by Jack Hodgins
7
There was nothing to keep him from relaxing on the guest-house couch to read from Travis’s literature anthology—just an owl hooting softly in the trees, and the familiar sound of waves against the rocky shoreline. The throbbing in his forehead had faded to a dull untroubling ache. Yet even as he slid happily into the lines of Gerard Manley Hopkins, For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow, he was aware of an annoying energy that would keep his limbs alert and restless, his brain unwilling to concentrate on printed words so long as there was a decision to be made. Hadn’t he already struggled to make the decision that had brought him here? For a man who hadn’t had to make a decision of any consequence in seven years, one was quite enough. Before he’d even got used to this place, he was expected to move on—this time to what was, after all, the city of his father’s death.
“The city of your father’s death” was how his mother had put it, seldom “Los Angeles” or even “L.A.” As a child he had imagined it as a romantic sun-washed city capable of sudden betrayal. He had never wanted to see it for himself. His mother had been eight months pregnant and reading a library book beneath a green umbrella when the police informed her of his father’s fall from that roof. He had heard her tell this a thousand times—a tall slim elegant woman in a housedress, often speaking with her back to him while she prepared a meal at the kitchen sink. She was a nervous, high-strung woman who often spoke too fast and occasionally left the room in the middle of a sentence, leaving him to imagine the rest.
His mother had loved the climate in Los Angeles, or claimed that she had. He remembered her insisting that she hadn’t missed the rain she’d grown up with, or the subtle seasonal changes in this mild corner of the continent. She could have spent the rest of her life on the beach, she said. His father had been a superb swimmer, a fine athletic figure in his bathing trunks, invited by noisy crowds to join in their games, but he’d chosen to spend his time with her, walking hand in hand along the waterline. He had, she believed, made her a gift of his place. To her young son, all of this might have been the lovely-but-tragic plot of a Warner Brothers movie.
Yet she’d never gone back. Once she’d moved north to her hometown, she allowed California and perhaps his dead father to become a lovely sun-washed memory—a happy episode that came to an abrupt end while she was reading David Copperfield at Venice Beach. Once the policeman had delivered his awful news, she said, the beaches, the sunshine, and the brilliant exotic flowers ceased to belong to her.
So it was not surprising to Axel Thorstad that she’d shown no interest in joining him and his friends on their Christmas trip to Los Angeles during his first year of teaching. She would have preferred that he and his friends stay home, or consider some other location for their break.
But to him and his colleagues, it seemed important that they put some distance between themselves and the school, to go where there was little chance of meeting their students on the street, and would not be tempted to plan lessons for the coming month. And somewhere near Los Angeles Andrzej Topolski’s sister had a home where they might stay. By Christmas break they were exhausted from the strain of preparing lessons, dealing with problem students, and marking tests and essays, as well as supervising extracurricular activities. Barry Foster had already decided to resign in June.
Andrzej Topolski had made the arrangements. They flew south on Boxing Day and moved into his sister’s extravagant house above Laguna Beach. Though she and her husband were away on a holiday of their own, Topolski was confident they’d meant for them to have the run of the house. Naturally this included the liquor cabinet. He demonstrated his talent for mixing frosty margaritas, which they drank beneath umbrellas on a terrace overlooking the ocean. To local inhabitants this may have been winter but the teachers on holiday were determined to spend as much time on the sand or even in the water as the temperature would allow.
But the weather turned cool their second day. Since Topolski was certain his sister had intended to leave him the keys to the Cadillac, and because Barry Foster had known which wires to cross, they’d driven in to the city and cruised up and down the streets of Hollywood and Beverly Hills, counting, as they spotted them, four Gloria Swansons, three John Barrymores, and one small Mickey Rooney. A seventy-seven-year-old man cringed to recall such adolescent enthusiasm, though his body easily remembered the excitement that had buzzed in his twenty-two-year-old chest.
Oonagh came out of a gift shop with a “Homes of the Stars” map, and insisted on driving past Yvonne De Carlo’s house. She had been told she resembled the actress, who had grown up as Peggy Middleton in Oonagh’s Vancouver neighbourhood. Of course they had all seen Yvonne De Carlo as Moses’ wife in The Ten Commandments and later as a gold-rush entertainer in the first episode of Bonanza. Thorstad could see the likeness but believed Yvonne De Carlo lacked Oonagh’s surprise of character, especially Oonagh’s husky laugh and her smile that bared her teeth out nearly to her ears.
Seeing Yvonne De Carlo’s house inspired in Oonagh a need to be a star herself, at least temporarily. She insisted on returning to Hollywood Boulevard where she got out of the car in order to walk down the sidewalk alone. They were instructed to drive up behind and recognize her. Of course this would be a lark, and they were happy to humour her. Something to tell when they got home.
Topolski waited just long enough, then drove ahead until they were abreast, then proceeded slowly. “Hey!” he shouted. “Aren’t you Yvonne De Carlo?” The name was probably lost in the traffic noise but the shout had turned a few heads. He honked the horn. Barry Foster and Axel Thorstad cheered. Oonagh raised a hand and gave them her widest smile, but kept on flouncing down the sidewalk. Though Thorstad had recognized her astonishing beauty from the first day they’d met, he had never witnessed such a provocative walk, her light cotton dress swishing around her legs at every step.
Satisfied that she had caused heads to turn, and even for two or three people to snap her picture, Oonagh continued to the end of the block before getting back into the car. Of course they congratulated her on her gutsy performance. Although they suspected that the real Yvonne De Carlo would probably make herself as inconspicuous as possible in public, this did not diminish their pleasure in knowing that Oonagh Farrell, even in Hollywood, had turned a number of heads.
After this success, Topolski had decided that they should find the house belonging to Derek Morris, the actor Thorstad’s father had stunted for. “Let’s see what sort of mansion the bastard lives in.” He was contemptuous of those who handed life’s risks to others—actors letting stunt doubles face the dangers while they took all the credit themselves, not to mention the money and fame.
The prospect of meeting Derek Morris had thrown Axel Thorstad into confusion. Did he want to discover whether Morris could remember his father, or his father’s accident? But Topolski cared little for the ambivalence of others and Topolski was behind the wheel. With the aid of Oonagh’s map, Barry Foster guided them up a canyon and along a winding road atop a narrow ridge until they came to the stuccoed wall and elaborate ironwork gate to Derek Morris’s property. Between the bars of the gate they were able to see, at the head of an oyster-shell driveway, a mansion that belonged more properly on a Louisiana sugar plantation. “That’s where your mother’s ten-cent cards are coming from,” Foster said.
“A guilty conscience,” Topolski said. “Signed and stamped by a servant.”
It was an encounter Thorstad would rather forget. Topolski got out of the car and insisted that blushing Axel Thorstad join him in admiring the garden that was visible through the bars. Almost immediately a figure appeared from behind the shrubbery—a groundskeeper, to judge by his faded overalls with dirty knees.
“Mr. Morris is out of town,” he said. “There is no one here but staff.”
Relieved, Thorstad turned away. But Topolski explained to the gardener that he was a relative, a cousin to Mr. Morris, in fact a member of the Polish royal family, as Derek must surely have mentioned. He fl
ashed his on-off smile. “The last time we spoke, he went out of his way to invite me to visit. Along with my friends.”
“Mr. Morris is not at home,” repeated the gardener—if that was what he was.
“Pity,” Topolski said. “And of course he did say this was a possibility. But he insisted that we come by and use his swimming pool anyway.”
“I’m sorry,” the servant said. “He left no such information with me.”
As they drove away, this episode was a matter of some hilarity to the others, though Thorstad was certain his father would have disapproved of their intrusion upon the actor’s privacy. Of course, if this were a movie, the gardener would turn out to be Derek Morris himself, fully aware that Andrzej Topolski was lying and his red-faced friend was a fool.
He did not resist their determination to find Centurion Pictures, somewhere to the east of the city. The others seemed to think the fact that Axel Thorstad’s father had been employed there would gain them easy entry to the studio, but again they were stopped at a gate, where a skinny youth in uniform turned them away. All they saw of Centurion Pictures was an avenue of leafy trees and a high stucco wall that extended the equivalent of several city blocks. He could imagine his father walking or driving in through the gate but had no way of knowing where he’d gone after that.
His father’s Hollywood was long gone by the time he and his friends were turned away from Centurion Pictures. Behind that wall Centurion was making what would be one of their most successful Westerns, starring Paul Taylor and Elizabeth Robson, which Thorstad would later force himself to see on the screen of the Capitol Theatre, though it meant sitting amidst a hundred noisy students on a Saturday afternoon. At the same time, elsewhere in the city, Marilyn Monroe was in front of RKO cameras for one of her first roles, in Clash by Night with Barbara Stanwyck and Robert Ryan. If the travellers from the north had seen Marilyn Monroe on the street, they could not have guessed she was anything but just another shopper or, perhaps, a tourist, and would not have given her the sort of attention they had given Oonagh Farrell.
After they’d been turned away from Centurion Pictures they put aside their disappointment and attended a performance of Returning to Troy, a new play by Horace Feltham at the Canyon Playhouse. A rather simple story—a young wife searching for her husband, the husband determined to sabotage this reunion, and a shy fireman who helps the woman with her search and may or may not be rewarded for his efforts. By the time they’d got back to Topolski’s sister’s home and talked about what they’d seen, they’d begun to suspect that Oonagh Farrell had discovered the life she believed she should be living. They did not imagine, then, that the lives of all four were about to make a drastic change in direction.
“Which of course they did, my darling! And now maybe you will realize what is going on that you may have become too confused to notice—how you have been led into exactly the situation you haven’t even recognized is one of your most compelling aspirations, because it’s time you woke up at last and faced the fact that something you have left incomplete and unacknowledged for most of your life is precisely what you have been led to confront without knowing it.”
Axel Thorstad almost responded aloud—“What? What have I been led to confront?” Of course it was not Elena who had kept track of Oonagh’s progress over the years, noticing the occasional photograph on the cover of some grocery-store magazine, the smallest news item in the Arts section of the newspaper—a role in some Broadway play, an award held high for the photographers determined to capture her incomparable smile—making it clear that she could not be found in any one place but belonged everywhere at once. Only recently had he noticed that she’d been photographed during a period of working in California.
When he mentioned Oonagh’s name at breakfast, Mrs. Montana was able to tell him why she’d been photographed in L.A. “Retired from the stage years ago, I think.” Travis and Carl had already left the breakfast room, and Mrs. Montana was about to leave for the office wearing a navy-blue skirt and jacket, though had yet to put on her shoes. “Now she has a regular role on TV. Are you telling me you knew her?”
“A colleague once, long ago,” was all he would admit to. Mrs. Montana did not strike him as someone who would appreciate knowing more about the relationship, but it was clear that he had just acquired a little additional interest, perhaps a small amount of mystery as well.
Mrs. Montana recalled seeing Oonagh Farrell in a televised version of The Glass Menagerie. “I’ve heard she was magnificent on the stage. But then you’ve probably seen her yourself, if she was a friend.”
“Once. Well, twice.” This was long ago now, in New York City. “My wife and I attended a performance of Saint Joan.” They had hoped to see Topolski as well, but apparently the Polish dukein-waiting was on a business trip to Peru.
Oonagh had been a brilliant Joan, just as he’d expected. You wanted to rise up and follow her into war, and yet at the same time you wanted to take her away and save the poor child from herself. And, near the end of the play—Thorstad had waited for it—she had been able at last to say, legitimately, with a catch in her voice, the heart-wrenching line she had made her own on many occasions—usually during interminable and tedious staff meetings: “How long, oh Lord, how long?”—but provoking tightened throats this time, and possibly tears, rather than muffled laughter.
She had probably been smiling to herself, knowing that Axel Thorstad was in the audience recalling her staff-meeting mischief. She’d hinted at this when they met for lunch the next day, but made no reference to having been, though briefly, the centre of Axel Thorstad’s life.
After lunch, Elena had chosen to shop for a black opal whose mix of colours was perfectly matched to her dark Castilian eyes, but he had returned to the theatre for the matinee performance of the same play, convinced that every word spoken by the inspired and headstrong girl from Domremy was intended just for him.
“Of course her Saint Joan was later shown on television,” he informed Mrs. Montana. “You may have seen it yourself. As was her Cherry Orchard.”
“Well! If you had told us she was an old friend we’d have watched Another Life last night. She plays a dotty old neighbour who claims to be Swedish royalty.”
He could not allow Mrs. Montana to see how he felt about this. That Oonagh Farrell could be in Los Angeles, and Topolski possibly with her, might be good enough reason to refuse the Montanas’ assignment. Oonagh Farrell might see his sudden appearance as the sort of harassment stars were sometimes subjected to from people claiming a long-ago friendship. Neither Oonagh nor Topolski had got in touch during all those years, though they certainly must have known where he could be found.
At any rate, this did not alter the fact that he wasn’t sure he wanted to be responsible for a resistant seventeen-year-old in the noisy glamour of Los Angeles. How much did he know about today’s youth once they were beyond the reach of their parents? He had heard that they had little in common with the students he’d taught, and might as well have been from another planet— inscrutable, unpredictable, and dangerous. Even a clean-cut boy without a nose ring could be waiting to cross the border in order to show his true colours. And, he mustn’t forget, this one was reluctant to have him along.
Because the city’s teachers were having some sort of professional workshop today, Thorstad assumed this would be an opportunity to discover how serious Travis was about his preparing for exams. But Travis had other plans. When he’d come thumping down the stairs from his room and paused to jam his feet into his runners inside the front door, he explained that this was his chance to put in some hours at the homeless centre downtown. “I volunteer.” He yanked a jacket from the closet. “Research for my role!”
His role in the TV series, he explained, was that of a teen who’d run away from his family to live amongst a group of street people in some New England town. His companions were dope addicts, alcoholics, released convicts, the mentally ill, and the unemployed. “This is vital, man!”
Axel Thorstad repressed an involuntary groan. He had no desire to go downtown, which he was sure would be a confusion of dangerous traffic and crowds of rude, impatient shoppers. Even less appealing was the spring rain that had worked itself up into a deluge during the night, the downpipes roaring at every corner of the Montanas’ house. Travis was obviously determined to sabotage or at least delay his would-be tutor’s opportunity to find out what it would be like to work with him.
Yet it could be useful to observe the boy when he was away from the family home.
Travis grabbed two umbrellas from a jardinière and led Thorstad out to his battered green Tercel in the three-car garage. The wheels were without hubcaps and the rear window had been replaced by a sheet of plastic duct-taped in place, but the engine roared into life at a turn of the key. Travis assured him that the rattling would not be noticed once they’d exceeded the speed limit.