“Hot, darling. My skin dried and cracked so much I looked like a Gila monster but this twit of a girl director thought it was all wonderful. The more wrinkles the better, from her point of view. I’m just a monster to these younger people coming up. They assume I’m dead; it’s like being poor Rita, only without the Alzheimer’s. But how are you, sweetheart, is more to the point.”
“I’m good. Things are good, Mom. We’ve settled into a routine and Jesse seems happy. When he’s happy, we’re all happy.”
“Oh, Clark,” she burst out. “You sound so brainwashed!”
As was his way with her, he stayed polite. He was a real Wilmot in that. Where had his father’s Hungarian flair gone to in this boy? “That’s the sort of thing people say,” he mildly conceded, “but my head’s never been clearer, actually. When I think back to Hollywood I was always in a daze. Not your fault—we had to live there, for your work. You did your work, I’m doing Jesse’s work. He’s sort of like what Harry Cohn was for you—crude, but inspired. The real thing.”
“But, b-but, baby, wh-what’s going to happen?”
“Don’t stutter, Mom; nobody’s asking you to feel guilty.”
“You-you’re surrounded by a virtual army and they’re surely going to put you all in jail, for that one p-p-policeman being killed, though of course you had n-nothing to do with it.”
“I said, calm down. It’s just a life. Mine, I mean. A time to be born, a time to die—you’ve heard that. We have wonderful feeling here right now. It’s like we’re one mystical body. I’ve lost a lot of flab, but there’s enough basic provender to last to spring at least. We’ll just have to wait to see what the Lord ordains. Read Revelation, especially the last chapters, if you want to know more. Everything’s in there, once you know how to look.”
“I’m c-coming out there. This is ree-ree-ridiculous, to hear you t-talk like such a simpleton.”
“Mom, I can’t advise it. You can’t get a motel room within fifty miles. You’ll get pestered to death by reporters. They’re all out here, hundreds of ’em, and are starving for something to happen. You know those people in New York that get out on ledges and everybody yells ‘Jump’? It’s like that. Well, fuck ’em—we’re not jumping, at least till we get a sign.”
She laughed, she was so relieved to hear him sound halfway like himself. “Don’t jump, Clark. I love you.”
He gave no sign of hearing. “Till Jesse gets the sign, I should have said.” But perhaps he had heard, for his tone became more confidential: “It’s a media circus, and I’m the coördinator at our end of it. I just wish those dickheads at Nova who said I was too abrasive to handle sensitive talent could see me now.”
“I’m sure they’re reading about it, darling.” She was over a hump, the blockage of self-doubt, and spoke fluently. “You’d be interested in a story Shirley was telling me. Apparently, when they approached Spielberg and told him they thought it would sex up the new Indiana Jones if they brought in Sean Connery, he’s supposed to have said—”
“Mom, incoming calls are limited to three minutes.”
“Oh. You mean the FBI—”
“No, they don’t care, they’d love it if we’d gab all day and give ’em some ideas. It’s Jesse’s rule; he says the outer world distracts us from God.”
“From him, he means. Clark, I know his type. This town is full of megalomaniacs; it’s the environment. Any man who can sleep with a new girl every night of the week naturally gets to think he’s God. Then they get in so deep embezzling and lying they can’t back out. I’ve been studying this man’s photographs in the paper and he’s one of those bluffers.”
“Mom.”
“When it catches up with them they don’t honestly think they’ve done anything wrong. At Columbia, even after they had all this evidence against Begelman—”
“Mom. Goodbye.”
“Clark? G-g-g-” She couldn’t say it, couldn’t get past the “g.” This simple word. He hung up while she was still trying. His own mother, and all those FBI eavesdroppers listening to her humiliation. “Goodbye,” she said in her bedroom to herself, looking into one of her mirrors, tilting her head this way and that. “Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, you idiot,” furious with herself.
He had scared her about the motel rooms. She had had experience of motel rooms, back in Basingstoke—little musty shacks huddled between the road and a strip of woods, next to a roadhouse, with the sheets on the bed smelling of mildew at best. She telephoned Bighorn Mountain, Uncle Jared’s private number. She blamed him for Clark’s involvement with this grotesque sect anyway. An unexpected voice—a New York voice, overripe and elderly and almost ironically smooth, like a butler in Thirties comedy—answered. “I’m sorry, miss, but my father died this October. To whom am I speaking, please?”
“Patrick? Is it you? Don’t you know my voice? When did he die?”
“Essie. My Lord. Didn’t you get the announcement? It made the Denver papers, but I guess not L.A. The whole funeral was agog at the thought that you’d show, but you didn’t. Your father didn’t make it either. My mother was quite hurt, and said the Wilmots had never liked Jared marrying a Catholic.”
“How ridiculous. We loved it. Ama loved underdogs. I was away for two months making a movie in which I kill somebody. My first onscreen victim. Very satisfying. My secretary is supposed to sift through the mail for what’s important. Darling, I’m so sorry. How old was he? Incredibly old, I suppose. And you—you’re incredibly rich now, I suppose.”
“Always hopeful—God, I love you. The perpetual ingenue. No, it turns out that by the time Dad was done wheeling and dealing he only owned a sliver of the mountain, something under an eighth. And the ski resort loses money all the time. The smart people go to Aspen or Vail, or like to be helicoptered into the Bugaboos. I’m just out here to tidy up the wreckage. Your son, by the way, has been making quite a name for himself, if you favor the Christian right. I must say, Pope John Paul Two looks almost reasonable, compared to what you heretics come up with.”
“Clark is compensating—you mustn’t mock. But it’s about that, yes. I need to come out and where could I stay?”
“Where else but with me, who made you what you are? Essie, it would be bliss. Only no towel-dropping this time.”
“I d-don’t know what you’re talking about. I have a perfectly lovely husband, a proper Bostonian.”
“God, if you could have seen yourself that day. I should have had a camera. So young, so lovely. Your hips had points, you were so skinny. You probably had Band-aids on your knees, and scraped elbows. The waif from below Wilmington. You thought it was part of the drill, you poor dear thing.”
“Well, it often was,” she said, and sniffed. “You’re making a motel sound not so bad.”
“Don’t be huffy, cousin. We’re family.”
He met her at the Burr County airport; he had filled out, so in his black chesterfield and white muffler he bulked like Jimmy McMullen in the newspaper photographs Ama had kept in a scrapbook back on Locust Street, when the financier was being hauled into court for fraud. Patrick’s black hair, long as a musician’s, had grayed becomingly, in white sweeps above his ears, but age had emphasized a pugnacious Irish coarseness to his nose and upper lip. In Uncle Jared’s topaz Cadillac Brougham, with a silver bighorn ram for a hood ornament, they drove east and north. “An awful lot of nothing,” Alma said, gazing out the window at the darkness as they climbed.
“Wait till you see Lower Branch. It’s Times Square before they cleaned it up.”
They drove through the crossroads hamlet on the way to the mountain. Snow had been plowed into heaps that went halfway up the telephone poles. Feebly blinking Christmas lights were strung on a cement-block building that must be the town hall, and on a steepleless wooden church across the street. Between the heaps of snow dirtied by the flickering polychrome tints, dark crowds of people—media people, she supposed—clustered like bees in agitated, buzzing swarms outside the entrances to the one bar and t
he one hash joint, called Mildred’s. Even the 7-Eleven was being overrun, in the cold fluorescent light of the Total station. So many cars and television vans were parked at improvised angles that the main street became one-way traffic in spots. A silhouette in a parka and headphones waved them forward; it was not a policeman but a drunken newscaster, who had nearly arranged a head-on collision, amid encouraging chaotic shouts, with a car coming the other way. It was a dismal carnival such as might be held on a frozen shelf of Hell.
In another forty-five minutes, along a winding road with an endless pine forest to the right and on the left a deep long valley holding a ragged receding lake white under the moon, and then an abandoned mass of gray buildings saying HENDERSON tucked into a mountainside, Alma was brought to the family condominium at Bighorn. Among the framed photographs on Uncle Jared’s dresser, she found herself as a little knock-kneed girl, with a bathing-suited little brother and two young parents pale as lard in the summer sun of a Delaware day before the war. Patrick would have sat up for hours serving weak Scotch-and-sodas and trying to relive old New York days, days when flesh merchants like Wexler and Arnie Fineman had the power of gods over a young model, and a girl could ride the subways at any hour without fear, and the art world still produced something you could call art, instead of this trash that was worse than performance trash because it stayed there, on the wall, with its glued-on broken crockery and absolutely hopeless drawing copied from old Life magazines which supposedly makes it very ironic. “Nobody is buying it, thank God; the Eighties are over and money is terrified of everything except Treasury Bonds.” She couldn’t rise to his prattle; the altitude or some deep black fatigue Alma was still carrying from Greece or this melodramatic business with Clark got to her; she could scarcely keep her eyes open. It depressed her to realize, from the way Patrick was trying too hard to bring back their common past, that knowing her for those few years back then—he who had seemed so suave and superior and in command when she first met him—had become a high point of his life, a justification of his inconsequential, sterile, mannered existence, an acquaintance he must peddle to others; the story of the towel had no doubt been told and retold, in cheerful, gleeful betrayal. That innocent wanton girl and that closeted, pained, elegant young man had deserved at least privacy. Patrick showed her her room and practically put her into bed, for all she could remember. She was too limp to even do her night cream. In her dreams something very big was pressing, pressing at an elastic door, growling and spitting; but in the morning, as the ski lifts started up, she deduced that it had been the sounds of the Sno-Cats grooming the slopes through the night.
“Tell me about your new marriage,” Patrick said at breakfast. In morning light he looked puffy from drink, his jowls still glossy from being shaved, and touching, his old handsomeness come down to a mere dignified bulk, too dignified now for the scramble of the art world, with its violent young bodies and wills. (“Everybody’s mutilating and puncturing themselves, these girls come in with the faces like absolute sieves, God knows what they’ve done to the rest of their bodies, it’s terrifying,” he had complained last night.) His close-shaved face was a blue-pink old querulous queen’s.
“It’s heaven,” she answered. “A stable older man. Why did I keep marrying those ridiculous boys before?”
“Because you were a ridiculous girl, my dear. Where do you and Number—is it?—Four live?”
“Well, that’s complicated right now,” Alma said. “When Coca-Cola sold Columbia to Sony for that insane mark-up in the billions—the poor Japanese, really—it left Caleb without a job, after all he had done to get TriStar started, so he went back to Boston of course, which his heart had never left. But I hate to give up the Coldwater Canyon house after all these years, and even the cottage in Malibu, the capital-gains taxes would kill me if I sold, so that’s how it stands.” Patrick’s lips mockingly quivered, and she said with all her actressy dignity, “Caleb and I are apart a good deal, yes, but what we give each other we don’t need to be physically present to receive. He loves my fame, and I love his dear old money.”
From his face, pursed in distaste like Charles Laughton’s when mutiny loomed, this was more than Patrick had wanted to know. Marriage between men and women was an area where he was invincibly ignorant; even his parents’ he had not been privileged to witness, and then his mother and Mr. Traphagen had given themselves to art. Alma went on, in revenge because Patrick had been rather boring last night, “Oh, I know you think I’ve made a lot of my own, and I have, but Hollywood money is like snow, didn’t somebody once say? It melts. Caleb’s is Boston money. It hides, and grows. These New Englanders have really never discovered the pleasure principle. They all love Maine because it’s so uncomfortable. Caleb has a house in Brookline and a shingled place on Martha’s Vineyard. I love it on the Vineyard. Cagney went there for years. Everybody on it thinks they’re some kind of star, so I get no attention. I go barefoot. I even go shopping barefoot.”
“You sound happy,” he said, subdued as she had wished.
“Oh, who can tell? When the ambition bug bites, happiness stops being the point. I should be happy, God knows—I think I would be, if Clark and these crazies of his weren’t such a desperate worry. Could you possibly, poor dear Patrick, drive me back to Lower Branch, or is there a Rocky Mountain taxi I could call?”
They arrived in time for the press conference that the FBI spokesman, Mr. Fred Dix, gave every eleven in the cement-block town hall, upstairs in the meeting room. He reminded her of Wayne Phillips, Sr., in front of the assembled Sunday school, looking uncomfortable and evasive and whey-faced from leading such an indoors life. Alma had not seen folding chairs like these—double, dark brown, with close-set slats on the curved seat—since Sunday school. The big room, with its industrial steel windows and an American flag drooping in the corner, was full of these chairs, but, even so, some reporters had to stand along the walls. The monotone briefing stated that the situation was basically unchanged. As per Mr. Smith’s request, two of his thirty-minute tapes on the real meaning of the whore of Babylon and related texts had been broadcast on radio stations in Gunnison, Salida, Leadville, and Glenwood Springs. Mr. Smith was still prayerfully meditating on the matter of releasing women and children. Physical access to the Temple and its grounds continued to be denied to television crews on the grounds of personal danger; on three separate occasions last week cameramen who had ventured inside the thousand-yard perimeter established by the coördinated law-enforcement team drew rifle fire from inside the main house. An exasperated reporter shouted, “Sir, is your so-called team going to do anything at all or just hang outside the perimeter forever?”
The spokesman’s jaw lifted, a bit like the President’s when he spoke of Manuel Noriega, and he said, “This is a highly delicate and volatile situation. Jesse Smith is a pathological liar and a known killer who is holding seventeen minors and five women in there. If he wants to prove me wrong, all he has to do is come out of that compound and submit to American justice.” This was a dare, meant to reach Jesse Smith as a sound bite, and the television cameras duly rolled. To make another bite, Fred Dix went on, “The winter is our friend, not his. Every day they hold out, they have less fuel, less food, less patience. More anxiety, more friction between them. We can wait all year. We can certainly wait till the snowdrifts aren’t there to impede operations.”
“What about cutting off their electricity again?” another reporter asked.
Dix’s patience was not as endless as he suggested. “We’re trying for a peaceful resolution and full communications is the way to bring that about. The FBI, the ATF, the Colorado and county forces of law enforcement are running this operation, not the news media. Our aim is to save lives, not provide a sensational story for the public. We’re not going to let the tail wag the dog here.”
One of the bored reporters noticed that Alma had come into the room. Like a beast with a hundred eyes and mouths and a single will, the forces of news-gathering rushed to consu
me her. She answered their questions one by one, taking care not to stammer and not to blink as the flashbulbs went off in their blue cascades: “I am here because I couldn’t bear to stay away—any mother would do the same.… No, I have never met Mr. Smith or read his pamphlets. This decision was Clark’s, and I have never pried. We all have a right to a private religious life, surely.… He was baptized as a Presbyterian on North Gower Street in Hollywood.… I have talked to him just once over the phone, for three minutes, and I must say he sounded more focused and alert than I have ever heard him.… No—I would be, of course, and you would be, but he did not sound frightened.… A quiet boy, basically, interested in much the same things as other boys are. He took after my dear father, I used to think.… Theodore R. Wilmot, W, I, L, M, O, T, Basingstoke, Delaware … That’s right, the mailman, though actually he retired many years ago.… Same-sex marriages? They do now? I didn’t know this. But any denomination has to keep up with the times, I suppose, including the Presbyterians.… Yes, with the wonderfully talented Jennifer Sprague, who is going to be I am sure one of the truly creative forces in American film of the Nineteen-nineties.… The Sharpened Knife, based on a true story in the news … Quite grim, yes, but cathartic … Two and a half months in Greece … Not really—how could I, considering when I was born? I think one of the good effects of television has been to promote more roles for mature women; the old Hollywood gave us a very artificially heightened sense of life and beauty, and it placed a terrible burden upon everyone, actresses and audience alike.… No, there is no truth in that rumor. We are very happy, though because of our work we are not as much together as we’d like.… Goodness, no, I wouldn’t think so, though I’m not sure I know quite what you mean by ‘all-out assault.’ … Perfect confidence. I’ve had some reservations about J. Edgar Hoover but never about the FBI as a whole.… Yes, I thought the blacklisting was disgusting, and still think so.… Well, I haven’t seen everything, being as I say on location in Europe, but I loved Andie MacDowell in Sex, Lies, and Videotape. For the best actor—”