“Good riddance,” said Hardwick.
“I’m taking the horse,” the Englishman’s boy said.
Hardwick had only jerked the cinch on his saddle a little tighter.
“I earned it,” the boy said.
Hardwick walked away from him.
Now there was only one thing left to do. They had buried Ed Grace under the floorboards of the fort and were going to burn it down over him. If they didn’t, said Hardwick, the Assiniboine would find the body, maul and mutilate it so his own mother wouldn’t know him.
They all sat their horses in expectation of the torching. Hardwick doused the floorboards with kerosene, came out and splashed the remainder of the can up and down the outside walls. Just as he struck a match, the Englishman’s boy darted his eyes frantically over the assembly and shouted, “Where’s the girl?”
Hardwick touched the match to the doorsill. There was a whoosh like a passing train and blue flame shot out around the sill, then sucked back into the mouth of the door like a fiery tongue. The Englishman’s boy threw himself off his horse and ran to the post, snatched at Hardwick’s arm, screaming, “Where’s the girl?”
Hardwick yanked his arm free and walked to his horse.
He stumbled to a door framed like a picture in wreaths of fire, tried to drive through it, but the furnace-blast sent him reeling back. He tore his jacket off, held it up to shield his face, and threw himself blind at the doorway. For a moment, he teetered on the threshold, then staggered back whimpering, the tweed singed and smoking. Tossing aside the jacket he peered into the rippling air and curling smoke. She was crouched on the countertop like a cat in a flood, the floorboards beneath her awash in fire. Briefly, smoke glutted the doorway; he lost sight of her. He wiped his eyes. The door cleared. She was drawing herself up to spring, spring down into the flames. He aimed and fired the pistol empty. Reloaded mechanically and emptied it again into the billowing smoke, even though there was nothing to see.
Outside he ran in circles, yelling for Hardwick. The grass, the trees, the creek were his only company and they could not be killed. He sank to the ground and watched the post burn to nothing. When night came down he walked among the glow of the dying embers, boots smoking. Of Grace and the Indian girl he found nothing.
Hours later, he mounted his horse and three times circled the ruins of the post, dabbed here and there with sparks like the sky was dabbed with stars. A dumb, holy prayer for the two of them. Then he turned his horse northeast, like an Indian, to seek in the wilderness.
30
Two days after Chance and Fitz pay me their nocturnal visit I go to see Rachel Gold. It’s been a long time since we have had any contact. I think she has phoned several times; the telephone rang so persistently, so doggedly, I concluded it had to be either her or Fitz, and I didn’t want to speak to either of them. But now, cornered by my conscience, I ride a streetcar to her pink stucco apartment building with its Spanish courtyard. It’s as if when my illness, my fever broke, something broke loose in me too, sending things floating to the surface, things I have to deal with.
My knock gets no answer, despite the fact I can hear somebody moving around inside. I bang the door, loudly.
“Pedlar begone!” she shouts imperiously.
“It’s me, Rachel. Harry. Open up.”
The sound of rapid, thudding footsteps and the door is flung open. She’s wearing a Chinese-looking robe, red dragons on a black satin ground. She is barefoot and the famous black hair is alive. So is her face, registering shock at my appearance.
“God, Harry, where’ve you been? Why haven’t I heard from you? What’s happened? You look like hell.”
“I’ve been sick,” I say curtly, inviting myself in, walking past her.
She trails concern after me into the living room. “You look like you could use something to eat. I’ll make you something to eat.”
“No, I don’t want anything to eat.” I sag down into an armchair. I’m nervous because of what I’ve come to say; my eyes drift around the apartment, avoiding hers, the anxiety in her face. “This won’t take long. I have something to tell you. And a favour to ask.”
“Shoot,” she says. I hear her settling on the sofa across from me. I’m reluctant to start; a strained, expectant silence forms.
“Harry, look at me.”
I do.
“What’s the matter?”
I begin, “Remember that day on the beach? When you told me I had to decide? Well, I’ve decided.”
“What have you decided, Harry?”
“I acted on impulse that day and I made a fool of myself. I’m sorry, but I’m acting on impulse again. There’s something that’s been eating at me. Something I didn’t tell you. About Chance.”
She shoots me a penetrating look. “What didn’t you tell me about Chance?”
I want to make this clear. “I’m not taking revenge on him,” I continue awkwardly, “and the last thing I want to do is hurt you, but I think you have a right to know.”
“Forget the pussyfooting. Out with it.”
“Remember what you said about Fitz in the Cocoanut Grove -that he was an anti-Semite?” I hesitate. “Well, so is Chance. In earnest. I’ve heard him say things.”
Rachel stiffens visibly, someone prepared for a slap in the face. She knows what is coming. “What kind of things?” she demands, voice brittle.
“Don’t ask me to spell it out. Take it from me. You don’t want to hear.”
Rachel draws the robe a little tighter around her shoulders. “A drink might help take the bad taste out of my mouth,” she says disgustedly. “Unfortunately for me, I quit drinking.” Her lips twist slightly, struggling to summon up an ironic smile. “But looking on the lighter side, maybe this cloud has a silver lining. When I hand the son of a bitch my resignation, I’ll be free to write that novel I’ve been threatening the public with for as long as you’ve known me.”
“Sure.”
“But I won’t,” she says quietly, more to herself than me.
I don’t contradict her. We both know she’s right on that score. Rachel says nothing else, sits absolutely still and quiet.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
She glances up at me. “That’s the second time you’ve said sorry this afternoon, Harry. Don’t be a parrot.” She moves now, abruptly, leans over and plucks a cigarette from a lacquer box on the coffee table, lights it with a flick of a match. Rachel back to business, the decisive close to a distasteful subject. Chance dismissed like a fly. “You mentioned a favour,” she says, shaking out the match, tossing it into an ashtray. “What is it?”
“I want you to visit my mother.”
Her eyes lift quizzically. “Of course. When would you like to go?”
“Not the both of us. Just you.”
She scrutinizes me closely. “Now what the hell is all this about?”
It seems lately there are no clear explanations. The best I can offer is, “I can’t face her right now.” I lay my hands on my kneecaps and watch them shake there uncontrollably.
“You’re a mensch, Harry. A mensch doesn’t abandon his mother,” she says sternly.
That word, whenever she used to apply it to me, would make me angry and envious. I would have preferred to be one of her gigolos. Now it fills me with despair. The debris of a lot of mistakes has floated to the surface in the past couple of days. It seems I have a long history of betrayals. “I let her down once before, Rachel,” I whisper without lifting my eyes. “You know what she asked me just before I left to come down here? To buy her a new dress so I could pick her out from all the rest of those drab women on the ward the next time I visited. She sensed I was running out on her. Knew it.”
“Or you think she did.”
“I’m afraid I’m going to let her down again. My money’s going fast. What if she ends up in one of those goddamn state-run asylums?”
“Stop this, Harry,” she says.
“But don’t you see?” I look up, plead with her to u
nderstand. “I can’t let that happen.”
“I told you before,” she says impatiently, “if you need money, I’ll lend it to you. Take my word on it.”
“She’s my mother. My responsibility. I’m going to do my best to take care of her. But I just can’t face her now.”
Rachel isn’t about to relent. “Go and see her, Harry.”
“Believe me, she’d rather see you.” I’m begging, desperate. “You said I was abandoning her. I’m not abandoning her, I’m just asking for a reprieve, a little time to get things straight in my mind. Is that so much to ask? Look at me, for Christ’s sake! Do you think she should see me looking like this?” I hold up my trembling hands as testimony.
She studies my face, my hands. They are the only arguments which have any effect. “Sure I’ll go visit your mother,” she says at last, gently. “But what about you? When will I see you again?”
I’ve made my mind up about that, too. No more lingering hopefully for love. It’s time to try to get Rachel Gold out of my system. “I don’t know. Sometime” is the only answer I can manage.
“Come on, Harry. What are you up to?”
I get to my feet. “Don’t you get it, Rachel? I’m ashamed. About my mother. About you. I can’t forget Chance once accused you of being an influence on me. He meant a bad influence. What I didn’t say is that if you were an influence – it was only for the good.”
“Harry, there’s no reason for this.”
“Listen to me, Rachel. I’m not fit for human company just now. Grant me a little time. Okay?” That said, I start to leave the room.
“Harry,” she shouts after me, “this is nuts!”
I pause, momentarily, to look back at her on the sofa. “Give me this one last thing, Rachel. Please. Don’t try to find me.”
Then I go.
To save some money I sell whatever I can of my household goods and move into a rooming house whose only other boarder is a cadaverous-looking retired Lutheran minister from Minnesota. For the next few months I continue to look for work, but aside from jobs as an extra, everywhere I meet with failure. Evenings, I sit in my landlady’s verandah, depressed, worried, fatalistic, waiting for something to happen; what, I’m not sure. Something. In another economy move I’ve dropped my subscriptions to the movie magazines, but the Lutheran minister’s daily newspaper is full of tittle-tattle about the approaching premiere of Chance’s epic Western. The chat columns retail gossip, there are full-page ads for the picture, and Chance has obviously forsaken his role as the Hermit of Hollywood. Now interviews with him multiply alarmingly. His mild professorial face greets me at the breakfast table, staring out from the morning edition. A buzz is building around the picture and show-biz reporters, after the success of Cruze’s The Covered Wagon and rumours about Chance’s picture, stoke it with headlines announcing the rebirth of the Western.
Then one afternoon Chance’s Hispano-Suiza pulls to the curb outside and a chauffeur in livery comes briskly up the walk with an envelope in his gloved hand. Chance has tracked me down. The envelope contains two passes to the premiere of the Best Chance production of Besieged. There is also a note which explains something else the envelope holds, a cheque for five hundred dollars.
Dear Harry,
Enclosed are two tickets to the premiere of our film; bring your inamorata if you wish. I’m sure you have been informed she has left my employ and is now at Metro, but I bear no grudges. I hope you will be able to say the same and lay aside personal prejudices, and judge for yourself whether or not Besieged crystallizes the idealistic hopes for American film which we shared in our first conversations. Please come, I would like to hear that you approve of what has been accomplished. Oddly enough, your good opinion remains important to me.
You and I share credit for the scenario. Mr. Fitzsimmons tried to dissuade me from this step, but upon reflection I knew I could not deny what you have meant to this picture; it is only right to acknowledge your contribution.
Which leads to the delicate question of money. You will find enclosed a cheque for five hundred dollars. I believe this sum is a fair settling of my account with you, if not yours with me. I am sure you are currently encountering financial difficulties, so please note that the cheque is drawn on company finances and not on my personal account. This, I trust, will dispel any notion you might have that this could be regarded as an act of charity. It is, rather, the closing of the books on a debt.
Yours sincerely,
Damon Ira Chance
The premiere is one week off. I put the tickets and the cheque in my night-table drawer, determined to make use of neither. But as the date draws near I find myself wavering; one minute I am rock-solid in my determination never to give Chance the satisfaction of seeing me at his premiere, and the next this determination dissolves like salt in water. One part of me needs to see what Chance has done, another dreads it.
I don’t know what is happening to me. One evening, sitting in the sun-porch watching darkness descend, I have the thought that the darkness sifting down into that empty street is like the darkness filling my own emptiness. I cover my face with my hands and cry. And that is how my landlady finds me, as Shorty McAdoo’s landlady Mother Reardon found him, in the darkness, his face wet with tears. And like him, I try to deny them.
Tuxedoed, I make my way to Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre, two blocks up the street. Searchlights are visible against the blue-black wall of night sky, golden sabres slashing and wheeling, crossing and clashing, bright blades of gleaming light. People overtake me on the sidewalk. Skipping insect-like toward this mesmerizing display, the women utter chirps of excitement as they brush impatiently by me “Oh!” “Look, Herb!” Little jolts of delighted anticipation set their hips to switching, rattle their heels on the sidewalk; they jerk with impatience. Despite trying to lock down their enthusiasm, the men are the same. Their excitement is proclaimed in the rigid set of their shoulders and faces, a pose of nonchalance. A young man in a straw boater trots by me, pretending to scan the thickening crowd for a friend, and, like horses in a paddock, others infected by his example start trotting too.
Suddenly he stops, his eye caught by a long, luscious limousine crawling up the street. All the rest of the trotters halt too, halt and edge toward the curb for a better look. One looses a low, appreciative whistle and his bird-like call is copied – they all trill their homage as their polished black dream glides by. Then the young man in the boater lifts his head – he’s spied another car – and all the other heads turn too, staring up the street, songbirds transformed into birds of prey.
The throng begins to clot, coagulate, as the Pierce Arrows, Stevens-Duryeas, Rollses, Renaults, and Mercedes pour out of the side streets in a parade of luxurious rolling stock running on golden rails laid down on the asphalt by headlight beams. Clusters of star-gazers crane necks for a peek into windows, into back seats. Reports of sightings fly about, fickle breezes which blow heads in this direction and that. “Is that Buster?” “Is that Doug and Mary?” They strain to see, ripple, bend as one, bow down over the curb like tall grass in a gust of wind.
I keep walking, moving as fast as the traffic jamming the roadway, touching shoulder after shoulder to beg passage, beckoned by Grauman’s marquee, hundreds of electric bulbs pulsing out a single word, Besieged, Besieged, Besieged, Besieged, Besieged…
Opposite the theatre, onlookers are packed deep on the narrow sidewalk, bobbing up and down on tiptoes, heads tossing like turbulent waves. Blue-jacketed cops patrol a rope strung mid-thigh at the edge of the pavement, good-humouredly keeping the crowd behind it with fatherly nods and gentle taps of the nightstick, friendly reminders not to trespass on the street.
Young couples with infants tucked in their arms; old couples gripping purses and canes, fragile in shiny black clothes and high-topped shoes and boots, red noses sharp, red eyes sharper; men wearing hand-painted ties and others in work shirts and cloth caps; fast-looking, painted girls and respectable young females whose scrubbed cheeks
exude rosy virtue: one happy congregation. With this mingling of humanity comes a mingling of scent, bay rum and tobacco, camphor and peppermints, lilac water and stale sweat, chewing gum and dirty diapers.
Chance’s publicity campaign has worked. Despite being no household name, no DeMille, no Griffith, despite having no actors in this picture who are stars of any magnitude, the ordinary people, the giants of the industry, have come.
A great stir of shuddering excitement. The crowd groans, “Charlie! Charlie! Charlie!”, a moan of sexual pleasure. Above the roof of the car, a mop of curly black hair, two black eyebrows, and a chunk of black moustache drawn on the alabaster face of a corpse by a cartoonist pops up to stare back across the street at us. It ducks back down to assist a young lady from the vehicle. The young lady is Leonore Ulric. The dapper little man graciously escorts Leonore Ulric out from behind the vehicle to greet us; they wave to us across a river of asphalt, Chaplin grinning impishly. Mad cheering as he wheels Miss Ulric in a military about-face on to the long red carpet running from curb to picture palace, snapping a sergeant-major’s salute to the bank of photographers. “This is too good!” “Catch this one!” The camera bulbs pop and blink like muzzle-flashes of distant artillery on a night horizon.
If Chaplin is here, the evening is already a success. But the magnificent automobiles keep disgorging celebrities on the crimson carpet; they wave to fans, blow kisses, strike preposterous poses for photographers. Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton, Pola Negri and Will Rogers, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford are all here. With each new arrival frenzy mounts, the mob calls names like they were the names of children lost in a forest; they skitter forward like iron filings answering the pull of powerful magnets. The press of people behind me drives me hard against the rope, it saws at my thighs; there’s an elbow in my back, a cane tangled between my legs. The smell of desperation pollutes the air. I start to scramble over the barrier before I get dumped over it on to my face.
The Englishman’s Boy Page 33