The doctor, after a glance at the new father’s face, excused himself from his patient.
The minute they were alone, Barry said, “My wife’s overmedicated.” He used his awkwardly accented French in the authoritative tone he put on during story conferences.
To his surprise, the obstetrician agreed. “My colleague, he has prescribed an antidepressant, a tranquilizer and a new medication that he says has been successful in your country for the relief from the panic.” Fauchery clasped his hands on the desk. “He would have started the treatment earlier, but there was the infant to consider. Last night Madame Cordiner became extremely agitated about somebody who recently passed away.”
“Yes, my cousin.”
“So he also prescribed Thorazine.”
“Thorazine? Isn’t that for schizophrenia? I’ve heard it’s dangerous. Especially since he’s using all those other drugs.”
“He believes the medications are necessary for Madame Cordiner.” Fauchery’s expression indicated that such heroic measures were not his own preference, but the matter being beyond his expertise, he was going along with the specialist whom he had brought in.
“How long should it be before she’s completely well?”
Dr. Fauchery raised his clean, plump hands. “Dr. Plon, he believes that the deeprootedness of Madame’s symptoms prove her recovery will be slow.”
• • •
“Beth? It’s a boy, exactly three kilos—six and a half pounds. He hasn’t got much hair, but what there is looks red.”
“Irving, wake up! Barry has a boy.”
Irving said, “Mazeltov! Barry, give Alyssia and your new son a big kiss from me.”
Beth was back on the line. “When was he born?”
“A while ago . . . actually yesterday.”
“And you didn’t call?” she reproached.
“We must talk.”
“Let me go in the other room.” After a minute she was on the line again. “Poor Irving didn’t get in until a couple of hours ago, and he needs his sleep. Have you phoned Dad? What took you so long to call?”
“Alyssia’s been . . . distraught. Beth, it’s worse than before. We’re in dire straits here.”
After a long pause Beth said, “I’m sorry, Barry, but the answer’s still no.” Her voice sounded faraway and regretful.
“You told me you wanted a child; you told me you could never accept a child who didn’t have your genes. This baby fills your specifications.”
“Why are you being so cruel?”
“I’m talking about . . . adoption.”
“Adoption?”
“Yes, adoption.”
There was a silence. “What about Alyssia? Does she agree?”
“She’s thinking it over,” Barry lied.
• • •
“What . . . about the baby . . .?”
“Alyssia, you can’t manage him right now.”
“It’s all the stuff they’ve got me on.”
“Hon, you’ve been having problems for years, you told me so yourself. That’s what they’re treating.” He paused. “I’m not capable of taking charge of an infant.”
“Juanita.”
“The physical care isn’t what I’m talking about. It’s the responsibility.”
“Juanita’s reliable. . . .”
“She quit a few months ago, hon. If another man comes on the scene, she’ll depart again. Besides, she’s a personal maid, not a nurse. Do you want our son raised by a series of hired nannies?”
Alyssia began panting.
Though this attack had none of the stridency of her previous struggles for air, her expression of dazed terror made it far more unnerving.
After summoning Juanita, who was waiting in the hall, he went into the tiny parlor-nursery.
The white-coiffed Alsatian nun placidly continued her embroidery. He stood over the antique brass cradle with its elaborate festoons of Valenciennes lace. The cradle accused him. Alyssia, before the birth and despite her precarious mental and physical state, had insisted on leaving the clinic to lovingly select baby furniture and an extensive hand-stitched yellow and white layette.
The baby was awake. The frown lines in his forehead reached to the pale, reddish fuzz. With jerky lack of coordination he rubbed the back of his curled fingers at his unfocused blue eyes.
Barry felt love aching painfully inside his throat and chest. His previous fantasies were nothing compared to the overwhelming emotional attachment he felt for this tiny scrap of humanity. He’s all that matters, Barry thought. Alyssia and I must be the worst set of parents since the Borgias, and I mustn’t let my squeamishness about pressing her interfere with what’s best for him.
When he returned to Alyssia’s room, she was pale and limp, but breathing normally.
“Hon, there’s no other choice. In this type of thing, the sooner the better. We have to let Beth take over.”
She stared dully at him. “Beth?”
“He needs her.”
“I’m not following you,” she murmured. “It’s all this junk in me.”
“Beth is instinctively responsible. She’s kind and loving, a true mensch of a person. She has every qualification to be an outstanding parent.”
“Clarrie,” Alyssia whispered, a spark in her glazed eyes telling him that someplace behind the pharmaceutical fog dwelt the old, spirited Alyssia.
“Beth did the best she could with Clarrie, under the circumstances.”
“How long . . . will Beth look after him?”
“Uhh, permanently.”
“You mean, adopt him?”
“It’s the only way.”
Alyssia half rose up. “Never!” she cried, then fell back in the pillow, turning her head away from him.
“Listen to me. What sort of life can we give him, you and I? To put it brutally, I’m an alcoholic and you’re in a highly questionable mental state. It’s not how we feel that counts, it’s what’s right for him.”
“I can’t lose everything. . . .” Alyssia whispered. “First Hap, then my baby. . . .”
“Hon, I never thought I’d love him so much.” Barry’s voice shook with emotion.
Then, steeling himself, he went to the escritoire for a sheet of the clinic notepaper.
He knew nothing of the legalities involved in giving up a child for adoption, and doubtless the Napoleonic Code differed vastly from the laws of the state of California. He did, however, know his wife.
She kept her contracts.
He wrote with careful legibility:
We, Barry Cordiner and Alyssia del Mar Cordiner, do hereby agree to surrender our male infant to Elizabeth Cordiner Gold and Irving Gold in order that they might adopt him. We will not make ourselves known to said male child, or make any claims on him.
May 5, 1980.
He returned to the bed. “Hon, write your name here,” he said gently.
“Never. . . .”
Tears were rolling from Alyssia’s eyes, but she showed no other sign that she was weeping. Her face didn’t crinkle, she made no sound. Just those tears runneling down her cheeks.
He set his informal adoption paper on the nightstand. “When you think it through, hon,” he said quietly, “you’ll see there’s no other choice.”
• • •
“Where’s the paper?” Barry asked when he returned at dusk.
Alyssia, who hadn’t greeted him, didn’t reply. He wondered if she were playing a silent game with him or if she were heavily drugged. It wasn’t important. All that mattered, he told himself, was their son.
He fished the quasilegal document from the nightstand drawer, holding it in front of her face. “Have you decided about this?”
She closed her eyes.
“The maternity clinic’s responsible for him now. But what about when you leave?”
She turned her head.
• • •
“Alice, I ain’t letting you do it.”
Barry had left a few minutes earlier, an
d they were in the baby’s room, Alyssia sitting next to the cradle in the chair vacated by the Alsatian nun, who was downstairs eating dinner with the staff.
“I’m just trying to think it through,” she said in a low, flat voice that sounded computerized. “Beth’s good, decent. She knows all the right things to do . . . she’ll teach him the college kind of things.”
“You’re worth more’n all of them Cordiners put together.”
Alyssia rocked the cradle gently.
“You’ll be better soon,” Juanita argued. “I know you’re all stoned now, but you mustn’t let Barry wheedle you around the way he always done.”
“Maybe he’s right, Nita . . . I’m a mess.”
“They’ve turned you into a zombie. You can’t make a decision now.”
The baby waved his fists.
“Look at how sweet he is,” Juanita said. “Here.”
She lifted the child, setting him in Alyssia’s arms. Alyssia snuggled him closer, resting her cheek against his head.
Juanita said, “You mustn’t even think about giving him up.”
Suddenly Alyssia tensed, giving a soft gasp, and the baby slipped onto her lap. He inhaled for a scream, turning crimson. Juanita took him, soothing him.
Alyssia, gasping for air, returned unsteadily to the bedroom.
• • •
When Barry had left the clinic, he walked along the quiet, tree-lined streets without a goal in mind. The sky grew completely dark, and he found himself again in front of the vine-covered house. He halted, staring up at the dim yellow glow coming through the curtains of the second-floor suite. Torn between his desire to give his son the best possible life and his self-loathing at pressing his sorely beset wife, he had reached the limit of his self-control.
Pounding his fist into his palm, he hurried away from the clinic. Previously he had noted a bistro, Le Chat Noir, opposite the cathedral.
• • •
The following morning he awoke fully clothed on his bed at the Trois-Rivières Méridien. He attempted to recall the events of the previous night, but a wave of nausea sent him staggering to the bathroom. After he finished vomiting, he remembered. He ordered a bottle of cognac sent to his room.
• • •
Two days later, when he visited Alyssia, he was shaven, wearing a clean shirt, but the sour odor emanating from his skin and his red-streaked eyes told her, drugged as she was, what he had been up to.
“Sorry—I haven’t been by, hon,” he said with a sheepish little grin. “Been celebrating fatherhood.”
For several minutes they were silent, then the baby began crying in the next room.
She sighed, closing her eyes. “You’re right,” she murmured. “I can’t take care of him.”
A shudder passed down Barry’s spine, as if a window had blown open. He hastily searched the nightstand drawer, finding his de facto adoption paper, signing his name, then resting the paper on a magazine, giving Alyssia his pen.
Her hand shook and her signature—the autograph that she had scribbled so many thousands of times—wobbled unrecognizably.
Barry folded the paper, carefully putting it in his inside pocket.
Then he rested his head on his wife’s milk-swollen breasts and began to sob. She, dry-eyed, stared dully at the flowering horse chestnut tree outside the window.
• • •
The news was broken by Dan Rather. Yet another tragedy had overtaken the Cordiner family. Alyssia del Mar had given birth to a stillborn girl.
• • •
Irving was tired after the long haul of the Tahoe condominium project, Beth told her family and friends, so she was taking him away. They leased a large, handsome chalet isolated in the foothills of the Alps.
When they returned a month later, they had a six-day-old adopted son, Jonathon. He was a large, healthy infant, able to hold his blue eyes in a fixed position, exceptional in a baby so young. By some stroke of fortune or precise Swiss adoption proceedings, he had a trace of the red hair common in Beth’s branch of the Cordiner family.
BEVERLY HILLS, 1986
Beth gripped her wineglass so tightly that the tendons of her hand stood out. She was recalling her measured walk down the chalet’s front steps to Barry’s rental car. She had been warning herself to remain aloof for a year or so, until she could be positive that this baby had none of Clarrie’s abnormalities. Yet, as she unfastened the straps of the car crib and lifted the small weight, an exultant stir twisted within her abdomen, a blood knot tying itself. And so it had began, her bedazzled maternity. Sometimes she even forgot the nightmare of Clarrie, connecting her own pregnancy to Jonathon. God knows, the family traits showed up in abundance—her son had Tim’s impetuousness, a strong hint of the Cordiner temper; he had Barry’s intelligence without the laziness.
Beth sighed. “What I can’t understand is why Alyssia wanted Jonathon here,” she said.
“Stop worrying, Beth,” Barry said.
“Yes,” Maxim said. “Can’t you see that this is just a friendly Cordiner family get-together?”
Giving her cousin a reproachful look, Beth got to her feet. “I can’t take another minute of this waiting. Besides, I have a PTA board meeting and—” She broke off as a car in low gear came up the steep drive.
Though the house blocked the foursome’s view, the sound captured their attention, and none of them spoke.
A car door slammed.
A faraway child piped, “Mommy!”
“She had a baby?” Beth whispered. “But how could she? It would have been in the news.”
They heard the front door open, then Alyssia’s intonations but not her words.
At the lower rumble of a masculine response, Maxim’s head jerked. Slowly all color drained from his lips.
“Maxim, what is it?” Beth asked, her charming voice solicitous.
He didn’t reply. He, who normally moved with total assurance, stumbled to his feet, barging to the house, attempting to slide open one of the mirror-treated windows. It was locked.
Slapping his palms on the glass, his voice almost unrecognizable, Maxim shouted, “Open up! Open up!”
HAP
1980
64
Within three months of Hap’s death, Desmond Cordiner had recovered as much as he ever would from his stroke. The limbs of his right side were alien appendages devoid of all sensation, and his speech was nearly incomprehensible. Yet the brain trapped within this wreckage retained its agile wiliness. He spent his long, invalid days planning means to keep his beloved older son’s memory alive. With lavish donations from himself and the rest of the family, he endowed the Harvard Cordiner chair at the USC film department, the Harvard Cordiner Gallery of Cinematic Art at UCLA, he founded Harvard Cordiner film scholarships at Columbia and the University of Chicago. (Desmond’s life had circled like a compass around the fixed point of the Industry, so it never occurred to him to build up the relief center in Zaire that had meant so much to Hap.)
Hap’s lack of a proper funeral preyed continuously on him.
The left side of his face working, Desmond sputtered out an idea to Maxim. Art Garrison and Harry Cohn had each had a funeral on a sound stage of the studio he founded—Cohn at Columbia, Garrison at Magnum. Why not give Hap a memorial on this grand scale?
Maxim, who was finishing the great slag heap of post-production work with the urgency of his grief, fully agreed with the concept and promised to implement it. By chance that was the week The New Yorker with Barry’s article hit the stands. Maxim read the piece in a cold fury. That jealous shit—no wonder he was skulking in France!—had painted Hap as an egomaniacal spendthrift, a hack director with delusions of grandeur. What better refutation for this poison could there be than to premiere The Baobab Tree, which would be completed in August, at the memorial? Assuredly the film was Hap’s crowning achievement. He and the studio would see to it that all the important people were there, as well as the world press.
• • •
&nbs
p; The August hot spell continued and that Saturday afternoon the thermometer rose to a hundred and three.
Outside Magnum’s iron-arched main gate, sweat-drenched onlookers strained against the cordon of equally sweaty off-duty LAPD cops hired for this occasion. The crowd ignored those mourners who lacked a VIP gold-embossed card and therefore were not permitted to drive onto the lot: for the most part these people who trudged inside mopping their saddened faces were the craftsmen from studio shops, the seamstresses, the extras, the hairdressers, the stuntmen, the makeup people. Many had worked with Hap, and others, the elderly retirees, had known him as a boy, the straw-haired son of Desmond Cordiner. He had been popular with them all.
The limousines carrying upper-echelon executives were greeted with near sullen disappointment, but the uncomfortable crowd came to exultant life, pushing and elbowing one another for a better view of Burt Lancaster and Richard Burton and Cliff Camron and Dustin Hoffman and Rain Fairburn and Shirley MacLaine. A small cheer went up for latecomer and star of the film Alyssia del Mar, arriving alone in a hired white stretch limousine. She glanced out the open window with an almost baffled expression, as if not sure why anyone should cry her name. Her Van Nuys fan club had heard on Good Morning America that for the first time she was emerging from her seclusion following the loss of her child to pay homage to her ofttimes director, with whom, as everyone in the club knew, she once had lived. A cognoscente announced that her soon-to-be ex-husband, Barry Cordiner, was staying in France because the family was pissed at something he had written about them.
On Stage 8, Magnum’s largest sound stage, the outsize screen seemed an insignificant blank postage stamp. Facing it were thousands of folding chairs in neat rows, and a dais banked with red roses that was reserved for the family.
Desmond Cordiner, slumping awkwardly in a wheelchair, was shielded from public view by an enormous arrangement of American Beauties. On each of the white leather seats on the dais had rested a place card. In expansive Hollywood style the family included its divorced members. Two of Maxim’s spectacular exes sat with their current spouses, and Madeleine Van Vliet Cordiner, as putative widow, had the place of honor behind the lectern. Every place was filled.
Dreams Are Not Enough Page 41
