Dreams Are Not Enough (61 page)

“Hey …” he whispered.

“Hey, hey.”

A greeting they had invariably exchanged when they passed in grammar school hallways, and had never used thereafter.

Hap limped forward.

Maxim took a step. As Hap’s arms went around him, he hugged his brother, experiencing a tribal completion, a profound sense of being part of a larger whole. He felt the moisture on Hap’s bearded cheek and his own eyes were wet, too.

“Daddy,” the boy was shrilling.

“Daddy} Is this my uncle?”

The threesome on the patio had stood poised like waxwork figures, peering into the living room at the masculine embrace. At the child’s question, they came to life.

Beth, lifting a hand to her pulsing throat, sank back into her chair.

The ladylike blusher stood out in slashes on her bloodless cheeks.

Barry released his grip on his pipe, and it clattered on the stones as he pressed a hand to his stomach. His shock was visceral, striking him with an ulcer like pain. How could the admired and envied cousin who had put the horns on him have returned to the land of the living? PD crossed himself, and a croak that was meant to be “Hap?” came from within his well-muscled chest. Then he crossed himself again.

The brothers pulled apart, Hap rubbing his knuckles over his eyes, Maxim blowing his nose.

“Hap, we thought you were dead….” Beth whispered, still grasping at her throat.

“Everybody thought” — “I didn’t mean to blow your minds like this,” Hap said.

“But we couldn’t figure out any easier way” — “Daddy!” The child stamped a sneakered foot.

“Yes, Ross, this is your Uncle Maxim. Maxim, this impatient guy is our son, Ross.” He ruffled the boy’s hair affectionately. The child squirmed away, scowling. In this irate moment, in spite of his near white hair and blue eyes, he bore a striking resemblance to his dead grandfather, Desmond Cordiner.

“I’m very happy to meet you, Ross.” Maxim, still pale, squatted and gravely extended his hand.

“But you’re going to have to help me out. I never had a nephew before, so tell me what I should do.”

“You take him to Disneyland, silly!”

The adults burst out laughing, not so much in amusement but as a release.

Hap reached an arm around Alice’s waist, drawing her closer.

“And this is my wife,” he said.

“That at least I did figure.” Maxim embraced her.

“Welcome to the good branch of the family.”

Hap’s cousins had surrounded him; Beth’s kisses leaving pink lipstick on his jawline PD pounding his shoulders, then kissing him, too; Barry continously shaking his hand.

Voices throbbed.

“I can’t believe it, I just can’t believe it. If only poor Aunt Rosalynd and Uncle Desmond—and Irving—could be here.”

“We’re talking miracles, Hap. Major miracles!”

“Words fail me—a phantasm agora come to life.”

A thick white cloud had passed over the sun, graying the unpruned garden and casting a film over the heart-shaped pool.

“Come on, Ross, let’s go inside,” Alice said, giving her son a poke between the shoulder blades.

A;

“He hasn’t had his snack yet, Alice,” Hap called. As the door slid shut after them, Barry asked, “Do you have to use pseudonyms?”

“We did,” Hap said.

“But Alice is her real name.”

“Alicia,” Barry muttered.

“Barry, it’s always been Alice,” he said.

“And Juanita’s her half sister.”

“Juanita has the same surname, but there the relationship ends-she came to work for us in France,” Barry protested. Then, under Hap’s sympathetic gaze, he flushed and mumbled, “Alyssia—Alice never told me.”

Maxim drew a breath as if forcing himself to speak.

“Hap, stop me if I’m wrong, but is the timing of your return connected to a recent ball score: cancer one, Lang zip?”

Beth, Barry and PD swallowed sharply, averting their eyes from Hap and one another. Like Maxim, each was once again reliving that quintessential betrayal scene when Lang had terrified them into ignoring Hap’s murder.

Hap sat on one of the rusty garden chairs, his bad leg thrust out straight in front of him.

“Exactly,” he said, ignoring the change in mood.

“Lang’s death is why we were able to come back here.” Briefly he outlined his knowledge of Lang’s complicity in the socalled accident, how the other man was killed in the jeep and been buried as Hap Cordiner while he had become Adam Stevens. He touched his leg.

“While this was being patched up in Switzerland, Alice found me.”

“And the two of you have been hiding out in Europe?” Beth asked, her voice caring and serene, her hands tensed on her purse.

“No, we came back before Ross was born. We live in North Carolina.

Part of the house is a kind of school we run for farm workers. With all the moving from crop to crop, they don’t get much of a crack at an education. “

“Perfecto.” Maxim’s smile had a plastic quality.

“You, in your long robe, arms outstretched, suffering the little children to come unto you.”

PD jumped to his feet.

“Screw off. Maxim!”

“That was brotherly awe,” Maxim said.

“I never speak ill of the dead.”

“It’s a remarkable concept,” Barry said over politely as he stooped to get his pipe.

“How did you arrive at it?”

“Actually Juanita had the idea—she’s running the place while we’re gone. She and Alice didn’t get much schooling—as kids they picked up and down California.”

Barry, about to refute this with the Lopezes’ rich family life in El

Paso, changed his mind.

“When you came back to this country, weren’t you concerned Lang might find you? I know only too well you can’t hide an identity like Alyss—like Alice’s.”

“She admits to being a look-alike,” Hap said.

The glass slid open and Alice stood there. She had washed off the Alyssia del Mar makeup, tied back her hair, changed to a white jumpsuit with running shoes, and it was possible to see that, away from the precincts of the rich and famous, she might easily pass as a look-alike.

She glanced at Hap and he nodded.

“If you can,” she said, smiling, “we’d like all of you to stay for lunch.”

Beth said, “This is one meal I wouldn’t miss for worlds.” But her face was yet more drawn with apprehension.

The phones in the house hadn’t been connected, so she went with PD and Barry to take her turn at the one in PD’s Rolls as they canceled appointments and lunch dates.

Maxim stayed on the patio, one bony leg over the other, the foot jiggling nervously.

“Why did you really come back?” he asked.

“Two reasons. Alice wants to sell the house. I wanted to see you-and the others.”

“You’re obviously aware that we knew your, uhh, death was no accident, but Lang threatened us out of an investigation.”

“Yes, Alice told me. So you and the others can stop walking on eggs as if I’m about to detonate.”

“And you haven’t voiced a single recrimination? You really are cut out to wear the long robes.”

“Believe me. Maxim, I was plenty bitter at first. As a matter of fact, it took me nearly a year before I could think about you or the others without hot, murderous urges.” He shrugged.

“Today it’s just good being here with you guys.”

“I’d have liked to see Lang get his, Hap. Believe me, I’d have loved to see him rot in jail for several concurrent lifetimes. But I was chicken … chicken.” The cloud had passed, and the remorseless December light carved hollows into Maxim’s angular face.

“Don’t you think I have my own guilts. Maxim? God, how I wanted to come back for Dad’s funeral—and Mother’s, too.”

“She at least went in her sleep.”

Hap held his fingers on his forehead, using his hand to shield his expression of misery.

After a minute’s silence. Maxim said, “So you finally snagged Alyssia—Alice.” Then he sighed deeply.

“Another black mark against me. I wasn’t invariably the soul of kindness to her. She knew too much for me to be kind. Did she tell you about … me?”

“Yes,” Hap said, leaning forward to grip his brother’s thin arm at the elbow.

“Maxim, it doesn’t mean a damn to me and never would have—except I’m sorry you went to such lengths to hide.”

The plump black cook, who had been hired from an agency for the day, was busy preparing the meal, so Alice asked Beth to help her set the table. As they took pottery from the butler’s pantry shelves, Alice asked, “How’s Jonathon?”

Beth’s hands trembled, and fearing the brightly glazed cups would fall, she clasped them against her gray silk blouse. This was the moment that she had dreaded and steeled herself against.

“He’s in school,” she said coldly.

“And if you’ve come back here to take him away from me, you might as well know that I’ll spend every penny Irving left me to keep him.”

“Beth, when I signed that paper giving him to you, I wanted to die.

But I felt it was the right decision. I still feel that way. “

Beth darted a suspicious glance at her former sisterin-law.

Alice pushed open the swinging door to the dining room.

“Do you really think I want to destroy his life?” she asked quietly.

“I’m interested in what he’s doing, Bethie, that’s all.”

Beth set the cups on the built-in sideboard.

“I didn’t mean to snap at you. But ever since I got your letter this morning, I’ve been afraid, so afraid.”

“There was no need. You’re his mother.” Alice was smiling, but small lines of sadness were visible below the blue eyes.

As they ate the creamy chicken salad and raspberry tarts, Our Own Gang found themselves reminiscing about their childhood in the socalled golden age of Hollywood: parties with Judy Garland, Bogey and Baby, Edward G. Robinson, Harry James playing his horn; they recollected the eternal studio intrigues that had seemed life and death at the time but now were quaintly humorous; they mythologized their own group mischief. Ross, thoroughly bored, disappeared to watch television in Barry’s old study. The adults lingered over their coffee, prefacing each remark, “Do you remember… ?” The laughter was no longer forced, the courtesy toward Hap had given way to goodnatured digs.

By four thirty, when the guests rose to leave, the long family rift was well on its way to being healed.

“I haven’t had a better time in forever,” Beth said emotionally.

“Let’s all have dinner at my house tomorrow.”

There was a chorus of acceptances.

“Alice, you and Hap must bring Ross,” Beth said, smiling euphorically.

“I do so want him to meet his cousin Jonathon.”

Hap saw his family to their cars. The group stood talking and laughing for another fifteen minutes before they were able to break apart until the following evening, hugging one another goodbye with a warmth utterly different from the constraint of a few hours earlier. Hap stood waving on the front step as one by one the cars disappeared down the steep, curving driveway.

Alice hadn’t come out. The falsetto voices assigned to cartoon characters came from the study, but she didn’t go in with Ross.

Instead, she sat on the couch, watching the dusk fall over the canyon walls.

Hap returned, sitting in the gloom near her.

“It is okay with you, Beth’s dinner tomorrow? You won’t be too upset, seeing JonathonI’ll be plenty shook. But on the other hand, it’d be worse not seeing him.”

“At lunch you kept looking around at us.”

“I was thinking about the wedding lunch at the Fabulador. You people glittered like gods.”

He smiled.

“Aren’t you over romanticizing

“Not a shred. There’s no other way to describe how glamorous you were to me. Maxim, and your father was head of Magnum, PD’s a famous director, Barry and Beth were hotshot college students. I felt like dirt in my good red dress.”

He smiled.

“That dress. God, love, that dress!”

“I’d never owned anything so beautiful. But somehow I knew it was all wrong to wear with divinities. Hap, all the years I was married to Barry I never once got over the feeling I was in the family on probation.”

“Even after you’d made it big?”

“Not until today did I feel like a genuine Cordiner.”

“You glittered more than any of us.” He reached out for her hand and their fingers twined.

“Now that Lang’s gone, if you want you can be Alyssia del Mar again.”

“The wench is dead.” Alice paused, adding pensively, “But I’m not saying I never miss her.”

“At odd moments I regret the passing of the old Harvard Cordiner, hotshot director, too.” He fumbled toward the lightswitch behind him.

As the lights came on they blinked, then smiled contentedly at each other. They were both thinking about the day after tomorrow, when they would return to their shared life, leaving behind everything of the past except the intangibles—family affection, memories, old dreams.