Текст книги "Rich Man, Poor Man"

Автор книги: Irwin Shaw

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Текущая страница: 31 (всего у книги 53 страниц)

“I bet,” Gretchen said.

“He was. Honestly. I could tell over the phone that he was really upset. He made a special point of calling me to ask me to fill in for him and explain why …”

“May I have some more wine, please,” Gretchen said.

Johnny signaled to the waiter, who refilled the glass. They were eating in a small French restaurant in the fifties. It was almost empty. Discreet, Gretchen thought. The sort of place you were not likely to meet anyone you knew. Good for dining out with married ladies you were having an affair with. Johnny probably had a long list of similar places. The Quiet Philanderer’s Guide for Dining in New York. Put it between covers and you’d probably have a big best-seller. The headwaiter had smiled warmly when they had come in and had placed them at a table in a corner, where nobody could overhear what they were saying.

“If he possibly could have made it,” Johnny persisted, excellent go-between in times of stress for friends, enemies, lovers, blood relations, “he’d have come. He’s deeply attached to you,” said Johnny, who had never been deeply attached to anyone. “He admires you more than any woman he’s ever met. He told me so.”

“Don’t you boys have anything better to chat about on the long winter nights?” Gretchen took a sip from her glass. At least she was getting a good bottle of wine out of the evening. Maybe she would get drunk tonight. Make sure she’d get some sleep before tomorrow’s ordeal. She wondered if Willie and her son were also dining in a discreet restaurant. Do you hide a son, too, with whom you had once lived?

“In fact,” Johnny said, “I think it’s a lot your fault that Rudy’s never been married. He admires you and he hasn’t found anybody yet who lives up to his idea of you and …”

“He admires me so much,” Gretchen said, “that after not seeing me for nearly a year he can’t take a night off to come and see me.”

“He’s opening a new center at Port Philip next week,” Johnny Heath said. “One of the biggest so far. Didn’t he write you?”

“Yes,” she admitted. “I guess I didn’t pay attention to the date.”

“There’s a million last-minute things he has to do. He’s working twenty hours a day. It was just physically impossible. You know how he is when it comes to work.”

“I know,” Gretchen said. “Work now, live later. He’s demented.”

“What about your husband? Burke?” Johnny demanded. “Doesn’t he work? I imagine he admires you, too, but I don’t notice that he took time off to come to New York with you.”

“He’s arriving in two weeks. Anyway, it’s a different kind of work.”

“I see,” Johnny said. “Making movies is a sacred enterprise and a woman is ennobled when she’s sacrificed to it. While running a big business is sordid and crass and a man ought to be delighted to get away from all that filth and run down to New York to meet his lonely, innocent, purifying sister at the plane and buy her dinner.”

“You’re not defending Rudolph,” Gretchen said. “You’re defending yourself.”

“Both,” Johnny said. “Both of us. And I don’t feel I have to defend anybody. If an artist wants to feel that he’s the only worthwhile creature spewed up by modern civilization, that’s his business. But to expect poor, money-soiled slobs like myself to agree with him is idiotic. It’s a great line with the girls and it gets a lot of half-baked painters and would-be Tolstoys into some pretty fair beds, but it doesn’t wash with me. I bet that if I worked in a garret in Greenwich Village instead of in an air-conditioned office in Wall Street, you’d have married me long before you ever met Colin Burke.”

“Guess again, brother,” Gretchen said. “I’d like some more wine.” She extended her glass.

Johnny poured the wine, almost filling her glass, then signaled to the waiter, who was out of earshot, for another bottle. He sat in silence, immobile, brooding. Gretchen was surprised at his outburst. It wasn’t like Johnny at all. Even when they had been making love, he had seemed cool, detached, as technically expert at that as he was at everything he undertook. By now, the last roughnesses, physical and mental, seemed to have been planed away from the man. He was like a highly polished, enormous, rounded stone, an elegant weapon, siege ammunition.

“I was a fool,” he said, finally, his voice low, without timbre. “I should have asked you to marry me.”

“I was married at the time. Remember?”

“You were married at the time you met Colin Burke, too. Remember?”

Gretchen shrugged. “It was in a different year,” she said. “And he was a different man.”

“I’ve seen some of his pictures,” Johnny said. “They’re pretty good.”

“They’re a lot more than that.”

“The eyes of love,” Johnny said, pretending to smile.

“What’re you trying to do, Johnny?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Ah, hell. I guess what I’m doing is being bitchy because I made such poor use of my time. Unmanly fellow. I now brighten up and ask polite questions of my guest, ex-wife of one of my best friends. I suppose you’re happy.”

“Very.”

“Good answer.” Johnny nodded approvingly. “Very good answer. Lady found fulfillment, long denied, in fulfilling second marriage to short but active artist of the silver screen.”

“You’re still being bitchy. If you want, I’ll get up and leave.”

“There’s dessert coming.” He put out his hand and touched hers. Smooth, fleshed, round fingers, soft palm. “Don’t leave. I have other questions. A girl like you, so New York, so busy with a life of your own—what the hell do you do with yourself day after day in that goddamn place?”

“Most of the time,” she said, “I spend thanking God I’m no longer in New York.”

“And the rest of the time? Don’t tell me you like just sitting there and being a housewife, waiting for Daddy to come home from the studio and tell you what Sam Gold-wyn said at lunch.”

“If you must know,” she said, stung, “I do very little just sitting around, as you put it. I’m part of the life of a man I admire and can help, and it’s a lot better than what I had here, being important and snotty, secretly screwing, and getting my name in magazines and living with a man who had to be dragged up from the bottom of a bottle three times a week.”

“Ah—the new female revolution—” Johnny said. “Church, children, kitchen. Jesus, you were the last woman in the world I’d’ve thought …”

“Leave out the church,” Gretchen said, “and you’ve got a perfect description of my life, okay?” She stood up. “And I’ll skip dessert. Those short, active artists of the silver screen like their women skinny.”

“Gretchen,” he called after her, as she strode out of the restaurant. His voice had the ring of innocent surprise. Something had just happened to him that had never happened before, that was unimaginable within the rules of the nicely regulated games he played. Gretchen didn’t look back, and she went out the door before any of the flunkeys in the restaurant had time to push it open for her.

She walked quickly toward Fifth Avenue, then slackened her pace as her anger cooled. She was silly to have become so upset, she decided. Why should she care what Johnny Heath thought about what she was doing with her life? He pretended he liked what he considered free women because that meant he could be free with them. He had been turned away from the banquet and he was trying to make her pay for it. What could he know of what it was like for her to wake up in the morning and see Colin lying beside her? She wasn’t free of her husband and he wasn’t free of her and they were both better and more joyous human beings because of it. What crap people believed freedom to be.

She hurried to the hotel and went up to her room and picked up the phone and asked the operator for her own number in Beverly Hills. It was eight o’clock in California and Colin ought to be home by now. She had to hear his voice, even though he detested talking on the phone and was most often sour and brusque on it, even with her, when she called him. But there was no answer and when she called the studio and asked them to ring the cutting room, she was told that Mr. Burke had left for the night.

She hung up slowly, paced the room. Then she sat down at the desk and drew out a sheet of paper and began to write: “Dear Colin, I called and you weren’t home and you weren’t at the studio and I am sad and a man who once was my lover said some untrue things that bothered me and New York is too warm and Billy loves his father more than he does me and I am very unhappy without you and you should have been home and I am thinking unworthy thoughts about you and I am going down to the bar to have a drink or two drinks or three drinks and if anybody tries to pick me up I am going to call for the police and I don’t know how I’m going to live the two weeks before I see you again and I hope I didn’t sound like a conceited know-it-all about the mirror sequence and if I did forgive me and I promise not to change or reform or keep my mouth shut on the condition that you promise not to change or reform or keep your mouth shut and your collar was frayed when you took us to the airport and I am a terrible housewife, but I am a housewife, housewife, housewife, a wife in your house, the best profession in the whole world and if you’re not home the next time I call you God knows what revenge I shall prepare for you. Love, G.”

She put the letter into an airmail envelope without rereading it and went down into the lobby and had it stamped and put it into the slot, connected by paper and ink and night-flying planes to the center of her life three thousand miles away across the dark great continent.

Then she went into the bar and nobody tried to pick her up and she drank two whiskies without talking to the bartender. She went up and undressed and got into bed.

When she woke the next morning, it was the phone ringing that awoke her and Willie was speaking, saying, “We’ll be over to pick you up in a half hour. We’ve already had breakfast.”

Ex-husband, ex-airman Willie drove swiftly and well. The first leaves were turning toward autumn on the small lovely hills of New England as they approached the school. Willie was wearing his dark glasses again, but today against the glare of the sun on the road, not because of drink. His hands were steady on the wheel and there was none of the tell-tale shiftiness in his voice that came after a bad night. They had to stop twice because Billy got car-sick, but aside from that the trip was a pleasant one, a handsome, youngish American family, comfortably off, driving in a shining new car through some of the greenest scenery in America on a sunny September day.

The school was mostly, red-brick Colonial, with white pillars here and there and a few old wooden mansions scattered around the campus as dormitories. The buildings were set among old trees and widespread playing fields. As they drove up to the main building, Willie said, “You’re enrolling in a country club, Billy.”

They parked the car and went up the steps to the big hall of the main building in a bustle of parents and other schoolboys. A smiling middle-aged lady was behind the desk, set up for signing in the new students. She shook their hands, said she was glad to see them, wasn’t it a beautiful day, gave Billy a colored tag to put through his lapel, and called out, “David Crawford,” toward a group of older boys with different-colored tags in their lapels. A tall, bespectacled boy of eighteen came briskly over to the desk. The middle-aged lady made introductions all around and said, “William, this is David, he’ll settle you in. If you have any problems today or any time during the school year, you go right to David and pester him with them.”

“That’s right, William,” Crawford said. Deep, responsible Sixth Former voice. “I am at your service. Where’s, your gear? I’ll show you to the room.” He led the way out of the building, the middle-aged lady already smiling behind him at another family trio at the desk.

“William,” Gretchen whispered as she walked behind the two boys with Willie. “For a minute I didn’t know whom she was talking to.”

“It’s a good sign,” Willie said. “When I went to school everybody called everybody by their last names. They were preparing us for the Army.”

Crawford insisted upon carrying Billy’s bag and they crossed the campus to a three-story red-brick building that was obviously newer than most of the other structures surrounding it.

“Sillitoe Hall,” Crawford said, as they went in. “You’re on the third floor, William.”

There was a plaque just inside the doorway announcing that the dormitory was the gift of Robert Sillitoe, father of Lieutenant Robert Sillitoe, Jr., Class of 1938, fallen in the service of his country, August 6th, 1944.

Gretchen was sorry she had seen the plaque, but took heart from the sound of young male voices singing from other rooms and the pounding of jazz groups from phonographs, all very much alive, as she climbed the stairs behind Crawford and Billy.

The room assigned to Billy wasn’t large, but it was furnished with two cots, two small desks, and two wardrobes. The small trunk they had sent ahead with Billy’s belongings was under one of the cots and there was another trunk tagged Fournier next to the window.

“Your roommate’s already here,” Crawford said. “Have you met him yet?”

“No,” Billy said. He seemed very subdued, even for him, and Gretchen hoped that Fournier, whoever he was, would not turn out to be a bully or a pederast or a marijuana smoker. She felt suddenly helpless—a life was out of her hands.

“You’ll see him at lunch,” Crawford said. “You’ll hear the bell any minute now.” He smiled his sober responsible smile at Willie and Gretchen. “Of course, all parents are invited, Mrs. Abbott.”

She caught the agonized glance from Billy, saying plainly, Not now, please! and she checked the correction before it crossed her lips. Time enough for Billy to explain that his father was Mr. Abbott but his mother was called Mrs. Burke. Not the first day. “Thank you, David,” she said, her voice unsteady in her own ears. She looked at Willie. He was shaking his head. “It’s very kind of the school to invite us,” she said.

Crawford gestured at the bare, unmade cot. “I advise you to get three blankets, William,” he said. “The nights up here get beastly cold and they’re Spartan about heat. They think freezing is good for our unfolding characters.”

“I’ll send you the blankets from New York today,” Gretchen said. She turned toward Willie. “Now about lunch …”

“You’re not hungry, are you, dear?” Willie’s voice was pleading, and Gretchen knew that the last thing Willie wanted was to eat lunch in a school dining room, without a drink in sight.

“Not really,” Gretchen said, pitying him.

“Anyway, I have to get back to town by four o’clock,” Willie said. “I have an appointment that’s very …” His voice trailed off unconvincingly.

There was a booming of bells and Crawford said, “There it is. The dining room is just behind the desk where you signed in, William. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to wash up. And remember—anything you need.” Upright and gentlemanly in his blazer and scuffed white shoes, a credit to the three years of schooling behind him, he went into the corridor, still resounding with the clashing melodies from three different phonographs, Elvis Presley’s wail, frantic and forlorn, dominating.

“Well,” Gretchen said, “he does seem like an awfully nice boy, doesn’t he?”

“I’ll wait and see what he’s like when you’re not around,” Billy said, “and tell you.”

“I guess you’d better get over for your lunch,” Willie said. Gretchen could tell he was panting for the first drink of the day. He had been very good about not suggesting stopping at any of the roadhouses they had passed on the way up and he had been a proper father all morning. He had earned his martini.

“We’ll walk you over to the dining room,” Gretchen said. She wanted to cry, but of course she couldn’t, in front of Billy. She looked erratically around the room. “When you and your roommate do a little decorating here,” she said, “this place ought to be very cosy. And you do have a pretty view.” Abruptly, she led the way into the hall.

They crossed the campus, along with other small groups converging on the main building. Gretchen stopped some distance from the steps. The moment had come to say good-bye and she didn’t want to have to do it in the middle of the herd of boys and parents at the foot of the steps.

“Well,” she said, “we might as well do it here.”

Billy put his arms around her and kissed her brusquely. She managed a smile. Billy shook his father’s hand. “Thanks for driving me up,” he said evenly, to both of them. Then, dry-eyed, he turned and walked, not hurrying, toward the steps, joining in the stream of students, lost, gone, a thin, gangling, childish figure departed irrevocably for that budding company of men where mothers’ voices which had comforted and lullabyed and admonished were now and forever heard only from afar.

Through a haze of tears she watched him vanish through the white pillars, the open doors, out of sunlight into shadow. Willie put his arm around her and, grateful for the touch of each other’s body, they walked toward the car. They drove down the winding drive, along a tree-shaded street that bordered the school’s playing fields, deserted now of athletes, goals undefended, base paths clear of runners.

She sat in the seat beside Willie staring straight ahead. She heard a curious sound from Willie’s side of the car and he stopped the car under a tree. Willie was sobbing uncontrollably and now she couldn’t hold it back any more and she clutched him and, their arms around each other, they wept and wept, for Billy, and the life ahead of him, for Robert Sillitoe, Jr., for themselves, for love, for Mrs. Abbott, for Mrs. Burke, for all the whiskey, for all their mistakes, for the flawed life behind them.

“Just don’t pay any attention to me,” the girl with the cameras was saying to Rudolph as Gretchen and Johnny Heath got out of the car and walked across the parking lot to where Rudolph was standing under the huge sign that traced the name of Calderwood against the blue September sky. It was the opening day of the new shopping center on the northern outskirts of Port Philip, a neighborhood that Gretchen knew well, because it was on the road that led, a few miles farther on, to the Boylan estate.

Gretchen and Johnny had missed the opening ceremony because Johnny couldn’t break loose from his office until lunchtime. Johnny had been apologetic about that, as he had been apologetic about his conversation at dinner two nights before, and the drive up had been a friendly one. Johnny had done most of the talking, but not about himself or Gretchen. He had spent the time explaining, admiringly, the mechanics of Rudolph’s rise as an entrepreneur and manager. According to Johnny, Rudolph understood the complexities of modern business better than any man his age Johnny had ever come across. When Johnny tried to explain what a brilliant coup Rudolph had pulled off last year in getting Calderwood to agree to buy a firm that had shown a two-million-dollar loss in the last three years, she had to admit to him that he had finally taken her beyond her intellectual depth, but that she would accept his opinion of the deal on faith.

When Gretchen came to where Rudolph was standing, making notes on a pad on a clipboard he was carrying, the photographer was crouched a few feet in front of him, shooting upward, to get the Calderwood sign in behind him. Rudolph smiled widely when he saw her and Johnny and moved toward them to greet them. Dealer in millions, juggler with stock options, disposer of risk capital, he merely looked like her brother to Gretchen, a well-tanned, handsome young man in a nicely tailored, unremarkable suit. She was struck once again by the difference between her brother and her husband. From what Johnny had told her she knew that Rudolph was many times wealthier than Colin and wielded infinitely more real power over a much greater number of people, but nobody, not even his own mother, would ever accuse Colin of being modest. In any group, Colin stood out, arrogant and commanding, ready to make enemies. Rudolph blended into groups, affable and pliant, certain to make friends.

“That’s good,” the crouching girl said, taking one picture after another. “That’s very good.”

“Let me introduce you,” Rudolph said. “My sister, Mrs. Burke, my associate, Mr. Heath. Miss … uh … Miss … I’m terribly sorry.”

“Prescott,” the girl said. “Jean will do. Please don’t pay any attention to me.” She stood up and smiled, rather shyly. She was a small girl, with straight, long, brown hair, caught in a bow at the nape of her neck. She was freckled and unmade-up and she moved easily, even with the three cameras hanging from her, and the heavy film case slung from her shoulder.

“Come on,” Rudolph said, “I’ll show you around. If you see old man Calderwood, make admiring noises.”

Wherever they went, Rudolph was stopped by men and women who shook his hand and said what a wonderful thing he had done for the town. While Miss Prescott clicked away, Rudolph smiled his modest smile, said he was glad they were enjoying themselves, remembered an amazing number of names.

Among the well-wishers, Gretchen didn’t recognize any of the girls she had gone to school with or had worked with at Boylan’s. But all of Rudolph’s schoolmates seemed to have turned out to see for themselves what their old friend had done and to congratulate him, some sincerely, some with all too obvious envy. By a curious trick of time, the men who came up to Rudolph with their wives and children, and said, “Remember me? We graduated in the same class?” seemed older, grosser, slower, than her unmarried, unimpeded brother. Success had put him in another generation, a slimmer, quicker, more elegant generation. Colin, too, she realized, seemed much younger than he was. The youth of winners.

“You seem to have the whole town here today,” Gretchen said.

“Just about,” Rudolph said. “I even heard that Teddy Boylan put in an appearance. We’ll probably bump into him.” Rudolph looked over at her carefully.

“Teddy Boylan,” she said flatly. “Is he still alive?”

“So the rumor goes,” Rudolph said. “I haven’t seen him for a long time, either.”

They walked on, a small, momentary chill between them. “Wait a minute for me here,” Rudolph said. “I want to talk to the band leader. They’re not playing enough of the old standards.”

“He sure likes to keep everything under control, doesn’t he?” Gretchen said to Johnny, as she watched Rudolph hurry toward the bandstand, followed, as ever, by Miss Prescott.

When Rudolph came back to them, the band was playing “Happy Days Are Here Again,” and he had a couple in tow, a slender, very pretty blonde girl in a crisp, white-linen dress, and a balding, sweating man somewhat older than Rudolph, wearing a wrinkled seersucker suit. Gretchen was sure she had seen the man somewhere before, but for the moment she couldn’t place him.

“This is Virginia Calderwood, Gretchen,” Rudolph said. “The boss’s youngest. I’ve told her all about you.”

Miss Calderwood smiled shyly. “He has, indeed, Mrs. Burke.”

“And you remember Bradford Knight, don’t you?” Rudolph asked.

“I drank you dry the night of the graduation party in New York,” Bradford said.

She remembered then, the ex-sergeant with the Oklahoma accent, hunting girls in the apartment in the Village. The accent seemed to have been toned down somewhat and it was too bad he was losing his hair. She remembered now that Rudolph had coaxed him to come back to Whitby a few years ago and was grooming him to be an assistant manager. Rudolph liked him, she knew, although looking at the man she couldn’t tell just why. Rudolph had told her he was shrewd, behind his Rotarian front, and was wonderful at getting along with people while carrying out instructions to the letter.

“Of course, I remember you, Brad,” Gretchen said. “I hear you’re invaluable.”

“I blush, ma’am,” Knight said.

“We’re all invaluable,” Rudolph said.

“No,” the girl said. She spoke seriously, keeping her eyes fixed, in a way that Gretchen recognized, on Rudolph.

They all laughed. Except for the girl. Poor thing, Gretchen thought. Better learn to look at another man that way.

“Where is your father?” Rudolph asked. “I want to introduce my sister to him.”

“He went home,” the girl said. “He got angry at something the Mayor said, because the Mayor kept talking about you and not about him.”

“I was born here,” Rudolph said lightly, “and the Mayor wants to take credit for it.”

“And he didn’t like her taking pictures of you all the time.” She gestured at Miss Prescott, who was focusing on the group from a few feet away.

“Hazards of the trade,” Johnny Heath said. “He’ll get over it.”

“You don’t know my father,” the girl said. “You’d better give him a ring later,” she said to Rudolph, “and calm him down.”

“I’ll give him a ring later,” Rudolph said, carelessly. “If I have the time. Say, we’re all going to have a drink in about an hour. Why don’t you two join us?”

“I can’t be seen in bars,” Virginia said. “You know that.”

“Okay,” Rudolph said. “We’ll have dinner instead. Brad, just wander around and break up anything that looks as if it’s getting rough. And later on, the kids’re bound to start dancing. Make them keep it clean, in a polite way.”

“I’ll insist on minuets,” Knight said. “Come on, Virginia, I’ll treat you to a free orange pop, courtesy of your father.”

Reluctantly, the girl allowed herself to be pulled away by Knight.

“He is not the man of her dreams,” Gretchen said, as they started walking again. “That’s plain.”

“Don’t tell Brad that,” Rudolph said. “He has visions of marrying into the family and starting an empire.”

“She’s nice,” Gretchen said.

“Nice enough,” said Rudolph. “Especially for a boss’s daughter.”

A heavy-set woman, rouged and eye-shadowed, wearing a turbanlike hat that made her look like something from a movie of the 1920s, stopped Rudolph, winking and working her mouth coquettishly. “Eh bien, mon cher Rudolph,” she said, her voice high with a desperate attempt at girlishness, “tu parles français toujours bien?”

Rudolph bowed gravely, taking his cue from the turban. “Bonjour, Mlle. Lenaut,” he said, “je suis très content de vous voir. May I present my sister, Mrs. Burke. And my friend, Mr. Heath.”

“Rudolph was the brightest pupil I ever taught,” Miss Lenaut said, rolling her eyes. “I was certain that he would rise in the world. It was plain in everything he did.”

“You are too kind,” Rudolph said, and they walked on. He grinned. “I used to write love letters to her when I was in her class. I never sent them. Pop once called her a French cunt and slapped her face.”

“I never heard that story,” Gretchen said.

“There’re a lot of stories you never heard.”

“Some evening,” she said, “you’ve got to sit down and tell me the history of the Jordaches.”

“Some evening,” Rudolph said.

“It must give you an awful lot of satisfaction,” Johnny said, “coming back to your old town on a day like this.”

Rudolph reflected for an instant. “It’s just another town,” he said offhandedly. “Let’s go look at the merchandise.”

He led them on a tour of the shops. Gretchen’s acquisitive instinct was, as Colin had once told her, subnormal, and the gigantic assembly of things to buy, that insensate flood of objects which streamed inexorably from the factories of America saddened her.

Everything, or almost everything that most depressed Gretchen about the age in which she lived, was crammed into this artfully rustic conglomeration of white buildings, and it was her brother, whom she loved, and who softly and modestly surveyed this concrete, material proof of his cunning, who had put it all together. When he told her the history of the Jordaches, she would reserve one chapter for herself.

After the shops, Rudolph showed them around the theater. A touring company from New York was to open that night in a comedy and a lighting rehearsal was in progress when they went into the auditorium. Here, old man Calderwood’s taste had not been the deciding factor. Dull-pink walls and deep-red plush on the chairs softened the clean severity of the interior lines of the building and Gretchen could tell, from the ease with which the director was getting complicated lighting cues, that no expense had been spared on the board backstage. For the first time in years she felt a pang of regret that she had given up the theater.

“It’s lovely, Rudy,” she said.

“I had to show you one thing of which you could approve,” he said quietly.

She reached out and touched his hand, begging forgiveness with the gesture for her unspoken criticism of the rest of his accomplishment.

“Finally,” he said. “we’re going to have six theaters like this around the country and we’re going to put on our own plays and run them at least two weeks in each place. That way each play will be guaranteed a run of three months at a minimum and we won’t have to depend upon anybody else. If Colin ever wants to put on a play for me …”

“I’m sure he’d love to work in a place like this,” Gretchen said. “He’s always grumbling about the old barns on Broadway. When he gets to New York I’ll bring him up to see it. Though maybe it’s not such a good idea …”

“Why not?” Rudolph asked.

“He sometimes gets into terrible fights with the people he works with.”

“He won’t fight with me,” Rudolph said confidently. He and Burke had liked each other from their first meeting. “I am deferential and respectful in the presence of artists. Now for that drink.”

Gretchen looked at her watch. “I’m afraid I’ll have to skip it. Colin’s calling me at the hotel at eight o’clock and he fumes if I’m not there when the phone rings. Johnny, do you mind if we leave now?”

“At your service, ma’am,” Johnny said.

Gretchen kissed Rudolph good-bye and left him in the theater, his face glowing in the light reflected from the stage, with Miss Prescott changing lenses and clicking away, pretty, agile, busy.

Johnny and Gretchen passed the bar going toward the car and she was glad they hadn’t gone in because she was sure that the man she glimpsed, in the dark interior, bent over a drink, was Teddy Boylan, and even after fifteen years she knew he had the power to disturb her. She didn’t want to be disturbed.