Set This House on Fire (17 page)

“Watch that wire,” I said.

Then we reached the balcony. Over the grimy marble portico a frieze of dryads cried out voicelessly to be cleaned. She turned and paused for an instant. “I—I wouldn’t talk about Cass to Mason if I were you. It’s nothing important. It’s just that tonight —oh, I don’t know.”

“I hardly even know the guy,” I said.

Her face lightened up as at this moment the sound of the jazzy piano once more fell on our ears. “Oh, I’ll bet you didn’t know,” she said. “Guess who came down from Rome and is playing that really fabulous piano?
Billy Raymond!”
Almost as if upon this incantation, then, the doors swung open and we entered Mason’s home.

I was charmed, staggered. In spite of my recollection of Mason’s fondness for display, I could see that here he had outdone himself. The room was one in which a grand duke would have felt perfectly at ease—a salon of such spacious dimensions that I felt it would not be unnatural to be ushered in by page boys and a fanfare of bugles. On the lofty groined ceiling some nineteenth-century artist with a flamboyant gift had applied his brush, filling the air with a fresco of clouds and lush vegetation and hues ranging from the clear green of the sea to voluptuous purple; the scenes were mythological and obscure, but I did make out what seemed f o be Demeter, and Persephone clad in the fashion of a mid-Victorian maiden, her clothes billowing around her as she floated on high and chewed dreamily at a pomegranate. Spaced around the walls of the room, holding up the cornices, were handsome ornamental pilasters, straight out of the Renaissance, which had been polished until they glittered like the purest gold; for all I know they may have been gold, and in any case I was speculating upon this notion when Rosemarie, having paused to exchange a few words in sign language with an impressive, formally attired old man whom I took to be the butler, grasped my arm and led me across the room. “I heard Alonzo tell Mason that it was the most pretentious place he had ever seen,” she said, as if reading my thoughts. “And he’s seen them all. But Peter, you have no idea; it’s so
cheap.
It used to belong to a baron or something, before Fausto took it over.”

I walked alongside my towering chatelaine toward the score or so people arranged in sofas and on chairs and around a black grand piano in the distance. Behind them, French windows each half as high as a house gave onto the somber and moonless sea; a faint breeze disturbed the crimson draperies, causing them to move limply in the shadows. There was a babble of voices—vehement, loud, and alcoholic. A confusing amber light played over the scene; perhaps too, tired as I was, my eyes lacked the power to focus. At any rate, what for an instant seemed to my eyes to be a round, jug-eared black vase perched on the piano top proved, as we neared the group, to be the head of a young Negro, whose eyes and mouth sprang whitely open in a kind of paroxysm as he burst once again into song.

“That’s Billy Raymond,” Rosemarie whispered. “He’s perfectly fabulous.” Silently we moved in toward the group around the piano. It was a naughty tune he sang; it had to do with bananas and other elongated objects, and as he lewdly anatomized the names of people famous in the world of stage and screen, using the banana motif as a key, his voice crooned lubriciously and he winked at the gathering, and grimaced, or made his eyes disappear altogether, clenching his lids tight as he hunched down and elicited wicked little arpeggios from the keys. But his references, obvious in intent as they were, were for the most part too parochial for me; ill-at-ease, I found myself eying Mason’s guests, who, sweating in sport clothes, had bent all their attention upon the raucous Negro and—except for a striking tall man with gray hair who stood propped aloof and sullen in one corner—had collapsed into various stages of laughter. Most of them were persons who by virtue of their position in my own hierarchical scheme of movie values made little impression upon me—what, after all, is an assistant producer, a unit manager, a publicity man?

Of the rest, aside from the stars, three stood out in my mind, and it was these three, cramped side by side on a small gilt settee, who caught my attention as my spirit wandered restlessly away from Billy Raymond. The first was a young woman named Dawn O’Donnell, a slim carrot-haired girl who sat sipping a crème de menthe, and whose complexion for a moment I hardly believed, so chalky white it was, until I realized that it had been painted on —out of some obscure need to shock her beholders—with artful care. She was not pretty; neither was she badly made; she could have been quite attractive, actually, but with her orange hair contrasting so starkly with her ghostly white skin she had succeeded in her desire—and desire it must have been, lacking only a false rubber nose to complete the make-up—to look exactly like a clown. I remembered having heard about her and had seen her from a distance in Rome. Dawn O’Donnell was not her real name —so I had read somewhere—but then little about her at all was real. There had been a period when she had been a minor actress, she had had a one-man show of paintings, had published a small volume of verse. In none of her endeavors, including several marriages, had she shown a molecule of talent, but being the heiress to a vast American mercantile fortune had allowed her to persist in her trifling labors, all the while presuming, I suppose, as Thomas Mann once put it, that one may pluck a single leaf from the laurel tree of art without paying for it with his life. At the moment I gathered she was interested in the art of the film and tagged along all over Europe after the movie-makers, who because of her enormous wealth on the one hand, and her eccentric, childish mannerisms on the other, treated her with a strange combination of deference and indulgence, and called her “Little Carrot-Top” and replied in passionate affirmatives to her never-ending “Do you think I’m beautiful?” I heard all this that night. Rosemarie told me she was sleeping off and on with Carleton Burns.

Now sitting next to Dawn O’Donnell on the settee was a sleepy-eyed, smiling man named Morton Baer, a well-known recorder of gossip for the newspapers whose every word, syndicated in the American-language paper in Rome, I had read with the same intense interest and delight I had once reserved for Keats. I knew him from his photographs. Baer was the only person present outside myself not dressed as if for an outing to the shore; he wore a fine flannel suit over his small, truncated, slightly hunched form, and a checkered yellow waistcoat, too, and he looked gentle and sheepish, sad even, as he tried dutifully to smile at Billy Raymond’s song, which he must have heard a dozen times before, and I couldn’t help but feel sympathy for his boredom, over and above the sneaking and mortifying admiration I had for the man—a celebrity in his own right—who hobnobbed almost on terms of blood kinship with movie stars on five continents, and knew J. Edgar Hoover and Herbert Bayard Swope, and had even dined several times at the White House.

The third member of the trio, finally, was a face so familiar from his photographs that I had the impulse to go up and slap him on the back as I would a long-lost friend. But when at last it registered upon me who he was, flabbergasted, unable to tell whether I was struck more by the incongruity of his being a part of this worldly throng, or by a subtly unpleasant reasonableness, I could only gaze and gaze at him as if he were something at a zoo. For this was the Reverend Dr. Irvin Franklin Bell, the exemplary, prolific, and optimistic Protestant clergyman known and loved doubtless by more Americans than any man of the cloth since Henry Ward Beecher. I was, to be sure, prepared for anything that night but not for this ecclesiastical glamour, so offbeat, so rare, and I pieced together from Rosemarie later how it must have come about: Bell, confidant of potentates in industry and business, while on a vacationing, non-evangelical tour of Europe had encountered at the Hotel Hassler in Rome his old friend Sol Kirschorn, the producer. Kirschorn was an admirer of Bell, as were many highly placed American men of substance who found the doctor’s simple moral equation of wealth and virtue, virtue and wealth, as easy to abide by as to understand. Learning, then, that Sambuco was on Bell’s itinerary, Kirschorn accommodatingly got in touch with his wife, Alice Adair, and told her on behalf of the unit of which he was the producer and she the star, to offer the famous preacher (he was staying at the Bella Vista, too) every hospitality. What I saw at this moment was the result: portly, amiable, mightily sweating, his eyelids visibly wincing behind his bifocals at each one of Billy Raymond’s lascivious groans, he tried nonetheless to hold on to his renowned sleek and jovial composure and, like a banker caught with his hand in the till, kept his cheeks plumped up in a sickly, illicit smile. I felt sorry for him in a way. Looking, in his floppy matching slacks and shirt of jade-green silk, like a print I had once seen of the dowager empress of China, his wet under-lip poised as if to receive a gumdrop, or to emit yet another platitude, he was in an ecstasy of discomfort, and I felt that it was unfortunate that a solitary dirty song should intrude so upon his enjoyment of this sumptuous rich world, by which he yearned to be ravished. Billy Raymond came to the end of his song.

I looked around for Mason but he was nowhere to be seen. As one last rippling chord brought the song to its conclusion, the trio on the couch made, each one, a fugitive gesture with his hands—Baer to stifle a yawn, Bell to straighten his spectacles, Dawn O’Donnell with nervous fingers uplifted to adjust her dangling earrings—so that for the most fleeting fraction of an instant they looked like those three little Oriental apes, mute, deaf, and blind to all evil; turning, I thought I saw Mason mopping his face, passing through the distant doorway to another room, and I raised my hand to beckon to him but he was gone. A roar of applause and hand-clapping went up from the gathering. As I wheeled about to face the piano again, Rosemarie handed me a bowlful of peanuts.

“I’ve asked Giorgio to bring you something more substantial,” she whispered. “He should be along in a minute,” she added. “Isn’t Billy fabulous? I’ll swear he’s better than Noel Coward. He’s—But shh-h …” Silence fell over the house as Billy Raymond commenced singing again, this time the sad limpid words of “As Time Goes By.” I’m a fairly good judge in such matters, and it did seem to me that his rendition of the song was inferior to many I had heard, including those of some amateurs. Nonetheless, the people went into some sort of a modified trance as they stood there listening—some propped chin in hands, their elbows resting on the piano; the bare-necked and pretty girls with their eyes closed, arms crossed, caressing their own shoulders—and gradually only myself alert and so famished now I could hardly bear it, I picked out those among the group whom, after all, I had come here to see: the bewitching Alice Adair, slender and blond and with such an opalescent transparency of skin that around her gently dimpled temple, as in that frog’s tongue which as a boy I had peered at through a microscope, every capillary and vein was presented to the eye live and mortal and throbbing; Carleton Burns again of the sex-glutted and ugly and dissipated face, the mean demonic dream-incubus of how many millions of women even his employers had no way of reckoning; and finally Gloria Mangiamele, black-eyed and tranquil and exquisite, of a voluptu ousness of which all her pictures had provided only the merest suggestion, whose marvelous breasts seemed to call out for seizing and fondling, but who, as she moved back now swaying slightly to the music, revealed a figure somewhat short-waisted and shortlegged, like many Italian girls, and an important feature which, from the point of view of my own taste, at least, I can only describe as duck-butted. But I was very hungry. I looked around once more for Rosemarie and just then—perhaps because, worn-out as I was, I was the natural prey of a cold—I sneezed. I sneezed again and again, a wet and exhausting barrage over which I had no control.

“Can
that, will you, for Christ sake?” I heard a man’s voice say as the music limped and rattled to a stop. Billy Raymond’s lips hung open pink and tuneless, his tongue dancing in his mouth like the clapper of a bell. I heard the same anonymous voice again; it seemed addressed not precisely to me but to a world full of blockheads and fools, of which I was the major example. “For Christ sake!”

“I’m sorry,” I murmured.

“For Christ’s own sweet sake!” Someone tittered in the room, someone coughed; a tinkling chord of the piano broke the silence and the husky plaintive song once more filled the room.

And I, rebuffed, sidled gradually away from the group to a cool shadowy place near one of the windows; here I sat with a cigarette between my twitching fingers, sulky, resentful, dreaming of steak.

Yet now as I try to recall the events of that evening in their proper order, it occurs to me that it was along about here that something happened which was the first of a series of mysterious goings-on that got more and more baffling, more and more embarrassing and ugly, as evening wore into night, and night into morning. It did seem odd at the time, but not especially important, and so I have had trouble recalling all the details. Here is what happened, though, as well as I can remember it. As I sat there I saw the dignified old butler—Rosemarie had called him Giorgio—tiptoeing with a tray in his hands through the song-enthralled gathering and up to Rosemarie, who inclined her ear far down to hear what he whispered into it. A worried frown appeared on her face; she peered indecisively about the room until, catching sight of me, she walked over to the place where I was sitting. Giorgio trailed in her wake. Behind her the piano music died in a sort of wan, resigned flutter; the guests, unloosed from their cataleptic dream, broke into wild applause and shouts, apparently in vain, of “More, Billy, more!”—and then slowly dispersed themselves, buzzing, around the enormous room.

“Here, Peter,” said Rosemarie, “I hope this will do. It’s just what all of us had for dinner, and—” She made a vague motion with her hand at Giorgio, who set the tray down on a table beside me. “And it’s real American food and—I mean, it’s
real.”
Her voice sounded troubled and upset. “Peter, I can’t understand what else Giorgio was trying to tell me. I think—” she said hesitantly, “I think he’s trying to tell me that Mason was—
cut,
or something.”