Establishment (37 page)

Now she tossed the script aside, rose, and kissed him lightly. “Dear Alex—what brings the mountain to Mahomet?”

“So now you're Mahomet? A small mountain I have always been. I'm here because you don't answer your telephone.”

“Because an unlisted number doesn't remain unlisted for ten minutes in this stupid place. Why don't you sit down instead of standing there and glaring at me? You make me feel more uncomfortable than my mother does, and that's going some.”

“Am I glaring?”

“You're glaring. Sit down.”

He was aware of the change in position. There was a point where it always happened, where the pupil became a star, and then the pupil became the master.

“Glaring is thinking,” he said. “I am thinking about the script on the floor over there. Expressive is when you're not acting too. You don't throw a script on the floor you have regard for.”

“Alex, I love you and I love your syntax. Don't be angry at me.”

“Have I ever been angry at you?”

“I can remember once or twice.”

“All right. So what about the script?”

“Do you remember what you said to me fifteen months ago when I came into your office after I sent you my screenplay? You said it stinks. This one stinks. It's a rotten screenplay. I could do better.”

He remained judiciously silent, thinking that the screenplay she had just thrown aside had an overwhelming male lead. He didn't have to remark on this; she was entirely aware of it.

“Well? No comment, Alex?”

“Comment? What's with a comment? We try something else. We find something you like.”

“You're angry.”

“I'm not angry, Sally.”

“I know you by now. When you sit like that without even crossing your legs, with your arms folded, you're angry.”

“I'm not angry. I'm unhappy. Where's Joe?”

“Oh, Alex,” she said with annoyance, “why don't you stop that shit and stop treating me like a little girl? You know damn well where Joe is. He's in the clinic where he always is, and at night he sleeps on a cot in his office, and if you think that makes me happy, you're crazy. And do you know how I know that you know where Joe is?”

“No, tell me,” he said mildly.

“Because Joe came here to see May Ling yesterday, and he told me the whole story about how you went over to Boyle Heights and tried to give him five thousand dollars for his clinic. He was burning. My God, Alex, that was a stupid thing to do!”

So a girl of twenty-three who I pick out of nowhere is telling me I'm stupid
, Hargasey thought.
Well, that's the way it happens. It happens.

“Why was it a stupid thing to do?” he asked. “Joe is doing something wonderful. So I appreciate what he's doing. I don't have a heart? I can't put some money there?”

“If you had thought twice about what you were doing, you would have known that Joe's first response would be to decide you were trying to buy him off.”

“Buy him off from what?”

“From me!”

“What? What are you telling me? Joe thinks we're having an affair? I don't play with children!” Hargasey's voice rose. “I won't even tolerate an insinuation to that end. You know me more than a year. Have I ever—”

Sally went over and put her arms around him. “Alex, stop that. I won't have a fight with you. Joe thinks I've turned into some kind of superbitch. I will not have you thinking that.” She stepped away from him, her pale eyes intense and angry. “He does not think I am having an affair with you because I told him I was not, and in no uncertain terms. I told him I was having an affair with no one. You know that! You know what kind of filthy gossip this industry feeds on. Has there been any gossip about me? Have you seen me make a play for anyone? Do you really think I want any of those pretty-boy, brainless studs? What do you think has happened to me? Don't you know? Can't you understand that when you pay someone who grew up on a farm in the Napa Valley half a million dollars in a period of fifteen months, it's going to do something to them? I'm not suffering. I love this. I love being a star. I love acting. I don't know whether I'm happy. There are times when I'm just miserable. But I'm always alive, and when I lived in that wretched little house at Silver Lake, I was never alive.”

Listening, watching her, Hargasey could only think of a performance. What a splendid performance! But that was the nature of it; that was why she was what she was.

“I don't want to divorce Joe,” she told him. “I don't want to. I love him. I've always loved him, since I was twelve years old. But he has this cursed poverty complex. And then, God help us all, I earned the money. If he had earned the money—well, I don't know. But for him to live in a house that I bought with my money—oh, no, he has his pride, that disgusting bullshit pride that goes with having a pair of balls. And don't look shocked, Alex. I was swearing just as eloquently before I ever met you and Paramount Pictures.”

“Can't you understand how Joe feels?”

“Alex, what is this to you? Why should you give a damn about what happens between Joe and me? Do you know anyone in this business who makes it and stays married to the one who was there first?”

“You think that's good?”

“I think it stinks. But what do I do? Tear up my contract with you? Burn down this house? Buy a house in Boyle Heights? I've been writing poetry. Does that surprise you? I've written over fifty poems this past year, and I'll have them published. It's a gesture of largesse on my publisher's part. They will pay me an advance of one hundred dollars, and over the next few years I'll earn another hundred. I am not going to get down on my knees to Joe and plead for forgiveness. What have I done?”

Hargasey sighed and spread his hands. “All right. This is something talking don't help and talking don't solve.” He took a script out of his jacket pocket. “I brought you another one. Girl in the French Resistance.” Sally's eyes widened. “Captured. German concentration camp. Escapes. Gives her life so the man she loves can live and dies with a German firing squad singing The ‘Marseillaise.'”

This time Sally did not dispute his syntax or remark on the ambiguity. She threw her arms around him and hugged him. “Alex, I adore you. You never heard me sing. I'm not great, but I'm all right. I mean, I do carry a tune.”

***

Judge Hampton Fremont telephoned Harvey Baxter and asked him to stop by his chambers at five o'clock that same afternoon.

“What do you suppose it is?” Kimmelman asked when Baxter told him about the call.

“God knows! Possibly he's heard something from the Appellate Division.”

“If he has, wouldn't it be unethical for him to tip you?”

“I don't think so.”

“How did he sound? Good? Bad? Depressed? You know he's rooting for Barbara.”

“I don't know, just said he wanted to see me.”

“You could have asked him whether it's good or bad news.”

“For heaven's sake, Boyd, you don't ask a judge a question like that. I'll go over there and then I'll know what he has to say. And don't say anything to Barbara. Don't get her hopes up or down.”

Fremont was pleasant but serious. “Sit down, Harvey,” he said. He finished signing some documents; then he looked up and stared at Baxter unhappily. “You lost,” he said. “The Court of Appeals upheld Judge Meadows. I just learned about it. You'll know officially tomorrow.”

Baxter nodded forlornly. “I was afraid of that.”

“I called you in to find out whether you intend to go to the Supreme Court?”

“Absolutely.”

“Good. Take the steps immediately, and we'll continue Mrs. Cohen at liberty. That may give you another six months. Not that the Supreme Court will hear your arguments. They'll never grant certiorari.”

“Why not? We have a tremendous issue here. It goes far beyond the question of a simple misdemeanor.”

“That's just it, Harvey. We've let these two lunatic committees drive us into the most ridiculous and obscene bind the federal courts ever fell into. Never in my memory has the issue of contempt been used to punish people of principle. Well, we've dug our own hole. You see, any challenge in these cases becomes a direct challenge to Congress' right to enforce its subpoenas. If the court hears one of these cases on a constitutional issue—and there are some—it faces a pretty predicament. If it decides for the government, it vitiates the Bill of Rights. If it decides for the defendant, it vitiates the power of Congress. Perfect horns of a perfect dilemma, and the answer is usually a denial of certiorari. But they'll brood over it and talk about it and examine their conscience, and that will take time, maybe three or four months, maybe a year if their calendar is heavy, and in that time who knows what can happen? We might even come to our senses, God willing. I hate to see that woman go to prison. It offends me, not only because she's Dan Lavette's daughter, but because she is something. So just hang in there, Harvey, and give it the full run.”

“You can count on that, your honor.”

“And remember that I'm here. There's not a great deal that I can do, but if worse comes to worst, I can ease it over some of the rough spots. I like that girl.”

“So do I,” Baxter said.

***

Barbara found herself unperturbed by the news. The telephone had rung while she was writing, and she found herself resenting the interruption. Harvey Baxter went into a long explanation, telling her that Judge Fremont was continuing her freedom on her own recognizance, that she was not to worry, and that he and Boyd Kimmelman were working on their brief for the Supreme Court.

“What on earth is certiorari?” she wanted to know.

“Just a fancy name for the Supreme Court's willingness to hear a case. If they grant certiorari, they will hear our plea.”

“Good. Carry on, Harvey,” she said almost indifferently.

Then she went back to work. The morning hours were best, and she treasured them. Sam had been entered in nursery school from nine to two in the afternoon, and that left the morning hours free. Barbara was well aware that she lived in two worlds: the specific, controlled world she created on blank sheets of paper, and the real world, uncontrolled and seemingly created by madmen. Fourteen years had gone by since she had begun to write as a professional, and she frequently felt that it was only because she could lose herself in this managed world of her own creation that she had been able to survive. Out of the real world, the day before, had come a letter from David Ben-Gurion, the prime minister of Israel.

“My dear Mrs. Cohen,” he wrote. “The sacrifice your husband made for our freedom has only now come to my attention. I realize that nothing I can say will lessen your grief. I am writing to tell you that we will never forget, and that his name, along with the names of so many others fallen in the struggle, will be enshrined not only on a monument to their memory but in our hearts as well.”

It was a small country. But in spite of the fact that the prime minister had signed the letter himself, it irritated her. She did not enjoy condolences. In her mind, she composed a reply which she never sent: “My dear Mr. Ben-Gurion, I know you bear no responsibility for my husband's death, but since you have written to me, I shall now tell you how I feel about the matter. I do not think that there is any such thing as a noble death, a heroic death, or a good death. I have lived most of my adult life around the sound and smell of war, and it is a smell that reeks of all the filth that man has created. Since I am a woman, I give myself the privilege of being an outsider. I stand at the rim of a lunatic asylum called civilization, and I listen to the obscenities of so-called leaders. I don't know why I am saying all this to you. God knows, the Jews have suffered enough. But my own suffering is very personal. I want my husband here beside me, and my husband is dead. Nothing will change that.”

Brooding after Harvey Baxter's telephone call, she wondered whether indeed the world in the pages she created could be different from the reality. It was not her nature to bog down on the problem of who she was and where she was going; she felt she knew exactly who she was, and sooner or later she would be going to prison; but the pages she wrote presented other problems, and the work came slowly and painfully.

But at least it's different
, she told herself.

At lunchtime she ate scrambled eggs and practiced her Spanish with Anna. After her years in France, Barbara spoke French like a native, but her Spanish was kitchen talk and no better. She had been trying to teach French to Sam, but he was more adept with the Spanish he picked up from Anna. The result was confusing, to say the least.

“I'll get Sam if you want me to,” Anna said, “if you want to go on working.”

“No. The work has become totally pointless, and when that happens, it's best to leave it alone for a while. I'll pick him up, and then we'll wander over to Grant Avenue, where my strange mother has rented space to open an art gallery.”

“But she had a gallery on Russian Hill.”

“Ah, no. That thing on Russian Hill was a museum. My mother is always a step ahead of the world, but it doesn't appear to catch up with her. She decided to establish a museum of modern art, but San Francisco never worked up any enthusiasm about it. The legend that we're really cultured is only a legend. Under the white collars and the umbrellas, we're still a frontier town. This project is actually a business, an art store, only when it's an art store, Anna, it's called a gallery. There never has been a truly fine gallery in town, but mother intends to change all that.”

Jean was changing it in a second-story floorthrough on Grant Avenue, just off California Street. Barbara entered with Sam, who wrinkled his nose at the smell of fresh paint and looked around in amazement. Dan, in jeans and a blue work shirt, was painting the walls dead white while Eloise, also in jeans, was working on a repainted Louis Quatorze chair, trying to remove the paint with sandpaper and solvent. Jean, who was preparing tea, welcomed them, hugged Sam, and informed them they were just in time to eat. “I want to paint like grandpa,” Sam demanded. Dan climbed down from his ladder and handed his paintbrush to Sam.