The Englishman's Boy (36 page)

She bites her lip, throws a nervous glance to the locked door. “Him.”

“Fitz? The man who dragged you into the room downstairs?”

“He came to Mrs. Kirkland’s and hired us all. For the night.”

“Mrs. Kirkland’s?”

“You haven’t heard of Mrs. Kirkland’s?” She can scarcely believe my ignorance. “It’s the deluxest establishment in the city. Mrs. Kirkland says everybody dreams of making love to a movie star. I thought everybody had heard of Mrs. Kirkland’s.”

“Sit down.”

“Very deluxe,” she repeats, still standing. “We have a splendid piano player, you should come just to hear him. He plays all the latest tunes. Daddy would die if he knew – the piano player’s a Negro.”

“How the hell old are you?”

My question pleases her. “How old do you think I am?”

“You look fifteen.”

“Just like Miss Gish,” she says proudly. “She played a fifteen-year-old girl in
Broken Blossoms.
That’s where I got the idea for my costume, from
Broken Blossoms.”
She touches her skirt. “Do you like it?”

I say nothing. She falls back on the bed in an artless, maladroit pose of abandon. “Are you ready?”

“No.”

She sits up, a picture of concern. “Why? Because of your leg? I saw you limping. Does your leg hurt?”

“Not because of my leg. That was hurt a long time ago.”

“Poor baby, how did you hurt it?”

I don’t explain.

“It wouldn’t hurt if I sat on your knee, would it? Let me sit on your knee.”

“Please don’t.”

She is standing over me. With one deft movement she hikes her skirts, straddles one of my thighs. There is nothing to her, it is as if a cat bounded up and settled down on my leg. She throws her arms around my neck. I try to pry her off but her arms tighten, she lowers her face to mine, the tiny lips part slightly. With solemn fervour, she says, “Miss Lillian isn’t wearing underpants tonight.” She slides back and forth against my leg, rubbing like a cat. “That feels nice. Ever so nice.” Large eyes dizzy me. She lifts her hips, takes my hand and slips it between her legs. “When you’re fifteen you’d like somebody to touch it – but that’s wicked. You’d like to show it to somebody – but that’s even wickeder. Shall I show it to you?” she whispers, breath warm on my throat.

“No,” I say, choking on the lie.

She nestles her head into the hollow of my neck and shoulder. “Let me take you out,” she says. “Please. I feel so wicked.”

When her hand fumbles at my fly I catch her wrist and twist it away. Her face writhes. “You’re hurting me,” she says.

“This is over. Get off me. Now.”

“Please,” she says, “you have to let me do it. He paid.”

“I buy my own whores.”

She shudders, the porcelain face cracks, I feel the doll’s body go limp. “Why do you want to get me in trouble? Can’t you be nice? He warned me. He said if I didn’t, too bad for me. I know he means it. Look what he did already.” She holds up her arm. There are bruises left by Fitz’s fingers. “I had to let him take a pair of nail scissors and trim me. So I’d look fifteen, he said. He laughed, the son of a bitch. Couldn’t you feel how he trimmed me?” She clutches at me desperately, begins to squirm in a mechanically provocative way. It feels like despair.

I shake her. “Stop it!”

She freezes, fine hair fallen loose about her shoulders.

There’s a sharp rap at the door. “Harry! Harry!” It’s Chance. I shove Miss Gish off my lap. She staggers backward, eyes running wildly round the room, rabbit seeking a bolt-hole. “Get on the bed,” I hiss. “On the bed. Throw up your skirts.” She clambers up on the bed and does as she is told. I get a glimpse of Fitz’s handiwork before facing the door and calling out, “Just a minute, Mr. Chance.” I unbuckle, my belt and then unlock the door. Chance peers impassively over my shoulder into the room as I ostentatiously do myself up.

“Satisfactory?”

“Yes,” I say, stepping into the hallway and pulling the door closed on Miss Gish.

“I wish I could say the same of this. I went directly to the ending and skimmed it – it’s an abomination. Dreadful.” His tone is aggrieved, hurt.

“Well,” I say, taken aback, stumbling, “it’s only a first draft, Mr. Chance. A rough approximation –”

He cuts my explanation short. “I thought you were a man worthy of opening my mind to, a man with the intelligence to understand what is at stake in this enterprise. And then you give me this –” He breaks off. “The girl,” he says sharply, “the business with the girl just won’t do. It misses the point completely.”

What is the point? “But I wrote it exactly as McAdoo described it – at least as much of it as the audience could stomach and we could get past Hays’s people. I assumed it wasn’t possible to go any further.”

“Yes, you wrote it
exactly
as McAdoo described it. But where is the artistic intuition? You’ve assembled the facts like a stock boy stacking cans on a shelf. You must reach beyond that. The last scene, the most important scene in the picture, is all wrong. Disastrously wrong,” he pronounces contemptuously.

I scramble to apologize. “I realize it isn’t as good as it should be. I want to make it better. Please, just tell me what’s wrong and I’ll do my best, make every effort to fix it.”

“Wrong?” His eyebrows lift. “The psychology is all wrong. Absolutely wrong.”

This only confuses me more. “Psychology?”

“I want the girl to start the fire,” he states. “Surely you see she must start the fire.”

“The girl?” I say, stupidly.

His severity relents a little in the face of my obvious bewilderment. Assuming the manner of a kindly, patient teacher he begins to lead me through the lesson, step by step. “What the picture must convey, Harry, is the psychology of the defeated. And what is this psychology? A diseased resentment,” he says implacably. “The sick hate the healthy. The defeated hate the victor. The inferior
always
resent the superior. They sicken with resentment, they brood, fantasize revenge, plot. They attempt to turn everything on its head; try to impose feelings of guilt on the healthy and the strong. But our film will not fall into that trap. Our film will be a celebration of spiritual and physical strength.”

My mind, confused, clumsy, doesn’t really believe it can be following what he means to say.

Chance smiles persuasively. “The resentment of the weak is a terrible thing, Harry. The inferior always refuse the judgements of nature and history. They are a danger to the strong and to themselves. Resentment blinds them to reality, blinds them even to their own self-interest.”

“Self-interest? I don’t know what you mean.”

“The judgements of nature and history are impersonal,” Chance says calmly. “But the weak refuse to accept them. Think of all those quixotic lost causes of history. The Jews furnish a perfect example. All those futile, petulant rebellions against the Romans. A sick resentment drove them to become the authors of their own destruction.”

I stare at him dumfounded. Suddenly my face is hot, my belly cold.

“That is how we must present the girl,” he says. “I envision her as a sort of Indian Samson. To destroy his captors he pulled down the temple on his own head. If she were to set fire to the building, that would be entirely in keeping – psychologically speaking – with the point we must make.”

“Which is?” I can hear an undercurrent of challenge in my voice. The private falling back on what the army calls dumb insolence.

Chance doesn’t notice. He’s too absorbed in his lesson. “That the Indian tribes, like the Jewish tribes, would not face facts. Think of the Sioux uprising at Wounded Knee. No different than the suicidal Jews at Masada. But let us not be sentimental about what they brought down upon themselves. The weak wish the strong to be sentimental because they know it undermines their strength. But in the world we face at this moment, we must keep strong. Only the strong will survive.”

“But the girl didn’t set fire to the post,” I say stubbornly, clinging to the irrefutability of fact.

Chance’s mouth twists with impatience. “Don’t be wilfully obtuse,” he says angrily. “I have explained to you. This picture is about psychological truth, poetic truth. Poetic truth is not journalism.”

“But it’s not a lie either. It can’t be a –”

He cuts me off brutally. “This discussion is at an end.” And he walks away from me. Doesn’t let me finish. I start after him, determined to have my say. Down the hallway he strides, fists clenching and unclenching at his sides.

“Mr. Chance!” I shout.

Down the staircase he goes, feet quick on the steps, nimble despite his stoutness, fleeing me as I clump awkwardly in pursuit. He rushes past the costumed girls and Fitz’s friends in garish suits who greet him with drunken familiarity. One room and another room and suddenly there is nowhere further for him to fly, we’ve washed up in the chamber with the French doors overlooking the garden, the room with the single hardback chair placed like an altar under a cut-glass electric chandelier. Chance halts under this fixture, stands bathed in harsh, stunning light which fractures his shadow into a spiky asterisk on the marble floor.

Now I have him cornered, everything I meant to say suddenly evaporates. The best I can manage is, “Mr. Chance, I did as you told me. I wrote the facts.”

This claim only agitates him. He begins to pace the marble floor,
flexing and unflexing his fingers like an arthritic. “I spoke of the dangers we face and you refused to hear. In Italy, Europe brings forth a new man, with a new rallying cry.
‘Avanti.’
Advance!
‘Ne me frego.”
I don’t give a damn! The artists, the Futurists, anticipate. They carry pistols. The poet D’Annunzio leads an occupation force into Trieste. And we sleep.
I
lived abroad,
I
read the foreigner’s books,
I
listened to his music,
I
ate his food. But not as a tourist, no, not as a tourist. As a spy. Like Attila the Hun did when he was held hostage in Rome, I put my time to good use, I studied the enemy. Like a Hun seer I read the future in the scorched bones. I saw the danger in the bones of Europe scorched by the last war. Look at the Bolsheviks in Russia, hard men every one of them. The Asiatic brutality of the face of Lenin. And the Germans? Do we expect the Germans to lie down with the lambs? Never.” He rattles on, unstoppable. “The war to end all wars was a sham, a lie. Eighteen million dead – only the beginning. The League of Nations offers Sunday-school morality while the hard men gather outside our door.” He quits his pacing to confront me. “And the danger is not only outside America, but inside also. Two years ago Congress adopted a new immigration policy. Each European nation is allowed a quota of three per cent of the number of its nationals living in our country. But what of the millions we have already let in?” He moves to my side. “The only solution, Harry, is conversion. Convert the strangers with lightning! The way Luther was converted in the thunderstorm! The lightning of pictures! American pictures! Make the Sicilian living in New York American. Make the Pole living in Detroit American. Convert all those who can be converted – damn the rest!”

He stares at me intently. I want to look away, but don’t have the guts. His fierceness hypnotizes. “That is my argument with the Laemmles, the Mayers, the Goldwyns, the Warners, the Zukors,” he says. “The Jews will not convert. They are too full of resentment. They remain Jews first and always. For two thousand years they refused every overture. Whatever society, whatever country they inhabit, the worst of it sticks to their coats like a burr. The Russian Bolsheviks are all Jews. Like Trotsky. Trotsky commands the Red
Army, refines Russian brutality as only a Jew could. The Jew Laemmle carries Teutonic burrs to us on his dirty coat, German sentimentality and kitsch taken to new heights of vulgarity. And so on. The examples are endless.”

Somebody is fiddling with the volume of a gramophone, jazz spurting and sinking like the jet of an erratic fountain. My mind is jerking and starting, like the music. Rachel, I think. Walk away, I think. But a chilled fascination roots me to the spot. And fear. I’m frightened now. Of this strange, eerie house. Of Fitz and his brutal friends, crashing about upstairs. Of Chance. Say something, I think. But I don’t. And this is the thing that frightens me most.

Chance’s gaze sweeps the room. “Do you know something, Harry?” he says, suddenly subdued. “This is my favourite room, the room where I think, imagine. Here I imagine myself on a train, a train which carries me to every corner of America. I imagine myself speaking from the back of it, at every whistle-stop, to the heart of America. Because when you speak from the heart to other hearts – even imagined hearts – the truth slowly dawns on you. Then the lightning crackles in your mind, pictures flash … something profound, something original is born. You
see
what is really there.” His voice has sunk to a whisper, but it is a hot whisper, coals settling in a grate. “Turn out the light,” he whispers, rapt.

For the moment, his puppet, I do. A little starlight and cloud-swaddled moon steals into immediate darkness through the French doors. Chance clambers up on the waiting chair, sways, corrects his equilibrium, rises erect under the baubles of the chandelier, pale grapes glistening in the pale moonlight. The gramophone falls silent, someone is changing a record. In that moment everything freezes. So do I. “What I have to say gives me no pleasure,” he states. His voice, low and confidential, spreads like a soft carpet over the cold marble to every corner of the room. “My friends, I wish I did not see so clearly. I tell you, the age of the hard men is upon us. That is the
Zeitgeist.
The Italian mimics the Roman centurion. The German worships blood and iron. The Bolshevik murders the Czar and his children. They leave us no choice but to be hard too. Remember the
frontier – how savagery answered savagery? Picture the lonely cabin in the forest, the eyes watching from the trees, waiting for their opportunity. The lonely hunter on the plain, naked in his solitude. The children hatcheted in the corn patch, the mutilated man in the grass. The wife raped. The barn burning, the cattle slaughtered, the carrion crows descending. We did not fail that test.”