Perhaps her kindness settled it. Perhaps she drew her troubled father down to her, held his head against her small bosom, felt the quickening, heard him go silent and then knew her inner thigh was being felt by his warm hand. She would not know what to do. He did it. But so often the man thinks he does it, and blame was not in anyone’s thoughts that afternoon. It was just a meeting of need and kindness, of ignorant wonder and weakness. He may have been more gentle and tender than he had ever been in love. He may have christened her, welcoming and guiding her, praising her startled excitement, telling her she was wonderful and beautiful. They may have slept in the deepest contentment of their lives. No one ever heard Evelyn hate the moment or the way it was done. Yet it may have been snatched, brutal and selfish; and he could have prevented it.
It was luck that her moment should be so dramatic, and luck or passion’s forgetting that it made her pregnant. But bad luck or good luck? If bad, then it must have been good that Hollis Mulwray was around, willing and able to marry Evelyn and take her north for the birth of the baby, Katherine. But Hollis assumed that Evelyn meant to be sheltered from her father. Perhaps the two of them should really have talked more to each other, not less; and perhaps pain and guilt were their most likely starting points.
Hollis’s generosity must have implied to Evelyn the guilt and horror she was expected to feel. It could not be missing if he loved her as he did. And being in love with Hollis was the best thing in Evelyn’s life. He was older than she; he was not handsome, and next to her father he struck no one as brilliant. But he was discerning and kind, and I am trying to suggest that kindness was vital to Evelyn. They told Katherine as she grew up that she was Hollis’s child by an earlier liaison. Evelyn looked after her like an older sister. Hollis made a good father. Seeing him with Katherine, Evelyn realized the ways her own father had failed her.
So she felt as much reproach as horror. As Katherine grew older, it became harder for Evelyn to consider a clean sweep of honesty. That’s what Vivian Sternwood, her closest friend, urged on her; that’s what Jake Gittes wanted, but he wanted to marry her too, while all she found in him was single-minded physical satisfaction, too blunt for his soft heart. But by the time Gittes came on the scene, Hollis was dead. Evelyn never had doubts about the murderer. There were business reasons for Noah Cross killing Hollis. They had made Los Angeles between them, in such a theft that they never trusted each other. But that wasn’t reason enough. No, Noah was jealous of Hollis; he longed to be seen as the father of Katherine, fifteen in 1936, that precious age. By then, Noah Cross had come to terms with his badness. He almost boasted about the courage it took. It made him feel greater than other men. Just as it did when Evelyn shot him and he did not even fall from the wound. And he felt true power when the police shot Evelyn, right through her imperfect eye, and he knew only relief as he held on to Katherine.
Someone told me that the thing you want to know about people is what most frightens them. It is advice that could come from a writer or a secret policeman. I don’t think incest frightened Evelyn Mulwray, at least not the hot act, not the part of it called rape. She had done it, and known the excitement. She may have engineered it out of a curiosity that would not be refused. She could not reject it out of hand when Katherine was such a happiness for her. So she hated her father—well, most people seem to need to do that, sooner or later.
No, what Evelyn Cross Mulwray feared most was telling Katherine, talking about it to her child. There is a part of us, so deep down and buried, that could sleep with our own children. But the soul, or whatever, then has to describe the act in language; and then the body writhes away from hearing in the worst tortures. The animal is on a leash to the mind that will not let it forget or use the excuse of vagueness or exaltation. Evelyn and Noah were alike in this: they could let action do the thing, but when the word had to be uttered they fell back in dread.
I can never get Noah Cross out of my head. He is a demon, utterly unlike the man I have wanted to be. But I am greedy for details about him. He monopolizes me. Some part of me I do not know must want to be a man of action striding across the world, laughing at the wreckage he leaves. Am I depressed because I will not allow Cross in my life?
HARRY MOSEBY
Gene Hackman in Night Moves, 1975,
directed by Arthur Penn
Named Harry for my brother, and Moseby for the ancestor who fought at Antietam and the Wilderness. We had the Civil War sword; it is in the attic, still, somewhere. He was born Harry Moseby Bailey in 1940, our first child. But he dropped the Bailey, to obliterate or forget the family he came from. It was an unexpected evasion in a censorious boy, always going on about “getting to the bottom of things.” Wherever he is now, I fear he rants to himself and others about control, “having one’s shit together,” reading his fortune when he stands up to assess what he has left in the toilet. I’m sure it’s a sturdy python: he would eat sensibly and look after his body. But there’s a dark room in his life that would turn his bowels to water if he admitted it. He keeps me in that dark room. He walks around it, never solving it or counting the weariness of walking so far.
His first two years he turned us into lovers, Mary Frances and me, asleep in a cot next to our inspired bed. He was happy until he was seven, growing up in Bedford Falls to news of the war. Harry kept the letters from his Uncle Harry; he was as conscientious about the war as only a child could be. One day he sat on my knee—this was ’forty-four, that June, with pictures in the paper of the beaches, one named after his favorite Omaha, bringing sea to our landlocked state—and he asked me whether my ear was adequate reason not to be there. I felt guilty, his manner was so demanding. I explained it again. Mary Frances came in and said, “We’re both lucky to have him,” a benediction over my head, so so serene. Then she altered. “Can’t you get that into your stupid head?” and I knew she was going. From one phrase to the next, she could jump the tracks. Harry just stared at her in that little boy’s way; she moaned and went away teary with another failure. The moan, high and small, like a dying cat, stayed in the room. “There, Daddy,” said Harry, to comfort me.
Nineteen forty-six and 1947 were the bad years for him, and for all of us: years of anxiety and smothered feeling with nothing to be sure of: his parents were frantic, eager and fearful, all at once. But it was a few years before we understood it was more than Harry could take. His younger brother was born in 1945. As soon as that happened I knew we had waited too long, let him be an only child imagining the world should be that way. Then in ’forty-six there was the problem of the bank, when it seemed that we would founder and close, and what everyone kindly agreed to call my “breakdown.” God! and all the rest of it. Mary Frances out of her mind at my depression: I had guarded her. And then the trip I took to New York and all that followed from that. Mark’s visit. Harry was too young to comprehend, so we told him nothing; we could not bear the thought of children picking up our dismay and anger. But he lived in his mother’s moods as much as anyone. They were climatic, the air in the house vibrated with her frustration and I was a cellar of unhappiness. He heard his Uncle Mark shouting in the house, and he must have heard his mother scream, such a hideous cry and such a relic of the actress she had buried. Then later, when she visited, he saw how beautiful Aunt Laura’s face had been spoiled. After that, she stopped coming. He adored her, too. Harry knew that the fabric around him had been torn in several places past repair. He hated disorder and, since I was the head of his household, he made me culpable. Did my deafness stop me hearing the first ripping sound in our family?
When he was fourteen, he asked to be sent to the military academy—to get away and to reproach me. I knew I had lost him, and I never said it was more than I deserved. But I feared for him. He was a boy still, despite being tall and strong, and having to shave; I wondered how he would deal with the rupture. Sometimes you can see a look in a tense face that says, “This is my tragedy, it will destroy me, but I will never give it up”—like someone who can’t s
wim, clutching someone else, ready to drag them down.
He came home once again in 1958, before he went to USC. That was all. He didn’t pack up his things; there was not that much warning. He simply left his childhood, an untidiness for us to clear up. It was a large family, and I still don’t understand what bursting energy it had that so many of us flew away from it, like the pieces of an explosion.
I watched his life from afar; I wasn’t told that he did write two or three times a year to his mother. He majored in psychology at USC, but his greatest achievement there was being free safety three years on the football team. He was a first-round draft choice in 1962, taken by the Detroit Lions, and he was All-Pro in 1964, 1965 and 1966. I saw him on television, but it’s not a game of faces. It’s all helmets and the huddled strategy. But he was good. You felt he had a passion about keeping his end zone intact. He was only 180 pounds, but he could stop much larger men inside the five-yard line when they were going at full speed. He absorbed their velocity, forced their momentum upward and crashed them down on their backs. It took the strength out of him. He retired in 1968, looking older than his real age.
He had met a woman in the Lions’ business office, Ellen Pressmann, and they moved out to Los Angeles. Harry set up a practice as an investigator: it was his old, self-appointed role as the sorter-out of truth, a free safety who stopped the attacks. So much of what happened was his own fault, taking care of things, and looking away from those truths he could not settle. Harry was a problems man, but only for problems he could solve. The others he ignored.
By 1974, his marriage was coming apart. Ellen was seeing another man, Martin Heller. Harry went to challenge him. Heller was a cripple—from Vietnam, I think—and not much use to a woman, or not in the ways Harry was most afraid of.
“What does she want from you?” he asked Heller.
“Someone to talk to.”
“Talk! Talk about what?”
“You mostly,” said Heller. “She doesn’t understand you.”
“There’s no mystery about me,” Harry must have roared—the old horror.
About that time, he got a call from a woman named Arlene Iverson. She’d been in some pictures in the forties—she was a femme fatale in a few films noirs. She had a teenage daughter, named Delly, who had run away; would Harry find her? He always said he could find anyone—but only if he decided to look, of course—he never found me, though he used to tell maudlin stories about trying to see me.
Harry discovered that Delly had known a group of movie stuntmen. One of them, Quentin, had been her boyfriend. He told Harry she’d gone off with Marv Ellman, another stuntman. The leader of that group, a stunt designer and an agent for others, was Joey Ziegler, and he suggested that Harry look for Delly in Florida. Delly had a stepfather, Tom Iverson, an ex of Arlene’s, and he ran a diving school down in the Keys.
He flew to Miami, and then he drove down to the Iverson place, between Long Key and Marathon. Delly was there with Iverson and his new wife, Paula, a tall, dark-red-haired woman who attracted Harry. It wasn’t a very savory setup: as far as Harry could tell, Iverson was sleeping on and off with both the women, and no one was disposed to protest about it. There was a defeated air to the house, of freedoms turning to poison.
Harry tried to persuade Delly to go back home to Los Angeles; I doubt if he caught the irony in “home.” He had a searching gaze, but he was always so sure he knew what he was looking for. Delly told him no, but Harry stayed around. One night he went out on a boat with Paula and Delly. He and Paula started arguing, the sort of fight when one person wants to be gentle but is afraid of seeming weak, and the other meets attack with counterattack. It reminded Delly of every parental row she’d ever heard, so she dived overboard to get away from it. Harry threw a searchlight on the water. Then Delly came up crying because she’d seen a dead man in a crashed plane on the seabed. She was overwhelmed, a child again. When they got back, Iverson assumed that his sleeping with her would be sufficient comfort. But Paula disallowed it at last.
In the middle of the night, Harry was awakened by Paula coming into his room. She wore her nightgown, old-fashioned and darned.
“How’s Delly?” he whispered.
“Sleeping. You?”
“Thinking. What in hell is that kid supposed to do with this world?”
Paula crept into bed with him. They talked a little and then they made love. They slept and Harry woke when he heard Delly screaming; in his dream it was the cry of all lost children, but it was Harry himself who had been screaming. When he woke his mouth was stretched open, but his voice was strangled. The girl was screaming for him.
He went into Delly’s room and he soothed her. He asked if she was sick. He told her he’d go with her back to her mother. He said he’d take her to a football game if she liked. The girl was calmed by his quiet voice and by his hand stroking her back. Then Harry looked up, and he saw Paula standing in the doorway. There was an expression of inexplicable distress on her face.
“You’re a football player?” she wanted to know. “You were?”
Harry took Delly back to Arlene, and he wondered about his own marriage: Paula’s warmth had shifted him away from Ellen. He was thinking of escape and a new life. Then he learned that Delly had been killed, in a car crash, with Joey Ziegler driving. He was suspicious, and he felt responsible for Delly. He met Quentin, and the young man told him it had been Marv Ellman dead in the plane off the Keys.
Harry flew back there. He discovered that the coast guard didn’t know about the crash, though Iverson had promised to report it. At the Iverson place, he realized that Tom had killed Quentin too. Harry took Paula out in a launch and he forced her to explain. She said that there had been a gang—Iverson, Quentin, Ellman, Ziegler—flying stolen archaeological treasures in from the Yucatan. Harry said he was going to sort it all out, and would she marry him then?
“No, never,” said Paula. “Do you know what I did? The night I made love with you? I did that to keep you occupied while Tom went to dive for the plane. There’s a Mayan fertility statue on board, its belly is filled with heroin.”
They reached the marker buoy, and Paula dived herself. She came up with the female statue Tom Iverson had never found. There was a ragged hole in the woman’s abdomen—as if she had had a Caesarean—and there was nothing inside.
“Abortion,” Paula shouted from the water. Then they both looked up at the sound of an aircraft. It dropped down toward them and a shot rang out. Harry was hit in the leg. As he fell over in the boat, he told Paula to dive to save herself. But the head of dark wet red hair just watched the small plane come back again, inviting it, and the brilliant pilot knocked it off, as if shooting a cabbage. But the impact shook the plane out of trim, and a wing tore the water. The plane cartwheeled; it snapped in two; Harry saw Joey Ziegler drowning in the cockpit, clinging to the last angle of air. The fine spray of Paula’s head and hair blurred the sun.
I cannot write this in one night. It takes every night there is. So I have to leave it open in the day by the window, where anyone could see it. And I do that: I take that chance with Mary Frances. Not for me some top-sheet about work and play to divert prying eyes from knowing who’s in bed with Jack. No, she has day after day to go through it all, finding and imagining references to herself. Leaving it there is my bravery, wondering if she can act every evening as if she has not read it or whether I will come back and find the table bare and smoke rising from the chimney. But she can act, of course; so well, I am her fan as well as her fool.
PAULA IVERSON
Jennifer Warren in Night Moves, 1975,
directed by Arthur Penn
Two people do not remember all they shared, even if they were together one still summer night. There are several strands of talk in their memories, more and less than they really said, things they have tried to forget, and things they only said in their imaginations. There is what one meant and the other understood. Harry Moseby remembered lovemaking: it was the peak he h
ad hoped for as soon as he saw Paula Iverson; so his mind smoothed away the slope of what led up to it. Paula had another version; it need not be correct, or his wrong. There are conflicting conversations in every dialogue. But it helps explain why she did not dive away from a plane intending to skim the surface of the water.
“Where were you when they shot Kennedy?” she asked him.
He knew instantly. “We were starting the afternoon training session. Karras was missing, and then he came out on the field. No one would believe him. He was crying.”
“I was in L.A. It was my senior year in high school.”
“What were you doing?”
“In bed with a boy. My first time.”
Harry said nothing, and nothing is a part of talk.
“He kept the TV on and they interrupted the program. It was the morning still there.”
“We won the game. Baltimore.”
“You think it was Oswald?”
“Had to have been.”
“Only Oswald?”
“Twelve years ago. We’ve had all the reports and do you think there hasn’t been a thought in every journalist’s head and every private eye’s that if there’s more to it he’s going to find it out? Twelve years and what do we have as an alternative? Nothing, that’s what we have. That and all the doubt.”
“Yeah, that’s what we got.”
They lay side by side, touching slowly, their bodies were so suspicious.
“So you won in Baltimore?” she smiled.
“Right. I was supposed to meet my father there.”
“Yeah?”
Suspects Page 32