An Idol for Others (6 page)

David leered. “I don’t think it’ll have much to do with luck in your case. I’m not making a pass at you, because I haven’t got time. I have to catch the train back to town in less than an hour. We better stick to business. You’ve heard of the Steelman School?”

“Sure.”

“I more or less run it, especially in summer. I need an assistant to take the load off my weary shoulders. I’m supposed to make the apprentices feel they’re getting their money’s worth by working their young asses off. I direct the shows that we don’t bring in from outside. I seduce the girls and some of the boys. Does that sound interesting?”

“The boys would be safe, as far as I’m concerned,” Walter said with a knowing smile. He was being offered a job. He mustn’t get flustered by the sophisticated trimmings. He wasn’t used to such open unorthodox references to sex.

“That sounds rather narrow-minded,” David said with a toss of his golden head, “but I’m sure it’ll add to the moral tone of the joint. I’m primarily interested in talent and ability, but I do like pretty faces around me. It’s rare that you find it all in one gorgeous package.”

“When do you want him–this assistant.” Walter managed to throw it in casually, but his heart beat with excitement.

“Not till summer. I might add that I’m not offering any pay. In your case, if it really makes a big difference to you, I’d be willing to give you a pittance out of my own pocket. You won’t have to sleep with me if you’re able to resist, but I like my assistant to at least
look
bedable. It gives people something to talk about. I know what a hard worker you are, and I know talent when I see it. Are you temperamental? Do you take orders easily?”

“I don’t know. Nobody around here gives me orders. I know more than they do.”

“I’m sure you do, but so do I. I’ll be your boss, and I like things done my way. You’re not really the assistant type. I might go so far as to say you’re slightly awe-inspiring. Will it work?”

“I know I still have a lot to learn, if that helps.”

“It should. You’ll have to come up and talk to Dick Steelman, but that’s just to make him feel that he’s my boss. When you come to town, I’ll ply you with champagne. No boys, eh? We shall see. How about another quick one before I run for my train?”

They had another quick one and talked about Walter’s qualifications in a flurry of David’s blatant sexual references.

Walking back to his room, Walter felt as if a whirlwind had swept though his life. David created such an intoxicating air of fun and excitement around him that the job seemed more part of a game than the enormous break it promised to be. It had been dangled before him so gaily that its importance was easy to overlook. In fact, it would bring him close to the big time, offer him invaluable contacts, give him an opportunity to seriously gauge what hopes he could permit himself in the fascinating world he had chosen for himself. David was a tonic he had been thirsting for.

The interview with Steelman would take place after the first of the year. Letters were exchanged in due course, and a date was fixed. He wasn’t nervous about the interview; David had made it clear that it was no more than a formality. David invited him to spend the night with him–the interview was set for late afternoon–but Walter made an excuse about school work. He had a drink with David afterward, and his job was confirmed. He returned to school in a state of high euphoria. He was practically a professional. David insisted on paying him $12 a week.

After that, David made a habit of sending him theater tickets, and Walter stopped swindling his parents. He also picked a quarrel with Debby and unloaded that burden. He was approaching real life. Debby had been left behind. David held the key to the future. They began to see each other regularly in the city. He was barely five years older than Walter and had been working since he was 17. He owed his start in large part to Richard Steelman’s infatuation with him. He had recently earned a college degree through part-time attendance at Columbia. His ambitions were purely commercial, with none of Walter’s high artistic and intellectual aspirations, but he listened to Walter and seemed to take him seriously. Genuine affection flourished between them.

The sexual jokes continued, but Walter had discovered a nice quality in David that made him feel sure that even if he made a serious pass and was turned down, there would be no unpleasantness.

As the scholastic year ended, Walter went home for a brief stay to repack his bags; and before his mother’s loud lamentations had stopped ringing in his ears, he found himself getting off a train on Long Island.

David was there to meet him in, appropriately, a station wagon. He was in full blaze, a glow of sun already on him, a gold chain around his neck added to the gold Walter was familiar with. His summer shirt and slacks revealed more of his body than Walter had seen before–a smooth, luxurious body, very sexy–even to Walter’s cautious eyes. His nose jutted, and his full, formless mouth was spread in a blinding smile. Getting into the car beside him stirred sexual associations in Walter that made his face burn and his mouth go dry with shame. Damn Harry.

“I have you in my clutches at last,” David exulted good-naturedly. “You’ll be amazed to learn that the only place I could find to put you is with me. We have separate rooms for appearance’s sake. We’ll see how long we stay in them.”

The theater was in East Cove, near East Hampton. David had been lent a great cottage on a large estate. The two drove through the burning early summer afternoon, turned into a drive lined with great trees and flowering shrubbery, then took another turn and stopped in front of a small frame house. “There. How’s that for a love nest?” David demanded.

“Marvelous. There’s just us here?”

“Curiously enough, that’s the way it turned out. Tomorrow it’s noses to the grindstone. Tonight I’m laying on a full-scale seduction scene. I’m taking you to dinner. There’ll be candlelight and wine. I’ll gaze hypnotically into your violet eyes. We’ll see who doesn’t like boys after that.”

They laughed together as they took possession of the house. There was a living room, separate bedrooms, and a bath. Within minutes Walter felt as if he had never lived anywhere else, or with anyone else. They had drinks outside on the edge of the lawn. He drank rarely, but he liked the worldly feeling of holding a glass.

“There’s a pool down there.” David indicated where the lawn sloped away to a clump of trees and a low roof. “We can use it. The Peabodys aren’t here. Somebody comes and fiddles around with it in the evening. Otherwise, we have the place to ourselves. Nobody will hear your screams of protest when I have my way with you.”

The seduction scene proceeded as scheduled, with the result David seemed to expect: They slept soundly in their respective rooms.

They were at the theater promptly the next morning. It was a handsomely converted barn set in trees. Behind it, discreetly removed from it, was a long derelict-looking building that was the dormitory and eating hall for the apprentices. The first show was coming as a touring package and was rehearsing in New York; none of the small resident company of actors was here yet. Walter was to take charge of the apprentices and get them organized.

He found them gathered in casual groupings in back of the theater. He called out names and tried to fix them to faces. Jerry, Bill, Malcolm, Philip, Betty, Anne, Helen, Clara, Jo, Marilyn. He realized that most of them were older than he.

They seemed amateurish–scrubbed, fresh-faced, patently the offspring of well-to-do parents. David had told him that one of the girls was a special case; she paid, but had spoken a line on Broadway and was a member of Equity. Clara Something? David had told him so many things.

He assigned them chores and took part in some of them himself. He knew how to build and paint sets and made himself useful to Oscar, the young designer. Walter’s attention was quickly caught by a tall girl with a regal bearing and arresting auburn hair. Her features were regular, her body graceful but not the sort to attract stares, and yet something about her set her apart from the others, who were merely pretty in a conventional way. He had told her to load handbills into the station wagon, and he watched her passing back and forth from the theater to the car. When this had happened several times, he put down his paintbrush and stood in front of her.

“Are you Clara?” he asked.

She looked him over before answering. “I’m Clara Washburn,” she said, her head lifted.

Walter suppressed a smile. The name struck a chord in his mind, but he didn’t immediately identify it. “I probably should’ve had one of the boys carry those,” he said. “Is there anything you’d like to do? How are you with a paintbrush?”

Her eyes challenged him and turned mocking. “I don’t have to do what you tell me, you know. I’m just helping out until I start rehearsing. You’re David Fiedler’s new boy.”

“Yes, his assistant.” Walter hoped he had said it in a way that concealed his indignation at the way she had phrased the statement. Was she suggesting that he was “bedable”? Had David already encouraged talk? He still feared the brand.

Clara uttered abrupt but not unfriendly laughter. “You’re living with him in that ghastly cottage of the Peabodys. They offered it to me, but I preferred something more convenient. I suppose you weren’t given much choice.”

“I like it,” Walter asserted. This girl demanded attack. He felt a hard masculinity in her that he was immediately determined to dominate. “Aren’t you staying over there in the dormitory?”

“Good heavens, no. I’m practically a member of the company. I’ve found a madly quaint little apartment over a garage, only ten minutes’ walk on the sea.”

“You walk on the sea? Sorry. That wasn’t worthy of me. When are you going to ask me over?”

“Oh, you’re one of those boys, all he-man and bluster.” She looked at him, with more challenge than mockery in her eyes now. “I’ll wait and see how much you count around here. If it looks as if it would annoy David, I might ask you soon.”

“You don’t like David?”

“I adore him. He just makes me feel competitive. I don’t see why he should have all the fun.”

“That’s fair enough. We could do something about it. Why don’t you have dinner with me as soon as I find out what my schedule is?”

She looked at him and said: “I do believe he might be civilized. How un-American. And those eyes. They’re violet, aren’t they? I hadn’t realized fauns have violet eyes, but what else could they be? Quite promising.” Her abrupt laughter rang out. He urged her to join him with a paintbrush, but she maintained that she had never been able to make paint stay in one place and went back to loading handbills.

He had never met a girl like her but felt he had got through the exchange in good array. He wasn’t sure that
attractive
was a word that would be applied to her, but she engaged his interest more compellingly than most people. Arresting. Spoiled. Difficult. She was all those things, and yet he liked her. The urge to dominate her remained in him. She challenged. He accepted the challenge. His impish smile played around his lips as he went back to work.

He stopped in mid stroke. Good lord. Could she be one of
those
Washburns? If so, he really was breaking into the great world. The Washburns owned most of one of the big cities of what he thought of as the West. Cleveland, was it? But their importance went far beyond that. Washburns had been founding museums, organizing scientific expeditions, sponsoring symphony orchestras and opera companies for several generations and not only in the city of their origin, wherever that was, but in New York as well. If she were one of those Washburns, she
was
the great world.

He watched for opportunities to make small contacts with her during the day, searching out the center of her appeal, her attraction, whatever it could be called. Her mouth was lively in a way he had never seen before. He found himself watching it to see what it was going to do next, although it did nothing that mouths don’t generally do. It spoke, it widened with laughter. It looked all the time as if it were about to gobble something up. There was something about the way the determined chin joined the neck that made him want to touch it. This was her only vulnerable area; the rest of her seemed unapproachable and inviolable as a priestess, or a queen.

One of the boy apprentices–Malcolm? Philip?–brought him the keys to the station wagon. “David says he’d like you to distribute the handbills so you can get to know the town. He says to take one of us to help. How about me?”

“Thanks. We’ll see.” He suspected that most if not all the boys were queer–or gay, Harry’s word–and had no intention of playing favorites with them. He gave a final swipe of the brush and went looking for Clara. He found her backstage with some other girls cleaning up the dressing rooms. He asked her to join him for the handbill job.

She made an impatient sound in her throat. “Oh, it’s all so boring. Think of something exciting and glamorous for us to do. I’ll be waiting.”

He took one of the other girls. By the end of the day, his amateurs had accomplished more than he had expected, and he had begun to feel like the leader of a team. David emerged, and they went across to the dining hall for an early supper with the others, but removed from them at the staff and company table. Clara had left.

“How’s it going, doll?” David inquired. “I have the impression that you’re not just a pretty face. You seem to’ve got everything organized very quickly.”

“The kids work better than I thought they would at first. They’re such a decorative lot.”

“A photograph comes with every application. I don’t supervise the selection for nothing.” David leered.

“What about Clara? Is she one of the Washburns?”

“The Snow Queen? I’ll say. An only daughter, the crown princess. She’s one of Steelman’s prize acquisitions. If she gives you any difficulties, roll over and wag your tail. Dick has designs on the Washburns.”

“I’m more likely to spank her. It’s what she needs.”

“If you think she’ll go for the rough stuff, don’t hesitate. This is her second summer. We don’t want her to get bored.”