Los Alamos (9 page)

“Just in time for the last coat. You see my
enjaradoras?”
she said, pointing to the Indian women. “Hector found them at Acoma. Aren’t they wonderful? So smooth, look at the walk—like new.”

“Hello, Hannah,” Emma said, embracing her quickly. “I’ve brought a friend. Actually, he brought me. Michael Connolly, Hannah Beckman.”

Hannah held up her muddy hands and bowed in greeting. “Forgive me,” she said, smiling at him. “Today I’m a worker. I couldn’t resist—the feel of the earth on your hands is something wonderful. I wanted to build my own house, just like the three little pigs, yes?”

She wiped her hands on a cloth. Neither Hector nor the Indian women paid any attention. They continued plastering the wall, their faces grave and impassive. Hannah took a cigarette out of her jacket pocket.

“But I am so glad you came. I thought I would not see you before I left. How is Daniel—he’s well?”

“Busy.”

“Ah. That’s good, yes?”

“Well, it’s good for him.”

“Then it’s good for you, my darling. So,” she said, glancing at Emma’s pants, “you came to ride and I’ve sent all the horses away. Now you’ll be disappointed.”

“No, I came to see you. We can’t stay long. Isn’t it early to be plastering?”

“What could I do? Next month is better, but I have this week. Pray for me. Appease the gods.” She looked up. “No rain, please, so Hannah’s house can dry.”

But the day was hot and clear and she spoke as if she knew luck was running her way. The house was a large square adobe with a hacienda-style overhanging porch decorated with long
ristras
of dried chiles. In the bright sun, the old tan walls had faded to the color of buckskin, accented by the traditional sky-blue paint around the door frame and windows. The wet mud would dry smoothly, without a crack.

“But why go to the bother if you’re shutting up the house?” Emma said. “Can’t it wait till you come back?”

“And when is that? No, you see the cracks from the winter? If you protect the bricks, they last forever. If not—” She left the consequences to their imaginations. “It must be done before the storms come in July, so better now. While Hector will still come. You’re filling his pockets with gold up there. Maybe he’ll never come back.”

She spoke as if he were not there in front of them.

“Come. We’ll have some tea, but first come watch my
enjaradoras
. You see how they measure the layer? Their hands tell them. Not too thin, but not too thick or it will fall off. They
feel
the mud and they know. They’re great sculptors, these women, and everything they make is from the earth. Think of it—earth and water and straw, that’s all. Buildings of earth. Paintings of sand. Ah, but you disapprove, Mr. Connolly, I can tell.” She turned to Emma. “He thinks I’m being a romantic.”

“Not at all,” Connolly said. “I was wondering how often this needs to be done—the walls.”

Hannah laughed. “You see, I was right. A pragmatist. Every few years,” she said to him, “depending on the severity of the winters.”

“So not so very different from painting an ordinary house.”

“But think what it means. You take the earth and build it all over again—your work is in the house. Not some cosmetic, not a Max Factor.”

Connolly smiled. “Except for the blue eye shadow,” he said, nodding to the window frames.

“Yes. The blue keeps the evil spirits away. Everyone knows that,” she said lightly.

“Why blue? Because of turquoise?”

“It’s odd you should say that,” Hannah said. “The Navajos believe that turquoise keeps evil spirits away. But these doorways—these came from the Moors. They brought the custom with them when they took Spain. So it’s nothing to do with the Indians at all. But blue—the same in both cases. It’s odd, yes?”

“Maybe it has an appeal for desert people,” he said. “A feel for the sky, something like that.”

Hannah beamed. “Well, a romantic after all. Quite a catch, Emma.”

It needn’t have meant anything—a turn of phrase with nothing implied—but Connolly was pleased that Emma let it stand uncorrected. It was only a moment, but he took in it the furtive pleasure of conspiracy.

“Hector, I must give our guests some tea,” she said, taking Emma by the arm. “Shall I make some for you?”

“Later. I need to finish up the flashings on the
canales,”
he said in flat, unaccented English that slid into quickly inflected Spanish. He nodded to Emma and Connolly, his only greeting, and returned to his work.

“As you wish,” Hannah said, her arm still linked in Emma’s as they walked toward the house. “You see,” she said, leaning her head toward Emma, “he’s angry with me. Should I be pleased? I don’t think so.”

“But you’ve gone away before,” Emma said.

“Yes, but this is different. The straw on the camel.”

“Nonsense, he’ll be here when you come back. He always is.”

“Well, always,” Hannah said dubiously. “Nothing is forever, my darling. Just the bricks. People have to move on. I think, you know, this will be the end of Hector.”

“Why go, then?” Emma said as they entered the house.

“My new master. They don’t like these long vacations at Fox. On the lot every day. What can I do? No more freelance. Mr. Zanuck says I have
responsibilities
now. Yes, sir.” She raised her hand in a mock salute. “So I obey. The good soldier.”

“You?” Emma said. “He doesn’t know what he’s letting himself in for.”

The wide center hall, with two rooms off each side, was cool and dim, but it led to a large open room in the back that ran the entire length of the house, bordering the patio. It was an artificial room, clearly made by combining several smaller ones, and its whitewashed walls were Hannah’s art gallery, filled with large, vivid canvases. She painted in closeup. Over the fireplace, Connolly noticed two paintings from the corn series, massive abstract ears of multicolored kernels, but there were other subjects as well—desert landscapes, still lifes of chiles, an adobe wall lined with morning glories, so like the actual courtyard wall outside that it made a trompe l’oeil effect in the room. There were large terra-cotta jars on the tile floor and the geometric colors of Indian rugs. Single low-lying shelves held found objects—a rusty farm tool, little piles of pink rocks. Nothing was out of place. It was one of those rooms entirely arranged to serve an aesthetic.

The tea was ready so quickly that Connolly guessed she kept a kettle always near the boil. It was served, incongruously, in pretty Meissen cups, floral and delicate in the severe Southwestern room, like some gap in taste she could not leave behind.

“It was different before, of course,” Hannah said. “At Paramount they didn’t care. Well, maybe they did, but they didn’t say. When Mr. da Silva was there—Buddy da Silva,” she said, rolling his name. “So appropriate, you know. My Buddy.” She lowered her voice to imitate the song and laughed. “You could come and go there. They appreciated the artists at Paramount. From the first. Think of Von Sternberg, what they put up with from him. Such behavior. But now it’s a mess. Nobody knows anything. Before it was Marlene. Now Betty Hutton. It was time to go.”

“Hannah, you’ve been complaining about Hollywood for as long as I’ve known you,” Emma said.

“Yes? Well, that’s not so long, is it? No, it
was
different before. I was different, perhaps. So now I go to design musicals. Boost morale. Make Mr. Zanuck happy,” she said, smiling.

“And will that be any better?”

“But, my darling,” Hannah said, laughing, “think of the
money
. They have so much money now. Why not take some? If I stay on the lot and keep everyone happy, I can come back here for good. Just paint and paint and paint and let them tap-dance until they fall over.”

“You won’t,” Emma said. “You love it there.”

“No,” Hannah said seriously, “now I love the money. Besides, it’s finished for me there. Europe is finished. They used to call me for the ‘European touch.’ They would say it just like that. ‘Hannah, give it the European touch.’ What is that now? A bomb shelter? Rubble? No, no more Europe here, I think. It’s too serious now. This is a country of children.” She glanced at Connolly. “Oh, my country too. But now it’s for children. Mr. Zanuck and his polo friends. I don’t think he wants that European touch.”

“What does he want?” Emma said.

“Now?” Hannah replied, her mood light again. “Havana nightclubs. Palm trees. Girls. More girls. So now we go to Havana for a while and have fun. And then I come home to paint.”

“You’re really going there?” Emma said.

“No, no,” Hannah said. “They don’t want to
go
to Havana, just the nightclubs. It’s always the same nightclub. I went to Ciro’s. They have a long staircase there. You stop at the top when you enter, you stop at the top on your way out—
two
appearances, you see. All the producers go there. So they see my set and they say, yes,
this
is a nightclub. Wonderful. Hannah’s done it again. Maybe now I’ll have the Ciro’s touch.”

Connolly watched them as they smoked and talked, a quicksilver flow of gossip, and saw that for Emma it was like leafing through some colorful magazine of the outside world. Selznick’s divorce. The mad sets Dali designed for
Spellbound
, which Selznick was making because of his own psychoanalysis. Brecht, who never washed. Thomas Mann, who had recreated his Berlin apartment in Santa Monica. The difficulty of photographing Veronica Lake without making her look foreshortened. All messages from that world far from the mesa, where no one worked behind barbed wire and worried about algae in the water, where you could talk about anything. But what did she make of it? And as he watched her he realized, with a start, that she was watching him and that Hannah was aware of them both. They talked around him—he didn’t have to say a word—but Emma would glance over at him secretly, to see what he thought, his expression conversation enough. He became in some curious way their audience, without either of them addressing him directly. The talk was as ephemeral as column filler, and after a while he felt that neither of them was really paying attention, Emma because she was caught up in some disturbance he caused, Hannah because she was watching a drama play out. He felt like someone brought home to dinner on approval and wondered if Emma regretted bringing him, now that it was his approval she seemed to care about. When he lit a cigarette, she was alert to the sound of the match, and when he looked at her through the smoke, she flinched involuntarily, as if she felt him touching her. It was Hannah who rescued them.

“But enough of this foolishness,” she said, standing. “You must think I’m selfish, Mr. Connolly, talking only of myself like this. I’m afraid Emma’s to blame—she likes to listen to me, and you know, I can’t resist that. I don’t see many people. Now you must tell me about you.”

“He works up on the Hill,” Emma said protectively, before Connolly could answer. “Here, let me help you with the washing-up.”

“Ah, then I mustn’t ask any more. So all my chattering, it’s just as well. I know the rules. Emma told you maybe that some of your colleagues lived here at the beginning? With the scientists, no questions.”

Emma was collecting teacups and made no move to correct her, so Connolly said, “That must have been frustrating.”

“For me? Not at all,” Hannah said gaily. “I love secrets. And everyone was so charming. How is Professor Weissmann? Does he still play chess with Dr. Eisler? And that funny boy from New Jersey with the nice wife?”

“I never see them anymore,” Emma said. “Everyone’s scattered. Busy. I never see
you
anymore, come to that. It’s like people you meet on holiday and then lose touch.”

“Not you, my darling. Here you are, coming to see me off to Havana. And now you want to play
hausfrau
. Very well, here’s mine too. You wash up and go be nice to Hector, say nice things about me, and I’ll show your friend the ranch and say nice things about you.”

Emma glanced at her, disconcerted. “That won’t take long,” she said.

“That depends on how much he wants to know. You see that I’m a terrible gossip,” she said to Connolly. “Would you like that?”

“Very much,” he said, smiling.

Emma, holding a cup in each hand, gave a helpless shrug. “Do be back for supper.”

Surprisingly, Hannah leaned on his arm as they walked slowly toward the corral, not saying anything, an old couple. Even the silence seemed an unearned intimacy.

“She wants me to like you,” she said finally. They had reached the corral and stood at the fence, looking west toward the mountains.

“Do you?”

“Me? It doesn’t matter. She likes you.”

“Look, I don’t want you to think—”

“Ssh.” She put her finger to her lips. “It’s all right. Sometimes, you know, it’s easier to say something to a stranger. Do you mind if I say something to you?”

He looked at her expectantly.

“Be careful with her. I’ve been worried lately. I knew something was troubling her—now I see it was you.”

“You’re mistaken.”

“No. We can be honest with each other. Like strangers. I can see that you’re—well, ‘in love,’ what’s that? Something for the nightclubs, a fantasy, yes? Something for the children. No. Involved with her. That’s something too, you know. You can’t help it either, I see. You watch her all the time.”

“Do I?” Connolly said, trapped now in her premise, wanting to see where it would go.

She smiled. “Of course. That’s why I’m saying this to you. I think you can be good for her. At first I thought it was the boredom, something to do. The same way she studies those Indians. But now I see it’s more. With Emma, it’s always something more, you know? She can’t be casual. So you cannot be casual either, my friend. Don’t hurt her. She deserves to be happy.”

“Everyone deserves to be happy.”

“Do you think so? Such an American idea. No, not everyone. But this time, yes.” She patted his arm. “So make her happy.”

“She’s in love with her husband.”

“Ach,” she said, waving her hand dismissively. “Don’t be foolish. She’s in love with her own heroism. She got him out, that’s why she married him.”