by Irwin Shaw
The others might have felt that they were doing Delaney no good by their attendance, but no one suggested going. So they all stayed, for their own reasons, taking turns sitting on the two wooden chairs that the nurses had set out in front of the window at the end of the corridor.
The doctor had merely said that Delaney was doing as well as could be expected and could not see visitors at the moment. The doctor said all this in Italian for Tucino and Tasseti and in excellent English for Holt and Jack. The doctor had a habit of speaking in a whisper, which made his words seem freighted with hidden meanings and forced his listeners to lean toward him to catch what he was saying. By eleven o’clock at night Jack was unreasonably irritated with the doctor.
Tucino and Tasseti paced back and forth restlessly, their leather heels tapping importantly on the stone floor, as they talked in a hushed, excited hiss of sound throughout the evening. From time to time their voices rose and Jack had the feeling that they were engaged in a long argument that they had had many times before and which rose to regularly defined climaxes after every fifty lines.
Holt stood calmly at the window, a small, vague smile on his lips. His sombrero was hung neatly on a radiator valve, a touch of Oklahoma, a breath of the plains, in the sick Roman night.
“I questioned the doctor carefully,” Holt said, “and I have the feeling Maurice won’t die. Naturally, the doctor won’t make any promises. If he says a patient will live and then he dies, it would put him in an embarrassing position professionally, and I appreciate that. But quite a few of my friends have gone through the same thing. In the oil business. The strain…That’s one of the reasons Mother insisted I arrange to take six months a year in Europe. If you enjoy being alive, there no sense in working yourself into your grave, is there, Jack?”
“No,” Jack said.
“I’m surprised about Maurice, though,” Holt said, shaking his head, with the Stetson marks in a neat oval on his graying hair. “There’s so much vitality there. He works hard, of course, but I don’t think that’s what did it. I have my theories, Jack…” He hesitated. “You don’t mind if I speak frankly, do you?”
“Of course not.”
“I know Maurice is an old friend of yours. He’s a friend of mine, too, I like to think. I’m honored to be able to call him my friend,” Holt said seriously. “What I’m about to say I say in the friendliest manner possible. I don’t want you to think I’m talking behind a sick man’s back or making a criticism. What I’ve observed about Maurice, Jack, is that he’s abnormally ambitious. Am I right? Am I unfair in that deduction?”
“No,” Jack said. “It’s not unfair.”
“He feels now that he’s not living up to his ambition,” Holt said. “That can affect a man’s heart, can’t it?”
“I would think so,” said Jack.
Holt peered soberly out the window. It was raining lightly and the palm trees gleamed here and there in the black, windless drizzle. “Somehow,” Holt said, “before I came here, it never occurred to me that it rained in Rome.” He cleared his throat. “The other thing about Maurice—and again, I want you to bear it in mind that I don’t mean it as a criticism—he doesn’t lead a normal home life.”
In the darkness of the corridor, Jack smiled at the gentleness with which the oil man judged his fellow man.
“If a man is disappointed in his ambition,” Holt went on, staring down at the rain, “and he doesn’t surrender, but keeps on fighting like Maurice—and mind you, I admire him for it—and if, at the same time, he’s under a strain at home, if he doesn’t find peace there—it’s no wonder if at a certain moment between fifty and sixty he collapses. I’m lucky,” he added irrelevantly. “After I met Mother I knew I would never look at another woman—in that particular way, I mean—again in my life. Maurice hasn’t been lucky, has he, Jack?”
“He’s looked at other women,” Jack said. “If that’s what you mean by being unlucky.”
“Still,” Holt said, “he won’t die. I have a feeling about things like that. I’ve come into a room and seen a man who seems to be in perfect health, just gone through an insurance examination with flying colors and all that, and I’ve told Mother later, in the privacy of our own bedroom, ‘We’ll attend that feller’s funeral before the year is out.’ And I’ve rarely been wrong.”
Look at me, Millionaire, Jack wanted to say. Look closely. What do you think about me? What will you tell Mother about me tonight in the privacy of your bedroom?
“I don’t have that feeling about Maurice Delaney,” Holt said, “and when I’m allowed to see him, I’m going to tell him so. What’s more, I’m going to tell him that I have decided to go through with our deal. I’ll finance him for three pictures in the next three years.”
“That’s very nice of you, Sam,” Jack said, touched again, as he had been the first night he had met Holt, by the man’s goodness.
“It’s not nice,” Holt said. “It’s business. I’ll make a damn good thing out of it. There’ll be only one condition attached to it…” Holt stopped.
Jack waited curiously. One condition. What? That Delaney lead what Holt insisted upon calling a normal home life? That would be an interesting clause in the contract. It is furthermore agreed that the party of the second part have dinner with his wife each evening at eight o’clock for the duration of this contract.
“The condition is that I will sign the deal only if you consent to come in as the producer in charge,” Holt said.
Tucino and Tasseti had come to a fiftieth line in their duologue and their voices resounded so loudly in the corridor that a sister poked her head out through a partly opened door and shushed them. Jack was grateful for the little disturbance. From this point on he did not want to say a word to Holt without weighing its effect carefully in advance.
“You’re surprised, I imagine,” Holt said, as the voices of Tucino and Tasseti diminished into an angry, low buzzing.
“Yes,” Jack said, “I confess I am. After all, I never did anything like this before.”
“No matter,” Holt said. “You have had a great deal of experience, you’re a man of intelligence. I’m sure you’re a man of your word, and most important of all, you understand Maurice. If anyone can control him, you can….”
“If anyone can control him.” Jack smiled sourly.
“If no one can control him,” Holt said, “maybe it would be better if he didn’t come out of that door alive. Better for him,” Holt added in his soft, drawling voice. He looked at Jack and chuckled at the expression on Jack’s face. “You’re surprised again, aren’t you, Jack?” he said. “You wonder what an old hick like me knows about things like this. Listen, Jack, there’re plenty of men who insist upon ruining themselves in the oil business, too. You get to know the signs. Anyway, it’s not so magical…” He waved his hand. “I’ve been doing a little investigating. It’s not as though Maurice took pains all his life to keep anything secret, is it?”
“No,” Jack said.
“I’ve been doing some investigating about you, too, Jack.” Holt’s voice was dry, almost timid. “You don’t mind, do you?”
“It’s all according to what you found out,” Jack said.
Holt chuckled again. “One thing I found out,” he said, “is that I can afford to pay you a lot more than the government. I won’t tell you what else I found out, except that it was all reassuring, it all jibed with the excellent impression you made on Mother and me.”
“Let me ask you a question, Sam,” Jack said. “What about him?” Jack nodded in the direction of Tucino, who was leaning now with his head against the wall while Tasseti whispered busily into his ear. “Where does he fit in?”
“He fits in all right,” Holt said. “The company will be a joint Italo-American enterprise, and Tucino will have to find one-quarter of the money.”
“Have you told him that you want me to be in on it?”
“I don’t want you just to be in on it, Jack,” said Holt. “I want you to run it. When the
time is ripe, I’ll tell Mr. Tucino.”
“Do you think he’ll stand for it?”’
Holt chuckled. “There’s nothing else he can do, Jack,” he said. “He’s on the verge of bankruptcy. It’s not that I want you to take advantage of his position, Jack,” Holt said, almost apologetically. “I admire his good qualities, as you know. I talked at considerable length about them the other night, didn’t I? He’s dynamic, he has quick ideas, he has a taste for what the public wants. But Italians do business in a different way from us, Jack. There are things that businessmen do to each other here, that are considered absolutely honorable, that would put a man in jail for five years back home. I’m going to be the president of this company. My name is going to be on it. You understand me, don’t you, Jack?”
“Yes.”
“It’s not an easy job I’m offering you,” Holt said. “You’ll earn your money. You get twelve thousand five hundred a year now from the government. I’ll give you thirty-five thousand a year for three years, with five percent of the profits.”
“And at the end of the three years?”
Holt grinned. He touched the crown of the Stetson, hanging on the radiator valve. “We’ll see, Jack, we’ll see. I’m a businessman, not an old-age-pension scheme.”
There was the tapping of solid heels, and Tucino came up to where Jack and Holt were standing in front of the window. “Listen, Jack,” Tucino said, his glasses shining dimly in the subdued hospital corridor light, “I think maybe it’s good idea you go to sleep now. You gotta lotta work to do tomorrow. Now we gotta move fast, finish the dubbing quickest possible, eh? Tell you the truth, Jack, Delaney is way over budget as is, already we’re shooting three weeks over. I listen to what you been doing, I like it very much. Only very slow. I know it’s not your fault…” He spread his hands to show how blameless he thought Jack was. “I know how slow the Maestro work. But now I take over, personally, on the set tomorrow. Now, without him, you finish up quick, eh, Jack, like a good boy, we get this whole picture in the can before Delaney comes outa hospital, eh?”
“I don’t know, Mr. Tucino,” Jack said. “If I rush through it and Delaney doesn’t like it, when he gets out of the hospital, he’s liable to want to do the whole thing all over again.”
“Who knows when he come out of hospital?” Tucino said excitedly. “Who knows if he come out alive or dead? What am I supposed to do? Wait? Pay hundred and twenty people just to hang around because my director had to go horseback riding? By the time Delaney can say yes, no, or maybe, this picture is going to be playing in ten thousand theatres.”
“Mr. Tucino,” Holt said softly, the drawl a little slower than usual, “don’t get excited.”
“Mr. Holt,” Tucino said, gripping Holt by both forearms, “I admire you. You’re a gentleman. You got oil wells. You can afford to wait. I don’t have no oil wells, Mr. Holt, I am in big rush.”
The door to Delaney’s room opened and the doctor came out. He looked fresh, remote. “Mister…ah…Andrus,” he whispered.
“Yes?” said Jack.
“He insists upon talking to you,” the doctor said. “I told him two minutes. No more. Please try not to excite him.”
Jack looked around him doubtfully at the other men. “Any messages?” he asked.
There was a silence. Then Holt said, “Tell him he has nothing to worry about.”
Jack went into the room and closed the door behind him.
There was a single, subdued light to one side of the bed, and a nurse was sitting in the shadows in the corner of the room. The light wasn’t strong enough for Jack to see the expression on Delaney’s face or the color of his skin. Under the covers, Delaney’s body seemed childish and frail on the high hospital bed, and the sound of his breathing was harsh and irregular. He was terribly, pathetically small. The day of illness had already diminished him. He had a tube taped onto his cheek, branched into his nostrils, for the oxygen. When Jack came in and stood close to the bed, Delaney moved the fingers of his hand slightly in greeting. Jack had an impulse to take Delaney in his arms, cradle him, comfort him, beg his forgiveness.
“Sam Holt’s out in the hall,” Jack said “He says there’s nothing to worry about.”
Delaney made a sound that Jack understood was meant to be a laugh.
“Jack,” Delaney whispered, and his voice, too, seemed childish and frail, “two things. First—don’t let Tucino touch the picture.”
“Don’t worry about the picture,” Jack said.
“He’s dying to get his hands on it,” Delaney whispered. “There’s still the last sequence to shoot. The one in the bar at the railroad station. It’s the most important scene in the picture. He’ll make it sound like Aïda. You have to help me, Jack. You can’t let him do it.”
“I’ll do my best to stop him,” Jack said, feeling helpless, and full of confused pity for Delaney because even now, living on oxygen and barely able to speak, his first thought was for his work. And what work! Jack knew the scene in the railroad-station bar. Delaney was right about it’s being the most important sequence in the picture—but the picture itself was nothing, less than nothing. It was sad—absurd—that a man on the brink of death should be concerned with anything so inconsequential as ten minutes of celluloid. Lord, I announce my coming. But first I must get certain actors onto their proper marks.
“If I conk out,” Delaney was saying, “I don’t want the last thing I do murdered by that Italian.”
“You’re not going to conk out,” Jack said.
Delaney turned his head slowly to one side, so that he could look directly up at Jack. “It’s the godamndest thing, Jack,” he whispered. “I’m not afraid. I don’t know whether it’s because I’m brave, or whether it’s because I’m a damned fool, or whether I’m sure I’m going to live. I’ll tell you something, Jack—until eleven o’clock this morning, I used to be scared shitless of dying. And now it’s nothing.”
There was a rustle in the corner where the nurse was sitting in the shadows.
“Scusi, Sister,” Delaney said. “I have a dirty tongue.”
“Signore,” the nurse said coldly to Jack, “you are tiring the patient.”
“Another minute, Sister,” Delaney whispered, “another minute, please. He is my best friend. From when we were young.”
“One minute more, that is all,” said the cold, accented voice in the darkness.
“Listen, Jack, just listen,” Delaney said rapidly, fighting time. “You’ve got to do it for me. You’ve got to take it over, Finish the picture for me. Jack, are you listening to me?”
“I’m listening,” Jack said.
“What the hell,” Delaney went on hurriedly, “you can do it. It’s not as though it’s all a mystery to you. You’ve been around long enough. If you tried, you’d be a better director than nine-tenths of the bastards with big names today. Whatever you do, it’ll be better than Tucino. Shoot every angle. Take your time. Let them yell. Cover everything. Go slow on the cutting, on the dubbing. I don’t want Tucino to have any prints made before I get out of this godamn hospital. Scusi, Sister. If Tucino yells, get Holt to shut him up. Holt’s on my side. And he’s tough. He can break Tucino in half if he wants to. And Tucino knows it. I’ll be out of here in six weeks, Jack, the doctor’s sure, and then I’ll put it all together myself…”
“Six weeks,” Jack said, almost automatically.
“What’d you say, Jack?”
“Nothing.”
“Get that kid. That kid today…what’s his name…at the riding school…”
“Bresach.”
“Get him to help you. Call him the dialogue director or your assistant or whatever. I read his script…”
“But you told him you hadn’t,” Jack said, remembering the morning.
Delaney smiled weakly against the pillow. “I wanted to sound him out first. The script’s too damned good for a kid that age. I didn’t want to praise him right from the beginning. There’re tricks in every trade, Jack…I have a
hunch about that kid. He’s hot. He’s got the movies in his blood. He’ll come up with a lot of ideas. Use him…”
Use him, Jack thought. There’s an order.
“Listen to him. Pick his brain,” Delaney went on, gasping. “Maybe this is just what this picture needs. A fresh little sonofabitch like that. I have a hunch about him. That’s the way I was at that age. Maybe this picture’ll start me all over again. Jack, you promise…?”
Six weeks, Jack thought. What will I tell Hélène? What Joe Morrison? What happens to my life?
“Jack,” Delaney said, “you promise, don’t you? I need you…Jack…”
“Of course,” Jack said. Standing there, next to the high hospital bed, he knew that from the instant that Delaney had swept into the dressing room that night in 1937 in Philadelphia, this moment, this promise, this sacrifice, this despairing act of friendship, had been inevitable.
“You won’t let me down, Jack,” Delaney pleaded.
“No, I won’t let you down,” Jack said. “Now, I think you ought to try to sleep.”
“In a minute, in a minute.” Delaney grasped Jack’s wrist. His fingers felt light, delicate, without force on Jack’s skin. “One more thing…”
“Signore.” The nurse rose in the shadows.
“Jack,” Delaney said rapidly, his voice rasping, “go to Clara for me. She’s got to come here, tell her, she’s got to come here. Even for one minute. Just to walk into the room and kiss my forehead. Christ, she can do that, can’t she?…What the hell is that to ask after all these years?”
“Signor Delaney”—the nurse came over to the bed, motioning with her head for Jack to go—“you must stop talking now.”
Delaney’s fingers closed more tightly on Jack’s wrist. “And you have to go to Barzelli for me,” he whispered. “Tell her she’s got to stay away from here. If she comes, Clara won’t come near me—tell her. You’ll tell her, won’t you, Jack?”
“Signore,” the nurse said loudly, “I will call the doctor if you do not leave immediately.”
“Yes, I’ll tell her,” Jack said. “Good night.” He pulled his hand away from Delaney’s grasp.