The Deer Park (3 page)

When she was drunk, Dorothea could never resist bragging that her son was the gift of a prince. Marion had known this since he was a boy and maybe it can explain a few things about him. At twenty-four, he was very special. Slim, tight-knit, with light wavy hair and clear gray eyes, he could have looked like a choir boy, I suppose, if it had not been for his expression. He had an arrogance which was made up of staring at you, measuring your value, and deciding you weren’t there. At the present time he was living in Desert D’Or, but not at his mother’s house. They got along too badly for that, and besides his occupation would have interfered. He was a pimp.

I often heard that when he was a child one would have predicted another career. He had been a high-strung boy, and he cried easily. When Dorothea had been able to afford it, there had been nurses and servants, she had always been pleased to spoil her son, to forget him, to love him and to match his tantrums with her own. There was a story she would tell about Marion when she was feeling sentimental and mourned the distance between them. Once, so long ago, she had been crying in her
bedroom—over what, she no longer knew—and he had come in, he was three and a half at the time, and he had stroked her cheek. “Don’t cry, Mommie,” he had said, beginning to cry himself, and consoled her the only way he knew. “Don’t cry, Mommie, cause you’re so pretty.”

He was a dreamy boy at school. She would tell me how he had been fascinated by railroad trains, by Erector sets, by collecting stamps and butterfly wings. He was shy, he was spoiled, he would be desperate at times with a desperate temper. In the first fight he ever had (it was with the tubby son of a motion-picture producer), he had been pulled screaming off the other boy’s neck. Somewhere in those years between ten and thirteen, changes occurred in him, he no longer seemed so sensitive; he turned surly and communicated with himself. To her amazement he told her once that he wanted to be a priest. His intelligence was startling at times, at least to Dorothea, but he had become difficult. He was always causing trouble, he was ahead of his teachers, smoking, drinking, doing whatever was not allowed. Before he graduated from high school, Dorothea had been forced to put Marion in one private academy after another, but no matter where she put him, he had a talent for making friends outside the school. At seventeen, he was arrested for driving eighty miles an hour on one of the boulevards of the capital. Dorothea fixed that, she had to fix many things he did. On his eighteenth birthday, he asked her for three hundred dollars.

“For what?” said Dorothea.

“There’s this girl I know and she needs an operation.”

“Didn’t you ever hear of precautions?”

He had stood before her, patient, bored, his clear gray eyes looking at her. “Yes, I’ve heard of them,” he said, “but you see, I was with two girls at the time, and I guess we got … distracted.”

Dorothea managed to write a sentimental column about her son the day he went into service, but that was the last she
could write about him. When he came out of the Army, he refused to work, he refused to do anything he did not care to do. She got him put on as an assistant to a well-known executive at a movie studio; three months later, Marion quit. “They’re preachers,” was all he would say, and moved in with her at The Hangover.

In Desert D’Or he knew gangsters, he knew actors, he knew show girls and call girls and bar girls; he was even a pet of those few residents of the resort who might be considered international set, and with it all, since he was capable of spending days in one bar after another or hours at the Yacht Club patio, since he knew the headwaiters of the best clubs in the resort and was respected by them because he valued them so low, he had access to the pool of businessmen, entertainers, producers, tennis players, divorcées, golfers, gamblers, beauties and near beauties fed to the resort by the overflow from the capital. When Dorothea kicked him out after a quarrel over money, assuming she could force him to work—for her son she wanted respectability if for nobody else—he found his trade ready to hand. When Dorothea learned, she pleaded with him to come back, and Marion laughed at her. “I’m just an amateur,” he said, “like you.” She hadn’t even dared to slap him; somehow it was years since anyone had tried that.

His operations were modest. He stayed away from the professionals; he did not care to take on the organization that would have meant, and many of his arrangements were unusual. He knew girls who would take a date once, and then never again, at least not for several months; he even knew a woman who did not need the money and merely was drawn to the idea of selling herself. As he had explained, he was an amateur, he dabbled. To work at a business was to be the slave of a business, and he detested slavery; it warped the mind. Therefore, he kept his freedom and used it to drink, to push dope on himself, and to race his foreign car through the desert, a gun in the glove compartment instead of a driving
license, for the license had been suspended long ago. I drove with him once and tried to avoid it thereafter. I was pretty good with a car myself, but he drove like nobody I ever knew.

From time to time he still would drop in at The Hangover, but he was contemptuous of the court, and they were uneasy with him. Of all the people there, he could tolerate only two. I was one of them, and he made no pretense about his reasons. I had killed people, I had almost been killed myself, and these were emotions he considered interesting. Out of the cat’s grace with which he held himself, he asked me once, “How many planes did you shoot down?”

“Just three,” I said.

“Just three. They lost money on you.” His mouth showed nothing. “You’d have shot down more if you could?”

“I suppose I would have tried.”

“You dig killing Asiatics?” Marion asked.

“I didn’t mean it that way.”

“They know how to train you characters.” He took a cigarette from a platinum case. “I wasn’t an officer,” he said. “I went into the Army a private, and I came out that way. I’m the only private they ever had.”

“They kept booking you in the stockade, I hear.”

“Yes, I learned a thing or two,” Marion said. “You see, it’s easy to kill a man. Easier to do that than chase after a roach and squash it.”

“Maybe you don’t know all there is about it.”

But Marion was always ahead of me. “You want a girl?” he asked abruptly. “I’ll get you a girl for nothing.”

“Not tonight,” I said.

“I didn’t figure you would.” He had sensed what I was trying to keep from everybody. I had followed Pelley’s troubles carefully, for we shared the same trouble. It had come on me shortly before I left Japan, and I had been helpless ever since. Once or twice, with girls I picked up in the bars of Desert D’Or, I had tried to cut my knot and only succeeded in tying it more
tightly. “I’m keeping myself for the woman I love,” I said to steer him away.

Love was the subject which steered Faye. “You look,” he said to me, “you take two people living together. Cut away all the propaganda. It’s dull. The end. So you go the other direction. You find a hundred chicks, you find two hundred. It gets worse than dull. It makes you sick. I swear you start thinking of using a razor. I mean, that’s it,” he said, waving a finger like a pendulum, “screwing the one side, pain the other side. Killing. The whole world is bullshit. That’s why people want a dull life.”

This was beyond me. I looked into his white-gray eyes, on fire with the argument, and said, “Where do you end up with this?”

“I don’t know,” he said, “I got to work it out.” He had straightened up then, had looked at his watch as though to cover how surprised he was to hear himself talk for so long, and said quietly, “When is Jay-Jay getting here? I have something to tell Dorothea.”

That was his other friend at The Hangover. Whenever Dorothea and Marion were not talking, he used the publicity man Jennings James for communications. Jay-Jay had managed to remain on good terms with them both. Years ago, he had been a legman for Dorothea, and he had known Marion as a boy. There was a tie between them; Marion tolerated him, he put up with Jay-Jay’s speeches, his drunks, his depressions; he had something like affection for him.

No matter his red hair, Jay-Jay’s tall skinny body and his skinny face with its silver-rimmed spectacles made him look like a bank clerk. Yet there was something childish about him. He lived in the past, and he loved to reminisce about those early days of the Depression when he was penniless in the capital and lived in a bungalow with two musicians, existing on oranges and the hope he could sell one of his short stories. Those were the good old days and now he did scattered publicity for Supreme Pictures, filing items with gossip columnists on
whatever Supreme stars might come to town. I knew for a fact he supplemented his income by sending an occasional girl Marion’s way.

With it all, he had a wistful charm. He would tell story after story in a slurred voice, often telling me, for I was the only one new enough to listen, that the great line, “Men with lipstick on their mouths look like they just discovered sex,” credited to the movie star, Lulu Meyers, was in point of fact a sentence he had written for her. “I’m sick of it,” Jay-Jay would say to me. “Why, I remember when Lulu was married to Charley Eitel and thought brains was everything. I saw her walk into a room one night at a party with her face shining like she’d just discovered love or drunk some jungle juice. ‘Eitel has just given me my first acting lesson,’ she says, ‘and it was so stimulating.’ This, after three years of making movies and seven starring roles, and I have to run interference for people like her.”

I think he was the first person in Desert D’Or to mention the name of Charles Francis Eitel. After that, it seemed as if everybody was always ready to tell some new story about the man. Eitel was a famous film director who was staying at the resort in the off-season, and he was one friend of Marion’s who never came to The Hangover. Until I came to understand it better, I often thought that Marion kept the friendship just to provoke Dorothea, for Eitel had been in the news in the last year. I heard that he walked off a set one day in the middle of shooting a picture, and two days later he was called a hostile witness by an investigating committee of Congress. Dorothea was livid about Eitel. As a gossip columnist she had never grown to be nationally big, and finally had been bored by the work, but in the last year or two before she retired, the head of her column always featured the American flag next to her photograph, and her copy was filled with shadows of subversion in the movie industry. Even now she was very patriotic, and like most patriots she felt strongly and thought weakly,
and so it was not easy to argue with her. I never tried, and I was careful not to mention Eitel unless I had to. Soon after I met him, I came to think of Eitel as my best friend at the resort, and I stopped her once in the middle of one of her tirades, said that he was my friend and I did not want to talk about him, and for a moment I thought she would tear into a rage. She came close, she came very close, her face flushed dark red, and she let fly at me. “You’re the lousiest snob I ever met,” Dorothea shouted.

“That’s right,” I answered her, and I didn’t dislike Dorothea for the truth of it. “I am a snob.”

“Well, swill in it,” she said under her breath, but Pelley was there passing a drink, and we didn’t discuss Eitel.

“Just cause you’re a rich man’s son, and phony up to the ears,” Dorothea said, “don’t think you know all the answers.”

“All right. That’s enough,” I muttered in my turn, and we let it lay.

But I was feeling satisfied. Dorothea’s boasts were built on the considerable ground of her experience, and since she was always saying that she could tell on what side of the tracks a man was born, I had the thought that I wasn’t too poor an impersonator.

I
NEVER KNEW
my mother for she died too early, and my father, who gave me the princely name of Sergius O’Shaugnessy, stopped taking care of me when I was five years old, and surrendered himself to traveling from job to job. He was not a bad man in his own way, and the few times he visited the orphanage were events I remembered a long time. He would
bring me a present, he would listen with sad eyes when I would ask him to take me with him, he would promise to return soon, and then he would disappear for another few years. It was not until I grew older that I realized he could never keep his word.

When I was twelve, I found out my last name was not O’Shaugnessy but something which sounded close in Slovene. It turned out the old man was mongrel sailor blood—Welsh-English from his mother, Russian and Slovene from his father, and all of it low. There is nothing in the world like being a false Irishman. Or maybe my mother was Irish. Once my father made that confession to me, he could never bring himself to add another detail. A workingman all his life, he wanted to be an actor, and O’Shaugnessy was his fling. Before he was through, he played a number of places. He did the Merchant Marine, and he took his mouth organ on more than one freight train, and he even ran some rum until his luck ran out and they railed him into the state pen. When they let him out, he was good for washing dishes. I can say that he passed some of his character on to me. I was the biggest boy in the home for my age, but I was not what they call forward. At least, not then. When he died, however, I began to look for a new character. At fourteen you don’t wear a name like Sergius easily—I had hidden it under a dozen nicknames, I had been Gus and Spike and Mac and Slim and I could name some others—but once he was dead, once I knew, and it took a long time to learn, that there were going to be no more visits and I was all alone, I began to call myself Sergius again. Naturally, I paid for it with a dozen fights, and for the first time in my life I was wild enough to win a thing or two. I had always been one of those boys for whom losing came naturally, but I was also rare enough to learn from winning. I liked boxing. I didn’t know it then but it was the first thing I had found which was good for my nervous system. In the space of fourth months I lost three fights and then won all the others. I even won a boxing tournament the Police Department held. After that I’d earned my name. They called me Sergius.