II
HIS MOTHER lived in Glendale; it was the house which he had taken when he married and later bought, in which his son and daughter had been born—a bungalow in a cul-de-sac of pepper trees and flowering shrubs and vines which the Japanese tended, backed into a barren foothill combed and curried into a cypress-and-marble cemetery dramatic as a stage set and topped by an electric sign in red bulbs which, in the San Fernando valley fog, glared in broad sourceless ruby as though just beyond the crest lay not heaven but hell. The length of his sports model car in which the Filipino sat reading a paper dwarfed it. But she would have no other, just as she would have neither servant, car, nor telephone—a gaunt spare slightly stooped woman upon whom even California and ease had put no flesh, sitting in one of the chairs which she had insisted on bringing all the way from Nebraska. At first she had been content to allow the Nebraska furniture to remain in storage, since it had not been needed (when Ira moved his wife and family out of the house and into the second one, the intermediate one, they had bought new furniture too, leaving the first house furnished complete for his mother) but one day, he could not recall just when, he discovered that she had taken the one chair out of storage and was using it in the house. Later, after he began to sense that quality of unrest in her, he had suggested that she let him clear the house of its present furniture and take all of hers out of storage but she declined, apparently preferring or desiring to leave the Nebraska furniture where it was. Sitting so, a knitted shawl about her shoulders, she looked less like she lived in or belonged to the house, the room, than the son with his beach burn and his faintly theatrical gray temples and his bright expensive suavely antiphonal garments did. She had changed hardly at all in the thirty-four years; she and the older Ira Ewing too, as the son remembered him, who, dead, had suffered as little of alteration as while he had been alive. As the sod Nebraska outpost had grown into a village and then into a town, his father’s aura alone had increased, growing into the proportions of a giant who at some irrevocable yet recent time had engaged barehanded in some titanic struggle with the pitiless earth and endured and in a sense conquered—it too, like the town, a shadow out of all proportion to the gaunt gnarled figure of the actual man. And the actual woman too as the son remembered them back in that time. Two people who drank air and who required to eat and sleep as he did and who had brought him into the world, yet were strangers as though of another race, who stood side by side in an irrevocable loneliness as though strayed from another planet, not as husband and wife but as blood brother and sister, even twins, of the same travail because they had gained a strange peace through fortitude and the will and strength to endure.
“Tell me again what it is,” she said. “I’ll try to understand.”
“So it was Kazimura that showed you the damned paper,” he said. She didn’t answer this; she was not looking at him.
“You tell me she has been in the pictures before, for two years. That that was why she had to change her name, that they all have to change their names.”
“Yes. They call them extra parts. For about two years, God knows why.”
“And then you tell me that this—that all this was so she could get into the pictures—”
He started to speak, then he caught himself back out of some quick impatience, some impatience perhaps of grief or despair or at least rage, holding his voice, his tone, quiet: “I said that that was one possible reason. All I know is that the man has something to do with pictures, giving out the parts. And that the police caught him and Samantha and the other girl in an apartment with the doors all locked and that Samantha and the other woman were naked. They say that he was naked too and he says he was not. He says in the trial that he was framed—tricked; that they were trying to blackmail him into giving them parts in a picture; that they fooled him into coming there and arranged for the police to break in just after they had taken off their clothes; that one of them made a signal from the window. Maybe so. Or maybe they were all just having a good time and were innocently caught.” Unmoving, rigid, his face broke, wrung with faint bitter smiling as though with indomitable and impassive suffering, or maybe just smiling, just rage. Still his mother did not look at him.
“But you told me she was already in the pictures. That that was why she had to change her—”
“I said, extra parts,” he said. He had to catch himself again, out of his jangled and outraged nerves, back from the fierce fury of the impatience. “Can’t you understand that you don’t get into the pictures just by changing your name? and that you don’t even stay there when you get in? that you can’t even stay there by being female? that they come here in droves on every train—girls younger and prettier than Samantha and who will do anything to get into the pictures? So will she, apparently; but who know or are willing to learn to do more things than even she seems to have thought of? But let’s don’t talk about it. She has made her bed; all I can do is to help her up: I can’t wash the sheets. Nobody can. I must go, anyway; I’m late.” He rose, looking down at her. “They said you telephoned me this morning. Is this what it was?”
“No,” she said. Now she looked up at him; now her gnarled hands began to pick faintly at one another. “You offered me a servant once.”
“Yes. I thought fifteen years ago that you ought to have one. Have you changed your mind? Do you want me to—”
Now she stopped looking at him again, though her hands did not cease. “That was fifteen years ago. It would have cost at least five hundred dollars a year. That would be—”
He laughed, short and harsh. “I’d like to see the Los Angeles servant you could get for five hundred dollars a year. But what—” He stopped laughing, looking down at her.
“That would be at least five thousand dollars,” she said.
He looked down at her. After a while he said, “Are you asking me again for money?” She didn’t answer nor move, her hands picking slowly and quietly at one another. “Ah,” he said. “You want to go away. You want to run from it. So do I!” he cried, before he could catch himself this time; “so do I! But you did not choose me when you elected a child; neither did I choose my two. But I shall have to bear them and you will have to bear all of us. There is no help for it.” He caught himself now, panting, quieting himself by will as when he would rise from bed, though his voice was still harsh: “Where would you go? Where would you hide from it?”
“Home,” she said.
“Home?” he repeated; he repeated in a kind of amazement: “home?” before he understood. “You would go back there? with those winters, that snow and all? Why, you wouldn’t live to see the first Christmas: don’t you know that?” She didn’t move nor look up at him. “Nonsense,” he said. “This will blow over. In a month there will be two others and nobody except us will even remember it. And you don’t need money. You have been asking me for money for years, but you don’t need it. I had to worry about money so much at one time myself that I swore that the least I could do was to arrange your affairs so you would never even have to look at the stuff. I must go; there is something at the office today. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
It was already one o’clock. “Courthouse,” he told the Filipino, settling back into the car. “My God, I want a drink.” He rode with his eyes closed against the sun; the secretary had already sprung onto the runningboard before he realized that they had reached the courthouse. The secretary, bareheaded too, wore a jacket of authentic tweed; his turtleneck sweater was dead black, his hair was black too, varnished smooth to his skull; he spread before Ira a dummy newspaper page laid out to embrace the blank space for the photograph beneath the caption: APRIL LALEAR’S FATHER. Beneath the space was the legend: IRA EWING, PRESIDENT OF THE EWING REALTY CO.,—WILSHIRE BOULEVARD, BEVERLY HILLS.
“Is thirty percent all you could get?” Ira said. The secretary was young; he glared at Ira for an instant in vague impatient fury.
“Jesus, thirty percent is thirty percent. They are going to print a thousand extra copies and
use our mailing list. It will be spread all up and down the Coast and as far East as Reno. What do you want? We can’t expect them to put under your picture, ‘Turn to page fourteen for halfpage ad,’ can we?” Ira sat again with his eyes closed, waiting for his head to stop.
“All right,” he said. “Are they ready now?”
“All set. You will have to go inside. They insisted it be inside, so everybody that sees it will know it is the courthouse.”
“All right,” Ira said. He got out; with his eyes half closed and the secretary at his elbow he mounted the steps and entered the courthouse. The reporter and the photographer were waiting but he did not see them yet; he was aware only of being enclosed in a gaping crowd which he knew would be mostly women, hearing the secretary and a policeman clearing the way in the corridor outside the courtroom door.
“This is O.K.,” the secretary said. Ira stopped; the darkness was easier on his eyes though he did not open them yet; he just stood, hearing the secretary and the policeman herding the women, the faces, back; someone took him by the arm and turned him; he stood obediently; the magnesium flashed and glared, striking against his painful eyeballs like blows; he had a vision of wan faces craned to look at him from either side of a narrow human lane; with his eyes shut tight now he turned, blundering until the reporter in charge spoke to him:
“Just a minute, chief. We better get another one just in case.” This time his eyes were tightly closed; the magnesium flashed, washed over them; in the thin acrid smell of it he turned and with the secretary again at his elbow he moved blindly back and into the sunlight and into his car. He gave no order this time, he just said, “Get me a drink.” He rode with his eyes closed again while the car cleared the downtown traffic and then began to move quiet, powerful and fast under him; he rode so for a long while before he felt the car swing into the palmbordered drive, slowing. It stopped; the doorman opened the door for him, speaking to him by name. The elevator boy called him by name too, stopping at the right floor without direction; he followed the corridor and knocked at a door and was fumbling for the key when the door opened upon a woman in a bathing suit beneath a loose beach cloak—a woman with treated hair also and brown eyes, who swung the door back for him to enter and then to behind him, looking at him with the quick bright faint serene smiling which only a woman nearing forty can give to a man to whom she is not married and from whom she has had no secrets physical and few mental over a long time of pleasant and absolute intimacy. She had been married though and divorced; she had a child, a daughter of fourteen, whom he was now keeping in boarding school. He looked at her, blinking, as she closed the door.
“You saw the papers,” he said. She kissed him, not suddenly, without heat, in a continuation of the movement which closed the door, with a sort of warm envelopment; suddenly he cried, “I can’t understand it! After all the advantages that … after all I tried to do for them—”
“Hush,” she said. “Hush, now. Get into your trunks; I’ll have a drink ready for you when you have changed. Will you eat some lunch if I have it sent up?”
“No. I don’t want any lunch.—after all I have tried to give—”
“Hush, now. Get into your trunks while I fix you a drink. It’s going to be swell at the beach.” In the bedroom his bathing trunks and robe were laid out on the bed. He changed, hanging his suit in the closet where her clothes hung, where there hung already another suit of his and clothes for the evening. When he returned to the sitting room she had fixed the drink for him; she held the match to his cigarette and watched him sit down and take up the glass, watching him still with that serene impersonal smiling. Now he watched her slip off the cape and kneel at the cellarette, filling a silver flask, in the bathing costume of the moment, such as ten thousand wax female dummies wore in ten thousand shop windows that summer, such as a hundred thousand young girls wore on California beaches; he looked at her, kneeling—back, buttocks and flanks trim enough, even firm enough (so firm in fact as to be a little on the muscular side, what with unremitting and perhaps even rigorous care) but still those of forty. But I don’t want a young girl, he thought. Would to God that all young girls, all young female flesh, were removed, blasted even, from the earth. He finished the drink before she had filled the flask.
“I want another one,” he said.
“All right,” she said. “As soon as we get to the beach.”
“No. Now.”
“Let’s go on to the beach first. It’s almost three o’clock. Won’t that be better?”
“Just so you are not trying to tell me I can’t have another drink now.”
“Of course not,” she said, slipping the flask into the cape’s pocket and looking at him again with that warm, faint, inscrutable smiling. “I just want to have a dip before the water gets too cold.” They went down to the car; the Filipino knew this too: he held the door for her to slip under the wheel, then he got himself into the back. The car moved on; she drove well. “Why not lean back and shut your eyes,” she told Ira, “and rest until we get to the beach? Then we will have a dip and a drink.”
“I don’t want to rest,” he said. “I’m all right.” But he did close his eyes again and again the car ran powerful, smooth, and fast beneath him, performing its afternoon’s jaunt over the incredible distances of which the city was composed; from time to time, had he looked, he could have seen the city in the bright soft vague hazy sunlight, random, scattered about the arid earth like so many gay scraps of paper blown without order, with its curious air of being rootless—of houses bright beautiful and gay, without basements or foundations, lightly attached to a few inches of light penetrable earth, lighter even than dust and laid lightly in turn upon the profound and primeval lava, which one good hard rain would wash forever from the sight and memory of man as a firehose flushes down a gutter—that city of almost incalculable wealth whose queerly appropriate fate it is to be erected upon a few spools of a substance whose value is computed in billions and which may be completely destroyed in that second’s instant of a careless match between the moment of striking and the moment when the striker might have sprung and stamped it out.
“You saw your mother today,” she said. “Has she—”
“Yes.” He didn’t open his eyes. “That damned Jap gave it to her. She asked me for money again. I found out what she wants with it. She wants to run, to go back to Nebraska. I told her, so did I.… If she went back there, she would not live until Christmas. The first month of winter would kill her. Maybe it wouldn’t even take winter to do it.”
She still drove, she still watched the road, yet somehow she had contrived to become completely immobile. “So that’s what it is,” she said.
He did not open his eyes. “What what is?”
“The reason she has been after you all this time to give her money, cash. Why, even when you won’t do it, every now and then she asks you again.”
“What what …” He opened his eyes, looking at her profile; he sat up suddenly. “You mean, she’s been wanting to go back there all the time? That all these years she has been asking me for money, that that was what she wanted with it?”
She glanced at him swiftly, then back to the road. “What else can it be? What else could she use money for?”
“Back there?” he said. “To those winters, that town, that way of living, where she’s bound to know that the first winter would … You’d almost think she wanted to die, wouldn’t you?”
“Hush,” she said quickly. “Shhhhh. Don’t say that. Don’t say that about anybody.” Already they could smell the sea; now they swung down toward it; the bright salt wind blew upon them, with the long-spaced sound of the rollers; now they could see it—the dark blue of water creaming into the blanched curve of beach dotted with bathers. “We won’t go through the club,” she said. “I’ll park in here and we can go straight to the water.” They left the Filipino in the car and descended to the beach. It was already crowded, bright and gay with movement. She chose a vacant space and spre
ad her cape.
“Now that drink,” he said.
“Have your dip first,” she said. He looked at her. Then he slipped his robe off slowly; she took it and spread it beside her own; he looked down at her.
“Which is it? Will you always be too clever for me, or is it that every time I will always believe you again?”
She looked at him, bright, warm, fond and inscrutable. “Maybe both. Maybe neither. Have your dip; I will have the flask and a cigarette ready when you come out.” When he came back from the water, wet, panting, his heart a little too hard and fast, she had the towel ready, and she lit the cigarette and uncapped the flask as he lay on the spread robes. She lay too, lifted to one elbow, smiling down at him, smoothing the water from his hair with the towel while he panted, waiting for his heart to slow and quiet. Steadily between them and the water, and as far up and down the beach as they could see, the bathers passed—young people, young men in trunks, and young girls in little more, with bronzed, unselfconscious bodies. Lying so, they seemed to him to walk along the rim of the world as though they and their kind alone inhabited it, and he with his forty-eight years were the forgotten last survivor of another race and kind, and they in turn precursors of a new race not yet seen on the earth: of men and women without age, beautiful as gods and goddesses, and with the minds of infants. He turned quickly and looked at the woman beside him—at the quiet face, the wise, smiling eyes, the grained skin and temples, the hairroots showing where the dye had grown out, the legs veined faint and blue and myriad beneath the skin. “You look better than any of them!” he cried. “You look better to me than any of them!”
III
THE JAPANESE GARDENER, with his hat on, stood tapping on the glass and beckoning and grimacing until old Mrs. Ewing went out to him. He had the afternoon’s paper with its black headline: LALEAR WOMAN CREATES SCENE IN COURTROOM. “You take,” the Japanese said. “Read while I catch water.” But she declined; she just stood in the soft halcyon sunlight, surrounded by the myriad and almost fierce blooming of flowers, and looked quietly at the headline without even taking the paper, and that was all.
Collected Stories Page 65
