I Could Go on Singing (9 page)

As they walked he told her about the Serpentine, and John Rennie’s bridge, and the Ring, and the Tea House and the Powder Magazine, and the Kinsington Gardens wall. They sat on a bench. She was flushed with the exercise and the coolness of the air.

“Thanks for prying me loose, Jason. It’s good to … get away from there.”

“I wanted to be with you,” he said bluntly.

She gave him a wary glance and looked away. “Look at the women in those lovely robes, Jason.”

“Saris.”

“When was the first time you were in London?”

“A long time ago.”

She made a face at him. “You’re truly ancient, aren’t you?”

“Compared to then, yes. I was a fearless warrior, aged nineteen. Company clerk in an infantry company because I knew how to type. Got here four months before D-Day. Intensive training. The company landed at Omaha Beach, but Fearless Warrior was in a hospital thirty miles from London. I was looking at the sky and walked into a ditch and broke my leg. And while I was in the hospital I caught the measles.”

She laughed. “Poor Jason. I was thirteen on D-Day. And I had a lot of excitement too. I stole a negative of my big sister in a bathing suit and had scads of copies made and sent them to soldiers and sailors and marines, with letters pledging undying love and devotion. I loved them all, really and truly. I was safe while they were all overseas, but some of them got leave and came looking for me. I was as tall as I am now, and weighed about ninety-eight pounds including my braces. And I had a stammer and a horrible complexion. I was a disappointment to them. After I confessed, I had to come straight home from school for a month. No allowance. No movies. And even my little red radio was impounded.”

“I wanted to be with you,” he said again.

She flushed and said, “The thing that really has George edgy is the idea of what it will do to the Jenny Bowman image if this thing about the boy comes out. You see, so much of the image depends on warmth, Jason. And she is such a warm woman. But even I had to have it explained to me, how such a thing could be, giving away a child like that. He thinks it will make the public believe the whole business of the warmth is an act, always has been an act, that she is really a cold and selfish woman. He doesn’t see how it could ever be presented in such a way her public will forgive her.”

“It must not be found out.”

“But she’s being reckless. Coming here was reckless. Going to see the boy is very dangerous.”

“The doctor may have some sense.”

“But he took her to see the boy. Is that sensible? What
good
will it do?”

He reached and took her hand. She made one effort to pull free, and then let her hand remain passive in his. “Lois, I wanted to be with you.”

She looked out across the grassy park. “You’re with me,” she said in a toneless voice.

“Last night I …”

“Last night I was tired and lonely and vulnerable, Jason.”

“What I want to say, I wasn’t making a pass. Not in that sense of making a pass.”

She pulled her hand away. “That’s nice to know. That’s dandy. Three separate times today George has managed to let me know what a darling man you are. I think that’s a terribly sweet gesture on his part, don’t you?”

“Lois, I just want to …”

“Be my friend? Be my dear friend?” She stared at him, gray eyes frigid. “All righty. Be my friend then. Walk me around and be a guide book and share my little secretarial problems, but kindly leave it right there. Okay?”

“What are you scared of?”

Her lip curled in a rather unpleasant way. “Isn’t that sort of a cheap and obvious question, Jason? That could lead us into that dialogue you talked about last night. Oh me oh my, I’m scared of life, scared of love, scared of myself. And here you are, to cure all my silly fears. Nuts, Jason. Nothing in this world scares me.”

“Loneliness?”

Her smile was thin. “We can’t have everything, can we? Maybe I get a little lonely on rainy nights. But it just doesn’t rain that often. I need no help, my friend. No pillar of strength, thank you so much. You fell in love with Jenny when she was shattered. And your wife was … an inadequate. I’m sane and sound and whole and dandy, Jason. I’ll provide my own strength, when needed, thanks.”

He smiled at her. “You can lick any woman in the house.”

“Bring ’em on!” she said, blushing.

“We’ll take you to the Marble Arch on Sunday, Lois, and you can stand on a box and explain to the multitude why you don’t need anyone or anything.”

“Did I sound like that?”

“A little bit.”

“I’m sorry. It … it’s sort of a reflex, I guess. These past two years working for George. In this business a girl who won’t play becomes sort of a minor legend. A real challenge or something. So I come out swinging. A little too hard, maybe.”

“You win on a TKO in the first round, Miss Marney. I am a tiresome old party with a nervous stomach, a four-year-old
daughter, a few screen credits, too few friends, too many acquaintances, a long history of emotional ineptitude and romantic bungling, no reserve for contingencies, and a present assignment I don’t like and couldn’t avoid. But I like you, Miss Marney. You take wild swings without good reason, but I like the way you walk and the way you look, and I think I like the way your mind works. If I make any passes at all, they’ll be that tentative kind you can block with one elbow. If we can just think of them as unavoidable male reflexes, a sop to my pride and a concession to your attractiveness, we can ignore them and be pretty good friends.”

She frowned at him. “You’re strange,” she said. “You are either a very honest man or you are a terrible sneak.”

“Lois, my dear, were I a sneak, I would have been one hell of a lot more successful in the industry.”

She laughed abruptly. “Okay, Jason. When I was going to sleep last night I decided to chill you good. And ignore you henceforth. But we will be friends.”

They shook hands and got up. The sun was gone, the shadows heavy. They walked slowly back toward the distant lights of the traffic of Park Lane and Piccadilly. After several minutes of silence, Lois said, “You didn’t hurt her, did you?”

“Jenny? No.”

“Because we’re friends now, I can ask you a question like that without you taking it wrong, can’t I?”

“Of course.”

“She can be terribly difficult.”

“She was too beaten down to be difficult seven years ago. I was therapy. I didn’t know it at the time, of course. No more than she did. We thought it was forever. It was a very quiet thing with us, and intense. But now I can see other reasons why it wouldn’t have worked.”

“Like?”

“Her mind works in specifics. Specific emotions, wants, needs. Incident and anecdote. It’s a very mercurial mind. But any abstract conjecture, any kind of subjective thought makes her itchy and restless. And I’m always thinking of things which have no utility at all. Like a moment ago wondering why these British gentlemen furl their umbrellas so tightly, and why they refold their newspapers so carefully they look unread.”

“Why do they?”

“Well, for a guess, the effect of the population density
over such a long period, a necessity for neatness, for taking up a minimum of space, a kind of tidiness that relates to all the other more necessary kinds. See what I mean? You were instantly curious. Jenny couldn’t care less. So maybe we both have trivial minds.”

She chuckled. He asked her why she laughed. “I caught that one on my elbow,” she said.

“Was it a pass?”

“Of course.”

“Inadvertent, though.”

She looked at him, her face solemn in the dusk, owlish. “Oh, but those are the worst kind.”

When they walked into the lobby, a voice behind Jason said, “They’ll give almost anybody a passport these days.”

Jason turned and looked down into the bland and smiling face of Sam Dean. “We’re both astonished,” Jason said woodenly.

Sam bowed toward Lois. “Our startled chum has forgotten his manners, my dear. I am Sam Dean.”

“Miss Marney,” Jason said. “Miss Marney is …”

“Yes indeed,” Sam said. “I know. Kirby King mentioned you with a certain amount of heat and emphasis, my dear. In his circle you are known as the stone butterfly. May I say that I admire his taste and deplore his tactics.”

Lois looked nervous. “Mr. Dean, if we’d known you were in London, we would certainly have set up …”

“All arranged, my dear. I had a lovely drink with lovely George. I just got in today. From Athens. Incredible sunlight there. Skit and Marielana and Hobey are there, working on that ghastly television thing. Is Jenny booked into Athens? No? Too bad. George should arrange it, really. Why don’t you run along, my dear, while I have a nice chat with my old chum, Jason.”

She looked at Jason nervously. He nodded and she walked toward the elevators.

Sam Dean watched her, approvingly, and said, “Everyone seems so jumpy around here, Jason.”

“You make people jumpy, Sam. Everybody gets jumpy in the presence of an assassin.”

Sam Dean looked at him, momentarily startled, and then lifted his chin higher and laughed. It was a small thin squealing laugh. “You amuse me, dear boy. You know why you can afford to be impertinent? You’re too small a target. I’d look ridiculous, aiming a broadside at Jason Brown. People
would wonder who the hell I was talking about. Let’s find a drink in this tomb.”

Jason followed Sam Dean into the lounge. Dean was a small frail man. His shoulders were thick and broad, and he carried them high and slightly hunched. He had almost no neck at all, and carried his narrow head tilted in a way that gave him the look of a hunchback, though he was not deformed. In New York, Palm Springs, Vegas, London, Miami, Acapulco, he was always dressed exactly the same way, black suits, beautifully tailored, black knit ties, highly polished black shoes, black socks, gold accessories, fresh white gleaming shirt and handkerchief. The rims of his thick lenses were gold. His hair was dark, his face pale and narrow, his eyes dark. He was always freshly barbered, manicured, immaculate. The only touch of color was the heavy red sensuous mouth.

No one knew exactly where he came from. They said he started out as a movie reviewer on a Philadelphia paper. No one knew how old he was. His show business gossip column—“The Dean’s List”—was syndicated in over two hundred papers. It was fed and fattened by nervous press agents who complied with Sam Dean’s six-to-one ratio. If you fed him six useable extraneous items, then he would accept one which plugged a client. He seldom had to write anything for the column. He had a New York office where a small staff put it together. Once in a while Sam Dean would write the lead paragraphs for the column. His touch was unmistakable. What he wrote would sound very warm and tolerant and slightly heartbroken that a public figure should be betraying the trust of an adoring public by some sort of private vice or recklessness. The general tenor was an admonition to shape up, mend your ways, and all will be forgiven. The usual result was so much panic on the part of the purse-string people that Sam Dean’s target slid quickly into obscurity.

He was known in the entertainment world as The Hangman.

It was also generally known in the industry that Sam Dean owned the controlling interest in Century Celebrities, Inc. This was a small public relations firm which seemed to do a minimum of public relations work. But it had a long client list. People who became a little too vulnerable seemed to learn that if they contracted with Century Celebrities at, say, two hundred a week, any mention of them which appeared in
“The Dean’s List” would be favorable. And when MCA was forced to drop its agency business, a new firm called Century Representation, Inc. appeared, and many of the people who had contracted with the first firm began to be represented by the second. Also there were producers in cinema, television and the legitimate theater who always seemed quite eager to give Sam Dean a little piece of the action when something looked good.

Sam Dean had become a very rich man. Feared with a cold fear—hated with a murderous intensity. But everyone was agreed on one aspect of his success. He never invented the unpleasantness he exposed. He checked facts. He had never lost a major suit. The column was larded with minor inaccuracies, but when he really dropped the boom, he had a file to back it up.

With a glass of cream sherry in his hand, Sam Dean smiled at Jason Brown and said, “I thought you had disappeared entirely and forever, dear boy, after your fleeting moments of notoriety. How long ago was it? Seven years. Don’t tell me you and Jenny have gotten hooked on nostalgia.”

“What’s the matter, Sam? You picked the time when she was really down, and then you tried to kick her to death. Does it bother you that she came back?”

Sam Dean looked amused. “You don’t understand these things, Jason. She was a public institution at the time. She had a responsibility to the public. That was a very messy divorce, you know. And she should have been spending her time bolstering a good public image instead of running off to Mexico with you.”

“So it was your duty to expose the whole filthy situation?”

“I am—in a certain sense—a watchdog, Jason.” He sipped the sherry, smacked his red lips and said, “Be grateful. I gave you national coverage.”

Jason stared at him in a brooding way. “You know, I don’t mind that so much. I can almost understand it. But I can’t ever forgive or forget that little notice you gave me when I married Joyce, or the little sour thing you put in there when Joyce was killed.”

“You sound as if I had some personal interest. Don’t be absurd, dear boy. When you became intimate with Jenny, you became newsworthy. And my public likes to know what happens to the ex-friends of the stars. What do you expect when you marry an alcoholic? Immunity? A conspiracy of silence?”

“Jenny is going to be delighted to see you.”

He finished the sherry, gestured for another. “Don’t be naive, Jason. Really! I’ve talked to Jenny many times since you and she broke up. She’s not a fool. I’m one of the facts of life of her profession, like agents and taxes. We get along quite well. She has a professional attitude. You are an incurable amateur. But what in the world are you doing here?”