Destiny

by Sally Beauman

  “He was looking for me, perhaps.”

  “Didn’t bother looking for twenty years. And if he was, how come he didn’t come right on in, and announce himself, straight out, same as any normal man would? He was buildin’ up to it, I reckon. Biding his time. Traced you to Orangeburg, traced you here through me, that’s how I see it. Then—well, who knows? Maybe he was going to sting you for a few bucks. Maybe worse. There’s no telling. He could have been dangerous…”

  “I don’t think so. I think—he just wanted to look. That’s all. He was an alcoholic—a sick man—he probably didn’t even know why he did it.”

  “Well, he’s dead.” Cassie’s mouth set in an obstinate line. “Let sleeping dogs lie, I say. The way I see it, he never done nothing for you, so why go telling the world he’s your father—a man like that?”

  “Oh, Cassie. It’s the truth. That’s why.”

  “So? Bend it a little. Why not? Plenty of folks do.”

  “Not anymore.” Hélène smiled at her gently. “I’m tired of lying, Cassie. And I’m tired of pretending. That’s all.”

  Cassie could see the appeal in her face, and hear it in her voice. Her heart softened. She shook her head.

  “Well. If you see it like that. I’d just like to save you some hurt, that’s all.”

  “The truth oughtn’t to hurt…” Hélène began, and Cassie gave a derisory snort.

  “Ought not, maybe. But it can. I seen truth cause trouble you wouldn’t believe, when a little lie—now that would have eased things over real nice. Still. I won’t argue. No sense in wasting my breath…” She paused. “You going to this funeral you’re fixin’?”

  She knew what the answer would be before the question was out; Hélène nodded. Cassie drew herself up.

  “Well. You ain’t going alone, that’s for sure. I guess I’ll have to come with you. You want me to do that?”

  “I would like you to, yes, Cassie.”

  “You want me, you got me.” Cassie paused, and they smiled at each other. Cassie hesitated, and then turned to the door. She looked thoughtful. In the doorway, she turned back.

  “I’ll wear my best black,” she said decisively. “Violet would’ve liked that. She helped me choose it, way back. Took the skirt up for me. Yes. My best black—that’d be the thing, I reckon.”

  She shut the door, her expression more cheerful. Hélène smiled. She turned away then, her face growing still and thoughtful, and looked out for a while at the garden. There, Cat was playing. She had a line of dolls, with which she rarely played, but which, today, seemed to be in favor. They had been marshaled in a group, and were being plied with tea from minute china cups. A birthday tea, perhaps—another few months and it would be Cat’s birthday.

  She was absorbed in her task, head bent; Madeleine, Hélène saw, was taking some photographs of her. She, too, was absorbed in her task, and taking particular care with the shots. Neither of them looked up.

  After a while, Hélène turned away from the window. She looked at the telephone. After the funeral; then, she thought. She did not pick it up.

  The funeral of Gary Craig took place four days later at Forest Lawn. It was a brief ceremony; Hélène, and Cassie in her best black, were the only mourners at the graveside. It was a beautiful day, a day of bright sunshine with a sky the clearest of blues, and as they left the chapel, Cassie’s spirits rose. It was over, she thought. Gary Craig had been laid to rest, and she now felt glad that Hélène had insisted she do the right thing by her father. He had had a good burial—that was important, Cassie considered. To her relief—and, she imagined, Bernie Alberg’s—the story had not broken. No rumors, no inquiries, and so no need of a statement. Maybe Bernie had leaned on the police to keep quiet after all, in spite of Hélène’s instructions. It was possible—and whether he had or not, the papers obviously hadn’t gotten on to the story, which was just fine as far as she was concerned. Cassie had no time for newspapermen; skunks and vultures, she thought, every last one of them.

  She and Hélène walked back, side by side, down the back pathways to where her driver, Hicks, and the long black limousine were waiting. Cassie looked out approvingly at the trees and lawns as they passed; she liked this place; it was serene, and it was tidy. Hélène’s head was bent, and she was silent; Cassie was thinking, not altogether charitably, that if Gary Craig had been unlucky in life, he had been fortunate in his final resting place. Neither of them noticed the man who was standing a few feet to one side of the limo, until they reached it, and he stepped forward.

  “Miss Harte?”

  Hélène looked up; it was then, and only then, as he took the photograph, that Cassie realized he had a camera. Hélène stopped; she gave the man a cold stare; then, without a word, she stepped through the door Hicks was holding open for her, and into the back of the car.

  Hicks and Cassie exchanged glances. Hicks, a burly man, well over six feet, who had been with Hélène three years and was devoted to her, stooped swiftly.

  “You want me to get that camera, Miss Harte?”

  The man was already backing away.

  “Just a fan,” he said nervously. “Just a fan. I only wanted one picture…”

  “Ain’t you got no sense of decency?” Cassie rounded on him. Hicks took a step forward. Then Hélène’s voice came from the car, clearly and firmly.

  “Leave it,” she said. “It’s not important.”

  And it was not, she thought, later that day, when dinner was over, and Cat asleep; when she was alone. Whether the man was a fan, or from a newspaper, she was not going to hide anymore, or pretend anymore. Gary Craig was her father: she had done what she had to do. What she had to do now was much more important, and much harder.

  She sat down at her desk and looked at the telephone. Much as she longed to hear Edouard’s voice, she had decided against the telephone. He might not be there. He might refuse to take the call. He might not agree to meet her. Had he said her name, that evening when she telephoned from the Plaza? Had her own telephone really rung three times, the evening Lewis hit her, the evening she knew her marriage was over? She was no longer certain. She thought it possible she had imagined both things.

  No, she would write. She drew out the sheets of writing paper, and looked at them. She uncapped her pen. It seemed impossible to begin. It was a letter to a stranger, after all; a man who in five years, though he must, in that time, have heard of her, had neither contacted her, nor sought her out in any way. She nearly gave up, then. An image rose in her mind—the Edouard de Chavigny of whom, sometimes, she read accounts in newspapers. A cold, self-sufficient man, who gave brusque, uninformative interviews, and who clearly did not suffer fools gladly. Not a man who would be exactly pleased to receive, after five years, a letter from an ex-mistress informing him he was the father of her child. If such a man replied at all, it would be through lawyers, informing her that such a claim, if repeated, was actionable.

  And yet—the man she had known had been very different. She let the two images rest, side by side, in her mind: the public image, and the private one. Slowly, as the memories returned, the public image, the image of the newspapers, began to fade. She forgot his reputation, and thought, instead, of the man she had loved—and, because she had also trusted him, the letter, once begun, was easy to write.

  She wrote for one hour. She mailed the letter herself, the next day. At noon, returning home, she knew she felt different; it was some time before she realized what the difference was. She was happy. It had been so long she had forgotten how that felt.

  Hélène and Edouard

  Los Angeles–Paris, 1965

  THE FIRST WARNING CAME at the end of February, though Hélène did not perceive it as such; she interpreted it as rudeness—inexplicable rudeness. It came in the form of a telephone call, from the wife of a studio executive. Mary Lee was that familiar figure, the corporation wife—one of the most developed of that species Hélène had ever met. All the force of her considerable energy was channeled into on
e cause: the promotion of her husband, and, by extension, of herself. A social alpinist, who no sooner climbed one range of mountains but she set her sights upon another, Mary Lee was tanned, always; thin, always; well-groomed, always; and she had a voice that made a power drill sound harmonious. She had laid siege to Hélène for a year, and redoubled her efforts once Hélène’s Oscar nomination was announced. Hélène, worn down by her persistence, finally agreed to attend one of her parties. Then, that day at the end of February, Mary Lee called to cancel.

  “Hélène? Yes, it’s Mary Lee. I hardly dared call—I’m just so embarrassed. Yes, our little dinner next week…I know, just when we had it all settled…Hélène, this is just terrible, but I have to call the whole thing off. And Joe Stein was coming, too, and Rebecca Stein—such darlings…but I simply can’t risk it. Jack has this horrible virus—no, not flu exactly. But he has a fever, and his throat is so bad he can hardly say a word—and the doctors have been very tough. Absolute rest. They say he’s not to do a thing, for a week at least. No work, and no parties! Well, you can imagine…so, I know it’s short notice, and I feel just dreadful about this, but…”

  Hélène said politely that she quite understood. She hoped Jack would recover soon. She hung up with a feeling of profound relief, since she had not wanted to go anyway.

  She had, since her return from Alabama, made a conscious effort to pick up the threads of her social life. To serve on charity committees again; to go out to dinners and parties and luncheons again—all these things helped to distract her from the knowledge that she had written to Edouard some three weeks before, and had received no answer.

  She thought no more of the canceled invitation until, only two days later, lunching with Gregory Gertz to discuss Long Division, she saw Mary Lee’s husband, Jack, on the far side of the restaurant, apparently in perfect health. This puzzled her slightly; she was even more puzzled, a few days later, when she heard from Rebecca Stein that Mary Lee’s dinner party had actually taken place, on the original date.

  “We heard you had to drop out at the last moment, Hélène,” Rebecca Stein said. “Such a pity. I was looking forward to seeing you.”

  Hélène frowned, said nothing, and thought no more about the matter. She was so busy that it was easy to forget the Mary Lees of this world: her agents were besieging her with scripts and with projects, though there was none she especially liked. She had constant meetings with Gregory Gertz, and with the rising young star, Randall Holt, who was to play the husband in Long Division; she had script conferences, fittings for costumes, makeup tests; there was the burgeoning round of dinners, committee meetings, and parties; and Bernie Alberg, ecstatically happy at the boost which the Academy Award nomination and the phenomenal success of Ellis had given to her career, filled in every spare second with yet another interview, yet another talk show appearance.

  Hélène felt distanced from all this; she did not enjoy it. She would have preferred the quiet of the months at the end of the previous year, she would have preferred to spend more time with Cat. But these distractions had served her in the past, and they served her again now. It was easier to invent a thousand fertile explanations for Edouard’s silence, and to believe them, if she had no time to dwell on them, but must immediately rush on somewhere else, if she could—for just a little longer, she told herself—take refuge behind her famous face, and her famous name. To be Hélène Harte was a protective device: a shield between herself and others, and also a shield between herself and her growing anxiety. For when she was alone, and when she gave herself time to think, when she was herself, the cold realization came closer and closer: he had not written; he was not going to write.

  So, resignedly, she let the jubilant Bernie Alberg fit into her crowded schedule a photographic session for Vogue, a documentary being made on her work with Angelini by the BBC, a cover story in Time magazine. Even Time dug up no information about her father, and this made Bernie Alberg more jubilant still. That story was dead, he was sure of it.

  Hélène looked at the story in Time, which concentrated on her film work, and which tipped her strongly for the Oscar. She looked at the cover photograph, and the headline beneath it, Hélène Harte: The Face of the American Dream. She was beginning to hate that tag, which—since Ellis—appeared in almost every story about her. Lise might be the face of the American Dream—whatever that really meant—but was she? She looked at the photograph, and felt she looked at a stranger.

  The Time story came out in the first week of March, before the Academy Award voting was completed. Later the same week, she received the second warning, though, again, she did not perceive it as such. Another curious telephone call, this time from the wife of an influential newspaper publisher, a woman who was a leading light in Los Angeles society, who had persuaded Hélène, some weeks before, to serve on her prestigious charity committee. She was not a Mary Lee; she was not evasive.

  “My dear,” she said baldly, “I’m going to ask you to drop off the committee. I think, from everyone’s point of view, that it might be wise. Don’t you?”

  Hélène was surprised, and mystified.

  “Well, my dear,” the woman went on briskly, “we are raising funds for the care of the sick and the elderly. So, I hardly think…” She paused. “If you’d just have your secretary send me a brief note, explaining that you’re very tied up just now, and feel you haven’t as much time to devote to our work as you would wish…”

  “Why should I do that? It isn’t the case.”

  “Possibly not, my dear. You’ve been very generous with your time. But I think it would be best. If you could let me have it tomorrow, before our next meeting?”

  She hung up before Hélène had time to argue. Hélène angrily sent a cold note saying she was resigning from the committee at the request of its chairman. She received a one-line acknowledgment.

  The third warning came later the same day, and this time it was unmistakable. Gregory Gertz telephoned her that evening. He sounded odd, and guarded. He informed her, with little preamble, that various production and technical difficulties had come up, and that filming on Long Division would have to be delayed. The start date could no longer be April 2. It would be two weeks after that, possibly three. Artists International, he said, would be talking to Milton first thing in the morning. He hoped this would cause no problems with her schedules…

  “Greg—wait a minute. I don’t understand. Yesterday, when I saw you, you said—”

  “Hélène, I’m sorry, I can’t talk now. I have a plane to catch. I’ll try to call you tomorrow…”

  It was then that Hélène knew there was something wrong, something that was being kept from her. Not simply because of the postponement—that was common enough, even this close to a start date—but because of Gregory Gertz’s manner. She knew that tone of voice, that mingling of suppressed panic and the desire to dissemble.

  Something was not just a little wrong, it was badly wrong. The next morning, at eight o’clock, Bernie Alberg called. “I’m coming around now,” he said.

  And, when he came, she understood.

  He laid the copies of the tabloid on a table in front of her. They were still sticky, straight from the presses. He stood there looking at her, all his normal ebullience gone. He looked gray, and exhausted, as if he had been up all night. He was a plump man, and his usual manner was bouncy, punchy with adrenaline. Now he visibly sagged.

  “Jesus, Hélène,” he said, “I’m sorry. I’m just so sorry. Those bastards. I never had a hint, not a smell, nothing. They kept the whole damn thing under wraps, and—well, you can see—they must have been putting this together for weeks. Someone gave them a lead. Maybe the cops. Maybe that guy in the morgue. Then they went after it. They couldn’t have done a story like this overnight. And now I find out that there were people who had heard, rumors, you know. And I blame myself. Blame myself? Jesus, I could shoot myself. I always thought I had my ear so close to the ground. Hélène—look—I know it isn’t eight-thirty yet,
but d’you think I could have a Scotch?”

  He helped himself. His hands were shaking. Hélène sat down and looked at the photographs. She looked at them one by one, and the captions under them. Then she read the story: four pages of it, with a follow-up touted for the next issue.

  On the first page, there was a photograph of her house, taken from the air. The caption read: Riches—the 2-million-dollar home Hélène Harte keeps in Beverly Hills. Scene of scandal parties; once the home of legendary Ingrid Nilsson.

  Next to it was a photograph of a filthy room, possibly in some flophouse, with an inset picture of a younger Gary Craig. That caption read: Rags: the room where the star condemned her father to die.

  On the next page there was a picture of a filthy poor white homestead. Outside it stood the wreck of a car; chickens pecked in the dirt; a tall, big-boned man, stripped to the waist, and gripping a beer can in his fist, glowered at the camera. Next to him, her face streaked with mud, was a small fair-haired toddler. It was a picture Hélène had never seen: she supposed the house was in Louisiana; she supposed the man was Gary Craig; she supposed the child was herself, for the caption told her all these things. Above it ran a banner headline: Hélène Harte—The Nightmare Behind the Face of the American Dream.

  Was poverty the American nightmare, and riches the American dream? She looked at the headline coldly, and turned the page. There was a photograph of herself at a recent party. She remembered that photograph being taken. There had been a crush of people, and the photographer had smiled, and joked, and asked the three of them to stand closer together—herself, Lloyd Baker, and Thad. Lloyd Baker had his arm around her waist, and Hélène had just turned to smile at him. Above that, in letters an inch high, was the legend: Super-Star Love Triangle—The Story She Did NOT Want Told. Lower down there was a smaller photograph of Lloyd and Katie Baker, and the headline: Lloyd Baker Love Nest—Wife Reveals All.