Some Faces in the Crowd (6 page)

“But you told me you were going out the window for my sake,” I protested. “Why do you drag in this other routine?”

He gave me one of those slow, inebriated winks. “My public,” he said. “This is high-level BK stuff. The highest possible level. They gotta believe I love ’em to the end. Get it?”

“Yes,” I said. “I think I get it.”

“Smart girl,” he said. “Why don’t we have one more drink and then you crawl into the sack with me? The hell with everybody.”

“That’s not what I came back for,” I said.

“Hell with everybody,” he shouted. “Hell with you too if you don’t be a good little girl and play house with Poppa.”

His face was flushed and his eyes were crazy.

I said, “Larry, get into bed and I’ll get you some sleeping pills. And for God’s sake, stop drinking. I’ll have the doctor come and give you a shot if you won’t stop.”

“Gotta put on a show at nine o’clock,” he said. “Gotta declare war.
War!”
he shouted. “This means
war!”

“Shhhh,” I said, “you’ve got to lie down. You’ve got to be quiet for a while. I’ll get Bert Wheeler or someone to take your place tonight. You need some sleep. Rest. Peace. Shhhhh.”

He reached out his arm for me and almost lost his balance. I put my hand on his elbow to steady him. He grabbed me and we tottered together. He tried to force his mouth against mine. “Larry, for God’s sake, let me go,” I said. I broke away and ran down the hall. Lonesome came running heavily after me. “Hey Marshy, quit runnin’. Let’s roll in the hay together.” His big voice was right behind me. I had reached the marble steps leading down to the entrance hallway of the duplex suite. I ran down two steps at a time.

“Hey Marshy, let’s …”

Then an ugly sound of hopeless protest came out of him. The staggering bulk of him had lost its balance on the top step and was floundering, hurling, thudding down. I could feel the back of his head striking the marble ledge of each step as he lurched to the bottom landing.

He made a low, broken moan and lay still. I was afraid to move him. I ran to the phone and called Tommy de Palma. When I told him what had happened, Tommy took the name of our Lord in vain, but quite solemnly. Then he said, “Listen, Marcia. You get the hell out of there. I’ll be right over and take care of everything. And never tell anybody—I mean
anybody
—how it happened.”

A few hours later it was all over for Lonesome Rhodes, at least the corporeal part. A compound fracture of the skull had removed his name from the Nielsen ratings. He had become a living legend even before he lost his balance on that top step and now Tommy de Palma did a beautiful job of rounding out the myth. On all the front pages it said that Lonesome’s death was due to collapsing on the stairs from overwork on his way to deliver a message of tremendous importance to his vast radio-TV audience. “We begged him to slow down, but as long as his great heart kept pumping he had to keep pitching for his fellow-Americans,” Tommy was quoted. Tommy had found the suicide note and without mentioning the window business he had used the sure-fire stuff about grieving and sorrowing for the fine American boys and his fellow countrymen. “I was with him at the end and I will remember his last words as long as I live,” Tommy said. I’ll remember those words too, but not quite the way Tommy reported them. He used that “great country of ours is just Riddle multiplied” line and wound up with the “bless you and keep you, my beloved kinfolk and neighbors” bit.

Tommy announced that the Lonesome Rhodes Foundation would continue as a lasting memorial to this simple American. Immediately thousands of dollars poured in from all over the country to keep up the good works. Plans were drawn up for a monument to Lonesome in Riddle with his famous last words inscribed at the base of a vast likeness in bronze. Well, Tommy can have his last words. They’re a little more fit for public examination than what the man really said when he was chasing me down those steps.

The funeral was the most impressive thing of its kind I have ever seen. Traffic was suspended on Fifth Avenue and the great thoroughfare was jammed for twenty blocks. Half a million people tried to pass the bier. Women grew hysterical and fainted. The Mayor was there, and General MacArthur, and a Marine Honor Guard and Ike sent personal condolences. The entire population of Riddle, Arkansas, was flown in by the publicity department of our TV network. A cowhand from Arkansas sang, “Oh Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie.” A bishop spoke on the spiritual essence in Lonesome Rhodes. “He was a man of the people,” said the bishop, “because he was, in the simplest and deepest and best sense, a man of God.”

It was a shame Lonesome Rhodes couldn’t have been there. He would have loved it. It was his kind of stuff, exactly as if it had been written for him and directed by him. He was an influence, there is no doubt of that. Look at the half-dozen minor imitators already trying to fill his boots. The film companies have started bidding for the movie rights. Already columnists are speculating as to who could play it. John Wayne? Will Rogers, Jr.? Paul Douglas? The Lonesome Rhodes Foundation is to have a considerable share of the profits. As Tommy de Palma would say, “Dat’s how legends are born.”

After the funeral, I walked around the corner to a bar and went in to think it over. While I had never given myself to Lonesome Rhodes, I had belonged to him. I had had a hand in shaping that legend. How could I disown it now without having to answer for myself?

H
ER LEGS WERE SHAPELY
and firm and when she crossed them and smiled with the self-assurance that always delighted him, he thought she was the only person he knew in the world who was unblemished. Not lifelike but an improvement on life, as a work of art, her delicate features were chiseled from a solid block. The wood-sculpture image came easy to him because her particular shade of blonde always suggested maple polished to a golden grain. As it had been from the moment he stood in awe and amazement in front of the glass window where she was first exhibited, the sight of her made him philosophical. Some of us appear in beautiful colors, too, or with beautiful grains, but we develop imperfections. Inspect us very closely and you find we’re damaged by the elements. Sometimes we’re only nicked with cynicism.

Sometimes we’re cracked with disillusionment. Or we’re split with fear.

When she began to speak, he leaned forward, eager for the words that were like good music, profundity expressed in terms that pleased the ear while challenging the mind.

“Everybody likes me,” she said. “Absolutely everybody.”

It was not that she was conceited. It was simply that she was only three. No one had ever taken her with sweet and whispered promises that turned into morning-after lies, ugly and cold as unwashed dishes from last night’s dinner lying in the sink. She had never heard a dictator rock her country to sleep with peaceful lullabies one day and rock it with bombs the next. She was undeceived. Her father ran his hands reverently through her soft yellow hair. She is virgin, he thought, for this is the true virginity, that brief moment in the time of your life before your mind or your body has been defiled by acts of treachery.

It was just before Christmas and she was sitting on her little chair, her lips pressed together in concentration, writing a last-minute letter to Santa Claus. The words were written in some language of her own invention but she obligingly translated as she went along.

Dear Santa, I am a very good girl and everybody likes me. So please don’t forget to bring me a set of dishes, a doll that goes to sleep and wakes up again, and a washing machine. I need the washing machine because Raggedy Ann’s dress is so dirty.

After she had finished her letter, folded it, and asked him to address it, he tossed her up in the air, caught her and tossed her again, to hear her giggle. “Higher, Daddy, higher,” she instructed. His mind embraced her sentimentally: She is a virgin island in a lewd world. She is a winged seed of innocence blown through the wasteland.

If only she could root somewhere. If only she could grow like this.

“Let me down, Daddy,” she said when she decided that she had indulged him long enough, “I have to mail my letter to Santa.”

“But didn’t you see him this afternoon?” he asked. “Didn’t you ask for everything you wanted? Mommy said she took you up to meet him and you sat on his lap.”

“I just wanted to remind him,” she said. “There were so many other children.”

He fought down the impulse to laugh, because she was not something to laugh at. And he was obsessed with the idea that to hurt her feelings with laughter was to nick her, to blemish the perfection.

“Daddy can’t catch me-ee,” she sang out, and the old chase was on, following the pattern that had become so familiar to them, the same wild shrieks and the same scream of pretended anguish at the inevitable result. Two laps around the dining-room table was the established course before he caught her in the kitchen. He swung her up from the floor and set her down on the kitchen table. She stood on the edge, poised confidently for another of their games. But this was no panting, giggling game like tag or hide-and-seek. This game was ceremonial. The table was several feet higher than she was. “Jump, jump, and Daddy will catch you,” he would challenge. They would count together,
one, two
and on
three
she would leap out into the air. He would not even hold out his arms to her until the last possible moment. But he would always catch her. They had played the game for more than a year and the experience never failed to exhilarate them. You see, I am always here to catch you when you are falling, it said to them, and each time she jumped, her confidence increased and their bond deepened.

They were going through the ceremony when the woman next door came in with her five-year-old son, Billy. “Hello, Mr. Steevers,” she said. “Would you mind if I left Bill with you for an hour while I go do my marketing?”

“No, of course not, glad to have him,” he said and he mussed Billy’s hair playfully. “How’s the boy, Billy?”

But his heart wasn’t in it. This was his only afternoon of the week with her and he resented the intrusion. And then too, he was convinced that Billy was going to grow up into the type of man for whom he had a particular resentment. A sturdy, good-looking boy, big for his age, aggressively unchildlike, a malicious, arrogant, insensitive extrovert. I can just see him drunk and red-faced and pulling up girls’ dresses at Legion Conventions, Mr. Steevers would think. And the worst of it was, his daughter seemed blind to Billy’s faults. The moment she saw him she forgot about their game.

“Hello, Billy-Boy,” she called and ran over to hug him.

“I want a cookie,” said Billy.

“Oh, yes, a cookie; some animal crackers, Daddy.”

She had her hostess face on and as he went into the pantry, he could hear the treble of her musical laughter against the premature baritone of Billy’s guffaws.

He swung open the pantry door with the animal crackers in his hand just in time to see it. She was poised on the edge of the table. Billy was standing below her, as he had seen her father do. “Jump and I’ll catch you,” he was saying.

Smiling, confident and unblemished, she jumped. But no hands reached out to break her flight. With a cynical grin on his face, Billy stepped back and watched her fall.

Watching from the doorway, her father felt the horror that possessed him the time he saw a parachutist smashed like a bug on a windshield when his chute failed to open. She was lying there, crying, not so much in pain as in disillusionment. He ran forward to pick her up and he would never forget the expression on her face, the
new
expression, unchildlike, unvirginal, embittered.

“I hate you, I hate you,” she was screaming at Billy through hysterical sobs.

Well, now she knows, thought her father, the facts of life. Now she’s one of us. Now she knows treachery and fear. Now she must learn to replace innocence with courage.

She was still bawling. He knew these tears were as natural and as necessary as those she shed at birth, but that could not overcome entirely the heavy sadness that enveloped him. Finally, when he spoke, he said, a little more harshly than he had intended, “Now, now, stop crying. Stand up and act like a big girl. A little fall like that can’t hurt you.”

A
T HALF-PAST FIVE
Ciro’s looks like a woman sitting before her dressing table just beginning to make up for the evening. The waiters are setting up the tables for the dinner trade, the cigarette and hat-check girls are changing from slacks to the abbreviated can-can costumes which are their work clothes, and an undiscovered Rosemary Clooney making her debut tonight is rehearsing.
Don’t let the stars get in your eyes …

A telephone rings and the operator, who is suffering from delusions of looking like Ava Gardner, answers, “Ciro’s. A table for Mr. Nathan? For six. His usual table?” This was not what she had come to Hollywood for, to take reservations over the telephone, but even the small part she played in A. D. Nathan’s plans for the evening brought her a little closer to the Hollywood that was like a mirage, always in sight but never within reach. For, like everyone else in Hollywood, the telephone operator at Ciro’s had a dream. Once upon a time, ran this one, there was a Famous Movie Producer (called Goldwyn, Zanuck or A. D. Nathan) and one evening this FMP was in Ciro’s placing a million-dollar telephone call when he happened to catch a glimpse of her at the switchboard. “Young lady,” he would say, “you are wasting your time at that switchboard. You may not realize it, but you
are
Naomi in my forthcoming farm epic,
Sow the Wild Oat!”

Reluctantly the operator plugged out her dream and sent word of Nathan’s reservation to André. André belonged to that great International Race, head waiters, whose flag is an unreadable menu and whose language is French with an accent. Head waiters are diplomats who happened to be born with silver spoons in their hands instead of their mouths. André would have been a typical head waiter. But he had been in Hollywood too long. Which meant that no matter how good a head waiter he was, he was no longer satisfied to be one. André wanted to be a screen writer. In fact, after working only three years, André had managed to finish a screenplay, entitled, surprisingly enough,
Confessions of a Hollywood Waiter.
He had written it all by himself, in English.