American Dreams (74 page)

case you don't know it. I saw the Times write-up when I came back. 1

didn't like what I read.'

She dabbed her melting makeup with a hanky. 'I'm sorry. I think we disagree about the war. I spoke my mind.'

'Take my advice. Don't get involved in causes. It steals your energy.' He smiled with all the. sincerity of a con man defrauding a widow. Being avuncular just wasn't in him.

Irked, she said, 'There are more important things than being a picture _

star and signing autographs.'

¦

'Not in my cash book, sister. Everybody says Hollywood people are the new royalty, the only royalty this country's ever had. You're part of that.

Look at all the press you get. The crowds you attract when you so much as break wind.'

'Al, please.'

He pressed on, a hard edge in his voice. 'Take the wrong stand on a t public issue like the

war, your audience is liable to desert you. You can't afford that.'

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'I'll chance it.'

'All right, Liberty can't afford it. I won't put up with it.'

'Why, because you hate red ink?'

They sounded like a couple of children spatting, but there was nothing childish or funny about Kelly's snarl. 'Stay out of those parades. Don't make any more speeches. That's it, that's the order. I run this studio.'

'You don't run me, Al. Not outside the gates.'

'Then you're making your last picture as Nell.'

t

What?'

'That lawyer you shoved down our throats -- a real genius. He overlooked one thing. You signed a contract binding you to work for Liberty for three years. But you don't get any say in the kind of work -- what pictures
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you're in. We have to pay you, but we don't have to use you.'

'Have you lost your mind? The Nell comedies make money.'

'Sure, but watch them go the other way if you keep opening your bazoo about the war. Half the people in this country want no part of it.

Half, maybe more. Get this straight, Fritzi. Liberty created the Nell pictures, and Liberty owns the character. We can hire any actress for the part. We can send you back to playing Princess Laughing Rainwater in cowboy pictures. Do you get what I'm telling you? We can put you in blackface and make you play darky maids. Or the rear end of a horse.'

'This is a bluff.'

'Sure, all right. Play the hand out and see. Take a vacation, Fritzi. A good long one. After this Nell wraps up, go make as many goddamn speeches for England as you want. Oh, one more thing. Don't bother crawling to Hayman this time. Ham's with me all the way on this. He hates what the limey press says about studio owners. That a lot of 'em are German Jews and love the Kaiser.'

He swiveled around in his chair and showed her his back. Fritzi reeled out of the office. Her funny shoes flapped and slapped. She felt like a novice drinker who'd gulped a quart of gin on an empty stomach.

A cool wind from the mountains dropped the nighttime temperature. She built a fire and put a new disc on the Victrola. Caruso singing LVesti la giubba1 filled the house. A song about a sad clown seemed appropriate.

She lay on the Navaho rug in front of the fire, toasting her bare feet.

Her eyes misted as the music soared, and she thought of Loy. The

\

Kelly Gives Orders 463

mournful air ended; the needle scraped as the disk went round and round. She rewound the machine and started the record again.

The twists and turns and confusions of the world baffled and frustrated her as never before. All your life you dreamed of one man to love, and he turned out to be wrong. You started along one road where you thought success lay, but it didn't, so out of a combination of desperation and accident you took another road, less desirable, and lo and behold, there you found the rewards, the dreams fulfilled in a totally unexpected
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way -- and then someone threatened what you'd achieved simply because you did what you believed right.

Were dreams always so thwarted, distorted, changed in ways you never anticipated? Was this what people meant by the riddle of life? If so, its solution was beyond her, though its pain and hurt were present and real.

What did it all mean? How could you understand? What could you do, beyond getting up next morning and going on? She fell asleep in front of the dying fire with the questions unanswered and the Victrola needle scraping in the center grooves of the record.

She hit on a scheme to take her out of Los Angeles for a while. She bought Schatze a pearl-studded collar, loaded her into a wicker traveling box, and boarded a train for Texas.

She rode the Pecos & Northern Texas Line, which ran from Lubbock to Farwell Junction on the New Mexico border. Yet she saw little of the countryside because of dust storms, yellow monsters that roared over the land, carrying off topsoil of the cotton fields.

At Muleshoe only two passengers left the train, Fritzi and an anvil salesman lugging a small sample. He disappeared in the dust, coughing. Fritzi looked around. A colored porter approached.

'Is there a hotel?'

'Yes'm. 'Cross the street.'

'Thank you.'

The clerk stared at her while she signed the ledger. Fritzi now understood that people stared at her the way they stared at Little Mary, or Charlie, but she still had moments when she stood away, remote from herself, a mystified observer who wondered how this could be. Dust blew past the grimy lobby windows as she asked, 'Is there a local police department?'

'No,

ma'am.'

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'Sheriff, then?'

'Yes'm, this is the county seat.' He gave directions. People were extra helpful if they recognized you; that was one of the few advantages.

The sandstone courthouse matched the hue of the dust clouds. The building smelled of spittoons and aging deed books. Sheriff Rob Roy Trigg's office was on the first floor. The sheriff was a big old buffalo of a
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man with a home haircut, handlebar mustaches, and neat citified clothes.

She found him sorting through wanted flyers. Many more hung three and four deep on his bulletin board. She wondered if a flyer with Loy's likeness and description was among them.

Trigg nearly tangled his feet racing around the desk to hold the guest chair. 'It's an honor, ma'am. My wife and myself, we enjoy you so much at the picture show.'

'Thank you, Sheriff.' No matter how often she had to listen to it, each person who said it fancied they were the first, so you couldn't be rude.

'I've come about a man I was acquainted with in Los Angeles. A resident of this town at one time. Loyal Hardin.'

'Why, sure, I knew Loy.' The words revealed nothing of his feelings. A fly walked across the sheriff's ink-stained blotter. He waved it off.

'Do you know his whereabouts?'

'No, ma'am, afraid I don't. No one's seen Loy in years. He killed a Texas Ranger, Captain Mercer Page, did you know that?'

'I had some hint of it. Loy and I worked in several pictures together. He handled horses, sometimes took small parts.'

'Do tell. Didn't know.' He brought a corncob out of his desk. 'Will this bother you?' She shook her head. He packed the pipe. 'Loy's sister, Clara, she's over in Lubbock in a home for the feeble-minded.' Trigg's hand hovered over the old pipe with a lit match. He almost burned himself before he blew it out. 'What happened about Merce Page was a real shame. Loy Hardin shot and killed him, then disappeared to hell and gone 'fore the whole story came out.'

'What do you mean, the whole story?'

Trigg leaned back with both hands cupped around his pipe. 'It got out that Loy shot Merce because he, ah, molested Loy's sister. After Loy ran off, women started coming forward. A young woman up in Lariat, that's in Partner County. Another from Castro County, preacher's widow. Woman of sixty, can you imagine? Lord knows how many more kept silent. The man was an animal. Not fit to wear a Ranger's badge. Upshot was, the murder charge was sort of put aside. Only Loy never knew it.'

Heat of the Moment 465

The irony of it. When B.B. wanted him for a good role, Loy feared he might be recognized back home and be locked up, unable to care for Clara. Poor sweet man, if he'd said yes, he might be a picture star by now.

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Wherever he was, Loy was free. Probably he'd never know.

84 Heat of the Moment

I

n the midst of the fiercely hot summer, a season of mounting war passions, Joe Crown felt himself a man besieged.

The climate in which German-Americans found themselves steadily Igrew more stormy and hostile. Editorial cartoons portrayed all Germans as 'cruel beasts' and 'lying Huns.' Newspapers ran wild scare stories about spy rings secretly financed by 'hyphenates.' It became sorrowfully evident to Joe that to be an American citizen of German origin was to be a pariah.

Though he didn't tell lisa, he worried endlessly about Carl, off there in France in a fragile aeroplane, risking his life. Carl never wrote letters, so he and lisa were left wondering about him, which only enhanced the anxiety.

He was beset by physical ailments. His eyesight continued to fail. A fall on the ice late in the winter had exacerbated arthritic pain in his hips. He tended to stoop, couldn't brace his shoulders back as he had for so many years, to reflect his pride at being a Union officer and then General of Volunteers in '98. I le was no longer erect and military but old and bent.

Since his seventy-third birthday, observed on March 31, it seemed to him that things had. slid downhill more rapidly. He and lisa had celebrated the birthday by themselves in the dining room of the Union League Club.

Joe was aware of whispers, and some ugly looks, as they dined that night.

Well, what else could be expected? His own friend Roosevelt was denouncing

'hyphenates' in speeches.

Now, in the blaze of July, here was his nephew Paul fresh off the transcontinental train and eager to show him pictures.

'Why should I waste my time?' the General said after lisa had retired.

He and his nephew sat with beer and cigars in the stuffy office on the first floor of the mansion. Wind shook doors and windows ahead of a storm blowing in from the prairies. Paul's train had come through downpours and a hailstorm.

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Battlefields

'Why should I make myself miserable staring at unpalatable sights for
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an hour or more, tell me that?'

'Because these pictures tell the truth about what's happening.'

Joe Crown was old, tired, beset by aches and pains, prohibitionists, pseudo-patriots, and disloyal children. He wanted to rebuff his nephew in the harshest of terms. He drank the rest of his beer while Paul, whom he loved like his own child, sprawled in his chair, alert and hopeful.

'Why do you insist on this?' the General said finally.

'Because I respect your integrity, Uncle Joe. If you see the truth, I know you won't try to deny it. You're not that kind of man.'

The General chewed his cigar. 'You said you were last in Los Angeles?'

'Yes, I was there right as the tour went to hell.'

'Did Fritzi have a hand in your coming here?'

Paul didn't avoid his uncle's eye, or even blink. 'She wanted you to see the pictures, yes. But I take responsibility. I made the decision to stop in Chicago.'

A lightning flash turned the windows white. Querulously, the General said, 'All right. For you, not her.'

Paul bounded out of his chair. 'I brought a rental projector with me in the taxi.'

After the more prosaic scenes of German soldiers behind the lines, and then the ghastly footage from the trenches, the Belgian field appeared. The captain tapped his cigarette on a metal case. The soldiers raised their rifles.

The captain demanded bayonets. The women kneeling fell over in a faint. The middle-aged farmer put his arm around his wife.

The impatient captain waved his cigarette. The soldiers fixed bayonets and lunged forward, ramming the steel into the six victims. When they fell in postures of agony the soldiers stabbed again, and again, many more times than necessary.

Joe Crown's cold cigar dropped to the floor. He held the arms of his chair as the screen went black. Rain spattered the window. He could only fall back on trite words. 'Mein Gott im Himmel.'

He staggered to his feet; Paul rushed to offer a supporting hand. 'I need air.'

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'It's about to storm, Uncle Joe.'

'Air. Come or stay as you want.'

Heat of the Moment 467

He blundered to the door like a gored animal. Paul followed him through the darkened downstairs. The wind drove the front door inward with a crash.

The General went down the front steps unsteadily, buffeted by the wind hurling grit before it. An empty barrel blew along Michigan, whirling and bumping in a dust cloud. A pressure heavy as an iron anvil lay on Joe's chest suddenly. He leaned against an elm tree, struggling to breathe.

'Uncle, what is it?'

/-"

'A little pain. I have them occasionally. They pass.'

This one took five minutes to pass.

'I'm all right now.' The wind blew from behind him, making his white hair fly around his head. Paul's necktie snapped like a whip.

'Does-Aunt lisa know about these pains?'

'No, she does not.' He raised his fists in front of his nephew's face. 'You must not tell her. I absolutely forbid you to say a word.'

Profoundly shaken and disillusioned by Paul's pictures, Joe Crown slept badly the next few nights. His employees suffered sudden outbursts of anger, a sign of turmoil they recognized from occasional times of trouble in the past.

Businessmen of Joe's acquaintance approached him, asking him to let his name be used in an advertisement arguing for a negotiated peace with Germany and the Central Powers. Most of those already signed up were German-Americans. The visitors also asked for five hundred dollars to help pay for inserting the ad, in two languages, in the city's English and German newspapers.

'I'll sign, and I'll give you the money,' he said. 'But don't misconstrue my reason. I no longer have sympathy for the men running the war from Berlin. I want to see it over to stop the killing of innocents.'