Four
Bill was surprised when Julia became involved in American political life. When he thought about it later, it was with the sense that some strong element of fate or inevitability had played a part. It was as though it were something not so much decided, as pre-determined. She had shown little prior sign of interest in politics and no sign of political allegiance. She could have been responding to the charismatic pull of the man who asked for her help. Much of the country eventually did. But Bill thought it went deeper than that. Because her participation brought to the fore profound questions about who she was and what she had done. The beacon on the hill was bound to shed a little of its light on the darkness of her secret past.
During her first couple of years in the industry she had energy, it seemed, only for her career and for her daughter. She moved to a pleasant town in Orange County. She got Natasha into a good school and she employed a housekeeper. She worked meticulously as a script editor, first on a series of abortive projects for Tommy Sweeney. The Civil War picture was abandoned after the girl from Milan revealed herself five months pregnant by the auto-parts mogul financing the project and Audie Murphy got cold feet about playing a character in a costume drama who did not survive until the final credits. Bill thought this no great loss to commerce or to art. Events before the eventual cancellation of the picture provided Julia with a valuable apprenticeship, a working insight into the way that things functioned in the industry. Or, more often, didn’t.
She outgrew Sweeney pretty fast. He found his vocation in television, directing a cop series that made his fortune while ruining his health. She outgrew Sweeney because she possessed qualities that he did not. She didn’t strike Bill as particularly ruthless or ambitious. But she was disciplined and intelligent and given to a sort of patient, diplomatic tact when she dealt with the more infantile and egocentric film people she encountered. It didn’t hurt, either, that she was so attractive. She had this European style, this dark sophistication that seemed almost mysterious. She wore Chanel suits to work and smoked Gauloise and left the lingering scent of Joy perfume behind when she vacated a room. She guarded her privacy, protected her daughter and had no appetite for gossip.
Bill heard it whispered that Julia Smollen might be one of those gorgeous, ball-breaking dykes. The only evidence he heard supporting this theory was that she wore a man’s wristwatch. At first her looks and that unconscious quality of exoticism caused a certain amount of confusion. She would arrive for a meeting only to be told that she had missed the casting, or that auditions were taking place in a different part of the building or on a different day. But as she became more successful, she became respected and better known and the misassumptions about who she was grew rare. Bill took a sort of pride in her smooth progress to sought-after script consultant. He was very irritated with himself for feeling this. The pride felt almost paternal. His feelings for Julia Smollen were a complexity beyond his heart, let alone his mind. But since they were not in the slightest fatherly, he thought this flush of pride in her achievements might mean he was becoming middle-aged.
She retained what he thought of as some endearing eccentricities. Principal among these was her passion for cycling. He tried to interest her in equestrianism. Learning to ride was a rite of passage in the industry. All of the lead players had to ride at least competently because horses were ubiquitous in films. Outside of the westerns and the period dramas, in what passed in southern California for real life, ownership and mastery of a horse was a reflection of social status. So there were lots of riding schools in their part of the world. There was much faux Englishness about the riding culture, with hacking jackets and stables featuring fake Tudor beams. More than compensating for the pretensions, though, were the wildernesses of coast and country open to riders.
But Julia stuck stubbornly to her bike, with its lightweight frame forged from English steel in Coventry. And its two aluminium drink canisters mounted on the racing handlebars. And the horrendously ugly shoes she wore to pedal it. What was wrong with a western saddle and a pair of hand-stitched riding boots?
‘Riding is so much more elegant,’ Bill said.
‘I am riding when I ride my bike. You don’t need to feed a bicycle. You don’t have to pay to have somebody stable and groom it.’
Bill shook his head. ‘You can take the peasant out of Poland,’ he said.
‘If you finish that sentence out loud, Bill, I shall punch you with my Polish fist.’
She was a voracious reader of newspapers and periodicals and took an intellectual interest in what was going on in the country. But she was as likely to read about European matters as she was about the domestic dramas occurring in Washington or New York.
Or in the South.
In 1954, the Supreme Court ruled racially segregated schools illegal. The papers had been full of nothing but the bloody implications of this landmark decision when, a few weeks after it, Bill drove over to visit Julia at her home. It was a beautiful day in high summer. Her house had a painted wooden balcony on the first floor, facing south. She waved down to Bill, who went up. She poured him a glass of lemonade from an iced pitcher on a table under a gingham cloth. Sunlight bathed the balcony. Newspapers and magazines were spread across the table, loosely anchored at the centre by the weight of a glass ashtray. Natasha was on a school trip to Niagara Falls. A picture on a newspaper front page, distorted by the angular glass of the ashtray, showed a black man with a bloodied face trying to shield himself with a broken banner demanding his civil rights. Julia had sat back down after pouring Bill’s drink. There was a French newspaper across her lap. Bill sipped cold lemonade. He could smell newsprint warming and yellowing in the strength of the sun. Julia was relaxed in a floral summer dress and espadrilles. She rested her feet on the balcony rail. Her hair was scrunched up under a sun hat. She looked about as beautiful as he had ever seen her look.
He nodded at the French newspaper. ‘What are you reading about?’
‘About the tour.’
‘The what?’
‘The Tour de France. It’s a bicycle race.’
‘I know what it is.’
‘I’m rooting for Fausto Coppi,’ she said. ‘He’s so brave in his attacking in the mountains. But you need to be a pragmatist to win the tour. So Louisan Bobet will probably ride down the Champs Elysees in the yellow jersey. Again.’
Bill spoke quietly. ‘Go, Coppi,’ he said. He sipped lemonade.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ she said.
‘You do? It’s normally the other way around.’
‘It isn’t fiddling while Rome burns, Bill. It isn’t the same as saying, let them eat cake.’ She gestured at the paper weighted by the glass ashtray, at the cruel picture distorted across the table under it. ‘Events in Georgia and Mississippi will not be affected either way by my reading about a bike race.’
‘Do you even care what happens?’
Julia dropped her French newspaper and folded her hands across her lap. She squinted up at the sun. Bill thought that the question had made her furious. When she answered, her words were very deliberate. ‘I’ll tell you what I think, Bill, from the luxury of my balcony, on this lovely, unsullied day.’ She was momentarily silent.
‘I’m glad the Union won your American Civil War. I think it tragic for what followed that President Lincoln was killed. Slavery is an abomination and segregation its abominable consequence. But I bore a child to a man who helped his nation enslave mine.’ She smiled. ‘I’m too ashamed to tell my daughter who her father was. I am in no position to judge others. If I pontificate, it won’t be about the situation in the South. I’d prefer to discuss the injustices of a bicycle race.’
‘I’m sorry, Julia.’
‘No need to be.’
He was silent himself for a moment, stunned by the implications of what she had told him. ‘Will you never tell Natasha who her father was?’
‘I don’t know.’ She picked her newspaper up off the balcony floor and then put i
t down again without unfolding it. ‘I don’t know that I could forgive myself for burdening her with that. But if I don’t tell her, I break the promise I made to him in the moment before he closed his eyes and died.’
Bill didn’t say anything.
‘It’s what one terms a dilemma, Bill. And the older she gets, the more urgent a dilemma it becomes.’
‘He was the best man I ever met, Julia.’
She met his eyes. ‘I know. I know what kind of man he was. I loved him.’
Bill rose from his chair. He would drag his elephantine bulk and bottomless stupidity elsewhere. It was still early. He was confident there was plenty of further crass damage he could do on his Saturday stampede through Orange County.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, reaching for his hat.
‘Don’t leave, Bill,’ she said. ‘I need you to stay.’ She smiled again. ‘Now that you have depressed me so thoroughly I need to have you to stay and cheer me up.’
These were the years, also, of the McCarthy witch-hunt. Bill thought America generally more alarmed by atom bombs in Russia than by the supposed threat of communist sympathizers in Hollywood. He was surprised at the energy and spite of the accusations. He was distressed, too, at the livelihoods lost. The gloom and panic became endemic. He had friends who were frightened and depressed. He went on the march to Washington, on the HUAC protest bravely led by Humphrey Bogart. But then Bogart was forced into his humiliating climb-down, his capitulation, confronted by the threat of a wrecked career. Bill himself lost wealthy clients when they saw his picture in the papers and saw him on the newsreels in the press coverage of the march.
Everyone knew that McCarthy was just a crude opportunist on the make, that his list of supposed influential communist sympathizers was so much paranoid fiction. Bill thought of him as a snake-oil salesman in a suit behind a microphone. He was a tub-thumper. A rabble-rouser. He was all that was least defensible about democracy. He was a dismal paradox of a man; exploiting what he condemned, denying those he accused of the very right to the free speech he said they threatened. He was also the subject of the first political argument between Natasha and Julia that Bill ever witnessed.
They were camping in Colorado, the three of them. Bill had gone to gather kindling and wood for their fire. There were wolves in the mountains that year in packs and he had decided as a precaution to build the fire to last right through until dawn. He had cut the dead wood to lengths with an axe where it had lain and then gathered it in his arms and carried it back. He walked lightly because that was the best way to carry a heavy load. If you had the strength, it was. Bill did. He had probably eighty pounds of wood aboard. They didn’t hear him approach. Good job I’m not a wolf, he thought. He bent down and put the wood on the ground and still they didn’t hear him. Their voices were low and urgent and emphatic and, of all things, they were talking about Joe McCarthy. They were on the other side of their tent from him. Their shapes were bathed in the diffuse glow of a lantern through the canvas. They were sitting so close together, mother and daughter, that he could not tell where one figure ended and the other began. He could not even tell which of them was which. He felt guilty about eavesdropping, so he started to build the fire, methodically, to tactfully alert them to his return. Their response to this was to raise their voices. Natasha sounded excited. Her mother enunciated what she said with a sort of cold disdain. And Bill was party to every word the two of them exchanged.
Natasha said, ‘I don’t think rich people, people like us, can imagine what it is like to be really poor. Poor people don’t have any hope. It’s why they turn to communism, isn’t it?’
Julia spoke carefully. ‘I’ve had experience of both wealth and poverty,’ she said. ‘I’ve seen both extremes.’
‘But you always had hope,’ Natasha said. ‘You were never in a hopeless situation.’
Julia said, ‘When you live without freedom, hope becomes very difficult to sustain.’
‘Everything is personal with you,’ Natasha said. ‘I’m talking about people here, in America, so downtrodden—’
‘America? I’ve seen worse.’
‘Two wrongs don’t make a right, Mother. America wouldn’t be the worst place to start.’
‘You could start at that school I pay for you to attend,’ Julia said. ‘There must be kids devastated they didn’t get to Europe on vacation this year. Don’t their parents know equality is a fundamental human right?’
If this were a prizefight, you’d be begging the referee to step between them and stop it, Bill thought. If it were a dogfight, you’d have to have a veterinarian put Natasha down. He took a match and struck it and watched flames curl around dry kindling.
‘McCarthy is a dangerous and disgusting person,’ the girl said.
‘Disgusting, certainly,’ her mother said. ‘But a danger to whom, precisely?’
‘Those people he’s persecuting.’
‘Persecution is ten thousand Polish soldiers taken into the Katyn Forest at the point of Russian guns and murdered on Stalin’s orders,’ Julia said.
There was a silence. Bill thought Natasha might be crying. ‘It’s impossible to talk to you about anything,’ she said. Go, Coppi, he thought. He rose and one of his knees cracked as he went to intervene.
Natasha had this particular way of introducing some outrageous claim. She owed it to one of her teachers at the school she attended. The school always referred to itself as an academy and its recruitment policy was a reflection of its pretensions. The staff was unconventional. The standard of scholarship and rate of exam success were high, but the teachers tended to be egocentric and flamboyant types. Natasha’s English literature professor was a Boston Irishman who had shown great promise as a juvenile poet. The consensus among publishers since then was that his youthful muse had departed abruptly carrying all her bags, since which point she’d never sent so much as a postcard home. His opinion was that he was the victim of a nationwide literary conspiracy. But he thought it had spread from the South, where his third collection earned its first poisonous review in an Atlanta literary journal.
‘There are towns in the southern states of North America,’ he would begin, ‘where the residents are known to eat their own young.’ Or, ‘There are towns in the southern states of this august nation, which have banned shoes with elasticated gussets on the grounds that they provoke sexual desire.’
Bill was driving the three of them back from Colorado, the route vast and panoramic on the way towards Los Angeles across the Utah badlands. It was three days since the argument he had heard and the chill between the woman and the girl had not lessened by a single discernible degree. Bill had Hank Williams playing on the car radio. When Hank had come on, he had turned the volume up. He thought Hank’s weary vocals went well with the endless landscape and if the mood of his songs was melancholy, that was quite all right with Bill, who was melancholy more often than he should have been himself. Then Natasha giggled from the back seat.
‘There are towns in the southern states of North America,’ she said, ‘where my mother would be welcomed as a bleeding-heart liberal.’
There was a silence in the car. Bill did not turn to look at Julia’s expression. Hank yodelled on the radio and twanged at his guitar. Bill cleared his throat. ‘There are towns in the southern states of this august nation,’ he said, ‘where your mother would be welcome.’
He actually heard the pause as they waited for him to continue. Then they knew he wasn’t going to. They both laughed, amused and then relieved, he thought, their laughter in the thaw between them much more generous than the joke deserved. He relaxed at the wheel. It was more than a decade, now, since his flight with Julia Smollen in the big Ford from Mexico. He thought of the grief and the thirst, the enormous, raging sensations that had governed him then; Julia a still, spectral presence with her hands over her belly, the veins blue in their backs through her translucent skin, the nails bitten and gnawed, the tyres slewing under them and the engine roaring as they fled Mex
ico over terrible roads. What did he feel for that time? Was it fondness? A sort of nostalgia? He smiled to himself. He had lost his best friend and gained a hopeless affliction. That’s what it was, wasn’t it? He loved Julia Smollen with all his heart and it was an affliction he had not the strength or the courage to fight.
A few miles on at dusk they found a lonely diner wrapped in blue neon and extruded aluminium and they stopped there for something to eat. Julia went to use the rest room and when she had gone Natasha put her arms around his neck and kissed him on the cheek and said, ‘You’re the best, Bill. You are. You’re the best.’
And he smiled at the compliment and thought of what he wouldn’t pay, at that moment, for a good, straight shot of honest southern bourbon.
Later, at the wheel and bolstered not by booze but by two cups of thick black coffee, he confronted Julia about the row. Natasha slept heavily under a picnic rug across the back seat of the car. He thought the feuding had worn her out.
‘Julia?’
‘Bill.’
‘I know from recent, painful experience that I should confine my political observations to the Tour de France.’
‘But you’re not going to, are you?’
‘You were right, of course. Coppi was valiant in the mountains. But Bobet won the race.’
She sighed. ‘Sometimes being right is not at all the point.’ She wound down the window and lit one of her French cigarettes.
‘You need to go easier on the kid, Julia. She’s only eleven years old, for Christ’s sakes.’
The road unwound in front of them. It was yellow in the pool of their headlights and then it was nothing at all. Julia smoked and picked tobacco from her teeth with a fingernail. Her hands were beautiful now, the nails neat, lacquered ovals pearly in the light from the dashboard instruments. ‘I was a radical myself, once. I was almost hanged for my defiance, made an example of, confined in a camp.’
A Shadow on the Sun Page 8