Текст книги "Rich Man, Poor Man"

Автор книги: Irwin Shaw

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Текущая страница: 45 (всего у книги 53 страниц)

Chapter 5

1966

For a few minutes at a time, while she was working, Gretchen forgot that it was her fortieth birthday. She sat on the high steel stool in front of the moviola, pushing the levers, gazing intently into the glass screen. She ran film and sound track together, her hands in dirty white-cotton gloves, emulsion stained. The spoor of film. She made swift marks in soft red pencil, giving the strips to her assistant to splice and file. From adjacent cutting rooms on the floor in the building on Broadway, where other companies rented rooms, came scraps of voices, screeches, explosions, orchestral passages, and the shrill gabble as track was run backward at high speed. Engrossed in her own labor she hardly noticed the noise. It was part of the furniture of a cutting room, with the clacking machines, the distorted sounds, the round tins of film stacked on the shelves.

This was her third picture as a head cutter. Sam Corey had taught her well as his assistant and then, after praising her highly to directors and producers, had sent her off on her own, to get her first independent job. Skilled and imaginative, with no ambition to become a director herself that would arouse jealousy, she was in great demand and could pick and choose among the jobs offered her.

The picture she was working on now was being shot in New York and she found the city’s impersonal variety exhilarating after the inbred, ambiguously jovial, big-family atmosphere of Hollywood, where everybody lived in everyone else’s pocket. In her free hours she tried to continue with the political activities that had taken up a great deal of her time in Los Angeles since Colin’s death. With her assistant, Ida Cohen, she went to meetings where people made speeches about the war in Viet Nam and school busing. She signed dozens of petitions and tried to get the important people in the movie business to sign them, too. All this helped her assuage her sense of guilt about having given up her studies in California. Also, Billy was now of a draftable age, and the thought of her one son being killed in Viet Nam was intolerable to her. Ida had no sons but was even more intense about the meetings, demonstrations, and petitions than Gretchen. They both wore Ban the Bomb buttons on their blouses and on their coats.

When she wasn’t going to meetings in the evenings, Gretchen went as often as she could to the theater, with a renewed appetite for it, after the years of being away. Sometimes she went with Ida, a small, dowdy, shrewd woman of about her own age, with whom she had developed a steady friendship, sometimes she went with Evans Kinsella, the director of the picture, with whom she was having an affair, sometimes with Rudolph and Jean, when they were in town, or with one or another of the actors she met when she visited the locations on which they were shooting.

The images passed before her on the glass screen and she grimaced. The way Kinsella had done the shooting made it difficult to get the tone that she felt the sequence needed. If she couldn’t somehow correct it by more ingenious cutting, or if Kinsella himself couldn’t come up with some ideas on it, she knew that eventually the whole scene would have to be reshot.

She stopped for a cigarette. The film tins she and Ida used for ash trays were always brimming with butts. Here and there stood empty coffee containers, lipstick stained.

Forty years old, she thought, inhaling.

Nobody today had as yet congratulated her. With good reason. Although she had looked for a telegram, at least, in her box at the hotel, from Billy. There had been no telegram. She hadn’t told Ida, now rewinding long strips of film on spools out of a big canvas basket. Ida was past forty herself, why drive in another spike? And she certainly hadn’t told Evans. He was thirty-two. A forty-year-old woman did not remind a thirty-two-year-old lover of her birthday.

She thought of her dead mother, forty years ago today. First born, a girl, to a girl scarcely more than twenty herself. If Mary Pease Jordache had known that day what words were going to pass between herself and the new infant in her arms, what tears would she have shed? And Billy …?

The door opened and Evans Kinsella came in. He was wearing a white, belted raincoat over his corduroy slacks and red polo shirt and cashmere sweater. He made no sartorial concessions to New York. His raincoat was wet. She hadn’t looked out the window for hours and didn’t know it was raining.

“Hi, girls,” Evans said. He was a tall, thin man with tousled black hair and a blue-black beard that made him look as if he needed a shave at all times. His enemies said he looked like a wolf. Gretchen varied between thinking he was alertly handsome and Jewishly ugly, although he was not a Jew. Kinsella was his real name. He had been in analysis for three years. He had already made six pictures, three of which had been very successful. He was a lounger. As soon as he entered a room he leaned against something or sat on a desk, or if there were a couch handy lay down and put his feet up. He was wearing suede desert boots.

He kissed Ida on the cheek, then Gretchen. He had made one picture in Paris and had learned to kiss everybody there. The picture had been disastrous. “A foul day,” he said. He swung himself up on one of the high, metal cutting benches. He made a point of seeming at home wherever he was. “We got in two set-ups this morning and then the rains came. Just as well. Hazen was drunk by noon.” Richard Hazen was the male star of the picture. He was always drunk by noon. “How’s it going here?” Evans asked. “We ready to run?”

“Just about,” Gretchen said. She was sorry she hadn’t realized how late it was. She would have done something about her hair and put on fresh make-up to be ready for Evans. “Ida,” she said, “will you take the last sequence with you and tell Freddy to run it after the rushes?”

They went down the hall to the small projection room at the end of the corridor. Evans pinched her arm secretly. “Gretchen,” he said, “beautiful toiler in the vineyards.”

They sat in the darkened projection room and watched the rushes of the day before, the same scene, from different angles, done over and over again, that would one day, they hoped, be arranged into one harmonious flowing entity and be shown on huge screens in theaters throughout the world. As she watched, Gretchen thought again how Evans’ talent, kinky and oblique, showed in every foot of film he shot. She made mental notes of how she would make the first cut of the material. Richard Hazen had been drunk before noon yesterday, too, she saw. In two years nobody would give him a job.

“What do you think?” Evans asked, when the lights went up.

“You might as well quit every morning by one,” Gretchen said, “if Hazen’s working.”

“It shows, eh?” Evans was sitting slouched low in his chair, his legs over the back of the chair in front of him.

“It shows,” Gretchen said.

“I’ll talk to his agent.”

“Try talking to his bartender,” Gretchen said.

“Drink,” Evans said, “Kinsella’s curse. When drunk by others.”

The room went dark again and they watched the sequence Gretchen had been working on all day. Projected that way, it seemed even worse to Gretchen than it had been on the moviola. But when it was over and the lights went up again, Evans said, “Fine. I like it.”

Gretchen had known Evans for two years and had already done a picture with him before this one and she had come to recognize that he was too easily pleased with his own work. Somewhere in his analysis he had come to the conclusion that arrogance was good for his ego and it was dangerous to criticize him openly. “I’m not so sure,” Gretchen said. “I’d like to fiddle with it some more.”

“A waste of time,” Evans said. “I tell you it’s okay.”

Unlike most directors he was impatient in the cutting room and careless about details.

“I don’t know,” Gretchen said. “It seems to me to drag.”

“That’s just what I want right there,” Evans said. “I want it to drag.” He argued like a stubborn child.

“All those people going in and out of doors,” Gretchen persisted, “with those ominous shadows with nothing ominous happening …”

“Stop trying to make me into Colin Burke.” Evans stood up abruptly. “My name is Evans Kinsella, in case it slipped your mind, and Evans Kinsella it will remain. Please remember that.”

“Oh, stop being an infant,” Gretchen snapped at him. Sometimes the two functions she served for Evans became confused.

“Where’s my coat? Where did I leave my goddamn coat?” he said loudly.

“You left it in the cutting room.”

They went back to the cutting room together, Evans allowing her to carry the cans of film they had just run and which she picked up from the projectionist. Evans put on his coat, roughly. Ida was making out the sheet for the film they had handled that day. Evans started out of the door, then stopped and came back to Gretchen. “I had intended to ask you to have dinner with me and take in a movie,” he said. “Can you make it?” He smiled placatingly. He dreaded the thought of being disliked, even for a moment.

“I’m sorry,” Gretchen said. “My brother’s coming to pick me up. I’m going up to his place for the weekend.”

Evans looked forlorn. He was capable of sixty moods a minute. “I’m free as a bird this weekend. I’d hoped we could …” He looked over at Ida, as though he wished she were out of the room. Ida continued working stolidly on her sheets.

“I’ll be back Sunday night in time for dinner,” Gretchen said.

“Okay,” Evans said. “I suppose I’ll have to settle for that. Give my regards to your brother. And congratulate him for me.”

“For what?”

“Didn’t you see his picture in Look? He’s famous all over America. This week.”

“Oh, that,” Gretchen said. The magazine had run a piece under the title “Ten Political Hopefuls Under Forty,” and there had been two photographs of Rudolph, one with Jean in the living room of their house, one at his desk in the town hall. Rising fast in Republican councils, the article had said about handsome young Mayor with beautiful, rich young wife. Moderate liberal thinker, energetic administrator. Was not just another theoretical politician; had met a payroll all his life. Had streamlined town government, integrated housing, cracked down on industrial pollution, jailed former police chief and three patrolmen for accepting bribes, raised a bond issue for new schools; as influential trustee of Whitby University had been instrumental in making it a co-educational institution; far-seeing town-planner, had experimented with closing off center of town to traffic on Saturday afternoons and evenings so that people could stroll about in a neighborly fashion while they did their shopping; had used the Whitby Sentinel, of which he was the publisher, as a platform for hardhitting articles on honest government, both local and national, and had won awards for newspapers in cities of under fifty thousand population; had made a forceful speech at a convention of mayors in Atlantic City and had been enthusiastically applauded; had been invited to the White House for thirty minutes with a select committee of other mayors.

“Reading that piece,” Gretchen said, “you’d think he’s done everything but raise the dead in Whitby. It must have been written by a lady journalist who’s wildly in love with him. He knows how to turn on the charm, my brother.”

Evans laughed. “You don’t let emotional attachments cloud your opinions of your near and dear ones, do you?”

“I just hope my near and dear ones don’t believe all the gush people write about them.”

“The barb has found its mark, sweetie,” Evans said. “I now am going home to burn all my scrapbooks.” He kissed Ida good-bye first, then Gretchen, and said, “I’ll pick you up at your hotel at seven Sunday night.”

“I’ll be there,” Gretchen said.

“Out into the lonely night,” Evans said, as he left, pulling the belt of his white raincoat tight around his slim waist, young double agent playing his dangerous game in a low-budget movie.

Gretchen had an idea of just how lonely the night and the weekend were likely to be. He had two other mistresses in New York. That she knew of.

“I can never make up my mind,” Ida said, “whether he’s a jerk or a genius.”

“Neither,” Gretchen said and began putting the sequence that displeased her on the moviola again, to see if there was anything she could do with it.

Rudolph came into the cutting room at six-thirty, looking politically hopeful in a dark-blue raincoat and a beige cotton rain hat. Next door a train was going over a trestle on the sound track and farther down the hall an augmented orchestra was playing the 1812 Overture. Gretchen was rewinding the sequence she was working on and the dialogue was coming out in whistling, loud, incomprehensible gibberish.

“Holy man,” Rudolph said. “How can you stand it?”

“The sounds of honest labor,” Gretchen said. She finished rewinding and gave the spool to Ida. “Go home immediately,” she said to her. If you didn’t watch her, and if she didn’t have a meeting to go to, Ida would stay every night until ten or eleven o’clock, working. She dreaded leisure, Ida.

Rudolph didn’t say Happy Birthday when they went down in the elevator and out onto Broadway. Gretchen didn’t remind him. Rudolph carried the small valise Gretchen had packed in the morning for the weekend. It was still raining and there wasn’t a cab to be had, so they started walking in the direction of Park Avenue. It hadn’t been raining when she had come to work and she didn’t have an umbrella. She was soaked by the time they reached Sixth Avenue.

“This town,” Rudolph said, “needs ten thousand more taxis. It’s insane, what people will put up with to live in a city.”

“Energetic administrator,” Gretchen said. “Moderate liberal thinker, far-seeing town-planner.”

Rudolph laughed. “Oh, you read that article. What crap.” But she thought he sounded pleased.

They were on Fifty-second Street and the rain was coming down harder than ever. In front of Twenty-One he stopped her and said, “Let’s duck in here and have a drink. The doorman’ll get us a taxi later.”

Gretchen’s hair was lank with the rain and the backs of her stockings were splattered and she didn’t relish the idea of going into a place like Twenty-One looking bedraggled and wearing a Ban the Bomb button on her coat, but Rudolph was already pulling her to the door.

Inside, four or five different door guarders, hatcheck girls, managers, and head waiters said, “Good evening, Mr. Jordache,” and there was considerable handshaking. There was nothing much that Gretchen could do to repair the ruin of her hair and stockings, so she didn’t bother to go to the ladies’ room, but went into the bar with Rudolph. Because they weren’t having dinner, they didn’t ask for a table, but went to the far corner of the bar, which was empty. Near the entrance there were people grouped three deep, men with booming advertising and oil voices who almost certainly did not want to ban the bomb, and women who had obviously just come from Elizabeth Arden and who always found taxis. The lighting was low and artful and was designed to make it worthwhile for women to spend the afternoon getting their hair done and their faces massaged at Elizabeth Arden.

“This’ll destroy your reputation in this place,” Gretchen said. “Coming in with someone who looks the way I look tonight.”

“They’ve seen worse,” Rudolph said. “Much worse.”

“Thanks, brother.”

“I didn’t mean it the way it sounded,” Rudolph said. “Actually, you’re beautiful.”

She didn’t feel beautiful. She felt wet and shabby and old and tired and lonely and wounded. “This is my night for self-pity,” she said. “Pay no heed.”

“How’s Jean?” Gretchen asked. Jean had had a miscarriage with her second child and had taken it hard and the times Gretchen had seen her she had seemed remote and subdued, dropping suddenly out of conversations or getting up in the middle of a sentence and walking off into another room. She had quit her photography and when Gretchen had asked her once when she was going back to it she had merely shaken her head.

“Jean?” Rudolph said shortly. “She’s improving.”

A barman came up and Rudolph ordered a Scotch and Gretchen a martini.

Rudolph lifted his glass to her. “Happy birthday,” he said.

He had remembered. “Don’t be nice to me,” she said, “or I’ll cry.”

He took an oblong jeweler’s box from his pocket and put it on the bar in front of her. “Try it on for size,” he said.

She opened the box, which had Cartier inscribed on it. Inside was a beautiful gold watch. She took off the heavy steel watch she was wearing and clipped on the slim gold band. Time, jeweled and fleeing, exquisitely. The day’s one gift. She kissed Rudolph’s cheek, managed not to cry. I must make myself think better of him, she thought. She ordered another martini.

“What other loot did you get today?” Rudolph asked.

“Nothing.”

“Did Billy call?” He said it too casually.

“No.”

“I ran into him two days ago on the campus and reminded him,” Rudolph said.

“He’s awfully busy,” Gretchen said defensively.

“Maybe he resented my telling him about it and suggesting he call you,” Rudolph said. “He’s not too fond of his Uncle Rudolph.”

“He’s not too fond of anybody,” Gretchen said.

Billy had matriculated at Whitby because when he finished high school in California he said he wanted to go East to college. Gretchen had hoped he would go to UCLA or the University of Southern California, so that he could still live at home, but Billy had made it clear that he didn’t want to live at home any more. Although he was very intelligent, he didn’t work, and his marks weren’t good enough to get him into any of the prestige schools in the East. Gretchen had asked Rudolph to use his influence to have him accepted at Whitby. Billy’s letters were rare—sometimes she wouldn’t hear from him for two months at a time. And when they did come they were short and consisted mostly of lists of courses he was taking and projects for the summer holidays, always in the East. She had been working more than a month now in New York, just a few hours away from Whitby, but he hadn’t come down once. Until this weekend she had been too proud to go up to see him but she finally couldn’t bear it any longer.

“What is it with that kid?” Rudolph said.

“He’s making me suffer,” Gretchen said.

“What for?”

“For Evans. I tried to be as discreet as possible—Evans never stayed overnight at the house and I always came home to sleep, myself, and I never went on weekends with him, but, of course, Billy caught on right away and the freeze was on. Maybe women ought to have fits of melancholy when they have babies, not when they lose them.”

“He’ll get over it,” Rudolph said. “It’s a kid’s jealousy. That’s all.”

“I hope so. He despises Evans. He calls him a phoney.”

“Is he?”

Gretchen shrugged. “I don’t think so. He doesn’t measure up to Colin, but then, neither did I.”

“Don’t run yourself down,” Rudolph said gently.

“What better occupation could a lady find on her fortieth birthday?”

“You look thirty,” Rudolph said. “A beautiful, desirable thirty.”

“Dear brother.”

“Is Evans going to marry you?”

“In Hollywood,” Gretchen said, “successful directors of thirty-two don’t marry widows of forty, unless they’re famous or rich or both. And I’m neither.”

“Does he love you?”

“Who knows?”

“Do you love him?”

“Same answer. Who knows? I like to sleep with him, I like to work for him, I like to be attached to him. He fulfills me. I have to be attached to a man and feel useful to him and somehow Evans turned out to be the lucky man. If he asked me to marry him, I’d do it like a shot. But he won’t ask.”

“Happy days,” Rudolph said thoughtfully. “Finish your drink. We’d better be getting on. Jean’s waiting for us in the apartment.”

Gretchen looked at her watch. “It’s now exactly eighteen minutes past seven, according to Mr. Cartier.”

It was still raining outside, but a taxi drove up and a couple got out and the doorman protected Gretchen with a big umbrella as she ran for the cab. Outside Twenty-One, you’d never guess that the city needed ten thousand more taxis.

When Rudolph let them into the apartment, they heard the violent sound of metal on metal. Rudolph ran into the living room with Gretchen on his heels. Jean sat on the floor, in the middle of the room, with her legs spread apart, like a child playing with blocks. She had a hammer in her hand and she was methodically destroying a pile of cameras and lenses and camera equipment that lay between her knees. She was wearing a pair of slacks and a dirty sweater and her unwashed hair hung down, masking her face, as she bent over her work.

“Jean,” Rudolph said, “what the hell are you doing?”

Jean looked up, peering slyly through her hair. “His Honor the Mayor wants to know what his beautiful, rich young wife is doing. I’ll tell his Honor the Mayor what his beautiful, rich young wife is doing. She is making a junk pile.” Her speech was thick and she was drunk. Jean smashed the hammer down on a big wide-angle lens and splintered it.

Rudolph grabbed the hammer from her. She did not struggle. “His Honor the Mayor now has taken the hammer from his beautiful rich young wife’s hand,” Jean said. “Don’t worry, little junk pile. There are other hammers. You’ll grow up and one day you’ll be one of the biggest, most beautiful junk piles in the world and his Honor the Mayor will claim it as a public park for the citizens of Whitby.”

Still holding the hammer, Rudolph glanced over at Gretchen. There was a shamed, frightened look in his eyes. “Christ, Jean,” he said to his wife, “there’s at least five thousand dollars’ worth of stuff there.”

“Her Honor the Mayor’s wife doesn’t need cameras,” Jean said. “Let people take pictures of me. Let poor people take pictures. Talented people. Hoopla!” She made a spreading, gay ballet gesture with her arms. “Bring on the hammers. Rudy, darling, don’t you think you ought to give your beautiful rich young wife a drink?”

“You’ve had enough to drink.”

“Rudolph,” Gretchen said, “I’d better be off. We’re not going to Whitby tonight.”

“Beautiful Whitby,” Jean said. “Where the beautiful rich young wife of his Honor the Mayor smiles at Democrats and Republicans alike, where she opens charity bazaars and appears faithfully at her husband’s side at banquets and political meetings, where she is to be seen at Commencements and Fourth of July celebrations and the home games of the Whitby University football team and the dedication of new science laboratories and the ground-breaking ceremonies for housing projects with real toilets for colored folk.”

“Cut it out, Jean!” Rudolph said harshly.

“Really, I think I’d better go,” Gretchen said. “I’ll call you in …”

“Sister of his Honor the Mayor, what’s your rush to leave?” Jean said. “Who knows, one day he may need your vote. Stay and we’ll have a nice cosy little family drink. Maybe if you play your cards right, he may even marry you. Stay and listen. It may be in … instructive.” She stumbled on the word. “How to be an appendage, in a hundred easy lessons. I’m having visiting cards printed up. Mrs. Rudolph Jordache, ex-career girl, now in the appendage business. One of the ten most hopeful appendages in the United States. Parasitism and hypocrisy a specialty. Courses given in appendaging.” She giggled. “Any true-blue American girl guaranteed a diploma.”

Rudolph didn’t try to stop Gretchen as she went out of the room and into the hallway, leaving him standing in his raincoat, the hammer in his hand, staring down at his drunken wife.

The elevator door opened directly into the apartment and Gretchen had to wait in the hallway and she heard Jean say, in a childish, aggrieved voice, “People are always taking away my hammers,” before the elevator door opened and she could flee.

When she got back to the Algonquin she called Evans’s hotel, but there was no answer from his apartment. She left a message with the operator that Mrs. Burke had not left for the weekend and could be reached all night at her hotel. Then she took a hot bath and changed her clothes and went down to the hotel dining room and had dinner.

Rudolph called at nine the next morning. She was alone. Evans hadn’t called. Rudolph said that Jean had gone to sleep after Gretchen had left and had been contrite and ashamed when she woke up and was all right now and they were going to Whitby after all and they’d wait for Gretchen in the apartment.

“You’re sure you don’t think it’s wiser to spend the day alone with her?” Gretchen asked.

“It’s better when we’re not alone,” Rudolph said. “You left your bag here, in case you think you’ve lost it.”

“I remember,” Gretchen said. “I’ll be up at your place by ten.”

As she dressed she puzzled over the scene the night before and remembered Jean’s less violent, but almost equally strange behavior at other times. Now it all added up. She had managed to hide it from Gretchen until now, because Gretchen hadn’t seen her all that often. But it was plain now—Jean was an alcoholic. Gretchen wondered if Rudolph realized it, and what he was going to do about it.

By a quarter to ten Evans hadn’t called, and Gretchen went down in the elevator and into the sun of Forty-fourth Street, a slender, tall woman, with fine legs, her hair soft and black, her skin unblemished and pale, her tweed suit and jersey blouse exactly right for a gracious country weekend. Only the Ban the Bomb button, worn like a brooch on the well-tailored lapel, might indicate to the passerby that not everything was as it seemed on that sunny American spring morning of 1966.

The debris of the cameras had been cleared away from the living room. Rudolph and Jean were listening to a Mozart piano concerto on the radio when Gretchen came in. Rudolph seemed unruffled and although Jean was pale and a little shaky when she stood up to kiss Gretchen hello, she, too, seemed to have recovered from the night before. She gave Gretchen a quick glance, that perhaps asked for pity and understanding, but after that, in her normal, quick, low-timbred voice, with a hint of gaiety that didn’t seem forced, she said, “Gretchen, don’t you look smashing in that suit. And tell me where I can get one of those buttons. The color goes with my eyes.”

“Yes,” Rudolph said. “I’m sure it’ll make a big hit the next time we have to go down to Washington.” But his voice was tender and he laughed, relaxed.

Jean held his hand, like a child on an outing with a father, as they went downstairs and waited for the man from the garage to bring the car. Her hair was washed and shone chestnut brown, and she had it tied in back with a bow and she was wearing a very short skirt. Her legs, without stockings, were lovely, slender, straight, and already tanned. As usual, she looked no more than eighteen.

While they were waiting for the car, Rudolph said to Gretchen, “I called my secretary and told her to get in touch with Billy and tell him we were expecting him for lunch at our place.”

“Thank you, Rudy,” Gretchen said. She hadn’t seen Billy in so long that for their first meeting it would be much better if there were others around.

When the car came, the two women sat in front with Rudolph. He turned on the radio. Mozart, unworried and spring-like, accompanied them as far as the Bronx.

They drove through dogwood and tulips and skirted fields where men and boys were playing baseball. Mozart gave way to Loesser on the radio, and Ray Bolger sang, irresistibly, “Once in love with Amy, Always in love with Amy,” and Jean sang along with the radio, in a low, true, sweet voice. They all remembered Bolger in the show and how much pleasure he had given them. By the time they reached the farmhouse in Whitby, where the first twilight-colored lilacs were budding in the garden, the night before was almost as if it had never happened. Almost.

Enid, now two, blonde and round, was waiting for them. She leaped at her mother and they embraced and kissed each other again and again. Rudolph carried Gretchen’s bag as he and Gretchen went up the stairs to the guest room. The room was crisp and sparkling, full of flowers.

Rudolph put her bag down and said, “I think you have everything you need.”

“Rudy,” Gretchen said, keeping her voice low, “we ought to skip drinks today.”

“Why?” He sounded surprised.

“You mustn’t tempt her. Jean. Even if she doesn’t take any herself—seeing others drink …”

“Oh,” Rudolph said negligently, “I wouldn’t worry about that. She was just a little upset last night …”

“She’s an alcoholic, Rudy,” Gretchen said gently.

Rudolph made a dismissive, light gesture. “You’re being melodramatic,” he said. “It’s not like you. Every once in a while she goes on a little bender, that’s all. Even as you and I.”

“Not even as you and I,” Gretchen said. “She shouldn’t touch one drop. Not even a sip of beer. And as much as possible, she should be kept away from people who drink. Rudy, I know. Hollywood is full of women like her. In the beginning stages, like her, and in later stages, horrible stages, the way she’s liable to be. You’ve got to protect her.”

“Nobody can say I don’t protect her.” There was a thin edge of anger in his voice.

“Rudy, lock up every bottle of liquor in this house,” Gretchen said.

“Calm yourself,” Rudolph said. “This isn’t Hollywood.”

The phone was ringing downstairs and then Jean called up and said, “Gretchen, it’s Billy, for you. Down here.”

“Please listen to me,” Gretchen said.

“Go talk to your son,” Rudolph said coldly.

On the phone, Billy’s voice was very grown-up. “Hello, Mother. It’s wonderful that you could come up.” He had begun calling her Mother when Evans had appeared on the scene. Before that it had been Mummy. She had thought it childish for a boy as big and as old as he, but now, on the phone, she longed for the Mummy. “Say, I’m awfully sorry,” Billy said. “Will you make my excuses to Rudolph? He invited me to come to lunch, but there’s a softball game on here at one o’clock and I’m pitching, so I’m afraid I’ll have to ask for a raincheck.”

“Yes,” Gretchen said. “I’ll make your excuses. When will I see you?”