Beggarman, Thief (43 page)

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t like the way your breath smells when you drink gin.”

“There’s no need to worry tonight, dear,” Frances said coldly. “I’m due for an early call with the hairdresser tomorrow and I’m not up to any gymnastics tonight.”

Wesley sat in glum silence until the waiter brought the drinks.

“Anyway, even if you’re so horrendously critical of a few little harmless, girlish tricks,” Frances said, sipping at her gin and tonic, “there are others who find them entrancing. That cute Mr. Jordache, with all that money, for example. His eyes light up like a billboard sign whenever he sees me.”

“I hadn’t noticed,” Wesley said, honestly shocked that anyone could call his uncle that cute Mr. Jordache.

“I have,” Frances said firmly. “I bet he’d be something. That icy Yankee exterior with a volcano underneath. I know the type.”

“He’s old enough to be your father, for God’s sake.”

“Not unless he started awfully young,” Frances said. “And I bet he did.”

Wesley stood up. “I’m not going to sit here and listen to crap like that. I’m going home. See how you get on with that cute Mr. Jordache with all that money.”

“Dear, dear,” Frances said, without moving, “aren’t we the touchy young man this evening.”

“Good night,” Wesley said.

“Good night,” Frances said calmly. “Don’t bother with the check.”

Wesley strode past the booth where his uncle was sitting. Neither of the two men looked up as he passed. He went out into the street, feeling childish, hurt and foolishly emotional.

Five minutes later Frances got up and walked toward the door. She stopped and spoke for a moment to the two men, but they didn’t ask her to join them. When she went back to the hotel she didn’t go down the corridor and open Wesley’s door as she did on all other nights, but continued on to her own room and stared at herself in the mirror over the dressing table for a long time.

Back in the bar, the two men were not talking about making movies. Donnelly was an architect who had drifted into scene designing when he discovered that he was offered only unprofitable commissions for mediocre small buildings which he considered beneath his talent. In the course of the preparations for
Restoration Comedy
he and Rudolph had become friendly, and at first timidly, then more enthusiastically, he had spoken about an ambitious project that he was involved in but so far had not been able to get financing for. Now he was giving Rudolph the details. “We live in the age of what the British call redundancy,” he was saying, “not only because of new machines or shifts in population, but redundancy because of age. Men retire from business because they’re bored and can afford it, or because they can’t stand the strain or because younger men are called in to fill their jobs. Their children have grown up and moved away. Their houses are suddenly too big for them, the city in which they live frightens them or has exhausted its attraction for them. Their pensions or savings don’t permit them to keep the servants they once had, the neighborhoods where they can afford to find small apartments are crowded with young couples with small children who treat them as invaders from another century, they are separated from friends of their own age who have similar problems but have looked for other solutions in other places—They want to keep their independence but they’re frightened of loneliness. What they need is a new habitat, a new atmosphere that fits their condition—where they’re surrounded by people approximately their own age, with approximately the same problems and needs, people who can be depended upon in an emergency, just as it gives them a sense of their own humanity to know that they’re ready to come to a neighbor’s aid when
he
needs help.” Donnelly spoke with great urgency, as though he were a general, outlining plans for the relief of a besieged garrison. “It has to be a real community,” he continued, gesturing eloquently with his large hands, as if already he was molding brick, mortar and cement into livable, populated shapes, “shops, movies, a small hotel where they can entertain visitors, a golf course, swimming pools, tennis courts, lecture rooms.… I’m not talking about the poor. I don’t know how they can be taken care of except by the state and I’m not vain enough to think I can rearrange American society. I’m talking about the middle-income group, the ones whose way of life is most drastically affected when the breadwinner stops working.” His voice dropped to bitterness. “I know all about this in the case of my own mother and father. They have a little money and I help some, myself, but from being a hearty, outgoing couple, they’re now a depressed, fretful pair of people, fiddling the last years of their lives away in useless boredom. My idea isn’t so new. It’s been tried and found successful all over the country, but so far I haven’t been able to get any money men interested in it, because there isn’t much profit to be made, if any. What it needs to begin with is to buy a huge piece of land in some pleasant country spot—not too isolated—so that when people want a little city life it’s easily available to them—and build a small, but complete village of modest, well-designed, but cheaply built attached homes, say in groups of four or five, scattered in a parklike landscape, houses that can be handled easily by two aging people. With bus service, doctors and nurses on hand, a congenial but unobtrusive management. It wouldn’t be an old folks’ home, with all the despair that entails—there’d be a constant flow of young people—sons and daughters and grandchildren, hopeful and lively, a view on the future. Your sister has told me that you’re a public-spirited man and that you have access to money and you’re looking for something to occupy your time. From what I’ve seen so far, I don’t think getting mixed up in movies is exactly your idea of public service.…”

Rudolph laughed. “No,” he said, “not exactly.”

“She also said that you’re a born builder,” Donnelly went on, “that when you were young you bulled through the idea of a shopping center in what was then practically a wilderness and made almost a whole small town of it. I went out to look at it the other day, the Calderwood complex near here, and I was deeply impressed—it was way ahead of its time and it showed real imagination—”

“When I was young,” Rudolph said reflectively. He hadn’t shown anything of what he thought as he listened to Donnelly’s speech, but he felt an excitement that was both new and old to him as Donnelly spoke. He had been waiting for something, he hadn’t known what. Perhaps this was what he was waiting for.

“I’ve got whole sets of drawings,” Donnelly said, “models of the sort of houses I want to put up, schedules of approximate costs … everything.…”

“I’d like to take a look at them,” Rudolph said.

“Can you be in New York tomorrow?”

“No reason why not.”

“Good. I’ll show them to you.”

“Of course,” Rudolph said, “the whole thing would depend on just what piece of land you could get, what its suitability was, what the cost would be—all that.”

Donnelly looked around him at the empty bar, as though searching out spies. “I’ve even picked out the spot,” he said, lowering his voice. “It’s a beauty. It’s abandoned, overgrown farmland now and cheap. It’s in Connecticut, rolling hill country, and it’s no more than an hour from New Haven, maybe two from New York. It’s made for something like this.”

“Could you show it to me?”

Donnelly glared at him, as though suddenly suspecting him of some dark purpose. “Are you
really
interested?”

“I’m really interested.”

“Good,” Donnelly said. “You know something—” His voice was solemn now. “I think it was fate that made me say yes to your sister when she asked me to work on this movie. I’ll drive you out there and you can see for yourself.”

Rudolph left a bill on the table to pay for the drinks. “It’s getting late,” he said as he stood up. “Shall we go back to the hotel?”

“If you don’t mind,” Donnelly said, “I’d rather stay here and get drunk.”

“Take two aspirin before going to bed,” Rudolph said. Donnelly was ordering another whiskey as he went out of the bar, offering a libation to fate, which had brought him and Rudolph Jordache together.

Rudolph walked slowly, alone, down the familiar streets. They had aged since he had pedaled along them, delivering rolls for the family bakery at dawn every morning, but he had the incongruous feeling this night that he was a young man again, with grandiose plans in his head, achievement in his future. Once again, as he had felt on the gravelly strand in Nice, he was tempted to sprint in the darkness, renewing the elation of his youth when he was the best 220 high hurdler in the high school. He even took a few tentative, loping steps, but saw a car’s headlights approaching and relapsed into his usual dignified walk.

He passed the big building which housed the Calderwood Department Store and looked into the windows and remembered the nights he had put in arranging the displays. If his fortune had started at any one place, it had started there. The windows were shabby now, he thought, an old lady putting makeup carelessly on her face, the lipstick awry, the eye shadow sloppy, the simulation of youth weary and unconvincing. Old man Calderwood would have bellowed. A dead man’s life’s work. Useful? Useless?

He remembered, too, marching, playing the trumpet at the head of a column of students on the evening of the day the war had ended, the future a triumphant panorama ahead of him. Yesterday, he had read in the town newspaper, there had been another parade of students, this time to protest the war in Vietnam, the youths chanting obscene slogans, defacing the flag, taunting the police. Eleven students had wound up in jail. Truman then, Nixon now. Decay. He sighed. Better not to remember anything.

When he had suggested to Gretchen that Port Philip would be a good place to shoot her movie—a neglected town, withdrawn from its prosperous and honorable past on the banks of the great river—he had resolved not to have anything to do with the actual machinery of the production or even visit the town. But problems had arisen and Gretchen had called for help and he had reluctantly made the trip, talked to the officials, fearing that they would recall his downfall when the students had turned against
him
and driven him away.

How beautiful Jean had been in those days.

But the officials had been respectful, eager to accommodate him. Scandals passed. New men arrived. Memories faded.

Donnelly reminded him of himself when he was young—passionate, hopeful, driving, self-centered, sure of his purposes. He wondered what Donnelly would feel ten years from now, many accomplishments behind him, the streets of his native town, wherever it was, changed, everything changed. He liked Donnelly. He knew Gretchen liked him, too. He wondered if there was anything between them. He wondered, too, if Donnelly’s idea was practical, workable. Was Donnelly too young, too ambitious? He cautioned himself to move slowly, check everything, as he thought he himself had checked everything when he was that age.

He would talk it over with Helen Morison. She was a hardheaded woman. She could be depended on. But she was in Washington now. She had been offered a job there on the staff of a congressman whom she admired and she had moved on. He would have to catch up with her somehow.

He thought of Jeanne. There had been a few letters, with less and less to say in each succeeding one, the emotion of the week on the Côte fading. Perhaps when Wesley finally went to France, he would take it as an excuse to visit her. The lawyer in Antibes had finally written that it had been arranged that Wesley could come back, but he hadn’t told Wesley that. He was waiting until the movie was finished. He didn’t want Wesley suddenly to take it into his head to quit the picture and fly across the ocean. Wesley was not a flighty boy, but he was driven, driven by his own ghosts, unpredictable.

He himself had been driven by the ghost of his own father, despairing, a failure, a suicide, drunk on poverty and destroyed hopes, so he could half understand his nephew. Weird, that that subterranean, hidden boy could turn out to be such a touching actor.

There had never been anybody with that kind of talent in the family before, although Gretchen had been briefly on the stage, without success. You never could tell where it comes from, Gretchen had told him after a session in the projection room in which they had watched and marveled at what the boy could do. And it wasn’t only that particular talent. It was every kind of talent. In America especially, no maps to tell where anybody had set out from or what ports they would sail to. No dependable genealogical trees anywhere.

He went into the sleeping hotel and up to his room and undressed and got into the cold bed. He found it difficult to sleep, thought of the pretty, coquettish girl in the bar, her jeans tight across her hips, her professionally inviting smile. What would it be like, he wondered, that perfect young body, open to invitation? Ask my nephew, he thought enviously, he’s probably in bed with her now. A different generation. He had been a virgin, himself, at Wesley’s age. He was ashamed of his envy, although he was sure the boy would suffer later. Was suffering now—he’d left the bar alone. Not used to the tricks. Well, neither was he. You suffered according to your capacity to suffer and there was something about the boy that made you feel his capacity was dangerously great.

He hovered between sleeping and waking, missing the body in the bed beside him. Whose body? Jean’s, Helen’s, Jeanne’s, someone he had never met but who would finally lie beside him? He had not found any answer by the time he fell into a deep slumber.

He was awakened by the sound of drunken singing in the street. He recognized Donnelly’s voice, harsh and tuneless, singing “Boola, Boola.” Donnelly had gone to Yale. Not a typical graduate, Rudolph thought dreamily. The singing stopped. He turned over and went back to sleep.

«  »

In her room, Gretchen was alone, going over the setups she wanted for the next day’s shooting. When she was on the set she made herself seem calm and certain of herself, even at times she wanted to scream in anger or anguish. But when she was alone like this, working by herself, she could sometimes feel her hands shaking in fear and indecision. So many people depended on her and every decision was so final. She had seen the same division of conduct in Colin Burke when he was directing a movie or a play and had wondered how he could manage it. Now she wondered how any human being could survive a whole month at a time, or longer, being cut in half like that. Private faces in public places, in Auden’s phrase, had no part in the business of making movies.