Moving On (108 page)

“Where is he?” she said. “What’s happened?” Then she heard his voice babbling from another room, and she stepped past her mother and there he was, in blue overalls, as merry and healthy as ever. She grabbed him up and kissed his neck and, holding him, went back to her mother.

“Thank god you’ve come,” Jeanette said. “I wanted to call but Garland didn’t want me to. He said you’d be back today.”

“What is it, mother? What is it? Is somebody dead?”

Jeanette sat down on a sofa shaking her head. “It’s Miri.”

Patsy was impatient. “Well, what? Is she dead or sick or in jail or pregnant or what?” When she said pregnant her mother’s blank pained face twisted and she began to cry.

“She’s pregnant,” she sobbed. Davey was twisting, trying to get to the floor, and Patsy squatted down and watched his blue bottom as he rapidly crawled into the other room.

Jeanette was sobbing so wrenchingly that Patsy could do nothing until she quieted. She sat by her on the couch and put her arms around her. Finally Jeanette grew calmer.

“Come on, dear. It’s not the end of the world,” Patsy said. “Where’s Daddy?”

“Oh, it is, it is,” Jeanette insisted.

“No. We’ll just have to get her back here where we can take care of her. Who’s the boy?”

It turned out they didn’t know. Indeed, they knew next to nothing. A daughter of an old family friend had seen Miri and reported that she was pregnant—that was all. They could not get her on the phone. Garland had started to go out and find her but had decided to wait for Patsy’s return. He came in an hour later, red-faced and not very coherent. He too regarded it as the end of the world and had been drinking heavily. It made Patsy angry. He had a reservation on a six o’clock flight to San Francisco. Once the facts were known to all and they had speculated fruitlessly about the possible father and what ought to be done, a silence fell over the room. Patsy was very angry at her sister for not having called, but then she had not been calling Miri and couldn’t really complain. But she was even angrier at her parents, an anger she tried hard to curb, because she felt sorry for them at the same time. It was plain that they were beaten. Their only plan was to find Miri and the boy and force them to marry. It was the only approach to such a problem that they knew. Even in her irritation with them Patsy kept away from stating some of the more awkward possibilities, such as that Miri might not know who the father was, or that he might be Negro, Arab, Chinese—there was really no telling. She decided that the first order of business was to block any confrontation between her parents and Miri. She had better go herself and find Miri and get the facts.

Once she made up her mind to go, she wasted no time. Garland surrendered his reservation with clear relief. “I guess it would be better if I stayed here to look after Mother,” he said, sighing.

“I think you two can use some mutual looking after,” Patsy said and left them and went to see Juanita. She got a report on Davey and took him out in her parents’ large sunny back yard and played with him for an hour and a half before she had to bathe and leave. While she was bathing she began to have apprehensions. Perhaps she was not up to the job she was taking on. She didn’t know California, and what she had read of the hippie scene made it seem rather different from the one camping weekend she had spent in Yosemite years before. But it was not really the thought of a strange city that scared her; it was the thought of a strange sister. They had never been the sort to exchange every confidence, but neither of them had supposed when Miri left for Stanford that such a time would elapse before they saw each other again. Miri had simply not come back, and Patsy couldn’t help wondering what sort of girl she would find when she found her.

In any case, as she packed, the desirability of some masculine help began to seem more and more clear. It occurred to her that while she was out there she might as well see Jim. It was absurd to go on allowing him to be a sort of floating man in her life. “You know,” she said, “maybe I ought to go see Jim first. If we can work something out he might come help me with Miri. If we can’t then I have an old friend in Los Angeles who might help. Let’s see if I can switch my flight.”

Her parents were cheered. They welcomed any effort toward reconciliation, on any front. The switching was no problem; the two flights left within minutes of each other, and in a very short time Patsy was flying west. It was a beautiful flight, with the sun setting just ahead of them for two and a half hours. Almost at once, it seemed, they were over the desert. Patsy had a seat by a window and looked down at the brown land and brown lakes and tiny towns whose names she didn’t know. She had a vague idea they must be flying over Lubbock and thought how strange it would be if Hank were still driving on one of the highways she was flying over. The only town the pilot mentioned by name was Las Vegas, and she was on the wrong side of the plane to see it. She had a gin and tonic for the sake of her nerves. The fields of clouds were made beautiful by the setting sun. She dozed for a little and awoke with a sense of pressure and a sense of disorientation. She felt very unprepared. Only a few hours before she had been in her bathrobe, being hugged, Hank’s arms around her and her back against his car, with the silent house and the clear morning and the still pastures around them. The sun that had risen while the two of them lay snugly in the bed had beaten her to the coast and dropped into the Pacific clouds. The land below was no longer bright with evening but was gray, sprinkled with faint lights, and soon, before she could clear her head, the plane had banked and was descending into the white smog of Los Angeles. Just before they landed she glimpsed a freeway below and rows of cars with their lights on.

As the plane taxied in among the strange smog-hidden terminals of the L.A. International and her fellow passengers gathered up purses and briefcases, Patsy became very oppressed by the hastiness of what she had done. The desire to keep her father in Dallas had wiped out her judgment, she felt. She had not called Jim, she had no hotel reservations, she didn’t know where Altadena was, or even where to find her luggage.

She found the latter with no real difficulty, but when she had carried her suitcase to a phone she found she could not call Jim. A course of action that had once been natural had become impossible. She had already put in her dime, but she could not imagine what she would say if she got Clara, so she got her dime back instead and stood for several minutes in a state of tense dejection. The longer she stood by the phone the less clear she felt about everything.

Finally she wrestled her suitcase into a locker and in a kind of torpor wandered into the main terminal and stood in a travelers’ shop looking at overpriced stuffed animals for Davey. She felt like going back to Texas and had to exert an effort of will to go check on flights to San Francisco, thinking she might as well go on there. But everybody wanted to go to San Francisco, it seemed. The length of the waiting line dejected her still more and in order to give it time to shrink she called Joe Percy. The sound of his voice saying hello was one of the most welcome sounds she had ever heard. It was amazing that one of the two people she knew in the whole city should be at home when she called. It was very cheering.

“Help,” she said. “Help, help, help. I’ve come to be a burden.”

“Why, Patsy Carpenter,” Joe said, with no surprise. “I knew you’d call if I sat by the phone long enough. I hope you’ve come to see me and not that fugitive husband of yours.”

“What do you know about him?”

“He buzzed me about a job. It was about the time Sonny got killed. I haven’t heard from him since, but I assume if you’re here he must be too.”

“He’s in someplace called Altadena. It’s a long story. Could you come and get me?”

“Not there,” Joe said. “It would take hours. What you should do is take a limo to the Ambassador. I’ll meet you there.”

“A what?”

“Limousine. And please plan to stay here. I have a nice guest room.”

“Okay,” she said, relieved. “Gee, I’m in Hollywood.”

“No, you’re at the airport,” he said. “Hollywood is another country.”

The fact of having found Joe cheered her up and she found her limo and squeezed in between two stone-silent businessmen. The lights and the speed and the heavy enclosing presences of the businessmen lulled her again; she felt already that she had slipped out of the normal stream of time and event. Anything was apt to happen. She rather expected the limousine to run all night through the freeways, for she had no idea how distant the hotel might be and the traffic around them was so fast and thick it was hard to imagine really getting out of it.

But when she arrived at the Ambassador, Joe Percy was there, having a conversation with one of the doormen. He came over and hugged her, and the businessmen hurrying to register bumped them with their briefcases.

A few hours later they were at his house and Patsy was drunk. Joe was apologetic, because he had helped her get drunk without meaning to. They had eaten at a quiet restaurant and he had had a natural number of drinks. Patsy was telling her story and had seemed to want a few drinks too, and he had let her have them, assuming she knew her capacity. When they finished eating and he saw she couldn’t walk straight he realized she had been drinking out of relief, or out of distress, and got her to his house, hoping she wouldn’t get sick. She was pale, and had cried a fair amount, and was talking around and around the same questions, which were when and how to give up a person one was married to, and how to know if a person one loved or liked was a good bet to marry. On the latter point Joe had no advice, but he did make it clear that he thought the time had come for her to give up on Jim. Patsy agreed, and soon came back to the question again, a little paler and a little sicker. Joe gauged it beautifully and got her to the bathroom just when she needed to be there. Then he put her to bed.

She slept, but not well. She didn’t want to have got drunk. Irritation with her own stupidity kept her awake. She felt too bad to move. She heard the sound of television from the other room, just loud enough that she could not stop hearing it and go to sleep. When she did finally sleep she had a vague fitful dream involving Hank and Roger’s ranch house. She felt weak and wretched when morning came, but was glad, nonetheless, that the night was over.

Joe Percy insisted that she get up and sit with him while he breakfasted. He made himself a good breakfast, but the sight of it did not please her. She sat in a chair across from him and sipped a little orange juice.

“I look awful,” she said. “It’s nothing to how I feel, though.”

“You look like you were drunk last night,” he said. “I didn’t know you couldn’t drink or I would have watched you better.”

“I can’t do anything like that,” she said. “I’m unsuited to all but the most basic wickedness. Even my milkshakes have to be vanilla.”

“About noon you’ll feel like living again,” he said.

“But I was supposed to do things! I was going to be brisk today. I was going to clear that girl out of Jim’s life and we were going to San Francisco to rescue my little sister from a bad end. That was the general plan.”

“You really want him back? I never thought you two were all that interested in one another.”

“We must have been at one time. We got married, didn’t we?”

Joe shrugged. He was wearing a light green pullover sweater and looked in top spirits.

“Maybe you stopped being, then.”

“I was raised not to accept reasons like that.”

Joe shrugged again. “Screw raisings,” he said. “You’ve got fifty-odd years to live.”

“I agree,” Patsy said. “I agree completely.” There were many windows in his house, some looking out on the bare brown shoulders of the Hollywood hills, but most looking out on the houses beyond and below. It seemed to be a sunny day, but the white smog diluted the sunlight and made it paler. The paleness made the outside look too cool and rather uninviting. She felt chilly even in her bathrobe.

“I know just the thing for you,” Joe said, “but unfortunately it will have to wait until lunch.”

“If it involves much action on my part it had better wait until lunch
tomorrow
.”

“No, today. You stay here and take it easy while I go work awhile.”

“What are you creating?”

“A TV script about a hippie who becomes a cop. It’s a shitty idea, but who knows?”

He left and she devoted the morning to recovery, most of it spent in the comfortable guest-room bed watching the hills outside her window become browner and more distinct as the sun burned through the smog. She read the L.A.
Times
and an issue of
Variety
and recovered to the point of wanting coffee. She made some and wandered around the living room looking at Joe’s books and magazines. Most of the books in his bookcases were upside down for some reason, but a fair number of them were interesting books, once they were turned over.

On impulse she went and dialed Jim’s number and let it ring seven times, her heart pounding. Then she decided she was silly and took a hot bath. Since her general plan had been destroyed, she felt at a loss. She had no secondary plan, but her weak feeling went away, at least. She had not really drunk so much. When Joe came back she felt somewhat like seeing the town. They climbed in his Morgan and he took her at once to a mod dress shop on the Sunset Strip and insisted that she buy herself a wild dress. As he had predicted, it was just the thing for her spirits. She bought a short bright yellow dress, with no back at all, wondering all the while what possible occasion she could have to wear it. The shop was full of teenage girls, their hair as long and as beautifully kept as the manes of show ponies, and they glanced at her from time to time with a certain hostility, as if she were far too old to be in their dress shop. Joe Percy they regarded with frank contempt, and he was relieved when Patsy finished and they could leave.

“Those kids looked at me as if I embodied the System,” he said. “Imagine it. Me embodying the System.”

“You embody more of it than they do,” Patsy said. They had lunch in a large dark-paneled restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard, and she had a chance to observe her escort closely. The closer she looked, the more she was inclined to feel that his high spirits were superficial. He looked tired. It made her feel odd, for she had just begun to feel good again. She had the strange feeling that she had somehow passed him her sorrow.