Two Weeks in Another Town Page 8

  “When he was young,” the Italian girl said, “when he made that picture, Mr. Delaney must have been full of excitement.”

  “And now?” Jack asked.

  “I have seen some of his other pictures.” The girl shrugged apologetically. “Not so full of excitement. More full of Hollywood, now. Am I wrong?”

  “I don’t know,” said Jack, thinking, I’m going to have a busy time here, I’m going to have to defend Maurice Delaney against everybody I meet in Rome. “I don’t go to the movies much any more.” Still, he looked at the girl with new interest. She wasn’t as senseless as she looked.

  “It was in Philadelphia before the war, in 1937,” Despière prompted him. “You were in a play…”

  Jack hesitated, annoyed at the way Despière made a social event out of his work, the way he liked to conduct his life before a constant feminine audience. “I don’t think the girls’d be interested,” he began.

  “Sure they would,” Despière said. “Wouldn’t you, girls?”

  “I’d love to hear about Philadelphia in 1937,” the sandy American girl said. “I was ten years old then. It was the best year of my life.” She smiled with dry, sad, unpleasant self-disgust.

  “And how old were you, cara mia?” Despière asked the Italian girl. “And where were you in 1937?”

  “Two,” she said, looking surprisingly shy. “And I was in San Sebastián, in Spain. If Mr. Royal—excuse me, Mr. Andrus—doesn’t want to tell us, it is impolite to push.”

  “I am a newspaperman, remember, Veronica,” Despière said. “For a newspaperman, to breathe is to push.”

  That’s no lie, Jack thought sourly. Veronica. That’s her name. Veronica. That’s the basic pass with the cape in a bullfight. San Sebastián, in Spain. He had a slippery, uncomfortable flicker of memory of the dream last night, and the link disturbed him.

  “I have a great idea, mes enfants,” Despière said, unwinding languidly from his chair and standing up. “We will all have lunch and exchange the secrets of our lives.”

  They all stood up, uncertainly. “If Mr. Andrus doesn’t object…” Veronica said, looking seriously, again with that unexpected youthful shyness, at Jack.

  “Of course not,” Jack said, giving in, thinking, Well, I have to eat lunch someplace.

  “Follow me,” Despière said, taking Veronica’s arm and starting off up the street. “I will take you to a place where there hasn’t been a tourist since the twelfth century.”

  Jack stayed behind to pay the bill. It was 1100 lire. With Miss Henken walking beside him, he followed Despière and Veronica, thinking, Well, the bastard’s figured out a way to get somebody else to buy his girl lunch, too.

  Miss Henken had a pleased, doubtful look on her face, the look of a girl who gets invited out to lunch only by accident.

  Jack watched the couple in front of him, Despière’s hand possessively on the girl’s arm, their laughter floating back across their shoulders, intimate, linked. The girl had marvelous legs, too, long and rosy in her high-heeled shoes, under the swinging beige coat, and, unreasonably, it made Jack more morose than ever. I bet they find an excuse to duck us after the coffee, he thought, savagely. For the afternoon session.

  “My God,” Miss Henken said flatly, gazing at the girl in front of her, “why couldn’t I have been born Italian?”

  Jack glanced at her with pity and revulsion. “She’ll be blowzy by the time she’s thirty,” he said, to support Miss Henken in the waste of her self-understanding.

  Miss Henken laughed drily and patted her poor flat breast. “Well, I’m thirty. I’d settle for that.”

  I have not come to Rome to comfort the rejects, Jack thought, hardening his heart, and kept quiet. But one thing he was sure of—he was going to make Despière pay for his own and Veronica’s lunch. If it was the only thing he accomplished all that day.

  It turned out that Despière was wrong about their having been no tourists since the twelfth century in the restaurant that he led them to. Sitting across the room from Jack and Despière and the two girls was a young couple, very clean and polite and quiet and American, who looked as though they were on their honeymoon. They were studying the menu very seriously and the bride looked up at the waiter standing in front of her and said, “I want something particularly Italian. Is an omelet particularly Italian?” and Jack would have liked to go over and kiss her pure, polite, earnest, beautiful American forehead.

  The restaurant was one of the standard ugly Roman restaurants, with the bay of Naples painted garishly on the walls and hideous modernistic lighting fixtures and high ceilings that played tricks with the voices of the diners and made it necessary to shout just to be heard across the table. Despière ordered spaghetti alle vongole for them all, because it was a specialty of the house, and the waiter put an open wide-lipped carafe of wine on the table and Despière said, “According to Jack, there are hidden beauties in Maurice Delaney’s character, and now he’s going to reveal them to us, so I can give a rounded picture of the great man to the world.”

  Jack began slowly, trying to remember the night more than twenty years ago, when he had met Delaney for the first time in the dressing room where Lawrence Myers and his girl, who was later to become his wife, were sitting in the harsh make-up light. It was after a performance during the tryout week in Philadelphia, and Myers and his girl were sitting side by side on a broken, mud-colored sofa while Jack wiped his face with cold cream and a stained towel at the mirror.

  “It was Myers’ first play,” Jack said, “and he was all excited, because the reviews’d been good and the audiences seemed to like it all right, and everybody kept saying that Harry Davies—he was playing the leading part—was going to be a star. He’s dead now, Davies,” Jack said. “Myers, too.” He stopped, wondering why he had felt he had to say that, what stones he was piling on the forlorn graves of those lost Americans by announcing their death on another continent. Myers seemed very alive to Jack that moment, as he spoke of him, the sallow, nervous boy in the shabby suit, sitting there next to the uneasy girl who looked like a governess on her day off and who loved Myers so ferociously that she made his life a cascade of hideous scenes of jealousy right up until the day he left the oxygen tent to die.

  “Myers had gotten friendly somewhere with Delaney and everybody knew Delaney was in the audience to see the show,” Jack went on. “Delaney had just made his first big, successful picture as a director, and he was back East on a holiday and he took the trouble to come down to Philadelphia to see the show and give Myers his opinion.”

  The waiter came with the food and while the fuss of service was being made at the table, Jack half closed his eyes and remembered what Delaney had looked like, gusting into the dressing room, twenty years younger, rough and confident, hoarse-voiced, carelessly dressed, but with an expensive camel’s-hair overcoat, and a floating cashmere scarf, like a banner, his face flushed and furious, his movements jerky with excessive vitality, as though nothing he could find to do in his life could tire him enough so that he could move at the rhythm of the people around him.

  “What he said was this,” Jack said, when the waiter had gone and they had begun to eat, “‘Forget the reviews, Myers, you’re a dead man. What do they know in Philadelphia? You’re going to get murdered in New York. Murdered!’”

  “That sounds like him.” Despière chuckled drily, his fork poised over his plate. “That sounds like my boy.”

  “He was being merciful,” Jack said, remembering how pale Myers had gone in the flat light of the dressing room and how the tears had started in his girl’s eyes. “Better know right off, better be prepared, than to go into New York hoping and have the hopes crash.”

  Jack saw Veronica nodding, understanding about false hopes, lying dreams.

  Miss Henken ate swiftly, secretly, as though she rarely got enough to eat, as though she were afraid that at any moment people would discover that there had been some mistake, that she had been invited by accident and she would be asked to
leave.

  “What other charming things did he say?” Despière asked.

  “Well, the producer and the director came in,” Jack went on, “because they wanted to hear what Delaney had to say, too, and Delaney turned on them and yelled, ‘You bringing this show to New York? What’s happening to the theatre? Haven’t the people in the theatre any honor any more? Haven’t they any respect, taste, decency, love for their bread and butter?’” Even now, Jack could hear the harsh, rasping, outraged voice in the crowded dressing room, could remember his own feeling, sitting there at the mirror, unnoticed in the riot of denunciation, admiring Delaney, because he, too, understood the failings of the play and despised the people around him who deceived themselves, out of weakness and sentimentality, about it. “‘When I first came to New York,’ Delaney shouted, and he was shaking his fist under the nose of the producer, and I thought he was going to hit him, ‘when I first came to New York, if a play wasn’t any better than this, we would take one look at it and flee to the mountains and leave the scenery to be burnt by the street-cleaning department. And now, today, Holy God, you have the indecency to stand there and tell me you’re going to bring it in! Shame! Shame!’”

  “What did the producer say?” Despière asked. “The producer said, ‘Mr. Delaney, I believe you’re drunk, and he ran out of the dressing room, with the director after him.” Jack chuckled, remembering that panicky flight so long ago.

  “See,” Veronica said, “I told you in those days he was full of excitement—Mr. Delaney.” She had been so interested in what Jack had been saying that she had forgotten to eat, and Jack was conscious all the time of her eyes fixed intently on his face as he spoke.

  “And what about that poor bastard of a writer?” Despière asked. “What did he do? Go out and jump into the river?”

  “No,” Jack said. “Delaney told him to forget this play. It was his first one, anyway, Delaney said, and most of the time, it was a good thing for a man if his first play failed. And Delaney told him how he’d hung around the theatre for seven years before he had any recognition at all and how he was kicked off his first two pictures right in the beginning of shooting. And he said, ‘Listen, kid, this one’s no good, but you’re a talented man, and you’re going to be all right, in the long run.’”

  Jack hesitated. Myers had been talented all right, but in the long run he had been unhappy and taken to the bottle and he had died at the age of thirty-three, but how was Delaney to know that that night in Philadelphia?

  “Then he asked Myers if he had any money and Myers laughed a little and said, ‘Sixty-five dollars,’ and Delaney told him he’d take him out to Hollywood with him right after the play opened, to write Delaney’s next picture, so that he’d have enough money to write another play. And he told him to avoid his friends and relatives on opening night in New York and to come and visit him in his hotel, so Myers wouldn’t have to talk about the play. And that’s what Myers and his girl did. The opening night was a disaster, with people walking out, starting in the middle of the first act, and Myers’ girl weeping in the back row. It was her birthday besides, and she’d got leave from her job in Stamford to celebrate with Myers, because, naturally, she didn’t believe Delaney, she thought the play was the greatest play since Hamlet, and everything was going so wrong. So Myers and his girl went over to Delaney’s hotel on Central Park South and they went up to his suite and he was alone, waiting for them, with a birthday cake with candles for the girl, and he took them down to the bar and got them a little drunk and told them not to read the reviews the next morning, because they could cripple a man forever, he said. Then he asked them where they planned to spend the night. Myers was living in a cold-water flat with two actors, and he couldn’t take his girl there, and she was supposed to stay the night with an uncle and aunt on Morningside Heights, and Delaney told them this was not a night for them to spend apart and he took them to the front desk and he told the clerk, ‘Listen, these’re two friends of mine. They’re not married and I want them to have a great room overlooking the park, high up, where it’s quiet and the breeze is fresh and where they can see the George Washington Bridge and Jersey from the window. And I want them to have everything this hotel has to offer. Let them send down for champagne and caviar and roast pheasant and put it all on my bill.’ Then he kissed them good night and told them they would have tickets for California on the Chief two days later and he left them alone.”

  Jack stopped, caught in the memory of those distant days which his own voice had evoked, those forgotten catastrophes, lost hopes, spent tears, that vigorous honesty, that rough, effective, human doctoring, that youthful belief. He hadn’t told them about himself at that time, either, about Delaney’s hiring him, too, almost casually, without compliments or duplicity, and he hadn’t told them about his own wife, his first wife, either, and how she hated Delaney and hated what Delaney meant to Jack. Well, that wasn’t part of the story and it wouldn’t fit into an article in a French magazine. “So,” Jack said, looking down at his plate, and beginning to eat again, “that’s what it was like in New York a hundred years ago, when I was young.”

  “If I was writing the article,” Veronica said, and Jack was conscious that she hadn’t moved her eyes from his face, “I would put it all in like that, every word, just the way he said it.”

  “What does it prove?” Despière shrugged. “That we were all better when we were young? Everybody know that.”

  “Maybe,” Veronica said, surprisingly, “that wouldn’t be such a bad thing to put in an article. Not such a bad thing at all.”

  “He was terrific with the ladies,” Miss Henken said, chewing away like a grazing spinster horse at her spaghetti and clams. “I heard. It was common gossip. He had them all. Put that in. That’s what people like to read.”

  “Listen to Felice,” Despière said gravely. “She has her finger on the public pulse.”

  “I bet,” Miss Henken said, looking with sandy-eyebrowed archness at Jack, “that when you were young, when you looked the way you did in the picture, I bet you had them all, too.”

  “I will draw up a list for you, Miss Henken,” Jack said, with distaste, “before I leave Rome.”

  “He’s a married man now,” Despière said, grinning, “and a pillar of government. Don’t disturb him with lascivious memories.”

  “I was just paying him a compliment,” Miss Henken said, aggrieved. “Can’t you even pay a man a compliment any more?”

  Jack caught Veronica’s eye, across the table, and Veronica smiled at him, swiftly, secretly, tilting her head. Why, Jack thought, surprised, she doesn’t think I look so bad even now.

  Despière, who missed nothing, caught the almost imperceptible interchange, and he leaned back in his chair, regarding them both, his heavy eyelids almost closed, deciding, Jack realized, how he was going to make the girl and Jack pay for the moment. “Be careful what you say to the man,” he said lazily. “His wife is famously jealous. Aside from being beautiful. She is so beautiful,” Despière went on, “that when Jack leaves town she becomes the most popular lady in Paris. By the way, Jack,” he said, “did I tell you? I got a call from Paris this morning from a lady and she said she saw your wife last night. Did I tell you?”

  “No,” said Jack, “you didn’t tell me.”

  “She was at L’Eléphant Blanc at three in the morning,” Despière said. “Dancing with a Greek. The lady didn’t know who he was, but he was very light of foot, she said. She said Hélène looked beautiful.”

  “I’m sure she did,” Jack said shortly.

  “They’re the happiest married couple I know,” Despière said to the girls, his revenge completed. “Aren’t you, Jack?”

  “I don’t know,” Jack said. “I don’t know all your other married friends.”

  “If there was any chance of success,” Despière said, “Hélène is just the sort of girl I would apply myself to. She herself is beautiful, and”—he nodded graciously at Jack—“her husband is amusing. It is too
boring to have an affair with a woman who has a dull husband. No matter how attractive she is, it never makes up for the hours you have to spend with him, pretending to be his friend.”

  Miss Henken laughed nervously, impressed by this boulevardier glimpse into a world where she would never be welcome, and Despière attacked his food happily, his triumph secure behind him.

  Before the coffee came, he looked at his watch and jumped up, saying, “I’ve got to leave you, children, I’ve got a date. We must have lunch together every day.” With a wave, he was away from the table. The proprietor came bustling over toward him and Despière put his arm around the man’s shoulders and walked to the door with him and the proprietor went outside with him to speed him on his way, while Jack sat glaring at their disappearing backs, annoyed with himself for being so slow and letting Despière get away without paying the bill, or at least his share of the bill. He looked suddenly at Veronica, to see how she was taking being left like that by Despière, but she was eating a pear happily, unmoved.

  Somewhere, Jack thought, I’ve gotten something all wrong.

  And then, a few minutes later, when they had finished their coffee, and Jack called, with bad grace, for the bill, the proprietor came over and said, smiling widely, that it had already been paid, that Signor Despière had said this lunch was on him, they were all his friends that afternoon.

  6

  OUTSIDE THE RESTAURANT, MISS Henken said she had to go to Cinecittà to ask about a job and they found a taxi for her and she went off with the expression on her face of a woman who always leaves every place alone.

  “Which way do you go?” Veronica asked, standing there, with her coat thrown back from her shoulders, in what Jack now recognized as a habitual attitude of self-display.

  “I’m walking back to my hotel. It’s not far from here.” Jack prepared to say good-bye and wondered if, out of politeness, he ought to ask for her telephone number. The hell with it, he decided, I wouldn’t use it.