Fault Lines

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  She grinned at me then, and crossed her eyes, and the tortured child fled and she was Glynn again, and it was all right.

  “Don’t you know enough to genuflect in the presence of a saint?” she said.

  “If you’re going to develop temperament before they even shoot this thing, I’m snatching you out of here,” I said, laughing.

  She made a pantomime of gagging, putting her forefinger into her open mouth, and Caleb Pringle laughed, too.

  “The whole course of history might have changed if little Joan had had the wit to do that to the Dauphin,” he said. “You ready? Molly, Mrs. Fowler is going to wait and see the final on the monitor. Take her and give her some coffee and a sweet roll, will you? I’ll send for you when we’re done.”

  The last thing I saw before the door closed behind me and Molly Shumaker was Caleb Pringle bending intently over my daughter, who sat with her face raised to him and her eyes closed. In the white light flooding down on her she looked again unearthly and ephemeral, doomed. But he said something to her and she smiled. I let the door swing shut.

  “I don’t know why I’m so nervous,” I said to Molly.

  “You’re great,” she said over her shoulder. “You ought to see some of the mothers we get. The poor kid who was in Right Time; God! We got to the point where we were seriously thinking about drugging his mother’s coffee. She was a terror.”

  The time seemed to drag torturously, though in actuality it was only a little over an hour when Laura came for us.

  “How did it go?” I said, following her back through the maze of corridors.

  She gave me her three-cornered kitten’s smile over her shoulder, the one she had always worn when she knew a secret or had been into something forbidden.

  “You’ll see,” she said.

  They were waiting for us in a tiny studio with padded swivel seats and a large, incomprehensible control board and banks of television monitors mounted overhead. There was a large central screen, and Caleb Pringle was sliding a tape into a slot on the board below it. He turned and gave me an enigmatic nod. Glynn sat in the back row of seats, hunched over, her fists knotted, one atop the other. She had been crying, and would not look at me.

  “What is it, sweetie pie?” I said, sinking into the seat beside her and glaring up at Laura. Laura—why did I listen to her? I always ended up coming to some sort of grief when I let her persuade me to do something my instincts cried out against. Why had I thought that would change?

  Glynn did not reply. She shook her head. She still would not look at me.

  “It was pretty intense,” Laura said. “I had no idea she could tap into that so soon. It took me months to learn to do it. These are just release tears, aren’t they, Punkin?”

  She ruffled the bangs on Glynn’s forehead. From the machine, Caleb Pringle said, “This is quite…extraordinary. See it before you decide to report us to the child abuse squad.”

  I sank back against my cushion, squeezing Glynn’s cold hand, and waited. I had every intention of giving my sister and her lover as fierce a tongue-lashing as I could muster. But I would, in fairness, wait until I had seen the test.

  The screen flickered with light and numbers rolled past and a voice I did not know said, “Test for Glynn Fowler, Arc, June 1995. Take three.” There was a bit more flickering, and then there was Glynn, sitting on a wooden stool against a stark, shadowy backdrop. She sat with her knees together and her hands loosely clasped on her lap, and her head dropped onto her chest. Light fell on her from above, as from an opening in a ceiling; otherwise the set was very dark. The camera came in on her, very slowly, until I could see only her head and shoulders and the great cross lying against her tunic. The angle of her head was heartbreaking. She did not move.

  From off camera a woman’s voice whispered, “Joan. Little Joan,” and Glynn raised her head slowly and looked in the direction of the voice. I drew in my breath. It was not Glynn who sat there, but someone who had taken her over, moved into her body. The feeling it gave me was terrible, near nausea but not quite that. This was what possession must look like.

  The voice spoke again, louder, and I recognized it as Laura’s, but her voice as I had never heard it: low, caressing, sly, somehow as evil as the hiss of a snake.

  “What do your voices say now?” Laura’s corrupted voice said.

  Glynn dropped her eyes back to her hands. Slowly they picked up the great cross and caressed it, a soft, unconscious, washing motion. The camera moved in further, as slowly and softly as fog.

  “Nothing. They say nothing,” she whispered.

  I had never heard such sorrow in my daughter’s voice, never such bewilderment. Never such despair, but despair as quiet as a sigh, or a little wind.

  She lifted her face again, and the light caught it, and the camera came on. Her face filled the screen now. Her eyes looked out as if at empty space, and they were blind. Her face was awful, beautiful, lost. I held my breath.

  “They say nothing,” she said again. I felt tears spring into my eyes. Glynn’s hand tightened in mine, but I could not look at her.

  “There is another way,” Laura’s low, dreadful voice said. “There is another voice that will speak, if only you will listen, and your heart will sing with it, and your body burn.”

  Without moving her eyes, Glynn said, “All my life it has been my passion to serve France and my Lord. Only these. But now my voices tell me nothing and my Lord is silent and my passion is cold in this cold place. If there is another voice to make my heart sing, for sweet Jesus’ sake, Lady, tell me it.”

  Two great tears gathered in her eyes, and her lips trembled suddenly, and she looked down. The tears slid from beneath her lashes and tracked down her face. She sat silent. Laura’s voice was silent, too.

  Very slowly Laura’s white hand came into the frame and reached over. Her finger caught a tear that trembled on Glynn’s chin, and so slowly that it seemed to take whole minutes, her finger traced the tear over to Glynn’s lips, and brushed the wetness across them. Glynn’s lashes dropped still; they shuttered her eyes, but the slow crystal tears continued, one by one.

  “You hear it now,” Laura said.

  The camera froze on the closeup of Glynn’s face with Laura’s finger on her lips, and then the screen went blank.

  For a long moment no one spoke. I could not find the breath to breathe, much less to speak. The little moment was heartbreaking, terrible, and so pregnant with both innocence and evil that it did not seem to me there could be words for it. I hated it. I felt horror and terror and furious rage; how dare he make this of my daughter? How dare Laura? But even as I sat paralyzed, trying to find breath and words, I knew that the test was, as Caleb Pringle had said, extraordinary.

  The lights came up and Caleb said, matter-of-factly, “I’ve never seen a first test like it. She is incredible. You do see that, don’t you?”

  “I see it. I also see that it is depraved, and evil, and if I had known it would be like this I would never on earth have—”

  “But that is just how it should be,” he said softly and patiently, as if he were talking to a child. “She has caught completely that awful innocence at the moment of corruption; seen the snake as it enters Eden. If she were not your daughter you would see.”

  I knew he was right. If I had seen this moment in a theater and not known Glynn, I would have been struck silent with its sheer power, instead of with horror and rage.

  I took a deep breath and looked at Glynn. She was looking back at me with a simple, whole-souled desire to please; it was a look I saw practically every day at home.

  “Well, I do see. And I’m totally impressed,” I said as lightly as I could, and smiled at her. “It was a beautiful job, Tink. How on earth did you do that? Seem so frightened? Cry like that? I didn’t know you’d ever felt like acting might be something you’d like to try—”

  “I wasn’t acting,” she said earnestly. “I don’t know what happened, quite. I was sitting there, scared out of my skull a
nd sure I was going to throw up, or stammer, or something, and then I heard Aunt Laura’s voice and it was so…I don’t know how to say it, but it made me feel so…bad. It was like something exploded behind my eyes. I started to cry, and I couldn’t stop, and I was scared of her; I forgot completely it was only Aunt Laura—”

  “That is acting,” Caleb Pringle said, smiling at her. “That’s just what acting is. On your part and your Aunt Laura’s. She called it out, maybe, but you’re the one who let it go. I don’t know what else you’d call it if it wasn’t acting. Too bad you can’t stay and be our Joan.”

  He spoke to her, lightly, but cut his eyes toward me.

  “Don’t even think it,” I said.

  “Mom…” Glynn began, her voice pleading, rising.

  “Met, listen…” Laura began.

  I got up out of my seat.

  “The test is wonderful and Glynn will love having the tape, and you were kind, and that is that,” I said. “There will be no talk now or ever about her doing Joan or any other movie at any time. We are going to the airport now and catch our plane, which is something we should have done a long time ago.”

  “Met, don’t you realize what this means? There’s going to be a nationwide talent search; it’s the role of the century for a new actress!” Laura cried. “How can you say no? Let her do it this once; she doesn’t necessarily have to have an acting career, just this one role—there’ll never be another young Joan as good as what you just saw. Pring will tell you that.”

  “Laura, what part of no is it you don’t understand?” I said. “Besides, it’s Mr. Margolies’s decision; how can you just assume—”

  “Margolies would say yes,” Caleb Pringle said mildly. “Margolies is going to go right through the roof of his Turkish bath-house when he sees this. He thought we had our Joan last night, didn’t you know? You saw how he looked at Glynn. But you have to test; sometimes the camera just kills them. That obviously isn’t the case here.”

  “I don’t care what the case here is,” I said. “You can show him the test or not. But Glynn is not doing this movie. Get your things together, Tink; we’ve got to make tracks.”

  She did not argue with me, but she did not move from the seat, either. She stared at her hands. Then she looked up.

  “Daddy would be so proud,” she said softly.

  I felt as though she had hit me in the stomach. Was that it? Something of her own, something that was, without any doubt in the world, on any level you chose to regard it, extraordinary, to show her father? Something he would have no choice but to notice? Either that, or the subtlest form of manipulation, and one of the oldest. The child’s ultimate weapon: Daddy would let me.

  “You know good and well Daddy would hate it,” I said tightly. “Now come on. Let’s go.”

  “Your mother’s right,” Caleb Pringle said to her. “It’s probably no role for a sixteen-year-old. I thought all along we’d have to use an older girl for Joan, but I just wanted to see…I never meant to cause a family rift. Tell you what. Why don’t you go in my office and call your friends back in Atlanta? Gloat unforgivably. Tell them you were offered the part in the movie but you turned it down. Rub it in six ways to Sunday.”

  Glynn broke into a slow smile.

  “Can I, Mom?”

  “Be my guest,” I said. “Gloat till you drop.”

  She followed the cheerful Molly Shumaker out of the room, and I turned to him.

  “Thanks for that,” I said. “I’d have ended up as the world’s heaviest heavy.”

  “It was my fault,” he said. “I should have run this idea by you before. Frankly, I was hoping the test would convince you. But I don’t push people; it never works out.”

  “She’s just too young,” I said, feeling defensive and a little foolish, a lioness who had charged what she thought to be a threat to her cub, and found it a shadow.

  “It’s not the kind of world we want for her or that she could handle. Some young women could, with one hand tied behind them, but not Glynn. You must see that we’ve got a fight with anorexia on our hands.”

  “Yeah, I noticed,” he said. “We see a lot of it out here. Of course to a filmmaker it usually just means that the victim will film like a dream. You’re right; it’s a dangerous world for some youngsters. She could well be one. I sensed a pretty sound armature under there, though.”

  “I hope you’re right,” I said. “Sometimes she just seems so fragile.”

  Glynn came back, her slowed steps speaking of disappointment.

  “You can’t tell me they weren’t impressed,” Laura said.

  “They weren’t there,” Glynn said softly. “They’re out here. Up north somewhere. Marcia’s dad wanted her to come spend some time with him, and she hates his second wife, so her mother let her ask Jess. I think it’s Palo Alto or somewhere; I know it’s a long way away from here. They’re going to stay a month.”

  Poor Glynn, I thought miserably. Jess is really gone now. How on earth can she replace a best friend?

  “Palo Alto,” Caleb Pringle said. “Really? I have a vacation place not thirty miles from there. Up in the Santa Cruz mountains, in a place called Big Basin. It’s really something, if I do say so myself. Up there in those redwoods, it’s like being right under the eye of God. And the air is so clear you can taste it, and the quiet so deep you can hear it. It saves what’s left of my sanity. Listen, why don’t you all drive up there and spend a little time? Glynn can see her friends and wave the tape in their faces, and you and Laura can kick back and relax, and I’ll come up in a few days and we can hike and sightsee and spend some quality time together. Eat; we’ll eat till we drop. I’m a great cook. I’ve got to recharge before we start Arc or I’ll fall apart in midfilm, and Laura could use some rest before she goes into it, and I’d love to show all of you that part of the country. God, but it’s beautiful.”

  “Mom,” Glynn cried. “Please say yes! I could go stay with Marcie and Jess; her dad has a pool, and they belong to this marina club thing, and Marcie says there are some of the coolest guys there, and there are two whole weeks before I have to leave for camp—”

  “No,” I said.

  “Met,” Laura whispered, a soft, anguished sound.

  “We can’t, Laura. How many times can I say it? Don’t tease about it.”

  “Well, some other time,” Caleb Pringle said pleasantly. “It’ll be there when you come back.”

  “Met,” Laura said carefully and precisely, “I’ve got something in my bra poking me in back. Come see if you can find it for me, will you?”

  “If you’re wearing a bra I’m wearing a wet suit,” I said, but I followed her out of the studio toward the ladies’ room. Better the session I knew was awaiting me be conducted in private.

  She held the door for me and I went in and turned to face her. She leaned against it, head down, hands clasped over her breast, and then lifted her face to me. I was expecting one of her finer histrionic performances, but I saw instantly that this was to be no performance. Her face was white except for hectic red splotches on her cheekbones, and her mouth trembled uncontrollably, so that for a moment she could not speak. Tears were running down her face.

  “Oh, baby,” I began, but she held up her hand and I stopped. I watched as she struggled to control her lips, and then she said, as carefully as she could through her ragged breath, “Met. Please. Please just listen to me until I’m finished. Can you do that?”

  “Laura, tell me what’s the matter.…”

  She looked at me mutely and I fell silent.

  She nodded and took a deep breath and went on.

  “You cannot possibly know what it would mean to me for you all to go up to the lodge with me. It’s the rest of my life, Met; it’s no less than that. Last night…last night was the springboard, but the lodge would cement everything; the lodge would give me time…the lodge would mean that I could spend another whole movie with him, and by that time I know that we would be together for good. I know that, Met. He�
�s never asked me up there before, and I can’t just say, well, my sister and niece have to go home but I’ll come, because it wasn’t just me that he asked.”

  “But why not?” I said, honestly baffled. “Why can’t you? It isn’t Glynn and me he’s in love with, God forbid—”

  “You have to be there because Glynn has to be there,” she cried softly, chafing her hands in distress.

  “Why on earth does Glynn have to be there? I don’t understand any of this, Laura,” I said.

  “Oh, God, Met, can’t you see how much he wants her for Joan? He’s hoping that you all will stay around long enough for him to show Margolies the test and convince you to let her do the picture; I know how he thinks. He said as much. I know he wants me to get you to stay. Listen, Met, without Glynn there may well not be any Arc at all, because Margolies was going to pull the plug on it this morning when they had breakfast; Pring was sure of that. He hated the new stuff Pring did on Right Time. And then he saw Glynn.…Met, it’s my only real guarantee, that film. I have to do it; I have to be with Pring through it. I have to know that that’s going to happen. He’ll marry me after Arc; I know he will, if not before. But Arc has to happen and it’s Glynn that Margolies is going to want.…”

  I went over and put my hands on her shoulder and looked into her face.