Agent King, perhaps instead of port, you’d prefer a nice bold red to see you through the rest of the evening. Adelram had taken note of the way the injured agent leered at his wife. He wondered if Phyllis’s reds had come or if there was still cause to be worried about another pregnancy. One child was quite enough, a further would be too great a burden and ought to be grounds for divorce. The first time he had encountered the detritus of his wife’s cycles, Adelram mistook the sanitary pads for a variety of household dye test, perhaps to see which reds had greater permanence, or the offcuts from some WPA art project for the inhabitants of the local red-light district, commissioned in the mistaken belief that art would get the nation out of the red. Only war could do that, only war could put the nation in the black, and war must be the footing on which the country set itself forever after, on constant red alert against the Reds.
– Are we taking separate cars, Desmond?
– I might want to leave earlier.
– You’re welcome to come with us. We could drop you on the way home, or perhaps you’d like to come back to the house tonight.
– I wouldn’t want to risk you two more than I already have.
– Don’t be like that.
– I’m stating a fact as well as a sentiment, Myles. I don’t want to do either of you any harm. Clearly, that is all I’ve ever done to anyone. So let’s go.
– Desmond, please. . .
– I’ll be back in a few hours, Max.
– Have a good night, boss.
They’re leaving, said Quisling, taking off the headphones. I think we’re done for the night. He and Agent King rose, left the Morrows and their maid in the living room, and from the darkened study at the front of the house watched the two cars across the street roll out the crescent of driveway. The street was quiet. From the living room came the sound of the Morrows whispering to each other and dismissing Edna for the night, leaving their empty glasses for her to retrieve and wash the next morning.
We should follow. We know where they’re going.
We think we know where they’re going.
Half of Hollywood will be there.
It’s a party. Why do we care if the man goes to a birthday party for a lady we know is cooperative? Quisling asked.
King raised an eyebrow as if Quisling’s question contained its own answer. I think we should follow.
I want to go home. I’ve had too much to drink.
You’ve hardly had anything.
Two scotches, a glass of port, another glass of port. I think I might be sick. Do you have an antacid?
King shook his head. Light from the street glanced off his blond hair. Quisling wondered if the man loved his wife. They had been partners for only a month and he was already considering asking for a reassignment to someone whose face had been more disfigured by life.
I’ll drive, said King, clapping a hand on Quisling’s shoulder. We’ll sit outside the Marsh place. We’ll confirm Frank is there. We’re supposed to follow him until the next shift.
I’ll go if you let me sleep. Tomorrow, I don’t know, I might just follow Mr. Frank’s lead.
What are you talking about, Quisling?
I’m talking about – Quisling clutched the edge of Professor Morrow’s desk. He had definitely drunk too much. He was about to reveal himself a doubter. A doubter was as good as a subversive. A subversive was a fellow traveler. A fellow traveler was as bad as a Communist. A Communist was un-American, scarlet, crimson, red, fire out of control, blood flowing, warnings unheeded, intoxicants derived from grapes, an alert he was ignoring. His parents would weep. He would spend the rest of his life weeping. There was a special penitentiary in hell reserved for agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation who expressed doubts about the nature of their assignments, who spoke against the Director, who mistrusted the presiding wisdom of the nation. Who knew what the nation thought? Where was the nation located? He had lived in America all his life, never been outside its borders, and if aliens asked him tomorrow to show them the nation he would not have known in which direction to point. It was all going to hell. The vortex pulled not from the feet but from the head, drawing him down, dizzy, and the only thing to do was to plunge forward if he wanted to live.
Never mind, King. Let’s go.
May 1, 1950
John
Although the volume on the television in John and Mary’s den was turned up the music from the terrace was so loud that John struggled to hear the dialogue at the beginning of the Edward G. Robinson picture airing on KTLA. It was one he had not seen before, its title card showing a shadowy pre-war London with Big Ben and St. Paul’s and Thunder in the City splashed across the sky, promising something other than what the story actually seemed to be about since it started in New York with a montage of street scenes, decent location shooting and quick-cutting, but had taken a turn to the ridiculous as a squadron of advertising blimps flew through clouds over the skyscrapers and acrobats went swinging beneath one of them without harness or net. It was obvious that the acrobats, three slender men in dark, figure-wrapping costumes, had been hanging in a studio and the city beneath them was no more than a cheap rear projection. Robinson was a decent fellow, but Thunder in the City did not look like an example of his better work.
Daddy, why aren’t you at the party? Iris said.
I am at the party, Marlow, I’m right here.
No, I mean why aren’t you out there with all the grown-ups?
I’m waiting for my own friends to arrive. Most of those people out there are your mother’s friends. They wouldn’t say hello to me if we were alone in the last room on earth.
Since before seven the room that opened onto the pool terrace at the back of the house had been showing a reel of Mary’s favorite clips of her past performances. Anywhere a person stood in the backyard it was possible to see the flickering image of Mary Dawn in dozens of different guises and moods, one flowing into the other like a procession of ghosts.
Isn’t there anything better to watch?
One of Nathalie’s boys – in the dark John could not see which one – pushed himself up on his elbows.
Wrestling, Mr. Marsh. And boxing from the Legion. And Versatile Varieties.
It was the older of the two, the one whose ‘w’s flattened out into ‘v’s and whose ‘v’s even more often pouted into ‘w’s. Vrestling and Wersatile Warieties.
Not that, Iris shrieked. It’s not even a real nightclub.
Shush, Iris, we’re missing this lousy picture.
They pretend as if it’s a real nightclub but it’s just in the studio. It gives me the creeps.
When John clapped a palm over his daughter’s mouth she squirmed, removed his hand to the arm of the chair, and played with the metal strap on his watch. She was too old for this behavior but a little more childishness a while longer was not such a bad thing in a town where kids were expected to be adults off stage and innocents when the cameras were rolling. He hoped Iris never got it in her head to ask for a screen test.
In the movie’s first scene a group of senior businessmen criticized the Robinson character’s advertising tactics: too much hullabaloo and shemozzle (Blimps! Circuses! Parades!), not enough gravity and restraint. What a thirties picture. The head and namesake of the fictional company, a Mr. Snyderling, was convinced it was just such hyping that had caused the Great Depression. The office set looked artificial, and John was sure Iris would be making a mental tally of all the ways the film failed to achieve verisimilitude. He did not know how his child had formed this passion for realism. He himself made ostensibly realist pictures that always shaded over into the expressionistic, the dreamlike, or the surreal, and it was these flights into the human subconscious, into the realm of the possible rather than the real, which Iris consistently disdained.
Of White Heat:
Iris: Is this supposed to be now or sometime in the future? I don’t think police have these kinds of machines. The person watching the picture shouldn’t have to wonde
r. It should all be obvious it’s from real life if it’s a picture about real life.
John: The ‘machines’ as you put it, are a sophisticated new form of radiolocation device and even if every police department in the country does not yet have them they most certainly do exist. This is not science fiction.
Of Notorious:
Iris: Is that a dream he’s having? I don’t think dreams belong in movies about everyday life. Dreams are for fairy tales and myths.
John: How many times have you woken in the morning and told me what you’ve dreamt the previous night? And how many times have those dreams been versions of fairy tales we’ve read the night before, or myths you’ve been studying in school? Isn’t that a part of everyday life?
Of one of John’s past productions:
Iris: Is it raining because she’s sad? You shouldn’t have weather to show the way people are feeling. That isn’t the way it is in real life, and certainly not the way it is in Los Angeles. Sometimes people are sad when the sun is shining. It’s too obvious if the rain is supposed to tell us that she’s sad, or is it supposed to be symbolic?
John: It is raining, Iris, because we were shooting on location and it was the end of the shoot and I was over budget and it would have been more artificial to make the character happy. Sometimes these things happen, and sometimes people are sad when it rains. Sometimes the weather accompanies emotion. Sometimes weather even creates emotion. Try not to be such a literalist.
On the occasion of a visit to the set of She Turned Away:
Iris: I don’t think a voiceover is playing fair. If you can’t make the story just with people saying their lines and doing stuff, then maybe you should write a book.
John: Well you’ve got me there. Chalk it up to stylistic choice.
To her mother Iris simply said things like, You looked very pretty, Mother, or When you cried I cried, too, Mother, but John knew from the calculated, disingenuous way she spoke that Iris loved Mary about as much as a lost sock. The way she told her father what she disliked about his films meant, he was certain, that she respected and loved him enough to be honest. Mary did not invite honesty. Honesty should never be punished but that was what Mary invariably did. Tell the truth and get a smack.
On the television the cityscape outside the office windows was obviously an assortment of cheap miniatures made from cardboard because whichever studio produced the picture must not have had the cash or know-how to do more convincing model building. It looked fake and it was fake and the fakeness could not be blamed entirely on it having been made more than ten years ago, nor did the fakeness have enough artistry about it to pass as interestingly fake, not like The Wizard of Oz, for instance, where you could see that the Emerald City and most of the backgrounds were matte paintings, or even Fleming’s other big winner, Gone with the Wind, where everything was so beautiful it scarcely mattered if it registered ten degrees wide of reality, but both those movies were fantasies of a kind: a fairytale fantasy and an historical one. Thunder in the City was a cheap fake and an artless one.
Perhaps Iris was right, and the hyperreal or the surreal could never mix convincingly with the quotidian. But no, surely not, because the Germans knew how to take the ordinary and the fantastic and churn the two together in a way that was both hellishly unsettling and utterly convincing on its own terms. John wanted to toss out Hollywood’s rulebook and write a new one in which the first and most important rule should always be to break all the rules found herein and ignore those who say otherwise.
When he was passing the room earlier he had caught the three children playing. Iris was being Cinderella and Franz – whom they were all supposed to call Fred – was Prince Charming, while the younger one, Siegfried, renamed Seth, had been dressed up in one of Mary’s discarded pink chiffon dressing gowns as the Wicked Stepmother. Mary was the one who insisted the boys should have what she called ‘American’ names instead of German ones, but everyone knew that when the lady of the house was away the originals returned. John felt sorry for Seth even though the boy’s skulking made his skin crawl. On weekends and during school vacations the lives of the three children blurred so it was impossible to say who was the child of the house and who the children of the maid. Nathalie had taken all three of them to see Cinderella no less than four times at Pantages, and John was certain he had paid for all of them each time, simply because it was what Iris demanded. There was puppy love between her and Franz and it seemed innocent enough for now, but he suspected Siegfried suffered for it. Last summer he had come home from the studio one day to find Iris instructing both boys to swim in the nude after having made them remove their matching fig-leaf bathing suits, which were themselves, John thought, a kind of obscenity. Iris had stood there filming the brothers with her home movie camera. He had spanked her and tossed the film and given a lecture on propriety and human dignity. But Daddy, she had cried, Adam and Eve went naked as the day. I don’t see why Franz and Siggie shouldn’t go naked, too. Does the same go for you? he had asked his daughter. Oh no, I’m playing God and God doesn’t go naked. He always wears a robe. The child was born to direct.
The Robinson character, in a slim-fitting gray double-breasted suit, was getting fired as the boss, Mr. Snyderling, suggested he go learn some modesty from the English. Off he heads, fastest ocean crossing in the history of cinema, and arrives in London, where his distant English cousins – rich in property, title, and class, but church-mouse poor in cash – hearing word of his arrival, are only too keen to sell off their stately pile in the misapprehension that because he works for the Snyderling Company he must be a millionaire. Everything in England is always for sale. They would sell the Crown and the two little princesses if they could get away with it, then shift the blame for any tastelessness onto the buyer.
Why would they want to sell their house? It seems a lovely house.
Because rich people in England don’t have any money.
And what about the poor people?
They don’t have any money either.
Then why would Mr. Robinson’s character go to England to learn how to sell?
I suspect that’s the point. The American is going to teach the English how to sell and be proved right in the end.
You’re so clever, Daddy.
Nathalie appeared at the door in the gray and white uniform Mary insisted she wear whenever they had guests. It made her look like an agent of the Gestapo.
Your friends are here, Mr. Marsh. What I mean is, Mr. Frank and Mr. Haywood and Mrs. Fairdale, they asked me to find you.
On the television, the German actress Luli Deste was in an open-top car on a fake street built in what appeared to be the tiniest of soundstages. Strange that she never had a bigger career with that face and laugh, those dark, penetrating eyes. Historical timing had not been in her favor. Just when she might have had a breakthrough in America Hitler happened and then you had to be like Dietrich or Lorre and learn how to play on the Germanness in a way that was sufficiently sinister and seductive so American audiences would understand the actors themselves knew there was something tarnished about their nationality, which made it okay to find Dietrich glamorous and Lorre darkly serpentine and that frisson of the verboten was enough to keep audiences lined up at the door. Luli, aristocratic and elegant, a real-life baroness by birth, was too comely a German to be comfortable, and that was why, John guessed, she had not appeared in a film since 1941. Word was she lived in New York these days, on her second or third husband, writing a book, but she kept in touch with the German exiles in Los Angeles. That bad-tempered Adorno fellow was supposed to have been a friend, part of the Mann and Chaplin sets, but he had left now, too, saying poetry was finished because of Hitler. No one with brains stayed in Los Angeles for long or if they did they never stopped complaining about it.
John lifted Iris off his lap. If she had her way, the kids would be watching boxing as soon as he left the room and she would get Nathalie’s boys to strip to their skivvies and mime the bout in front of
the screen. That had happened once before as well.
The clothes stay on, Iris. You hear me?
I always keep my clothes on.
You know what I mean. And no boxing, he said.
But this is just as bloody, Iris said, pointing at the television screen where Robinson was struggling to ham his way through the two-bit script.
Watch your mouth, brute.
The living room was choking with people who were supposed to be friends but most of them John would have traded for a night alone. Since Chasen’s had catered the party it was trays of barbecued spareribs and soft-shell crab flown in from New England. John was certain it would be the last party he and Mary hosted together unless he changed his mind and turned informer. What he really wanted was to absent himself entirely from the whole mess, let the right and the left fight it out. If he could keep quiet in public and speak in private, pronounce the names of friends in self-preservation while telling them he’d said nothing, then that might be the way to do it and keep everyone happy. All John wanted was the quiet life in the house with the wife and the child, weekends at the beach, a simple career making movies. He knew it would be better for him in the end if he surfed the dominant tide, no sense fighting the current, a riptide takes you down, drags you south along the coast to Mexico, and drops you in a trench from which you never rise. He was inclined to surf, to do what was necessary, so that he could still come home at night having worked an honest day and feel pride in what he had done – the work, not the squealing. Pride itself was an achievement, a rising above his roots. How could pride in good work be anything but a blessing? Cora and Zebulon Marsh had tried to beat the pride out of him, his mother’s hand raised as she shouted, You prideful boy. She caught him by his collar, put him over her lap, and spanked him until he could wriggle away from her and run to hide in the apple orchards, scurry through manzanita bushes and shimmy up the flaking bark of madroña trees where Cora could not reach him except with a pitchfork. He had watched her shoot a rattlesnake that split open releasing seven hungry babies and his mother had gone after each of those with an axe, lopping off heads and rattles before throwing their remains on a fire. At the end of John’s seventh-grade year, on the final day of school, hot and dusty from the walk up the hill, Cora had put him over her knee, yanked down his pants, welted corrugations into his ass. Why such a beating? He had come home proud of his good grades. See how well I did! See how hard I worked! But no, You prideful boy, you should come home saying, I could work harder. I must not think myself greater than I am. I must know my place. I must always be humble.
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