I found him in his bed, his lap and legs covered with sheets of discarded newspaper. He held an undiscarded sheet in clenched hands.
“That backstabber is here. He’s followed me. Am I never to be rid of that spineless excuse for a man?”
Shepard was standing in a corner, looking unmoved. “Whitehead,” he said.
I reached for the newspaper, and Drury reluctantly handed it over. It was the state edition of an Indianapolis paper, the Star Republic. Whitehead’s elaborate name jumped out at me from a two-paragraph story at the bottom of the page. The headline was Hollywood Producer Visits.
Beneath the headline was the announcement that John Piers Whitehead, “distinguished Broadway director and Hollywood producer,” had arrived in Indianapolis to direct a production of Knickerbocker Holiday for a local college’s summer theater. The story’s second paragraph was a quote from a college professor named Walter Carlisle, who gushed about how lucky he and his school, Butler University, were. His enthusiasm left me wondering if he and Whitehead had ever met.
I glanced over my shoulder toward the parlor. “Does Gilbert know about this?”
“No,” Shepard said. “The Traynor dogsbody who brought the Sunday papers took what was left of Gilbert home.”
“Forget Gilbert!” Drury thundered. “We have to take action. This is the most transparent ploy I’ve ever seen, hiring himself out to direct some summer musical. He’s just trying to get close enough to sabotage me again.” He held his hand out for the paper, and when I’d given it back, he crushed it into a ball.
The same man who had taken the Ku Klux Klan in his stride was in a genuine rage. That or the odd way in which Drury’s Hollywood enemies were reassembling themselves around us had me seeing spots. I shook my sleepy head, but the picture didn’t get any clearer.
From his neutral corner, Shepard said, “I’ve been trying to tell Carson not to get himself worked up until we know the score. I told him you could check it out during your visit to Indianapolis.”
“What visit would that be?” I asked.
“Have you forgotten your grandmother’s dinner invitation?” Shepard asked back.
I hadn’t forgotten it. I’d decided that the Klan threat had canceled all bets. “I can’t leave after what’s happened.”
“Yes, you can,” Drury said, shaking the balled-up paper at me. “You have to put the fear of God into that wretched person. You have to scare him off.”
“You’d better wire Paddy for a replacement,” I said. “Leg breaking is a separate department.”
“Carson didn’t mean it that way,” Shepard said. “Just talk to the guy, that’s all we’re asking. Then go visit the folks. Stay over if you want to. We’ll be okay without you for one night. Leave that howitzer of yours where I can find it and have a good time. Bring me back a drumstick.”
22
So, while Traynorville waited for whatever was going to happen to happen, I went visiting in Indianapolis. I took Highway 32 west to Noblesville and west from there to the highway’s intersection with 31, where I turned south. About an hour into my drive, I passed through the belt of little communities that separated Indy from the serious farmland. Those towns were bigger than I remembered, almost sprawling into one another and the city without a break. Indianapolis itself looked like the blueprint for the decade: clean, quiet, and prosperous. Fat, dumb, and happy, Shepard would have called it. Every block had people dressed up for church and enough gaudy, new sedans and coupés on patrol to make me feel homesick for my DeSoto.
I didn’t drive very far into Indy. Butler University was on the city’s north side in a section of upscale homes and wooded streets. The school was upscale itself, with stone buildings done up in a streamlined Gothic style that said middle of America, middle of the century, middle of the road. It wasn’t a university really, not if you went by acreage. Just a nice little college appended to the largest basketball facility in the state, the Butler Field House. The university’s teams played there, of course, but more important to the average Hoosier, the field house was the place where the finals of the state high school basketball tournament were held. That made it more than a sports facility. It was the local Lourdes, a redbrick cathedral whose altar was a stretch of varnished hardwood with a font at either end.
I found myself in the shadow of this shrine after I’d determined that no one was home at Butler’s theater department on this hot, still Sunday afternoon. I’d asked around for the school’s summer theater; it was next to the field house, an open-air theater nestled in a natural bowl in the trees.
I inquired at the box office for Whitehead and, when that drew a blank stare from the kid behind the window, for Professor Walter Carlisle, the man quoted in the Star Republic article. Carlisle was on hand, supervising the construction of risers on the theater’s wooden stage. The sound of hammering covered my descent on a gravel path past row after snaking row of green folding chairs. Even so, the man who turned out to be Carlisle spotted me before I’d made it to the end of the aisle. He climbed down from the stage and came up the path to meet me.
I’d left my suit coat and hat in the station wagon, rolled up my sleeves, and loosened my tie. Carlisle still made me look like a member of a wedding party. He wore an almost white undershirt, fatigue pants cut off at the knees, and army boots that made my feet feel so nostalgic, they ached. Carlisle might have earned his boots the hard way, although he looked a little too old to be a veteran. He was forty-five by my guess, but fit, his walk and his build both athletic. His sunburned face was dominated by a jutting, ball-shaped chin, but that impression might have been due to the way he stuck the chin out toward me, like he was spoiling for a fight.
“Help you?” he asked when we came together a few rows shy of the orchestra pit.
I determined that he was the professor I was looking for. Then I asked after John Piers Whitehead. “I read in the paper that he was in town.”
“And you are?”
I thought about omitting my connection to Drury and trying to pass myself off as an old Hollywood friend of Whitehead’s. Carlisle was more likely to reveal the producer’s current whereabouts to a friend than a draftee leg breaker. But I didn’t try it. The professor was still sticking his chin out at me, looking as though he knew exactly who I was and why I was there. And I had a second reason for showing my hand: I didn’t like my chances of scaring off Whitehead, a man with nothing to lose. Telling Carlisle the whole story might accomplish the same thing. Once he realized that Whitehead was using him and his theater as part of a vendetta against Drury, the professor might yank Whitehead’s meal ticket and send him packing.
Unless, of course, Carlisle already knew all about Whitehead’s schemes and didn’t give a damn, which turned out to be the case. He listened calmly while I identified myself and told him why I was in Indiana. But when I started to describe the sabotage attempts against The Imperial Albertsons, Carlisle began to shift his weight from boot to boot. By the time I reached the accident with the camera crane, he’d had enough.
“Anyone who thinks that John Piers Whitehead could hurt another human being never met the man,” Carlisle said, a single pulsing vein splitting his high forehead. “I’ve known him for twenty years, and a more sensitive human being never drew breath.”
“You knew Whitehead in New York?”
“Yes. He gave me my first job at the height of the Depression when I was fresh out of college. Not just a job, either. He gave me a love of theater and a mission to protect it. His little government project was doing just that. We thought of ourselves as the Irish monks of a new dark age, keeping the candle of learning, of theater, alight.”
“Then Carson Drury switched you over to electricity.”
“Carson Drury,” Carlisle repeated, using the tone most people reserved for Hitler or Joseph McCarthy. “That charlatan. He co-opted our project, turning it into his own private stock
company, Repertory One.”
“And giving you the heave-ho?”
“No. He never fired me or anyone else. He left that kind of unpleasantness to John. Drury simply deserted us, dozens of theater people desperate for the work. He ran off to Hollywood with a few of the chosen and left the rest of us to starve. Luckily, I had a friend in John Whitehead. His letter of recommendation got me my first teaching position. I’ve followed the jobs ever since, ending up here.”
We both looked around at the little theater in the hollow. It was a long way from New York.
“Let’s talk about how Whitehead landed here,” I said.
“Why would I discuss that with you?”
“You might be as curious as I am about what he’s up to.”
“There’s nothing mysterious about that. He and I have kept in touch. He wired me last week to let me know that he was going to be in Indiana. He asked me to arrange some temporary employment, lectures or teaching. I got the idea of asking him to direct the last production of our season. I was scheduled to do it myself, but I decided I’d earned a break.”
“Some break. You’ve hired a guy who can’t direct his own feet.”
Carlisle unbent a little. “All John needs is a little rest.”
“In a sanitarium. You didn’t know about his drinking, did you?”
“No. Our correspondence dropped off during the past few years. I wasn’t aware that he’d fallen on such hard times.”
“But when he wired you out of the blue for a job, you found him one.”
The chin came up again. “I owed him that and more.”
“When did he tell you that Carson Drury was here in Indiana?”
“Not until after he arrived. He came off the plane from California drunk. I couldn’t believe the change in him. He told me then about Drury’s plan to refilm The Imperial Albertsons. John’s life is somehow tangled up with that film. He sees this as his last chance. I won’t be the one to take that chance away. I won’t hand him over to Drury or to you, so don’t even ask me where he is.”
That left me without another question, so I made an observation. “If you were really Whitehead’s friend, you’d get him as far away from Carson Drury as you could.”
Carlisle surprised me by nodding in agreement. “Drury is really the addiction for John, not alcohol. Or maybe the movie business is. If only he’d gone back to New York ten years ago. He’s still respected there–or he was, for a long time after Hollywood had forgotten him. I’ve often wondered why he stayed out there where he wasn’t wanted.”
I’d worked out an answer to that very question during my drive down from Traynorville. I was expecting my father to ask why I’d stayed on in a town that didn’t want me. I tested my answer out on Carlisle. “Some people have only one genuine love affair in them.”
23
I had some time before my next appointment. I used it to visit Crown Hill Cemetery, which was only a mile or so from Butler. Crown Hill contained the highest ground in the city, the actual peak being the site of James Whitcomb Riley’s grave. The Hoosier poet wasn’t the cemetery’s only celebrity. The place also housed John Dillinger, the Hoosier gangster.
I’d come to Crown Hill to visit my mother’s grave. I needed the help of the resident caretaker to find it, and it embarrassed me to ask him. It needn’t have. The caretaker had no way of knowing that I was June Elliott’s son and that I hadn’t been by to visit her since the day of her funeral, five years before. And if he had known, he wouldn’t have cared. He probably guided a different neglectful son or daughter every day of the week.
After the Crown Hill stop, I drove around the city for a time, ending up on Meridian Street, the most important north-south street in Indianapolis. With the east-west Washington Street, it formed a gigantic cross on which the city was laid out. But Washington had never been very fashionable. Nor, for that matter, had south Meridian. North Meridian was the address to have, so that was where my father had to live. He couldn’t afford a mansion like Traynor House, duplicates of which lined Meridian north of Thirty-eighth Street. So he’d settled for an apartment building a little to the south of Thirty-eighth, the Woodruff Building. It was a Greek temple inflated to six stories, the kind of temple the Greeks would have built if Archimedes had gotten around to inventing the elevator.
Farmers ate their Sunday dinners early, so my father ate his fashionably late. I got to Meridian Street about four, and I still had time to pace the sidewalk and smoke a Lucky from the pack I’d bought after leaving the cemetery. That purchase was my revenge against Ella for organizing this little dinner party. A couple of cocktails would have been better preparation, but there was no place to buy one in Indianapolis on a Sunday. So I finished my cigarette, passed another one to the Woodruff’s doorman, and took the building’s tiny elevator to the fifth floor, thinking how like my dad it was to have missed the penthouse by a single stop. How like the Elliotts in general.
I knew my grandmother would answer the door, and she did. Outside of Hollywood, where a star might change hair colors as often as husbands, it was common for people to pick a certain style at a certain point in their lives and stick with it until the finish. My grandmother had made her final selections around 1935. They included hair in tight curls worn short and steel-rimmed spectacles that somehow looked frilly against her soft, jowly face. The way that face lit up when the door opened reminded me of another home-coming a decade earlier.
“Tommy,” she said, using the name my parents had given me and Hollywood had taken away. She said it softly, just as she had the day I’d stopped by on my way to California after the war, so as not to ruin the surprise for the rest of the family.
There was no family left to surprise except my father, which meant I wasn’t surprising anyone. He was sitting in an overstuffed chair next to the radio cabinet in the formal, little living room, lying in wait for me. My grandmother had seemed unchanged to me, perhaps because I’d always thought of her as ancient. I’d never thought of my father that way. I was shocked to see how he had aged, how dull his eyes were, how little color was left in his hair and the skin of his face.
He’d always reminded me of Walter Huston. Not the crazy prospector of The Treasure of Sierra Madre Huston. Not the character actor but the leading man. The Walter Huston of Dodsworth, a tall, dignified Midwesterner with a long, thin face, a squared-off nose, and eyes that were narrow without being shifty. Now my father only reminded me that Walter Huston was dead.
He shook my hand without getting up from his chair.
“How are you?” I asked. It was as close as I could come to asking if he was ill.
“Fine” was as close as he could come to telling me.
We got through dinner on the strength of my grandmother’s cooking and her storytelling. When she finally ran out of family stories, I considered telling a few of my own about the California branch of the Elliotts. Instead I told a story about a favorite actor of my grandmother’s, Ronald Colman. I’d met Colman some years earlier in a professional capacity. I related the outlines of that case to give my grandmother a chance to catch her breath and to give my father an idea of how I spent my days. My better days. She listened wide-eyed. He rubbed the edge of his knife with his thumb and said nothing.
After the banana pudding dessert, I helped my grandmother clear away the dishes. When I came back into the dining room, my father was gone. I spotted him slipping into a room down the hall, his study, a place that had always been off-limits to me. So much for that, I thought, but my grandmother thought differently. She was waving me on with both hands like a third-base coach who knows that the catcher has forgotten his glasses. I rounded the dining room and headed for the study.
My father was seated behind his desk, cleaning his pipe; that is, he was going through the motions of cleaning it, working a furry bit of wire around and around in the stem, reenacting a ritual I’d surely watched fro
m my cradle. It really was a ritual this time and not a practical exercise. The pipe cleaner came out as white as it had gone in.
I could have asked him for some tobacco from the glass jar on his desk if I’d remembered to bring my pipe. I lit a Lucky instead and took a long, self-conscious drag.
“I suppose you’re drinking now, too,” my father said.
“When I don’t need a clear head for shooting craps.”
He acknowledged the joke by grunting. “I suppose the war did that to you.”
“Turning twenty-one did that to me, which happened some years back.”
“Don’t remind me. I hate to think of the time that’s gone.”
And the people, I thought. “Your grandchildren are doing fine, by the way. And your daughter-in-law.” That didn’t even rate a grunt. “They wanted to come out to see you, but I thought it might be dangerous.”
“Did you think I’d bite them?”
“I meant the job I’m doing is dangerous.” I gave him a rundown of the attacks on Drury’s movie, ending with our visit from the Klan.
That got his full attention. He left off packing his pipe with tobacco, the step I’d actually wanted to see.
“The Klan?” he repeated. In his incredulity he sounded like an older, better educated Sheriff Gustin. “You saw Klansmen?”
“And a burning cross. It brought back the night they marched here in Indianapolis. I thought they were coming for you that night.”
“I was too small an annoyance to merit that kind of attention. I’m proud to have been an annoyance to them, though, proud to have had a small part in ridding the state of them.” He went back to packing his pipe before adding, “For a time at least.”
“You believe they’re still around?”
Come Back Dead Page 15