I turned a page, and what I saw drew a small gasp of surprise from me. As though in answer to my question “Why didn’t I know them?” was a picture that said, unambiguously, “You did.” It was a picture of me, aged about ten I should think, sitting on a wall, a kind of stone balustrade at the edge of a terrace or balcony, with the unknown couple flanking me on either side. There seemed to be a garden behind us, with a big ornamental urn visible over my shoulder. They both wore evening clothes, he white tie and tails, she a glamorous ball gown. I wore just an ordinary shirt and short pants, but I had my arms around them and they around me. We were hugging one another and grinning at the camera like a happy family group. I found it hard to believe my eyes. I had absolutely no memory of the occasion.
I set the album down, still open at the puzzling photograph, and began racking my brain in an effort to recall where and when it had been taken. But my mind remained a complete blank. I thought back to my life at that age and started running through the months and years. Could there be some piece of my childhood, I asked myself, that I had for some reason forgotten? There were no gaps in my memory so far as I could see. But maybe that was how amnesia worked, disguising itself from its sufferer by hiding the fact that anything was missing.
Yet I couldn’t believe that. From what little I knew of memory loss it was something of which the victim was intensely aware. Either that photograph was a fake—but why would anyone conceivably do that?—or the boy in that picture wasn’t me.
If he wasn’t me, the resemblance was remarkable. I compared it with the pictures of myself I’d been looking at only minutes earlier, all of which I remembered being taken. There was no doubt that the similarity was overwhelming.
It made no sense. There were no names or dates or information of any kind written alongside the pictures in the album. I pulled a few loose, including the one of myself with the unknown couple. There was nothing on the back of it either.
As I continued to puzzle, my gaze drifted from a corner of the album and onto one of the yellowing old newspapers lying in the trunk. It was one I hadn’t looked at yet, and I saw now that it was an old copy of Variety, the show-business weekly. Curious to know what its connection with my very non-show-business parents could be, I picked it up.
Nothing on the front page caught my attention, so I flipped through in search of whatever might be there that could have caused my father to keep it in this little cache of memorabilia.
On page four I found a quarter-page photograph of the same couple, being showered with rice. The story was headed: “Jeffrey Hart Marries His ‘Larry.’”
Rising British stage and film heartthrob Jeffrey Hart yesterday married his dance and comedy partner, Lauren Paige (“Larry” to her many friends in the business). After a short honeymoon the pair will embark on a nationwide tour of The Reluctant Debutante before returning to the U.K. to fulfill film commitments there.
So that’s who my parents’ friends were: actors. I had a feeling they might have been fun, which made me regret even more that I couldn’t remember them. It also made me feel the sadness of my parents’ later years all the more keenly. How much had changed within a few short years.
Why couldn’t I remember those people?
Chapter 3
I had booked an executive suite at the Traveller’s Rest. It was far larger than I needed for one night, but it would serve as a place for Sara to change clothes or get some rest if she wanted to. After an early and mercifully brief dinner in the Antler Room, where the service was prompt but the food awful, I went through my father’s trunk once again in my room. Aside from the photographs and the copy of Variety, there was nothing in it that I felt inclined to keep for sentimental or any other reasons. I went down to the desk and asked for a large, strong envelope. I put the photo albums and the old showbiz paper in it, plus my father’s unfortunate reviews, then tipped a porter to get rid of the trunk.
My phone rang. It was Sara on her way in from JFK to Manhattan. She would spend the night at the apartment, then come up first thing in the morning as planned. But there was something else she had to tell me. She would be coming up with our usual driver, Rauol, but instead of returning to the city she was having him take her on up to Boston, where she needed to spend a couple of days with some gallery people she had met in Chicago. She asked if I would like to go with her, but wasn’t surprised when I said no thanks: She knew how lost I was in the art world, and how lost on me was most of the art she dealt in. She gave a tolerant laugh, then asked if I was all right, not too depressed by everything. I assured her I was fine and said I looked forward to seeing her in the morning.
Sara and I had been married a little over seven years (“the seven-year hitch,” as one of my heartier friends calls it) and had no children. I had been married once before, too young, when I was still teaching in college and before I started writing full-time. The marriage didn’t last long, just over three years; I’m glad to say we parted friends. Sara was just over thirty when we met and had never been married herself. One reason for this was that she’d put so much time and energy into making a success of the gallery that she’d had little of either left over for the more mundane business of living. The other reason was that, among a handful of less serious affairs, she’d had one long relationship that had shown every sign of ending in marriage, but (for reasons I never fully understood) had finally broken up. The man in question had been a “thrusting young lawyer” (is there any other sort?) with political ambitions. I’d never met him and had no idea what had become of him. The fact is we didn’t talk about our pasts all that much. We both felt, I suppose, that it was a kind of adolescent thing to insist on full disclosure of all previous sexual and romantic attachments. We were too old for that: old enough to realize how much more important it was to look forward than back.
It was true that we were very different in many ways, but then I suppose there is some truth in the adage that opposites attract. For example, I, being a word person, have little talent for the visual arts, though I realize the two things are not mutually exclusive. Some people can do both as easily as walk and chew gum at the same time, but not me. The world of the art critic and the dealer, the process by which art was given value, either abstractly or financially, remained arcane to me. I’d learned a lot from my wife, but not enough to understand why some things I liked were unfashionable or just plain bad enough to be embarrassing, while some things I loathed were considered as the standard by which all else was judged. But we never argued or fell out over the issue. One of the reasons we got along so well was that neither of us had any hesitation in yielding to the other’s expertise in a specialized field, while holding on to our own personal opinions, but knowing that’s what they were: personal.
Sara got to the Traveller’s Rest just after eleven the next morning. In fact I need not have booked a suite at all because she needed neither to change nor to rest. She looked wonderful in a slim-fitting black suit and coat and a small black hat fixed at an almost jaunty angle on her long auburn hair. One of the things I had always loved about her (in truth was daunted by when I first met her) was an innate elegance that she had in her. Every movement, every gesture, was always carried out with casual grace and poise. There was nothing studied about her, no self-consciousness, none of the brittle look-at-me elegance of so many women I saw in the circles she moved in. She also had a warmth and directness of manner that made people take to her immediately, to want to know her better and become her friend.
She folded me in her arms as she might have a lonely child. “Has it been awful, darling? You sounded so down when I called you last night.”
“I’m all right. It’s just, you know, memories.”
“I know. I do know.”
Sara knew because she had lost her parents in a freak hotel fire in the south of France when she was a teenager and away at school. She was an only child, and the painful shock of that bereavement had never entirely left her. It was responsible, I always thought, for an appeal
ing hint of vulnerability that she carried with her alongside the image of the astute and successful businesswoman that the world saw. When I stepped back to look at her, both of us standing in the middle of that dreary executive suite sitting room, I saw that a tear had formed in the corner of one eye. As I wiped it away with the tip of my finger she smiled apologetically and dug in her purse for a tissue.
“I’m so sorry I was away…”
“It doesn’t matter, really.”
“And now I can’t even go back home with you.”
“Don’t worry. I’m fine. I’m grateful you’re here at all. Thank you.”
She smiled again and planted a kiss lightly at the corner of my mouth. I looked at my watch. “Better be on our way,” I said.
The funeral was at a small Presbyterian church on the edge of town. Aside from the two of us and the minister, the only people at the graveside were Abigail Tucker, Shirley, another member of the staff from the home, and one of its residents, a retired schoolmaster with whom my father had played chess from time to time. It wasn’t much of a farewell, though it didn’t surprise me, and it was probably more than my father would have wanted if he’d had the choice.
Sara and I had lunch in a little place we found in the restaurant guide that we had in the car. It was rustic-pretentious and the chairs were like a whole booth to yourself, but the food was surprisingly good. I had the best coq au vin since we’d been in France the previous year, Sara had the best grilled tuna steak she’d tasted in even longer. We had a bottle of Burgundy, which was excellent, and we drank a toast to my dad. Poor lost miserable son-of-a-bitch. A loser. Big time. Sara reached across the table and squeezed my hand. She knew what I was thinking and feeling.
“Fuck him,” I said, “he made his choices and he got mad if I even tried to talk to him about them. I’d have liked him to know that I admired him in a way. Not in the same way that I despised him. Whatever that means.”
She reached for the bottle and topped up my glass.
“I’m getting a little drunk,” I said.
“Why not? As a matter of fact, so am I.”
I looked at her. I sometimes asked myself what a woman like that was doing with me. Not that I’m too embarrassing to be seen with, at least so I like to think. Hair beginning to streak with a little gray, but plenty of it still hanging in there, thank God. Moustache comes and goes, but at least that’s a matter of choice. I suppose I look like what I am, or was, or maybe still am at heart: a kind of absentminded college professor. Except I dress a little better than I used to.
It all started for me the night that the college president (I was still teaching law in those days) called me in as a replacement dinner guest for someone who had the flu. The dinner was for a group of people who had contributed serious bucks to the library extension. Sara was among them. Her father was the establishment’s most luminous alumnus, an engineer who came up with some small mechanical refinement of something no one had heard of that made him the darling of the military, and ultimately one of its biggest suppliers. I had been dazzled by her, and a little afraid. I hadn’t even thought of falling in love with her. It was obviously impossible. She was beautiful, clever, and rich. Out of my class.
Yet—you know how it is—I’d fantasized that I could give her something she needed, something her life was lacking, something unconditional. We talked, she was staying over with the president and his wife, and we had dinner the following night. When the semester ended a week later I went to New York. We were married three months later.
It’s a truism I’ve always accepted that in any relationship one partner loves more than the other. Not that the other doesn’t love at all, just that one would be more destroyed than the other if the relationship were to end. The irony is that it’s often the “unconditional” lover who’s the happier—as long as that love is accepted, of course. I felt lucky and privileged that mine had been.
“You know,” I said, “the strangest thing happened yesterday. I was going through some stuff my father had left in an old trunk. There were a lot of old photographs, holidays and so on, all of which I remember. But there was one of me about age ten with a couple of people I don’t ever remember meeting.”
“That’s happened to me. You don’t even know the picture’s been taken, and someone you’ve just said a casual word to while you’re crossing the room looks like your oldest friend.”
“But this one’s posed, everyone smiling at the camera. And they’re in evening dress.”
“And you?”
“Short pants and a sports shirt. But they were actors.”
“How d’you know?”
“Because there’s a piece about their marriage in an old copy of Variety that was also in the trunk. It’s really strange.”
“D’you have the picture with you?”
“It’s back at the hotel. I’ll show you later.”
I never did. By the time she dropped me off at the hotel we’d moved on to other topics of conversation. Besides, it was getting late and she had to start for Boston.
“I’ll only be two days, three at the most. I’ll send Rauol back to New York with the car and take the shuttle.”
It was starting to rain as we kissed goodbye under the log-built portico of the hotel. I watched, waving, till the car disappeared down the drive. Then I walked into the lobby and booked a cab to take me to the station in an hour.
Chapter 4
I’ve never been a big movie fan. Sara was somewhat more so than I, but neither of us owned any reference books in which I could check out the film careers of my mysterious childhood friends. However, I had noticed a specialist movie shop a few blocks from where we lived, and I walked over to it the next morning.
The only “Harts” I could find any trace of in all the books on the shelves were Dolores Hart, Harvey Hart, Moss Hart, and William S. Hart. There had been a Mary Hart in B-pictures in the thirties, who had later changed her name to Lynne Roberts. Of course there was Lorenz Hart, the song lyricist, who died in 1943. He had been popularly known as “Larry,” just as Lauren Paige had been nicknamed “Larry,” so that after her marriage she would presumably have been known as “Larry” Hart. But that was a pretty tenuous connection. In fact not a connection at all, just a vague coincidence. As to the careers of either Jeffrey Hart or Lauren Paige, there was nothing.
I asked the graying ponytailed man in charge if there were other sources I might consult. He produced a couple of tomes that specialized in obscure cult movies, but we drew a blank there too. He himself had never heard of Jeffrey Hart or Lauren Paige, or any variations thereof. Refusing to be defeated, he withdrew to the computer behind his desk and began a search of the Web. A few minutes later, he handed me a printout listing five movies starring Jeffrey Hart, four of which costarred Lauren Paige.
The information on the sheet of paper that he’d given me was minimal to say the least. Titles, stars, director, and in one case the writer. No plot descriptions, no critical comments or biographical information. Spring in Piccadilly was dated 1953 and starred both of them, as did Whistling Through in 1958. They appeared in support of a pop star trying to break into acting in Girl Scout Patrol in 1963, then in There’s a Spy in My Soup in 1967. Jeffrey alone played a small role in The Silver Spoon in 1973.
Little though I knew or cared about the cinema, I formed the impression that this amounted to a less-than-glittering career. The “rising heartthrob” written about in Variety had risen, it seemed, not very far. Whether he and Ms. Paige were still alive I had no idea, though I imagined that if they were it would not be impossible to track them down. But just to find out when and where I had been photographed with them? It hardly seemed worth it.
It was a bright clear morning when I left the movie shop, not long after eleven. I was crossing Amsterdam at Eighty-seventh, going east when, as I reached the far side, my attention fell, quite by chance, on something lying in the gutter. It was a playing card: the ace of hearts.
It wasn’t the wo
rd-play, the pun of “Harts” and “hearts,” that drew my attention to it. What made me stop and pick up the card was a memory that it triggered, which had lain dormant for many years. It was a memory of a literary agent I’d once known who’d since moved out to Los Angeles. Her name was Vanessa White. She had never been my agent but she represented a couple of other writers I knew well. Maybe it was the association of Los Angeles and Hollywood and the movie bookshop I’d just stepped out of that made the connection, I don’t know. All I know is I saw that playing card and thought of Vanessa White.
She was an attractive and sophisticated young woman who delighted in telling the filthiest jokes I’d ever heard. I never figured out whether she was trying to shock people or whether gross-out was the only thing she found genuinely funny. It was an odd contrast with her svelte appearance and normally rather delicate manner. She was a thoughtful, reflective woman. I remember her telling me once that she used to collect odd little things that struck her as signs pointing in a certain direction. She showed me a pocket at the back of her “organizer” where she kept small items cut out of newspapers and magazines, a stranger’s scribble on some hotel phone pad, a pressed flower, and a playing card she’d found under a restaurant table. These things, she said, tended to lead her on to other things, to guide her life along a certain course that was for some reason the right way for her to go.
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