“Tell Rosita we’re all on her side. Linda Gail will tell her the same thing.”
“I’ll tell her, Hershel. You and Linda Gail take care.”
“It’s y’all I’m worried about, not us,” he replied. “Don’t do anything without including us in. We got us an agreement on that? We’ll always be Rosita’s friends. We’ll back your play, whatever it is, Loot.”
I went back upstairs. Rosita had finished dressing but had not put on any makeup. “You don’t look well,” she said.
I sat in a chair by the window and told her of my conversation with Hershel.
“He has no idea what’s going on, does he?”
“None at all.”
“Why didn’t the people who sent us the photo also send one to Hershel?”
“You already know why,” I said.
“They didn’t want to use all the knives in the set. They want you to live with the knowledge that at any given moment they can destroy Hershel’s marriage. They also want to make you party to the deception of your best friend.”
“That’s exactly what they’re doing.”
“Maybe you should tell Hershel and show him the photo.”
“The photo of Linda Gail looks like it was taken in a motel. In all probability, it was taken the night she got drunk and allowed herself to be seduced by Jack Valentine. Should I tell Hershel that?”
“I think we have to let go of Linda Gail. Her choices are always about herself. She won’t change. She seems incapable of understanding how much injury she’s done.”
I couldn’t argue with that logic.“I’m going to destroy this photograph,” I said.
“They have others.”
“Good,” I said. “One day I’ll catch up with the people who took them. When I do, I won’t feel any qualms. They’ll get the reward they’ve earned.”
“I don’t want you to talk about killing again.”
“What do you think I did in the war?”
“The war is over.”
“It’s never over. You enlist and you fight it for the rest of your life. I’m going to make these people pay for what they’ve done. There’s a difference between justice and vengeance.”
She walked toward me and placed her hand on my forehead, as though checking to see if I had a fever. “Don’t you ever start thinking like that,” she said. “Don’t compromise yourself because of scum like these people. Do you hear me, Weldon?”
That was Rosita Lowenstein in full-frontal attack mode. It was a state of mind I had learned not to challenge. I put my arms around her, crossing them behind her back. I could smell the fragrance in her hair and the heat in her skin. I looked her in the eye. “Straight shooters always win,” I said.
She buried her face in my neck, her fingers kneading my arms, her bare feet standing on the tops of my shoes. I swore I would get every one of them, one at a time or all at once; it didn’t matter.
I KNEW I COULD not get close to Dalton Wiseheart on my own. But maybe there was another way into his inner circle, I told myself. He might have an enemy who would be only too glad to help undermine the outer wall of the fortress. Wiseheart had made a remark about his daughter-in-law, Clara. What was it? She was a different kettle of fish? I wondered in what way.
While Rosita took a nap, I drove to the far end of River Oaks, where Roy and Clara Wiseheart lived amid a level of Greco-Roman glory that Nero would have envied. Her name had been Harrington before she married. Her family had made its money in rice and cotton in the early part of the century, then doubled its wealth during the Great War by growing beans for the government and investing the profits in the demand for explosives. Unlike many of their peers, the Harringtons were reclusive and generated no mystique about their personal lives. They were rich and gold-plated against the minuscule concerns of ordinary people, and that was all that mattered. What else did anyone need to know?
I pulled into the driveway and walked across the lawn toward the porch and the massive three-story columns at the front of the house. I had no idea if anyone was home. Nor did I have a plan. During the drive from my house to the Wisehearts’, I had decided to approach whoever was home in the most honest fashion I could. If I was rebuffed, at least I wouldn’t have to resent myself.
I saw her in the side yard, weeding the garden on her knees. She was wearing cloth gloves and denim pants and a straw hat and a gray work jacket with big pockets for garden tools. “How are you, Miss Clara?” I said, lifting my hat.
“Roy is in Los Angeles, Mr. Holland,” she said.
The sunlight was not kind to Clara Wiseheart. The foundation on her skin was cracked, the wrinkles at the corners of her eyes showing through like cat’s whiskers. I realized she was at least a decade older than her husband.
“May I talk to you?” I asked.
She inserted her weeding trowel in the dirt. “About what?”
“My wife was arrested on false charges. She was molested by the arresting officer.”
One of her eyes was smaller than the other, an intense blue, triangular in shape. “Why would you want to tell me about something like this?”
“Because I think Dalton Wiseheart is trying to injure us. Because I want to make him accountable for the evil deeds I think he’s done.”
She got to her feet and brushed off her knees. “Follow me.”
I walked behind her into the backyard. The swimming pool had been drained, and pine needles and oak leaves were stuck to the bottom and the sides like crustaceans. The air was cold in the shade and smelled of gas and herbicide and a moldy tarp carelessly piled against the pool house. The yard seemed marked by neglect and the onslaught of winter or, better said, the ephemeral nature of life and our inability to deal with it.
An old hand-crank record player had been set on a low brick wall that bordered an elevated flowerbed. It had a fluted horn on it and a record mounted on the turntable.
“Sit down,” she said.
The chair was hard and cold to the touch, the glass tabletop the same. She sat across from me, her triangular-shaped eye watery. She took a drink from a coffee cup that smelled of liqueur, her gaze never leaving my face. “Why would I be your confidante regarding the character deficiencies of Dalton Wiseheart?”
“I’m not asking that of you. I’m telling you of the harm I believe he’s done to an innocent woman. I want to talk to him. I want him to look me in the face and tell me he’s not responsible for hiring an evil man to commit sexual battery on my wife and put her in jail.”
“Dalton plays the role of an avuncular wheat farmer for journalists stupid enough to write about him. He has squandered millions buying professional baseball and football teams. He also spends huge sums trying to control an electorate that, in my opinion, shouldn’t be allowed to vote. Dalton is a bumbling idiot and should be treated as such.”
“Do you think he’s capable of paying a Houston police officer to hurt my wife?”
“I feel sorry for you,” she replied.
“Oh?”
“Is he ‘capable’ of hurting your wife? He’s capable of anything. He used to make his son beat him.”
“I don’t know if I heard you correctly.”
“When Roy didn’t fulfill his father’s expectations, Dalton would lie across the bed and make Roy whip him with a razor strop to demonstrate how much pain his son was causing him. You ask what he’s capable of? The answer is anything.”
“I see,” I replied, not knowing what to say.
“I doubt that. You’ve entered a world you have no knowledge of. You remind me of the man who was king because he had one eye in the kingdom of the blind. Isn’t that the kind of place where you grew up? A kingdom of blind people where the gentry have the astuteness of Cyclopes? It must be harrowing to find yourself in an environment where you’re never sure whether you should go to the front or the back door.”
/> “I’ve never had anyone say something like that to me,” I said, getting up to go. “This has been quite an experience.”
“Don’t put on self-righteous airs with me, Mr. Holland. You brought Mrs. Pine into our lives. I know my husband’s propensities. He has the appetites of an adolescent. When they wane, he comes back home, repentant and talking about tennis and his coin collection, just like a little boy. Next time he’ll be at it with the maid. She would be the logical step down from your business partner’s wife.”
I looked again at the hand-crank record player. Normally, I would have thought it was completely out of place. In this instance I did not. I had come to think of Roy and Clara Wiseheart as people who lived inside an inner sanctum where the difference between death and life was hardly noticeable; it was a place where the bizarre and the pathological were norms.
“I’ll find my way to my car,” I said. “No need to see me out. I’m sorry I intruded upon your privacy.”
“You wanted to be a gamesman,” she said. “Now you are. Enjoy it. An actor I knew before I met my husband once called it a ‘divine and sweet, sweet sewer.’ That was right before he killed himself. Maybe you won’t drown in it, Mr. Holland. Your friends probably will.”
As I walked away, I heard her start up the phonograph. I turned around, the air even colder now, the leaves of a transplanted swamp maple lit like fire against the sun. “Is that Bunny Berigan?” I asked.
“It’s ‘I Can’t Get Started with You.’ Roy gave it to me on our second date. I guess I still have my sentimental moments.”
Are we our brother’s keeper? Her face was a Grecian mask of callousness and cynicism so blatant, you wondered if it was pretense. Did she fear the Great Shade? Did she know the last names of her servants? Did she ever experience joy? As I looked around, I wondered if I was standing inside a necropolis. That night I wrote these words in my journal: Dear Lord, Thank you for my dear wife. Thank you for the wonderful life you’ve given us. God bless all those who work and play in the fields of the Lord. This is Weldon Avery Holland signing off again. Amen.
Chapter
20
LINDA GAIL’S FLIGHT back to Houston had been canceled because of bad weather, so she took a cab to Union Station and bought a stateroom ticket on the Sunset Limited, an expenditure she previously would have thought unimaginable. It was late afternoon when the train pulled out of Los Angeles, and in no time she found herself gazing through the lounge window at orange groves and palm trees and painted deserts and a red sunset that seemed created especially for her.
She ordered a glass of sherry and took her fountain pen and monogrammed stationery from her bag and began writing Hershel a letter she would ask the conductor to mail at one of the stops. When she thought about Hershel, she had to reconstruct her mental fortifications one brick at a time so an inconvenient truth or two didn’t steal its way into her peace of mind. It was a difficult task. He would never be able to understand the complexity of her situation, she told herself. Why burden him unnecessarily? She had made a conscious choice to enter into an affair with Roy Wiseheart, that was true. Yes, it was morally wrong and indefensible and even treacherous, but it had happened. That was it, it had happened. Things happened. Passive voice. And there was nothing to do about it. So enough about that.
She had stayed true to Hershel when he was overseas, hadn’t she? There had been temptations, many of them, potential boyfriends lurking around the edges of a dance floor or looking at her from a back pew in the church. What about Hershel? No French or Italian girl ever tempted him? Had anyone thought of that?
People were weak, she told herself. Her infidelity didn’t mean she was indifferent toward him. He doted on her and would give her anything she wanted. She wasn’t unappreciative. It wasn’t his fault that he didn’t understand the creative world and the people who dedicated themselves to the arts and humanities and the making of great films. There was a simple way of putting it all in context: She had grown up in a place where she didn’t belong, and she had finally found her milieu. It was no one’s fault. That was life.
Dear Hershel, she wrote in a navy blue calligraphy that had been the envy of everyone in her high school English classes, I’ll probably be home before you receive this. But no matter. I just wanted to organize my thoughts and put them down on paper for you to look at. I’ve been thinking about building a home in Santa Monica, not far from the ocean. I think my commitments are going to keep me there much of the time. Would you object if I talked to an architect? A small house on one of the bluffs would be a grand place for you to relax, and it wouldn’t cost much. It’s not Malibu.
The train pulled into a biscuit-colored stucco station covered with a Spanish-tile roof and surrounded by an oasis of date palms that reminded her of an illustration from the Arabian Nights. She could see the ice and mail wagons on the loading platform, and the marbled pink and purple stain of the sun’s afterglow on the hills and desert floor, and car lights tunneling through the dusk out on Highway 66. She looked down at the flowery design on the borders of her stationery, and the blue swirls in the letters that comprised the words she had written to her husband, her heart becoming sicker and sicker at the betrayal she was making a systemic part of her life.
She had to stop this self-flagellation, she told herself. Adults needed to behave as adults and deal with the world as it was. Guilt solved nothing. She began another paragraph.
I think from a financial perspective, the investment would be a good one. One home in River Oaks and another by the beach in Santa Monica! Who would have ever believed that? It’s funny how things work out. Remember when we met at the dance? Boy howdy, life can be a jack-in-the-box, can’t it?
She felt her face shrink at her hypocrisy. She tore the stationery into strips and put them in her bag just as the train jolted forward and two men in suits and fedoras, one of them with a Graflex Speed Graphic, entered the lounge and sat down on the horseshoe-shaped couch across from her. The photographer raised his camera and popped a flashbulb in her face.
“Good heavens, who are you fellows?” she said innocently.
“We almost got you at the airport, but you were too quick for us,” the other man said. “Can you give us an interview?” He held a notebook and pen in his right hand.
“Who’s it for?”
“It’s a wire story about the new girl at Warner Brothers,” he said.
“Anything to pass the time. Can I buy you boys a drink?”
She was surprised by her ease and familiarity with the press. Well, why not? That was Hollywood. They were all part of the same culture, weren’t they? Others didn’t understand what it was like out there. The weather was beautiful. It seldom rained, although the bougainvillea and orange trees seemed to bloom year-round. The actors and producers and directors and news reporters and the army of people behind the camera were guests at a party that never ended, one that began with a mist-shrouded sunrise over the Santa Ana Mountains and at night was domed with the constellations and rimmed by waves that created a sensation like an erotic kiss when they surged around her thighs.
The two journalists sitting on the pale blue vinyl couch seemed like pleasant and considerate men, not lighting cigarettes without asking permission, the man with the Graflex dropping his used flashbulbs in his coat pocket so the porter would not have to clean up after him, both of them smiling good-naturedly. She particularly liked the older man. He said his name was Jimmy Flynn and that he had worked for several of the studios as a publicist and had been a correspondent during the war at the Battle of Monte Cassino and a friend of Ernie Pyle’s. He was handsome and dignified and wore a wedding band and addressed her as Miss Pine.
“Actually, I’m married,” she said.
“Out here, all actresses are eternally Miss,” he said. “What profession is your husband in, Miss Pine?”
“Do we have to go into that?”
“Not
if you don’t want to,” he said.
“He’s from an old plantation family in central Louisiana. But he’s in the oil business these days. He has his own company.”
“How do you like being with Warner Brothers?”
“It’s wonderful. Everyone has been very nice, Mr. Warner in particular.”
“I think I remember reading about your husband,” Jimmy Flynn said. He set down his pen. “He created a big breakthrough in natural gas technology, didn’t he? Something to do with welding machines.”
“That’s correct, he did.”
“His business partner is a man named Holland?”
“Yes, that’s true,” she said.
“They call themselves the Dixie Belle Pipeline Company.”
“It’s not what they call themselves. It’s the name of their company.”
Outside the window, she could see the headlights of the vehicles on Highway 66 veering angularly into a stretch of desert that was white and cratered and devoid of vegetation, even cactus.
“It’s quite a story, if I remember it correctly,” Flynn said. “They were in the war together. Mr. Holland brought back a girl who was a prisoner of the Nazis. She’s related to Rosa Luxemburg. Her father was a Communist.”
Linda Gail’s smile had faded. “I don’t know anything about that,” she said.
“Her name is Rosita. To your knowledge, is the wife of your husband’s business partner a Communist?”
“I don’t know why you’re asking me this. I don’t know her.”
“Not at all?”
“I have met her, but I do not associate with her. Does that answer your question?”
“You didn’t know she was a Communist?”
“If I knew that, I would have reported her to someone.”
“Really?” Flynn said. “You’re a tough lady. She’s tough, isn’t she, Quinn?”
“Real tough,” the photographer said, blowing his cigarette smoke out the side of his mouth. “One more before we go, sweetheart. You don’t mind, do you?”