” I stick them under his nose.
At the mention of tickets, a resentful look slides on to his flat face.
“You can’t cross the road,” he says. “We got traffic control here.”
“Look,” I say, “I’ve got a bad leg. It can’t take much more of this pushing and shoving.”
“If you got a bad leg, take it home. Take it home or stay where you are.”
I’m prepared to argue when I spot the Hispano-Suiza gliding up in front of Grauman’s. I nod to the cop, a tacit promise to stay put. He clamps his jaw with authority, takes a couple paces down the rope, glances over his shoulder to make sure I’m not up to any funny business behind his back.
Chance and Fitz get out of the car. They are wearing tails and silk top hats. The enthusiasm of the crowd dips, they don’t recognize these two. The expensive car, the beautiful young girl in the evening dress sweeping forward with a bouquet to present to Chance announce these men are important – but why? Chance accepts the bouquet with a stiff little bow, passes it to Fitz who grapples it clumsily to his chest.
Slowly Chance turns to face us, slowly his hand rises in a hieratic gesture to the marquee. He points and we cease even to murmur, watch in enthralled silence, struggling to decipher this obscure gesture. Now he is shaking his finger at the sign, emphatically, schoolteacher waiting for the answer.
A single voice rises in a shout from the back of the crowd. “Besieged!” Radiant pleasure, pride, happiness flood Chance’s features. He straightens, grows taller. Yes, his body is saying, yes, yes, yes. The finger prods once more, jabbing a smattering of high, thin, involuntary-sounding cries out of the mob. Behind me a hoarse voice, roughened by a foreign accent, joins in, to my left I hear a child’s, a woman’s. Now Chance’s finger is marking time, more voices add to the deep, swelling chorus of, “Besieged! Besieged! Besieged!” People shout it recklessly, happily, making a noise like the noise of empty barrels rolled in an empty street. “Besieged! Besieged!”
Chance raises his hands above his head, clasps them in a prizefighter’s gesture of victory, shakes them at the mob. The mindless roar is physical, a hot wave of breath on my back. I twist around and confront a wall of faces; a painted midway canvas of freaks, a nickel’s worth of depravity, the mouths yawning cavernous and hungry, the eyes blazing.
But now the mad clamouring sputters, fades out, disintegrating into lonesome cries, desultory handclapping. I look back and Chance is strolling up the carpet into a barrage of winking flashbulbs, Fitz walking carefully in the rear, the tall hat balanced on his head, the flowers bundled in a big fist.
Around me everyone subsides into disappointment. It’s over now. A sort of post-coital tristesse settles on us, a listless shame. We avoid each other’s eyes, shrink from touching one another; the knot which briefly held us together is unravelling, people are drifting away like scraps of paper blowing in an aimless wind. Across the street, uniformed flunkies are closing the main doors of Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre, the temple is being secured. It is too late for the picture. I will miss Besieged.
For three hours I sit in a café drinking coffee, keep trying to imagine what the audience is being treated to up on the big screen four blocks away. Every fifteen minutes I check my watch and light another cigarette. People stare at me because of the tuxedo. At eleven I pay the bill and go out into the night. A fitful wind has sprung up, a wind that seems to nudge me in the direction of Grauman’s. Although it feels like rain, I don’t turn for home. Instead I button my jacket, stuff my hands in my pockets, and permit myself to be shoved along by the wind at my back. The self-congratulatory speeches will have ended long ago, the last reel will be playing itself out, soon the theatre will empty. It’s a short walk but feels endless. The avenue is deserted and still, the streetlight poles stark, the ponds of light at their feet bright, shallow, sterile. My left shoe rasps on the concrete, hoarsely, monotonously. I drag it past a line-up of parked automobiles, chauffeurs killing time as they wait for the picture to finish. The police have left, the rope barrier is down, but a few stubborn souls still huddle in the wind, waiting. Tramping up the theatre side of the street, I am treated to a star’s-eye view of the fans. From this perspective and distance they look small and pitiable, like children somebody has forgotten to collect after a birthday party.
I stop and light a cigarette under the marquee. None of the officious staff raising the green-and-white awning against the possibility of rain tell me to move on. It is the tuxedo. They assume I am waiting for a friend.
All at once there’s an excited rushing about of Grauman employees, the doors are opening, the picture is over. The first of the audience spilling out talk animatedly, always a good sign for a picture, while others linger in the lobby, an even more auspicious sign. Out in the fresh air women draw their furs tightly around their shoulders, the men light cigars and impatiently scan the street for drivers and automobiles. One of Grauman’s young men beckons imperiously to the line-up, headlights snap on, the cars move forward like dominoes tipping in a chain reaction. The remnant of fans wave autograph books in the air and cry out beseechingly from across the road.
Here a tuxedo can loiter, smoke a cigarette, cast eyes up to the sky for portents of rain. Betty Blythe, star of the Queen of Sheba, passes close enough for me to touch, and so do Bessie Love and Colleen Moore. Others troop by, gentlemen and ladies I don’t recognize, L.A. businessmen, lawyers, doctors, their wives. People with enough social standing, enough money, to be granted the boon of buying a ticket to a premiere, to be granted the pleasure of rubbing shoulders with Charlie Chaplin, people who fifteen years ago would have dismissed picture people as vulgarians.
I hear bits and snatches of conversation popping up like bright birds in a bush. “Superb!” says someone. “All it needed for perfection was a true star!” is the opinion of another. “Where is he? Where’s Chance?”
I spot Fitz, a head taller than anyone else, doing a chain-gang shuffle through the bottleneck of congestion in the lobby doors. Where Fitzsimmons is, Chance will be too.
I’m correct. Once under the awning Chance holds court, greeting admirers. Actors behave like they do before a camera, pantomiming their awe, their delight, their amazement. When actresses seize Chance’s arm and cuddle against his shoulder, or raise themselves on tiptoe to plant a kiss on his cheek for photographers, he receives their attentions with awkward, old-fashioned, gentlemanly courtliness.
Chance is happy. He shines with it, happiness suffuses him. Nodding and smiling, he shakes hands, accepts pats of congratulation on the shoulder. Men offer him cigars. I read his lips. Over and over he is saying, Yes, yes, yes.
Now Fitz is guiding him away, escorting him down the carpet. For an instant Fitz’s and my eyes lock, and he deftly steers Chance a little to the right to avoid us meeting. They go past. A determined well-wisher importunes them, expressing admiration for the picture. Chance begins nodding again.
It starts to rain lightly, just hard enough to flicker in the light of streetlamps and headlights, sparse and granular, like a shower of rice at a wedding. Across the street, the little covey of devotees, neglected, is breaking up. Someone opens a newspaper over her head. Someone is crossing the road. Someone else is following him.
The first jaywalker moves like a somnambulist, looks neither right nor left, steps into the path of an oncoming car. The pavement is slick with rain, a horn blares, the car brakes, slides to a stop inches from the man’s legs. Under the awning people break off conversations to stare curiously. In the glare of the headlights the man stares back, searching the faces.
Shorty in a black suit and white shirt, collar buttoned tightly. His face lit from beneath by the car headlights, the planes of his face like snow, his eyes black and sunken. He looks old, a walking corps
e. He steps up on the bumper of the car and surveys the crowd under the green-and-white awning. “Chance!” he shouts. A woman laughs in surprise, as if this were a joke.
Shorty steps down from the bumper, advances. Wylie follows, eyes switching nervously back and forth. The light of the marquee falls full upon McAdoo, carrying himself like an old soldier, wearing his black suit like a uniform. He passes everybody as if they were nothing more than fur coats and evening dress hung on a clothesline for airing. People step aside, make way for him. He looks strange under the electric light; his tan is gone and his face burns with a hospital pallor. Sick, you would think, if the firm, steady tread, the young man’s stride which bears the old face onward, didn’t belie it.
Reaching Chance and Fitz he says loudly, “I’d like a word.”
Chance stands with a sceptical smile on his lips, his head turned ever so slightly to one side, his eyes fastened on the belly of the awning. “If this is business,” he says without looking at McAdoo, “you must make an appointment to see me. I do not conduct business on social occasions.”
Wylie shifts his feet on the carpet. McAdoo’s mouth tightens. “I come to ask you to write to the newspapers and tell them that feller in your picture ain’t me.”
Chance is still smiling, still refusing to look McAdoo in the face. He watches the awning flutter with gusts of wind and rain. “Of course it isn’t you,” he says. “Mr. McAdoo is dead.”
“Liar!” bursts out Wylie. He rounds on the gaping bystanders. “Don’t you believe him! This here’s Shorty McAdoo! I know him! Know him good as anything!”
“You’re mistaken,” Chance says. “Shorty McAdoo is dead and this man is an impostor.” For the first time he looks directly at Shorty. “Stand aside,” he says coolly, “let me pass.”
“Every day he waits at that gate for a word and you drive on by! He ain’t waiting no more!” Wylie screeches.
McAdoo grabs Wylie’s arm, pulling him up short. “You listen to me,” he says with urgency. “Take hold of yourself. I told you. This ain’t got nothing to do with you. I come for my say. That’s all – a say. I can do my own talking without help from you. Go home.”
“Once more,” says Chance. “Stand aside.”
McAdoo shakes his head. “You’ve had one walk over me. You ain’t going to get two. Not until I’m finished.”
Chance gives Fitz a sign and he slips between them. McAdoo runs his eyes up and down him. “So you’re the big dog.”
“That’s right.”
“Cock your leg and piss on somebody else,” says McAdoo and moves to step around him. As he does, Fitz grabs him by the lapels of the black suit, jerking him off his feet, shaking him, snapping the old white head back and forth in a blur. McAdoo kicks at him, battering the Irishman’s shins, boots thudding against fenceposts. That’s it. Flying head, flying feet, everything a blur.
Something cracks, hard and sharp like fracturing bone, and Fitz sways with the old man slumped unconscious in his fists. A woman screams, a long aria of terror. A thought lurches in my mind. He’s snapped the old man’s neck, like a dry brittle stick broken over a knee. But then Fitz’s eyes roll upward, trying to locate the source of his own death, the neat black hole drilled square in the middle of his forehead. He falls, a big tree axed, crashes to the carpet, dragging McAdoo down with him.
Wylie is walking forward jerkily, his arm held stiff and straight at shoulder height, my pistol on the end of it, pointed at Chance. I hear people running, feet pounding, there are more screams, shouts for the police, but they reach me from a far way off, a place divorced from this moment. A fine mist of smoke hovers under the awning; the thick oily smell of a discharged weapon startles my nostrils.
Chance stands, a prisoner in the dock awaiting judgement, his lips moving. What looks like prayer is really only Chance repeating, over and over, “Fitz, Fitz, Fitz, Fitz…”
“Wylie!” I scream, the name tearing my throat. Recognizing the voice, his face veers to me, the movement tortured. “Christ, Wylie, let him go,” I beg. “Don’t do it. Don’t.”
Pronouncing the last don’t, I understand Wylie is looking at me with cold hatred, that my own death is being debated in his slow, clumsy mind at this instant.
The wailing of a police siren saves me. Wylie swings his head to the sound, swings back to Chance, decision written on his face. “You-you-you ought to talked to him,” he says, stumbling over the words. “If you’d just only talked to him. We would been in Canada now. We would been in Canada… happy.”
Chance’s face wears the blank look it wore months ago at supper as he tore the bread, eating like an animal. When Wylie’s pistol rises up so do Chance’s arms, not in surrender, but in an extravagant gesture of welcome.
The bullet buckles him as if two strong hands from behind had ripped down hard on his shoulders. His legs give way, sinking him to his knees, a flower of blood spreading vivid petals on his starched shirt front. Wylie takes two steps forward, shoves the gun against his chest and fires, the flash scorching Chance’s linen.
By the time I reach Chance, Wylie has dropped the gun and is gazing at the rain as it drums down harder and harder, draping a silver blanket on either side of the awning, enclosing the four of us in a lonely tent. I hear its wild thrashing on the canvas roof and, underneath that, the keening of police sirens.
As I prop Chance’s head in my arms he snatches me by the nape of my neck, pulling my face within inches of his with a brutal, frantic strength.
“Harry?” he whispers.
I struggle to pull my face away from the dire mask confronting me, but the grip is unbreakable.
“Harry,” he gasps, “when we talked… you see… I could not bring myself to tell you everything.”
“What? What couldn’t you tell me?”
“The consequences of the truth.” His breath rasps short and quick in my face. “Artists… visionaries… they always find a way to kill us, Harry. Always.”
“Who?” I shout down at him. “Who are they?”
He is beyond speech. He makes a gesture to the wall of rain, to whomever, whatever, he imagines lurks behind it. The canvas rips, shreds in the wind with a wrenching, desolate sound as I watch his eyes darken, as he struggles for his last breath, as the open pit of his mouth slowly fills with blood, as the frothy pink liquid spills down my arm, marking me.
31
I end with a list of names as I began.
Shorty McAdoo, unconscious, was taken by ambulance to hospital. Six hours later, he slipped off the ward and disappeared. I never saw him again. Shorty on the run, just as he had been as a boy. Making for the Medicine Line. I like to believe he crossed it one last time.
Wylie hanged himself in jail. They buried him in the potter’s field Shorty and he had saved his brother from.
Two weeks after the premiere I said goodbye to Rachel at the train station. She had come to see my mother and me off to Saskatoon, our fares paid with the five-hundred-dollar cheque Chance had written me as a settling of accounts. A Santa Ana was blowing, the hot wind whipping her electric black hair around her head. The locomotive stood impatiently panting steam while she kissed my mother farewell. When we shook hands she said, “Reconsider, Harry. I can get you a job at Metro. I’ve got pull there.”
Grit and cinders were flying in the wind. I knew I was done with Hollywood. I shook my head.
“Maybe it’s best,” she said, tugging down the hem of her skirt against the Santa Ana’s ferocity. “Maybe this isn’t the place for you.”
And she was right. Like Shorty McAdoo, I didn’t belong there.
The conductor was calling us aboard. As we stepped up into the railway car she cried out, “Don’t be a stranger, Harry! Write me!”
Pressed against the window, my mother and I didn’t take our eyes from Rachel until the train left her behind, waving.
I never did write to Rachel Gold. A couple of months after I’d settled back in Saskatoon, I landed a job managing a movie theatre. I’ve been th
ere almost thirty years. Funny, isn’t it? Harry Vincent still in the picture business. In 1925 I put a down payment on a little house overlooking the river which runs through the city. My mother lived with me in this house for ten years, until she died in February of 1935.
I never married. It isn’t that I’ve been carrying a torch all these years. I remember being a rookie at the studio, Rachel laughing and showing me a picture of herself in an old central-casting book. It was from the days when she was a bit actress, before she became a scriptwriter. The photograph was of a very young woman, but it was still Rachel. She had a knowing look in her eye.
Later, I pinched the book, took it home, and cut her picture out of it. I discovered it in my wallet a couple of years after I moved back to Saskatoon. Pictures on cheap paper don’t wear well. I could hardly make out her face. During one of my walks by the river I dropped it into the water. I have no more idea where Rachel Gold ended up than I do where that photograph did. Both moved out of view.
I accept that. Living beside the river has taught me something about change. Paved white with snow and ice in winter, slack and brown in summer, the river is never the same. As a boy, I had rushed down to it only in its moments of crisis, when it ripped apart and roared, shattered while I stood on the bank, shaking with excitement. The apocalypse has its attractions.
Chance was greedy for the apocalypse. More, he wanted to have a hand in creating it. For thirty years I’ve stood at the back of my theatre watching men like him in the newsreels. Hitler ranting like some demented Charlie Chaplin; Mussolini posturing on a balcony like some vain, second-rate Latin screen star. Now Senator Joe McCarthy bullies his way through his hearings, the gods and goddesses of Hollywood facing a different kind of public judgement than the box office, frightened, cringing before the cameras they love so dearly.
I can offer no judgement of Chance’s picture Besieged because I never saw it. Not many people did. It got pushed into oblivion; Chance’s murder became bigger than the picture itself. As so often happens in Hollywood, scandal became the story, obscuring everything else. The man who wanted to be another D.W. Griffith, a visionary filmmaker, is remembered today only as the man who got killed at a premiere. A small footnote.
The Englishman’s Boy Page 34
