Children of Light

by Robert Stone

  “Very well.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “That’s the line. I get along without you very well.” She turned toward him and on her face there was a pained half smile. “It’s absolutely true. No question about it.”

  “Good,” Walker said.

  She had turned away again, toward the blackness beyond the window; she was singing:

  “I get along without you very well, Of course I do.”

  She sang it twice over, snapping her fingers, straining for the key. He watched her come over to the bed.

  “Wanna sing along with me, Gord?” She raised his chin with her palm. “Except when autumn rain …” she sang. “Da dum de da da dum. Remember, Gord?”

  “No.”

  “No,” Shelley said. “Naw. Well, that’s good, Gordon. ’Cause then I don’t have to worry about you. Or you about me.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Walker said with a shrug. “People should care.”

  “Is that what you think, Gordon?” she asked. “You think people should care?”

  “Perhaps,” Walker suggested, “you find the sentiment banal?”

  “No, no,” Shelley said. “No, baby, I find it moving. I find all your sentiments moving.” She lay down beside him. “You want to fuck some more? Or you too drunk? Tell momma.”

  Slowly Walker leaned forward, took the champagne bottle from beside the bed and drank. “Stop it,” he said quietly.

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes, all right.” She took the bottle from his hand. “Why her? Why Lee?”

  Walker shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  “You think you invented her,” Shelley said. “You’re going to be sorry.”

  “No doubt,” Walker said, and shortly went to sleep.

  A sweet expensive tropic darkness had enveloped the Villa Liberia; it was included in the budget and thought to enhance production values. Beyond the tiki torches stood illuminated fences and armed men. These, together with the jacaranda, reminded Lionel of South Africa, of Houghton and home.

  To the sound of a gentle surf, Lionel climbed the hotel’s elegantly turned stone pathway until he stood upon a broad parapet that commanded the rows of bungalows and the main buildings with their interior gardens and swimming pools. In the lagoon, below and to his left, a few dories swung at anchor, lighted for night fishing. Southward along the coast, beyond the wire, were the lights of the village.

  At the parapet, the path divided. A shallow ramp descended to the shadowy beach; a flight of coral-colored steps climbed toward the casitas on the higher slope. Lionel leaned against the stones of the rail and took out a cigarette.

  In the morning he would be flying home—Los Angeles, then Rio, then Johannesburg. He had been eight years away. Neither of his children had seen their grandparents. Nor had they seen the beautiful scourged land, the winter roses, apartheid. Thinking about the trip, he was charged with excitement over the children’s impending discovery and his own return. They would lose their innocence there, pick up a small portion of the real world’s burden, learn fear. It was not all so sanitized there as at Bahía Honda.

  He smoked and considered his fear and the fear his children would inherit. He and Lu Anne had talked about the danger. They had agreed it was remote, that the Night of the Long Knives was unlikely to come in that very month of that very season as if only to engulf their children. Luck rarely ran that hard. Yet, he thought, someone’s luck would run out there. Sometime, sooner or later, someone and their children, traveling in that country, would awaken in the night out of luck.

  For the moment, it was a phantom terror. He was not afraid for himself or for the kids, not really. His long-term apprehensions were serious ones; for his parents too old to run away again, his married sister and her boys, old friends of all colors with complacent styles or dangerous politics. So many of the people who had shared his youth—in Houghton, Durban, the Cape—had become politically involved and he could only imagine the lives engagement imposed on them.

  He was a rich doctor in Los Angeles, a world away; a Hollywood shrink, a cliché Married to an actress whose name would be vaguely familiar in Pietermaritzburg or Maclear or Aliwal North.

  Then it struck him how happy, how joyful he was to be going away. He lit another cigarette and watched the twinkling dory lights.

  He stood and smoked and considered the petty emotional squalor which was his present stock-in-trade. So aroused was he that it took him some little time to understand that the true source of his excitement—his happiness, in fact—was that he would be getting away from her. From her closely reasoned madness, her nightmare undersea beauty and deluded eyes.

  He was startled from this insight by the sound of a woman’s laughter. The laughter was so loud and confident and heedless, so alien to his lonely despair that it surprised him to anger. Looking up the slope, he saw in the fairy glow of the patios a blond woman with her back toward him. She was seated on one of the low, tiled walls that surrounded the whirlpool baths and she appeared to be naked. So far as he could make out, she was wide-shouldered and slim-waisted, attractive in the latest of California styles, the style which was orthodoxy on that production. The girls all looked a bit alike to Lionel. Drawing nearer, he saw that there were two men sitting chest deep in the whirlpool on which the woman rested.

  Inadvertently, Lionel had blundered into the director’s compound. He began to back away along the path he had followed but, uncannily, one of the men spotted him in the darkness. He heard his name called. He recognized the man as Walter Drogue. The woman was Drogue’s wife, Patty.

  “Lionel,” Drogue called to him. “Bienvenidos! Come over and have a drink.”

  Lionel trudged self-consciously toward the patio. At his approach, Patty rose from the edge of the Jacuzzi and hastily draped herself in a burgundy-colored beach robe. The second man in the tub got to his feet and climbed for dry land, making no attempt to cover his nakedness. He was an elderly man, grizzly of chest and scrotum, his frame slack and emaciated. He took a chair and observed Lionel’s approach with black gypsy eyes, watchful and expressionless.

  The director stayed where he was in the tub, smiling contentedly. He was deeply tanned. His dark hair, moistly pasted to his forehead like Napoleon’s in a cognac ad, was worn short, shaven about his neck and ears in an almost military fashion.

  “Lionel,” Drogue declared, “you and Patty know each other.”

  “Of course,” Lionel said. “Good evening.”

  “Hi,” Patty said, raising her amber eyes to him.

  “This is my father, Walter senior,” Drogue told his guest, indicating the naked old man, who had taken a chair beside Patty Drogue. “He’ll be with us for the next ten days. Dad, this is Lionel Morgen, Lee Verger’s husband.”

  Walter Drogue senior was a man from the mists of legend, a contemporary of Walsh and Sturges and Hawkes. The introduction of this celebrated figure did not put Lionel any more at ease. He felt offended by old Drogue’s nakedness. Drogue senior did not offer his hand but instead placed it, all venous and liver-spotted, on his daughter-in-law’s caramel shoulder.

  “Well,” Lionel declared, with a fatuous enthusiasm that chafed in his own hearing. “I’m certainly privileged to meet you, Mr. Drogue.”

  “Yeah?” old Drogue asked.

  “I was just spying out the way, you see. We haven’t been up here in the dark.”

  “I’m glad you came,” Walter Drogue the younger said. He had descended to chin level in the whirling green water. “Give us a chance to rap informally. Just ourselves. What would you like to drink?”

  Desperate as he was for escape, Lionel decided a drink might be welcome. And indeed there were things for him and Drogue to talk about apart from the general company. The presence of Patty and the old man would have to be endured.

  “Well, I won’t say no,” declared Lionel affably. “If I could have a whiskey? A scotch?”

  He had hardly spoken when Patty Drogue disengaged herself from the old man’s pawings and hurr
ied into the bungalow.

  “So,” Drogue junior said from the depths of his whirlpool, “couldn’t take it, huh?”

  Lionel looked down at the immersed director and chose to conclude that he was being good-naturedly teased, as an outsider.

  “Actually,” he said, “I’ve been enjoying myself enormously.”

  When Patty Drogue came out again, she was carrying a tray heaped with bottles and glasses and shakers filled with ice. Lionel, to demonstrate an easy manner, took up a bottle of unblended scotch and poured himself an undiluted measure.

  “That’s good,” the younger Drogue said. “It’s a pretty crazy way to pass whole weeks. Especially if you’re not really playing. As a rule, locations and spouses don’t mix.”

  “We’ve been all right,” Lionel said. “I don’t think we’ve been in each other’s way, Lu and I.” He glanced across the pool and saw that both Patty and old Drogue had settled into pool chairs. Apparently no conversations went unwitnessed in this family circle. “And I see you bring Mrs. Drogue.” The whiskey was as smooth as good brandy. Lionel drank rarely but this glass warmed his blood.

  Patty Drogue laughed. Her laughter had an unsettling edge, as though he had said something ridiculous.

  “That’s true,” Walter said. He too seemed to be suppressing a secret hilarity. “I always bring Mrs. Drogue.”

  Lionel assumed an expression of self-assured amusement to show that he could join in the fun.

  “South Africa,” young Walter Drogue said, “South Africa’s easier to handle?”

  Lionel held his smile.

  “You have to understand that my parents live there. My mother got there from Europe in the very nick of time.” He was silent for a moment. “And of course they’re quite anxious to see their grandchildren. At their age they can’t count on too many visits.”

  “I didn’t mean to put South Africa down, Lionel,” Walter said. “I mean—why should you carry the weight? You left, didn’t you? To practice here.”

  Lionel was growing tense. He finished his drink, and before he had a thing to say about it, Patty Drogue brought him another.

  “I left,” he said. “I suppose I could have stayed and joined the Resistance. I mean … friends of mine did. But my parents wanted us all to go. Myself and my sisters.”

  “Your parents loom large in the picture, huh?”

  “You should talk,” Patty Drogue said casually to her husband.

  Walter junior shrugged good-naturedly. The older Drogue watched her with his blank cautious eyes.

  “Silence, exile, cunning,” old man Drogue said from the shadows. “And you get to hear the bellyaches of rich Americans. Your parents should be proud of you.”

  “Wherefore do we lecture Lionel?” Walter Drogue asked charitably. “We’ve been showing our films to segregated houses out there. We used to do it in our own South. We have plenty to answer for.”

  “I realize that Mr. Drogue spent time in prison,” Lionel said, belching on his drink. He was afraid he might appear obsequious. “Perhaps I’m not made of the same stuff.”

  “Perhaps,” old Drogue said. “I was indicted. I never did time. Life is made of perhaps. Perhapses.”

  “Lay off him,” the younger Drogue said. “He’s not getting paid to take this shit from you. Go pick on a qualified professional.” He turned sympathetically toward Lionel. It seemed to Morgen that a pattern was emerging in which each of the Drogues would seize an opportunity to protect him from the others. Perhaps even the old man would rally to his defense at the next attack. He glanced into the dark corner where old Drogue was lurking; it seemed, after all, unlikely.

  “Don’t let him demean you, Lionel. He thinks he invented political commitment. He thinks he invented facing the slammer.”

  “Well,” Lionel said, “it’s true enough about me. I’ve had friends go to the slammer for fighting apartheid but I’m quite untouched.”

  “You know what the cons say?” old Drogue demanded of them. “They say never trust a man who hasn’t done time.”

  “You don’t have to place your trust in me, Mr. Drogue,” Lionel said. “I’ll be on my way in the morning.”

  “There were bets down on whether you’d finally leave or stay,” young Drogue told him. “Weren’t there, Pat?”

  “Do I have to say how I was betting?” Patty Drogue asked plaintively.

  “Bets?” Lionel asked. “I don’t see why anyone was betting. We knew from the start how long I’d be here. I mean, your girls bought my tickets.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Drogue said. “But we thought under the gun you’d be more flexible about it.”

  “My schedule is not flexible in the least, Walter. I’ve taken all the hospital leave I can manage. I was back and forth to New Orleans a dozen times. It’s taken me a year to organize my appointments in time for this trip.”

  Young Drogue gave him a long cool look and shrugged amiably. Patty stared into the surgical green light of the whirlpool bath. The old man was invisible within the patio’s toy jungle.

  “We haven’t changed our plans,” Lionel said. “I don’t see why that should surprise anyone.”

  Walter emerged naked from the lighted pool and slipped into a boxer’s silk robe that had YOUNG DROGUE embroidered across the back. The Drogues’ collective nakedness had begun to repel and embarrass Lionel. In his experience, the clothed party held the advantage in mixed encounters. Within the Drogue compound, this principle seemed to have been reversed.

  “O.K.,” Walter Drogue the younger said.

  “So,” Lionel said, “as I am on my way out, I thought we might speak privately for a bit.”

  Young Drogue sat down on a plastic chair and stretched, yawning luxuriantly. “What a good idea,” he told the psychiatrist. “Patty,” he told his wife, “bring me a drink, please. And bring the good doctor one. And the aged P.” Walter Drogue the elder swore audibly from his corner of darkness.

  “We exploit Patty a little,” Walter explained to Lionel. “She wouldn’t have it any other way.”

  “I’d like to speak privately,” Lionel said.

  “This is privately, Lionel,” Walter Drogue said. “This is as private as we let it get.”

  “It’s about Lu Anne,” Lionel said.

  “No shit?”

  “I think I just wanted to know … from a second source, as it were, how things were going.”

  Walter gave him a soft smile. “Fine, Lionel. Things are going fine.”

  “She’s quite good, isn’t she?”

  “Oh, I think that would be an understatement, Doctor. She’s always good, your Lu Anne. But this is something else.”

  “And the picture? Your feeling about the picture is good as well?”

  “Lu Anne and I are the picture,” Walter Drogue said. “We two together. And we’re good enough to eat.”

  “I’ve been seeing dailies as soon as they come in,” Lionel told Walter Drogue, “and I’m terribly impressed.”

  “We’re sitting on a treasure, my friend. We’re going to astonish the world.”

  Patty returned with another tray of drinks.

  Lionel wiped his glasses. His head ached with the whiskey.

  “I thought …” Lionel began. “I wanted to be sure everything was all right with her.”

  The director was silent. Lionel drained his glass.

  “Would you like another?” Patty Drogue asked.

  “Oh no,” Lionel said. “Not now.”

  “She likes bringing drinks,” Walter Drogue explained.

  “It’s my way of atoning,” Patty said.

  “Tell me what you think,” Walter Drogue said soberly. “You’re her husband, you’ve been living with her. You’re a … specialist in human behavior. How do you think she’s doing?”

  “I don’t think that since she left the stage she’s been so involved in a show,” Lionel said.

  “Surely,” Drogue said, looking about with his bright-eyed smile, “this is good news?”

  �
�Well,” Lionel said, “yes.”

  “But …?”

  “Her eyes,” old man Drogue said from the shadows. “I remember her eyes from when she first came out here.” They all turned toward him. “It didn’t show up in her glossies,” old Drogue went on. “You could turn the page right past her. Up on the screen, her eyes, they’d fucking lay you out. I remember,” he said. “From when she first came out here.”

  Lionel stared at his huddled figure in the darkness, trying to think of something to say.

  “Before sound,” old Drogue said, “they would have loved her eyes.”

  “Even you don’t go back that far,” Patty Drogue told the old man playfully. “Can you really say ‘before sound’?” She did a bass imitation of his rasp.

  “He was here before sound,” her husband told her. “He worked on House of Sand.”

  “You look at their eyes from those days, you’ll see eyes.” He grunted, a laugh or the clearing of his throat. “They came from tough lives.”

  “House of Sand!” Patty Drogue declared. “I love it! I love it,” she told Lionel, “when they say ‘before sound.’ ”

  “That was the last one Everett French did. He was a lush then. I cut it for title inserts.”

  “That’s romantic,” Patty Drogue said. “Everett French losing his shit to gin. Fitzgerald-like.”

  “So you tell me,” young Drogue said, addressing himself to Lionel. “How’s my actress and your lady wife?”

  “Listen,” Lionel said. He was holding on to Walter Drogue’s silken sleeve, the sleeve of his boxer’s robe. When he saw the Drogues staring at his hand he took it away. “There is a certain kind of artist, don’t you think,” he asked them, “who might be described as a halluciné?”

  “Dickens,” Patty Drogue said with enthusiasm. “Joan Miró. What do you think, Walter?”

  Young Drogue’s faux naïf smile tightened.

  “Sure,” he said, turning the very word to bitter mimicry. “Dickens and Joan Miró.”

  “Wagner,” old man Drogue said from his unseen perch. “Mahler. Max Reinhardt.”

  Lionel was impressed at their erudition. “Those are all,” he said, “wonderful examples.”