Rich Man, Poor Man (69 page)

‘Yeah,’ Billy said. ‘I really like it’

‘It was Rudolph’s favourite dessert, too. Wasn’t it, Rudolph?’

‘Uhuh,’ he said. He didn’t remember ever getting it more than once a year and he certainly didn’t remember ever remarking on it, but this was not the night to halt the flights of his mother’s fancy. She had even refrained from putting on rouge, the better to play the role of grandmother and she deserved some marks for that, too.

‘Billy,’ Rudolph said,’ I spoke to your mother.’

Billy looked at him gravely, fearing a blow. What did she say?’

‘She’s waiting for you; I’m going to put you on a plane Tuesday or Wednesday. As soon as I can break away from the office here and take you down to New York.’

The boy’s lips trembled, but mere was no fear he was going to cry. ‘How did she sound?’ he asked.

‘Delighted that you’re coming out,’ Rudolph said.

That poor girl,’ his mother said. The life she’s led. The blows of fortune.’

Rudolph didn’t allow himself to look at her,

Though if s a shame, Billy,’ she continued, that now that we’ve found each other you can’t spend a little time with your old grandmother. Still, now that the ice has been broken, perhaps I can come out and visit you. Wouldn’t that be a nice idea, Rudolph?’

‘Very nice.’

‘California,’ she said. I’ve always wanted to see it. The climate is kind to old bones. And from what I hear, it’s a virtual paradise. Before I die … Martha, I think Billy is ready for the chocolate pudding.’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ Martha said, rising from the table.

‘Rudolph,’ the mother said, ‘don’t you want a bite? Join the happy family circle?’

‘No, thanks.’ The last thing he wanted was to join the happy family circle. ‘I’m not hungry.’

‘Well, I’m off to bed,’ she said. She stood up heavily. ‘Must get my beauty sleep at my age, you know. But before you go upstairs to sleep you’ll come in and give your grandmother a great big good night kiss, won’t you, Billy?’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ Billy said.

‘Grandma.’

‘Grandma,’ Billy said obediently.

She swept out of the room. One last triumphant glare at Rudolph. Lady Macbeth, the blood behind her, undetected, now splendidly running a nursery for precocious children in a warmer country than Scotland.

Mothers should not be exposed, Rudolph thought, as he said, ‘Good night, Mom, sleep well.’ They should be shot out of hand.

He left the house, ate dinner at a restaurant, tried to call Jean in New York to find out what night she could see him, Tuesday or Wednesday. There was no answer at her apartment

Draw the curtains at sunset. Do not sit in the evenings and look out at the lights of the city spread below you. Colin did so, with you at his side, because he said it was the view he liked most in the world, America was at its best at night.

Do not wear black. Mourning is a private matter.

Do not write emotional letters in answer to letters of condolence from friends or from strangers using words like genius or unforgettable or generous or strength of character. Answer promptly and politely. No more.

Do not weep in front of your son.

Do not accept invitations to dinner from friends or colleagues of Colin who do not wish you to suffer alone.

When a problem comes up do not reach for the phone to call Colin’s office. The office is closed.

Resist the temptation to tell the people who are now in charge of finishing Colin’s last picture how Colin wanted it to be done.

Give no interviews, write no articles. Do not be a source of anecdote. Do not be a great man’s widow. Do not speculate on what he would have done had he lived.

Commemorate no birthdays or anniversaries.

Discourage retrospective showings, festivals, laudatory meetings to which you have been invited.

Attend no previews or opening nights

When planes fly low overhead, leaving the airport, do not remember voyages you have taken together.

Do not drink alone or in company, whatever the temptation. Avoid sleeping pills. Bear in unassuaged silence

Clear the desk in the living room of its pile of books and scripts. They are now a He,

Refuse, politely, the folios of clippings, reviews of plays and films your husband has directed, which the studio has kindly had made up in tooled-leather covers. Do not read the eulogies of critics.

Leave only one hasty snapshot of husband on view in house. Pack all other photographs in a box and put them away in the cellar.

Do not, when thinking about preparing dinner, arrange a menu that would please husband. (Stone crabs, chili, piccata of veal pizzaiola.)

When dressing, do not look at the clothes hanging in the closet and say, ‘He likes me in that one.’

Be calm and ordinary with your son. Do not over-react when he gets into trouble at school, when he is robbed by a group of hoodlums or comes home with a bloody nose. Do not cling to him or allow him to cling to you. When he is invited with friends to go swimming or to a ball game or to a movie, tell him, ‘Of course. I have an awful lot of things to do about the house and I’ll get mem done faster if I’m alone.’

Do not be a father. The things your son must do with men let him do with men. Do not try to entertain him, because you fear it must be dull for him living alone with a grieving woman on top of a hill far away from the centres where boys amuse themselves.

Do not think about sex. Do not be surprised that you do think about it.

Be incredulous when ex-husband calls and emotionally suggests that he would like to remarry you. If the marriage that was founded on love could not last, the marriage based on death would be a disaster.

Neither avoid nor seek out places where you have been happy together.

Garden, sunbathe, wash dishes, keep a neat house, help son with homework, do not show that you expect more of him than other parents expect of other sons. Be prompt to take him to the corner where he picks up the school bus, be prompt to meet the bus when it returns. Refrain from kissing him excessively.

Be understanding about your own mother, whom son now says he wishes to visit during the summer vacation, Say, ‘Summer is a long time off.’

Be careful about being caught alone with men whom you have admired or Colin has admired and who admire you and have been known to admire many other women in this town of excess women, and whose sympathy will skilfully turn into something else in three or four sessions and who will then try to lay you and will probably succeed. Be careful about being caught alone with men who have admired Colin or

C6lin had admired and whose sympathy is genuinely only that, but who will eventually want to lay you, too. They, too, will probably succeed.

Do not build your life on your son. It is the most certain way to lose him.

Keep busy. But at what?

‘Are you sure you’ve looked everywhere, Mrs Burke?’ Mr Greenfield asked. He was the lawyer Colin’s agent had sent her to. Or rather, one of a huge battery of lawyers, all of whose names were on the door of the suite of offices in the elegant building in Beverly Hills. All of the names on the door seemed equally concerned with her problem, equally intelligent, equally well dressed, equally urbane, smiling, and sympathetic, equally costly, and equally helpless.

‘I’ve turned the house upside down, Mr Greenfield,’ Gretchen said. ‘I’ve found hundreds of scripts, hundreds of bills, some of them unpaid, but no will.’

Mr Greenfield almost sighed, but refrained. He was a youngish man in a button-down collar, to show that he had gone to law school in the East, and a bright bow tie, to show that he now lived in California. ‘Do you have any knowledge of any safety deposit boxes that your husband might have had?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘And I don’t believe he had any. He was careless about things like that’

‘I’m afraid he was careless about quite a few things,’ Mr Greenfield said. ‘Not leaving a will. .’

‘How did he know he was going to die?’ she demanded. ‘He never had a sick day in his life?’

‘It makes it easier if one thinks about all the possibilities,’ Mr Greenfield said. Gretchen was sure he had been drawing up wills for himself since he was twenty-one. Mr Greenfield finally permitted himself the withheld sigh. ‘For our part, we’ve explored every avenue. Incredibly enough, your husband never employed any lawyer. He allowed his agent to draw up his contracts and from what his agent said, most of the time he hardly bothered to read them. And when he allowed the ex-Mrs Burke to divorce him, he permitted her lawyer to write the divorce settlement’

Gretchen had never met the ex-Mrs Burke, but now, after Colin’s death, she was beginning to get to know her very well. She had been an airline hostess and a model. She had an abiding fondness for money and believed that to work for it was unfeminine and repugnant. She had been getting twenty thousand dollars a year as alimony and at the time of Colin’s death had been starting proceedings to get it raised to forty thousand dollars a year because Colin’s income had risen steeply since he had come to Hollywood. She was living with a young man, in places like New York, Palm Beach, and Sun Valley, when she wasn’t travelling abroad, but sensibly refused to marry the young man, since one of the clauses that Colin had managed to insert in the divorce settlement would cut off the alimony on her remarriage. She or her lawyers seemed to have a wide knowledge of the law, both State and Federal, and immediately after the funeral, which she had not attended, she had had Colin’s bank deposits impounded and had secured an injunction against the estate to prevent Gretchen from selling the house.

Since Gretchen had had no separate bank account and had merely asked Colin for money when she needed it and allowed his secretary at the office to pay the bills, she found herself without any cash and had to depend upon Rudolph to keep her going. Colin had left ho insurance because he thought insurance companies were the biggest thieves in America, so there was no money there, either. As the accident had been his fault alone, with no one else involved (he had hit a tree and the County of Los Angeles was preparing to sue the estate for damage to the tree) there was nobody against whom Gretchen could press claims for compensation.

‘I have to get out of that house, Mr Greenfield,’ Gretchen said The evenings were the worst Whispers in shadowy corners of rooms. Half expecting the door to open at any moment and Colin to come in, cursing an actor or a cameraman.

‘I quite understand,’ Mr Greenfield said He really was a decent man. ‘But if you don’t remain in possession, physical possession, Mr Burke’s ex-wife might very possibly find legal grounds for moving in. Her lawyers are very good, very good indeed -‘ The professional admiration was ungrudging, all the names on one door of an elegant building paying tribute to all the names on the door of another elegant building just a block away. If there’s a loophole, they’ll find it And in law, if one looks long enough, mere is almost always a loophole.’

‘Except for me,’ Gretchen said despairingly.

‘Ifs a question of time, my dear Mrs. Burke.’ Just the gentlest of rebukes at a layman’s impatience. There’s nothing clear-cut about this case, I regret to say. The house was in your husband’s name, there ‘is a mortgage on it payments to be made. The size of the estate is undetermined and may remain

undetermined for many years. Mr Burke had a percentage, quite a large percentage of the three films he directed and a continuing interest in stock and foreign royalties and possible movie sales of quite a number of the plays he was connected with.’ The enumeration of these splendid difficulties that remained to be dealt with before the file of Colin Burke could be marked ‘Closed’ obviously brought Mr Greenfield an elegiac pleasure. If the law were not as complicated as it was he would have sought another and more exigent profession. There will have to be expert opinions, the testimony of studio officials, a certain amount of give and take between parties. To say nothing of the possibility of other claims against the estate. Relatives of the deceased, for example, who have a habit of cropping up in cases like this.’

‘He has only one brother,’ Gretchen said. ‘And he told me he didn’t want anything.’ The brother had come to the cremation. He was a taut young colonel in the Air Force who had been a fighter pilot in Korea and who had crisply taken charge of everything, even putting Rudolph on the sidelines. It was he who had made sure there were no religious services and who had told her that when Colin and he had spoken about death, they had promised each other unceremonious burning. The day after the cremation, Colin’s brother had hired a private plane, had flown out to sea and strewn Colin’s ashes over the Pacific Ocean. He had told Gretchen if there was anything she needed to call on him. But short of strafing the ex-Mrs Burke or bombing her lawyers’ offices, what could a straightforward colonel in the Air Force do to help his brother’s widow, enmeshed in the law?

Gretchen stood up. Thank you for everything, Mr Greenfield,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry I’ve taken so much of your time.’

‘Not at all,’ Mr Greenfield stood, legally courteous. ‘I’ll keep you informed, naturally, of all developments.’

He escorted her to the door of his office. Although his face showed nothing, she was sure he disapproved of the dress she was wearing, which was pale blue.

She went down a long aisle flanked by rows of desks at which secretaries typed rapidly, without looking up, deeds, wills, complaints, summons, contracts, bankruptcy petitions, transfers, mortgages, briefs, enjoinders, writs of replevin.

They are typing away the memory of Colin Burke, she thought. Day after day after day.

It was cold up in the bow of the ship, but Thomas liked it up there alone, staring out at the long, grey swells of the Atlantic. Even when it wasn’t his watch, he often went up forward and stood for hours, in all weathers, not saying anything to the man whose watch it happened to be, just standing there silently, watching the bow plunge and come up in a curl of white water, at peace with himself, not thinking consciously of anything, not wanting or needing to think about anything.

The ship flew the Liberian flag, but in two voyages he hadn’t come close to Liberia. The man called Pappy, the manager of the Aegean Hotel, had been as helpful as Schultzy had said he would be. He had fitted him out with the clothes and seabag of an old Norwegian seaman who had died in the hotel and had gotten him the berth on the Elga Andersen, Greek ownership, taking on cargo at Hoboken for Rotterdam, Algeciras, Genoa, Piraeus. Thomas had stayed in his room in the Aegean all the time he was in New York, eight days, and Pappy had brought him his meals personally, because Thomas had said he didn’t want any of the help to see him and start asking questions. The night before the Elga Andersen was due to sail Pappy had driven him over to the pier in Hoboken himself and watched while he signed on. The favour that Pappy owed Schultzy from Schultzy’s days in the Merchant Marine during the war must have been a big one.