by Steve Tesich
A phone call would save him, but the phone didn’t ring.
He considered calling somebody himself but couldn’t decide who it should be.
After much thought, he resolved to call his mother in Chicago. He picked up the receiver and extended his index finger to dial.
But then he just sat there with his index finger frozen in midair, because he didn’t know who was calling her.
He had to be somebody in order to make the call, but he couldn’t decide who to be.
Life of any kind, existence itself, seemed impossible.
Privacy suddenly revealed itself to him to be a dying planet that could no longer sustain life.
His only hope for survival was to flee. To go public. Which was what he did.
6
It’s still the same Saturday night in mid-December and Saul is still standing shivering outside Harry’s Shoes on the corner of Eighty-third and Broadway.
Snatches of monologues roll through his mind, and his lips move as if he is rehearsing them aloud.
Monologues addressed to all kinds of people, alive and dead, including several to himself.
Right across from Harry’s Shoes, where he is standing, is a public pay phone.
His nerve failed him last night and the night before that but, as if in compensation for his failure, his need to give voice to his monologues has grown as well.
He goes to the pay phone and picks up the receiver, but he suddenly becomes confused. He forgets completely that he doesn’t need to put any money into the box, or actually dial any number in order to have the conversation he plans to have. But for verisimilitude he drops a quarter into the slot and dials his own number.
The telephone rings five times and then it stops. The answering machine comes on.
“Hi, this is Saul Karoo. I can’t answer the phone right now, but if you leave a message I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.”
The recording he hears was made when he first moved to his new apartment on Riverside Drive. His former voice, at the time the recording was made, now sounds to his ears like the voice of some happy, innocent fool living happily in a fool’s paradise.
The innocence and optimism in that voice cause Saul on the pay phone to gasp in pain for the poor man who made the recording.
Although he doesn’t feel that he knows him well, or ever did, his heart now goes out to him for the reverses and losses he has suffered.
“Oh, Saul,” he says. He starts out softly, still lacking confidence as a phone freak, but his voice rises as he goes on.
“God, Saul, I just heard what happened! Is it true? Tell me it’s not true. It is. Really! Not both of them. Oh, no. Oh, dear God, not both of them, Saul. Not Leila and Billy as well. Both dead. No. How? Why? …”
Initially hesitant to give expression to his pain in public, Saul feels all hesitation fall away as he goes on.
“But they were both so young, so very young, and their whole lives were …”
It’s not that he’s so carried away by his performance as to become blind to the people, the spectators, the audience moving past him in both directions on the crowded Saturday-night sidewalk. Just the opposite.
He sees the people who see him. He sees them looking at him and he feels transformed into a living entity.
He feels something very elusive and very personal, very private, on the corner of Eighty-third and Broadway, something that had refused to materialize in the privacy of his own apartment.
As if privacy were now possible only in public, where it could both be brought into being and verified in the eyes of passing strangers.
“And you were there when all this happened? In the car. You were driving? Oh, Saul …”
He feels his heart breaking for the poor man and he starts to weep.
His weeping is restrained at first but then it gradually becomes unrestrained.
“What are you going to do now, Saul? I can’t imagine what in the world you will do with yourself. How will you live, knowing that both Leila and Billy are dead? How in God’s name will you live with yourself? I feel so sorry for you. So, very, very …”
He can’t speak anymore for the sobbing.
CHAPTER FOUR
INSPIRED, IF THAT’S not too strong a word, by his public conversation with himself, Saul returned the next day for an encore. Being a creature of habit, he made a habit out of it, and in the days to come he became an out-and-out public phone freak junkie.
A street person of sorts.
He used his apartment as a place where he could take showers and have his nightly insomnia, but other than that his life was lived in public.
Just as in the old days he used to get up in the morning, take a shower, and go to his office on West Fifty-seventh Street, he now got up, took a shower, and left his apartment at about the same time, to walk the streets of Manhattan and make imaginary calls from public phones.
Except that he now no longer paid or dialed. He just picked up the receiver and started talking.
He wandered down Broadway, down Eighth Avenue past Forty-second Street, all the way down to Penn Station, using pay phones along the way.
Sometimes he took cabs to La Guardia or the JFK airport and spent part of his day at various clusters of pay phones at these places, talking on the telephone, surrounded by travelers who were likewise engaged.
His conversations, if they can be called that, ranged far and wide. Some were local. Some long-distance. Some were with the living and some were with the dead. He still called himself from time to time, and then, as himself, he called others.
He always made sure, however, that there was somebody nearby who could not help overhearing what he was saying.
He called his dead father and tried to convince him that he had tried to love him while he was alive.
He called his mother in Chicago and apologized profusely for not having called her before.
“I’ve been going through hell, Mom, I really have. Have you heard? Do you know what happened? Billy died. My Billy is dead, Mom. I’m nobody’s father anymore and never will be again. I hurt, Mom. I hurt. I don’t know what to do with myself anymore. No, no, don’t worry. I’ll be fine. How are you? …”
He called Billy and Leila at least once a day, sometimes two or three times a day.
“Billy, It’s Dad. I was just wondering how you’re doing, son. No, nothing wrong, I was just calling to see …”
“Leila, it’s Saul. When are you coming back? I miss you. I miss you so much I can hardly …”
Sometimes he wept. Sometimes he told jokes. Sometimes he pleaded with both Leila and Billy to forgive him.
“Please, I beg you …”
“Nymph,” he cried out once in his call to Leila, “in your orisons be all my sins remembered.”
Over and over again, he insisted in his calls to both that he had loved them with all his heart.
And although he broke down and wept on the phone, making a spectacle of himself, something in his sentimental declarations of love failed to satisfy, so that he had to call again.
“I do, I do love you, I really do, why don’t you believe me?” he insisted, as if one of them or both of them were casting doubts on his assertions at the other end.
Whether he called Laurie Dohrn to seek her forgiveness or whether he called Arthur Houseman to seek his for ruining his film (“I loved your film. I adored it. It was a masterpiece”), almost all his public phone calls were designed to induce pain in him.
He welcomed guilt and pain and embraced them with open arms.
But it was only guilt and public pain that he embraced and the public remorse that went with them.
His public torment was pleasant in comparison to the torment that awaited him in the privacy of his apartment at night.
CHAPTER FIVE
ON THE NIGHT of the premiere of Prairie Schooner in Pittsburgh, Cromwell, having been informed about Leila’s death in a car accident, gave a little impromptu speech to the audience before the film be
gan.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he told them, “it is with profound regret that I inform you about the tragic death of the star of this film. None of you here know her name, not one of you has ever seen or heard of her before, but I assure you that after you have seen this one and only film of her tragically aborted career, you will never forget her. Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce you to … Leila Millar.”
The lights went down. The movie began. When Leila’s name appeared on the screen (AND INTRODUCING LEILA MILLAR), there was a smattering of applause.
It is impossible to know if Cromwell’s impromptu speech had the effect of predisposing the audience toward liking the film, or if the film itself was solely responsible for their ecstatic response. A standing ovation.
There was no TV coverage of the premiere, since there were no big stars in the movie, but a local TV station ran a story about Leila on its evening news the following evening.
Helen Landau, a coanchor of the evening news, went out to the site of the accident with a small crew and shot the following segment.
Mike in hand, Helen walked along the shoulder of highway 381.
“A dream of stardom ended here yesterday,” Helen said, looking right into the camera.
She talked about Leila not only playing a waitress in the movie but having been a waitress in real life. A working-class girl. She talked about this being her first film.
“And so,” Helen concluded, “on what was to have been the happiest day of her life, a young woman, perhaps meant for stardom, died on this seemingly peaceful spot along state highway 381. But who knows, though stars die, their light shines on for generations, as perhaps will the light of … Leila Millar.”
The segment ended with a publicity still of Leila’s face from the movie, smiling her smile.
And so, while Saul was lying in a coma in that hospital in Pittsburgh, Leila’s story began to grow.
According to Cromwell’s original schedule, there were to be two more sneak previews before the film was released, but the advance word generated by Leila’s death created a demand that necessitated adding more sneaks to the schedule.
Normally, a large ad was placed in the papers of the city where the preview was to play, but that was no longer needed. The story of Leila’s story, along with a large picture of her, appeared in the newspapers of each city that was added to the schedule. On the night of the preview, the crowds in each city showed up in turn-away numbers.
There was just something about Leila’s story, even before her so-called full story was known, that caused it to spread. Even those people who only saw a movie every two years or so wanted to see Leila’s movie when they heard about her and her story.
A working-class girl. A waitress. Plucked from anonymity, where most people spend their lives, to be the star of a movie. And then to die on the day of the movie’s premiere, so that she never even got to see herself on the screen. All this created a tragic poignancy that was hard to resist, and a marketing bonanza that even a marketing genius like Cromwell could not have created on his own.
What made him the genius that he was, evil or otherwise, was the way he took control of it.
Even before the extended sneak preview schedule was concluded, he was getting telephone calls from representatives of large movie theater chains, which caused him to reconsider the release pattern for the movie. It seemed possible now to postpone the opening date and instead of opening gradually, to open the film on the same day all around the country, as if he had a blockbuster hit on his hands and not a small art movie.
Having all those Leila stories in all those newspapers was fine for the time being, but his experience with stories of this kind, with stories of any kind, warned him that it could all lead to an oversaturation of the marketplace long before the film opened.
Therefore what he needed was a definitive Leila story waiting in the wings, one of those feature-length bio pieces written by a reputable journalist with impeccable credentials.
A Pulitzer Prize-winning writer currently unemployed because his newspaper had recently folded came to Cromwell’s attention.
The man was getting on in years and his chances of being picked up by another paper (because of his age and his politics) did not seem very good.
He had won the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the civil war in Angola, but that was a long time ago and the civil war was still going on.
Cromwell called him, explained the nature of the project, and offered the kind of money that precluded needing time to think it over.
A deal was struck. Verbal at first, on the telephone, and then a formal contract was signed.
In all fairness to Cromwell, he had no idea where the story of Leila would lead. All he knew about her was what everybody knew. If he knew anything else, it was that she and Saul had been having an affair.
And because he knew this, he placed that circumspect call to Saul to see if he objected to having Leila’s story made public. He wanted it to be on the record that he had Saul’s approval to proceed.
And Saul, having no idea what he was agreeing to, gave it.
The same principles of investigative journalism apply whether you’re writing about the civil war in Angola, insider trading on Wall Street, or the story of Leila Millar. If you’re a scrupulous journalist, which this journalist was, and if you have a nose for the story, which he had, you sniff out the heartbeat of the story and then you follow it wherever it goes.
In what was supposed to be a perfunctory interview with Leila’s mother in Charleston, South Carolina, one of those mother interviews you had to have for a piece of this kind, our Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist found, or had handed to him by the mother, the heartbeat of the story. The baby that Leila had when she was fourteen and that she gave up for adoption.
The rest was not necessarily easy, but neither was it as difficult as one might imagine.
People working for hospitals and for adoption lawyers tend to uphold the confidentiality they’re supposed to uphold so long as they remain employed. Once they leave their jobs or are fired, they are not quite so strict with themselves.
When Cromwell was informed where the story was headed, he made only one request and that was for the journalist to leave Saul alone.
“I don’t want you to bother him,” Cromwell told him over the telephone. “He has suffered enough.”
CHAPTER SIX
1
THE STORY, BEFORE it came out as a story, was preceded by rumors of its existence that spread from west to east via phone and fax lines. Then little excerpts from it appeared in various publications. And then the Story itself appeared in a well-known and highly reputable national magazine.
It was simply called “Leila,” subtitled “An American Tragedy.” Later it would be expanded and published as a book bearing the same name but a different subtitle: Leila: A Love Story. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the original story and of the book would eventually receive his second Pulitzer Prize, this time in the field of biography.
But for the time being, March 1991, it was still a magazine story called “Leila,” but it was about Saul and Billy as well, and their tragic love triangle.
The story had everything in it, as one critic put it, except murder.
2
When the magazine story came out, Saul decided to flee town. To flee from the phone calls he was getting. From the publicity the story was generating. From the celebrity status he was acquiring. But most of all to flee from the terrible temptation to become the simplified and sanitized and slightly glorified Saul Karoo the story said he was and the public took him to be. Even Dianah, who hadn’t spoken to him since Billy’s death, called him on the phone and was ready to forgive him after she read the story. He fled from her forgiveness as well.
3
He had no destination in mind, but he had a suitcase and a passport when he arrived at Kennedy Airport.
He stared at the names of cities, domestic and foreign, for which the airplanes
of airlines, domestic and foreign, were bound.
For hours, no destination presented itself to him and he hung around the airport, a vagrant in desperate need of a voyage to somewhere.
And then, a destination finally appeared to him. He would flee to the city where he was born (Chicago), to the house where he was raised, and to the woman (his mother) who had given birth to him.
4
The March he left in New York was not the March he encountered in Chicago. A late winter storm had blown in from the west and it took two hours by cab, through swirling snow, to get from O’Hare to Homerlee Avenue.
He recognized the neighborhood, the street, the house, but not his mother when she opened the door. Nor did she seem to recognize him. Not until he said, more as a question than a greeting, “Mother?”
“Saul?” she replied, in the same interrogative tone.
They stood there in the doorway, both bareheaded, she squinting up at him, he looking down at her. The falling, swirling snow fell on both of them in equal measure. The snow covered Saul’s thinning gray hair and his mother’s recently dyed and incredibly black hair.
As black, he thought to himself, as my black Remington typewriter in my office on West Fifty-seventh Street.
Finally, his mother moved back and aside, pulling the door, and Saul, changing the suitcase from one hand to the other, stepped inside.
5
The preliminary conversation between mother and son flowed rapidly. There was an eagerness on both sides to maintain the sounds of their voices for as long as possible without a pause. And so, in this preliminary conversation, a lot of ground got covered.
The weather was a real mess, they both agreed.
Terrible day for travel.
Did he know (he didn’t) that they had closed O’Hare Airport? She had just heard it on the radio before he arrived. His must have been one of the last flights allowed to land.
Since he never came to visit her (not since college) just to see her, but stopped by on his way to somewhere else, she asked where he was going.