Was there nobody?
There were friends in Ireland who sent butter. There was a soup kitchen. There was a visit to an uncle, who made advances to her when she had a full stomach, and she held out and got fifty pounds out of him for not telling his wife.
"Couldn't you work?" Stahr asked.
"I worked. I sold cars. Once I sold a car."
"But couldn't you get a regular job?"
"It's hard--it's different. There was a feeling that people like me forced other people out of jobs. A woman struck me when I tried to get a job as chambermaid in a hotel."
"But you were presented at Court?"
"That was my stepmother who did that--on an off chance. I was nobody. My father was shot by the Black-and-Tans in twenty-two when I was a child. He wrote a book called Last Blessing. Did you ever read it?"
"I don't read."
"I wish you'd buy it for the movies. It's a good little book. I still get a royalty from it--ten shillings a year."
Then she met "The Man" and they travelled the world around. She had been to all the places that Stahr made movies of, and lived in cities whose name he had never heard. Then The Man went to seed, drinking and sleeping with the housemaids and trying to force her off on his friends. They all tried to make her stick with him. They said she had saved him and should cleave to him longer now, indefinitely, to the end. It was her duty. They brought enormous pressure to bear. But she had met The American, and so finally she ran away.
"You should have run away before."
"Well, you see, it was difficult." She hesitated, and plunged. "You see, I ran away from a king."
His moralities somehow collapsed--she had managed to top him. A confusion of thoughts raced through his head--one of them a faint old credo that all royalty was diseased.
"It wasn't the King of England," she said. "My king was out of a job as he used to say. There are lots of kings in London." She laughed--then added almost defiantly, "He was very attractive until he began drinking and raising hell."
"What was he king of?"
She told him--and Stahr visualized the face out of old news-reels.
"He was a very learned man," she said. "He could have taught all sorts of subjects. But he wasn't much like a king. Not nearly as much as you. None of them were."
This time Stahr laughed.
"You know what I mean. They all felt old-fashioned. Most of them tried so hard to keep up with things. They were always advised to keep up with things. One was a syndicalist, for instance. And one used to carry around a couple of clippings about a tennis tournament when he was in the semi-finals. I saw those clippings a dozen times."
They rode through Griffith Park and out past the dark studios of Burbank, past the airports, and along the way to Pasadena past the neon signs of roadside cabarets. Up in his head he wanted her, but it was late and just the ride was an overwhelming joy. They held hands and once she came close into his arms saying, "Oh, you're so nice. I do like to be with you." But her mind was divided--this was not his night as the Sunday afternoon had been his. She was absorbed in herself, stung into excitement by telling of her own adventures; he could not help wondering if he was getting the story she had saved up for The American.
"How long have you known The American?" he asked.
"Oh, I knew him for several months. We used to meet. We understand each other. He used to say, 'It looks like a cinch from now on.'"
"Then why did you call me up?"
She hesitated.
"I wanted to see you once more. Then, too--he was supposed to arrive today, but last night he wired that he'd be another week. I wanted to talk to a friend--after all, you are my friend."
He wanted her very much now, but one part of his mind was cold and kept saying: She wants to see if I'm in love with her, if I want to marry her. Then she'd consider whether or not to throw this man over. She won't consider it till I've committed myself.
"Are you in love with The American?" he asked.
"Oh, yes. It's absolutely arranged. He saved my life and my reason. He's moving half-way around the world for me. I insisted on that."
"But are you in love with him?"
"Oh, yes. I'm in love with him."
The "Oh, yes" told him she was not--told him to speak for himself--that she would see. He took her in his arms and kissed her deliberately on the mouth and held her for a long time. It was so warm.
"Not tonight," she whispered.
"All right."
They passed over suicide bridge with the high new wire.
"I know what it is," she said, "but how stupid. English people don't kill themselves when they don't get what they want."
They turned around in the driveway of a hotel and started back. It was a dark night with no moon. The wave of desire had passed and neither spoke for awhile. Her talk of kings had carried him oddly back in flashes to the pearly White Way of Main Street in Erie, Pennsylvania, when he was fifteen. There was a restaurant with lobsters in the window and green weeds and bright lights on a shell cavern, and beyond behind a red curtain the terribly strange brooding mystery of people and violin music. That was just before he left for New York. This girl reminded him of the fresh iced fish and lobsters in the window. She was Beautiful Doll. Minna had never been Beautiful Doll.
They looked at each other and her eyes asked, "Shall I marry The American?" He did not answer. After awhile he said:
"Let's go somewhere for the week-end."
She considered.
"Are you talking about tomorrow?"
"I'm afraid I am."
"Well, I'll tell you tomorrow," she said.
"Tell me tonight. I'd be afraid---"
"--find a note in the car?" she laughed. "No there's no note in the car. You know almost everything now."
"Almost everything."
"Yes--almost. A few little things."
He would have to know what they were. She would tell him tomorrow. He doubted--he wanted to doubt--if there had been a maze of philandering: a fixation had held her to The Man, the king, firmly and long. Three years of a highly anomalous position--one foot in the palace and one in the background. "You had to laugh a lot," she said. "I learned to laugh a lot."
"He could have married you--like Mrs. Simpson," Stahr said in protest.
"Oh, he was married. And he wasn't a romantic." She stopped herself.
"Am I?"
"Yes," she said unwillingly, as if she were laying down a trump. "Part of you is. You're three or four different men but each of them out in the open. Like all Americans."
"Don't start trusting Americans too implicitly," he said smiling. "They may be out in the open, but they change very fast."
She looked concerned.
"Do they?"
"Very fast and all at once," he said, "and nothing ever changes them back."
"You frighten me. I always had a great sense of security with Americans."
She seemed suddenly so alone that he took her hand.
"Where will we go tomorrow?" he said. "Maybe up in the mountains. I've got everything to do tomorrow, but I won't do any of it. We can start at four and get there by afternoon."
"I'm not sure. I seem to be a little mixed up. This doesn't seem to be quite the girl who came out to California for a new life."
He could have said it then, said, "It is a new life," for he knew it was, he knew he could not let her go now; but something else said to sleep on it as an adult, no romantic. And not to tell her till tomorrow. Still she was looking at him, her eyes wandering from his forehead to his chin and back again, and then up and down once more, with that odd slowly-waving motion of her head.
...It is your chance, Stahr. Better take it now. This is your girl. She can save you, she can worry you back to life. She will take looking after and you will grow strong to do it. But take her now--tell her and take her away. Neither of you knows it, but far away over the night The American has changed his plans. At this moment his train is speeding through Albuquerque; the sche
dule is accurate. The engineer is on time. In the morning he will be here.
...The chauffeur turned up the hill to Kathleen's house. It seemed warm even in darkness--wherever he had been near here was by way of being an enchanted place for Stahr: this limousine, the rising house at the beach, the very distances they had already covered together over the sprawled city. The hill they climbed now gave forth a sort of glow, a sustained sound that struck his soul alert with delight.
As he said goodbye he felt again that it was impossible to leave her, even for a few hours. There were only ten years between them, but he felt that madness about it akin to the love of an aging man for a young girl. It was a deep and desperate time-need, a clock ticking with his heart, and it urged him, against the whole logic of his life, to walk past her into the house now and say, "This is forever."
Kathleen waited, irresolute herself--pink and silver frost waiting to melt with spring. She was a European, humble in the face of power, but there was a fierce self-respect that would only let her go so far. She had no illusions about the considerations that swayed princes.
"We'll go to the mountains tomorrow," said Stahr. Many thousands of people depended on his balanced judgment--you can suddenly blunt a quality you have lived by for twenty years.
He was very busy the next morning, Saturday. At two o'clock, when he came from luncheon, there was a stack of telegrams--a company ship was lost in the Arctic; a star was in disgrace; a writer was suing for one million dollars. Jews were dead miserably beyond the sea. The last telegram stared up at him: I was married at noon today. Goodbye; and on a sticker attached, Send your answer by Western Union Telegram.
Chapter VI
I knew nothing about any of this. I went up to Lake Louise, and when I came back didn't go near the studio. I think I would have started East in mid-August--if Stahr hadn't called me up one day at home.
"I want you to arrange something, Cecilia--I want to meet a Communist Party member."
"Which one?" I asked, somewhat startled.
"Any one."
"Haven't you got plenty out there?"
"I mean one of their organizers--from New York."
The summer before I had been all politics--I could probably have arranged a meeting with Harry Bridges. But my boy had been killed in an auto accident after I went back to college, and I was out of touch with such things. I had heard there was a man from The New Masses around somewhere.
"Will you promise him immunity?" I asked, joking.
"Oh, yes," Stahr answered seriously. "I won't hurt him. Get one that can talk--tell him to bring one of his books along."
He spoke as if he wanted to meet a member of the "I am" cult.
"Do you want a blonde or a brunette?"
"Oh, get a man," he said hastily.
Hearing Stahr's voice cheered me up--since I had barged in on Father it had all seemed a paddling about in thin spittle. Stahr changed everything about it--changed the angle from which I saw it, changed the very air.
"I don't think your father ought to know," he said. "Can we pretend the man is a Bulgarian musician or something?"
"Oh, they don't dress up any more," I said.
It was harder to arrange than I thought--Stahr's negotiations with the Writers' Guild, which had continued over a year, were approaching a dead end. Perhaps they were afraid of being corrupted, and I was asked what Stahr's "proposition" was. Afterwards Stahr told me that he prepared for the meeting by running off the Russian Revolutionary films that he had in his film library at home. He also ran off Doctor Caligari and Salvator Dali's Le Chien Andalou, possibly suspecting that they had a bearing on the matter. He had been startled by the Russian films back in the twenties, and on Wylie White's suggestion he had had the script department get him up a two-page "treatment" of the Communist Manifesto.
But his mind was closed on the subject. He was a rationalist who did his own reasoning without benefit of books--and he had just managed to climb out of a thousand years of Jewry into the late eighteenth century. He could not bear to see it melt away--he cherished the parvenu's passionate loyalty to an imaginary past.
The meeting took place in what I called the "processed leather room"--it was one of six done for us by a decorator from Sloane's years ago, and the term stuck in my head. It was the most decorator's room: an angora wool carpet the color of dawn, the most delicate grey imaginable--you hardly dared walk on it; and the silver panelling and leather tables and creamy pictures and slim fragilities looked so easy to stain that we could not breathe hard in there, though it was wonderful to look into from the door when the windows were open and the curtains whimpered querulously against the breeze. It was a lineal descendant of the old American parlor that used to be closed except on Sunday. But it was exactly the room for the occasion, and I hoped that whatever happened would give it character and make it henceforth part of our house.
Stahr arrived first. He was white and nervous and troubled--except for his voice, which was always quiet and full of consideration. There was a brave personal quality in the way he would meet you--he would walk right up to you and put aside something that was in the way, and grow to know you all over as if he couldn't help himself. I kissed him for some reason, and took him into the processed leather room.
"When do you go back to college?" he asked.
We had been over this fascinating ground before.
"Would you like me if I were a little shorter?" I asked, "I could wear low heels and plaster down my hair."
"Let's have dinner tonight," he suggested. "People will think I'm your father but I don't mind."
"I love old men," I assured him. "Unless the man has a crutch, I feel it's just a boy and girl affair."
"Have you had many of those?"
"Enough."
"People fall in and out of love all the time, don't they?"
"Every three years or so, Fanny Brice says. I just read it in the paper."
"I wonder how they manage it," he said. "I know it's true because I see them. But they look so con vinced every time. And then suddenly they don't look convinced. But they get convinced all over."
"You've been making too many movies."
"I wonder if they're as convinced the second time or the third time or the fourth time," he persisted.
"More each time," I said. "Most of all the last time."
He thought this over and seemed to agree.
"I suppose so. Most of all the last time."
I didn't like the way he said this, and I suddenly saw that under the surface he was miserable.
"It's a great nuisance," he said. "It'll be better when it's over."
"Wait a minute! Perhaps pictures are in the wrong hands."
Brimmer, the Party Member, was announced, and going to meet him I slid over to the door on one of those gossamer throw-rugs and practically into his arms.
He was a nice-looking man, this Brimmer--a little on the order of Spencer Tracy, but with a stronger face and a wider range of reactions written up in it. I couldn't help thinking as he and Stahr smiled and shook hands and squared off, that they were two of the most alert men I had ever seen. They were very conscious of each other immediately--both as polite to me as you please, but with a softening of the ends of their sentences when they turned in my direction.
"What are you people trying to do?" demanded Stahr. "You've got my young men all upset."
"That keeps them awake, doesn't it?" said Brimmer.
"First we let half a dozen Russians study the plant," said Stahr. "As a model plant, you understand. And then you try to break up the unity that makes it a model plant."
"The unity?" Brimmer repeated. "Do you mean what's known as The Company Spirit?"
"Oh, not that," said Stahr, impatiently. "It seems to be me you're after. Last week a writer came into my office--a drunk--a man who's been floating around for years just two steps out of the bughouse--and began telling me my business."
Brimmer smiled.
"You don't look to me like a m
an who could be told his business, Mr. Stahr."
They would both have tea. When I came back, Stahr was telling a story about the Warner Brothers and Brimmer was laughing with him.
"I'll tell you another one," Stahr said. "Balanchine the Russian Dancer had them mixed up with the Ritz Brothers. He didn't know which ones he was training and which ones he was working for. He used to go around saying, 'I cannot train these Warner Brothers to dance.'"
It looked like a quiet afternoon. Brimmer asked him why the producers didn't back the anti-Nazi League.
"Because of you people," said Stahr. "It's your way of getting at the writers. In the long view you're wasting your time. Writers are children--even in normal times they can't keep their minds on their work."
"They're the farmers in this business," said Brimmer pleasantly. "They grow the grain but they're not in at the feast. Their feeling toward the producer is like the farmers' resentment of the city fellow."
I was wondering about Stahr's girl--whether it was all over between them. Later, when I heard the whole thing from Kathleen, standing in the rain in a wretched road called Goldwyn Avenue, I figured out that this must have been a week after she sent him the telegram. She couldn't help the telegram. The man got off the train unexpectedly and walked her to the registry office without a flicker of doubt that this was what she wanted. It was eight in the morning, and Kathleen was in such a daze that she was chiefly concerned about how to get the telegram to Stahr. In theory you could stop and say, "Listen, I forgot to tell you but I met a man." But this track had been laid down so thoroughly, with such confidence, such struggle, such relief, that when it came along, suddenly cutting across the other, she found herself on it like a car on a closed switch. He watched her write the telegram, looking directly at it across the table, and she hoped he couldn't read upside down....
When my mind came back into the room, they had destroyed the poor writers--Brimmer had gone so far as to admit they were "unstable."
"They are not equipped for authority," said Stahr. "There is no substitute for will. Sometimes you have to fake will when you don't feel it at all."
"I've had that experience."
"You have to say, 'It's got to be like this--no other way'--even if you're not sure. A dozen times a week that happens to me. Situations where there is no real reason for anything. You pretend there is."
The Love of the Last Tycoon Page 13