I Could Go on Singing (21 page)

When she opened the door he pushed by her, calling, “Matt? Matt?”

The boy came out of his room. Jenny said quickly, “Matthew, dear, we didn’t win.”

“Hello, father,” the boy said uneasily. “I wanted to come along to the airport with Jenny, but she thought it better she talk to you alone about Paris and all.”

“She explained it perfectly. All I want you to do now is pack up and come along. Are you ready?”

“No. But … there isn’t much. It won’t take me a minute.”

“Hurry along, then. The car’s outside.”

“All right,” the boy said and went into his room and closed the door.

“Paris,” David said in a disgusted voice. “And Rome and Brussels and Berlin, the whole tour. Then maybe you could get him into the moving pictures.”

“Oh for God’s sake don’t sulk. I’ll say I’m sorry. Matthew will say he’s sorry too. What do you want us to do? Grovel and sob?”

He stared at her. “I don’t want you to do anything. I just want to get out of here as soon as possible.”

She stared at him. “Just what was so terrible about having fun together? What’s so shameful about that? Why should that give you the right to stand there and look at me as if I were a criminal?”

“You know what you did.”

“All right. I broke a promise. I know it. All the years your wife was alive I kept out of the way, didn’t I?”

“She was good for him.”

“Fine! She was good for him. Congratulations! But what has he got now? You with your sour face, too busy
to go visit him. And Aunty Beth who’s about forty years too late. What kind of life is that for him?”

“You are either too stupid to realize, or to stubborn to admit that Matthew and I have a good relationship. We did very well before you came and we’ll do very well after you leave.”

“My God, you know how to strike a nerve, don’t you? He needs me and I want him!”

“He’s not yours to have, Jenny. You gave him to me a long time ago. I love him and I need him.”

“
You
need
him
? He’s a child, David. What does
he
need?”

“He’s my son and I’m going to keep him!”

There was a heavy silence. Jenny turned toward David and said clearly, “There’s just one little thing we may be overlooking, you know. He’s my son too. I made him. So where do we go from there?”

Jenny began to cry as she told Jason about it. She turned her agonized face toward him. “Oh, Brownie. It was so awful.”

“What happened?”

“Matthew. Matthew was … he was there, in the doorway. David saw him first. I don’t know how long he’d been there. But you could see by his face that he’d heard it. He stood with his suitcase and that tape recorder, and he looked so white and sick. Neither of us could think of anything at all to say to him. He swallowed hard and came into the room and said he was all packed. His voice shook. He took his things over near the door and stood with his back to us after he put them down, and asked if … if it was true.” She snuffled and blew her nose. “So David told him it was true. Then Matthew asked his father why he hadn’t told him. David said he meant to, intended to, but he kept putting it off. Then he asked me why I hadn’t told him. He looked so white and wretched and accusing. I said I’d promised his father not to. Then David decided it was time to leave. The boy didn’t want to leave. He wanted to stay and get it all clearer in his mind. I had no objections. I said so. But then David reminded the boy how few orders, direct orders, he had ever given him. And he ordered him to leave. And Matthew, with a sort of shy and wonderful dignity turned to me and explained that he was leaving not because he wanted to, but because he had been ordered to. He asked me if he could phone me tomorrow and talk. I said I would like to have him do that. And then, as David
was looking more and more surly, Matthew turned to him and said that he didn’t expect he would be ordered not to phone his friends. It was very brave and very firm. And … and then they left. Oh, hold me, Brownie. Hold me close. I feel as if I was falling off the edge of the world.”

He held her until the tears were under control.

“What shall I do?” she asked. “It isn’t fair. It just isn’t fair.”

“I don’t see that there’s anything you can do, Jenny. You have no legal claim on the boy.”

“No legal claim,” she said thoughtfully.

“Now that the boy knows, he might insist on being permitted to see you once in a while.”

“After David poisons his mind against me? No, I keep wondering if that is true, Brownie.”

“If what is true?”

“That I have no legal claim at all. I wonder …”

“Jenny?”

“You have been a darling, Brownie. I love you. Now run along and send George in here. Find him and send him in here.”

Jason heard the rest of it in the dressing room at the theater. George had briefed him on some of it. At Jenny’s insistence he had made two long phone calls to the New York lawyers who had handled the adoption procedures. When Jenny came sweeping into the dressing room, she was holding her head high. She looked vibrant, narrow-eyed and dangerous. Her small jaw had a clamped and stubborn look. Ida was getting her costume ready. Gabe was ready to fix her hair.

George followed her in, practically wringing his hands. “Yes, darling, there is a case,” he said.

“I told you, didn’t I?” she said firmly. “Brownie, Ida, I’ve got a son.”

“Did I say how much of a case?” George said. “What you got, Jenny, is a technicality. I’ve been telling you. The adoption was legitimate. But there’s some kind of second papers or final papers. And you never signed them.”

“Good for me!” she said pertly.

“Can’t you slow down a little?” George demanded. “New York was very cold about this. You know? Frankly, it’s a long shot. No guarantees. Nothing easy. A whole long Megillah in court. It would be a hell of a thing to fight.”

“I’m a fighter, George, and I know what I’m fighting for. Tell them to go ahead and get it rolling.”

“So you have to have lawyers here too.”

“So they can pick some lawyers here. Tell them to get going.”

George sighed heavily. “Gabe, Ida, Jase. Go take a coffee break or something.”

“Better be a fast one,” Ida said.

“Brownie stays,” Jenny said. The other two left.

She was at the dressing table, sitting on the bench. George went up behind her and put his hands on her shoulders. “Leave out the lawyers one minute, Jenny. For advice take a little from me. Right now you are at the top of a career you’ve been building for twenty years. For half that time I’ve been with you, helping. Right?”

“Right,” she said.

“So I know a little about the subject? And now that you’ve got the career neat and tight in your hot little hands I can’t stand by and watch you toss it over the wall.… But more than that I can’t stand by and see you destroy yourself.”

“How?”

“So you fight the case. You may win. It’s possible. I don’t know. But do you know what it would mean? You’d have to stay right here in England and fight this thing out. You couldn’t be in Rome one week and Miami the next. You’d have to be here in the courts. And that can be pretty rough. On you
and
the kid. The boy has a father, a home, a school, a way of life he knows. So you want to jump into the middle of that and make all kinds of waves.”

“Yes. That’s what I want.”

“So you get him and what do you do with him. Trail all over the world dragging a tutor along? Hotel suites, rented cars, other people’s houses. They’re pretty tough in England about schooling. The court would have to decide that kind of life would be okay for him. They might say you’d have to leave him in school and see him now and then at vacation. Is that what you want? Don’t you see?”

“Go on,” she said and got up and went into the screened dressing area.

“And what would happen to you? How would you be able to work with this pull all the time? Do you know how to raise a boy? I’d say he’s been raised fine so far. It’s not all kisses and presents and supper after the show. It’s a full-time
job, and dear, forgive me, but I don’t think you know how to do it. This is your job, right here, and you do it better than anyone else in the world. You
know
it. Don’t force this. Let it rest. Don’t give the whole world a fat chance to crucify you for something that happened a long time ago. You bring it out in the open, in the courts, and they’ll make it stinking dirty rotten for everybody. You want the lawyers on the other side trying to prove you’re not fit to have him? Let it rest, darling. The kid is happy; he belongs. Leave him there. Any other way may destroy you. And destroy your son too.”

There was a long silence. Jenny came back out into the dressing room wearing her costume. She smiled at George. “You’re terribly sweet, George, and I know you’re trying to help, but when you’re lucky enough to find something that really matters, the way I have, you have to hang onto it. I love him, George. And do you know the strangest thing? I think he loves me.”

Ida knocked at the door and opened it. “We better come in and get you set.”

“Come on, then,” George said hollowly.

“George?”

“Yes, Jenny.”

“Just for luck, buy Matthew a ticket.”

“To Paris?”

“No. For the whole tour.”

“For the whole tour,” George said emptily. He nodded. He walked out of the dressing room. Ida and Gabe were working on Jenny.

“George is right,” Jason said.

“Is he? What things have the most meaning, Brownie?”

“The things you want the most, I guess.”

“Exactly.”

Jenny looked at Ida. “Please, Ida. Be happy for me. Don’t be angry. Don’t think I’m crazy. And don’t feel sorry for me. Be happy and wish me luck.”

Ida looked at her for a long moment. “Okay, Jenny B. Luck.”

The overture had started. Jenny listened, kissed Ida lightly on the cheek, and then headed slowly for her place in the wings.

Jason Brown awoke Tuesday to a feeling of gray and sour depression. He could not remember his dreams, knew only that he had dreamed, had somewhere run and somewhere wept, but knew not why. He felt a half-step removed from reality, exiled in a cold place, charged with insoluble problems. He yearned for home sunshine, the cluttered workroom, Bonny’s flower face. Here was only the cold wet springtime, and Jenny Bowman plunging into a destruction no one could halt. Here was Lois, denying the abundant gifts of her warmth, rejecting herself and trying to think it wisdom. Here, in a strange city, where his memories of Jocelyn and Joyce were bittersweet, he would now be privileged to watch the end of something else. He got up feeling seamed and dusty. He remembered Wegler’s little aphorism. If something can go wrong, it will. Yes indeed, Sid. It always has.

He was just leaving the room when the phone rang.

“Jason?”

“I was just thinking about you, Lois.”

“I’m sorry I was such sour company last night.”

“Nobody was exactly loaded with glee.”

“Jason, the boy is on his way to see you. Matthew is on his way to your hotel.”

“Matthew? But why?”

“I haven’t the slightest idea. I don’t think he talked to anyone else here. I’m quite certain of it. He asked how he could find you. He asked me not to say he had phoned me. He was very polite. Maybe he was upset. It’s difficult to tell.”

“I … I’ll let you know later on what it’s all about.”

“All this must be very hard on him.”

“Thank you for warning me, Lois. Has George phoned New York?”

“Jenny thinks he has. He’s stalling. I don’t know what good it will do. Her mind is made up.”

Matthew arrived ten minutes later. He called on the house
phone. Jason said he was just on his way down to breakfast and he would be glad to have the boy join him.

The boy was waiting at the elevators. He seemed very grave and contained. They went to the dining room. He said he’d had breakfast, but he would like a sweet bun and coffee, please.

“I don’t want to bother you with my problems, Mr. Brown.”

“I don’t know if I can help you, Matthew. But if I can, I will.”

“The reason I came to you, sir, Jenny and I talked one day about the people close to her. She is very fond of everyone, of course. They are nice people. But she said something about you which I remembered. She said you … know how to help people. She said you know what people should really do.”

“I’m never that certain of anything, Matthew.”

“This is something where I … must talk to someone who isn’t really a part of it all. You do … know about me?”

“Yes, I do.”

“I thought you might, sir.”

“I learned about it seven years ago.”

“Am I imposing on you?”

“No. Jenny is my friend. Don’t be apologetic about this.”

“It’s just that it’s rather difficult to talk about it, I suspect. Such a personal thing. It’s easier to talk to someone I don’t know awfully well, but it’s still difficult. Everything seems … so changed for me. I see things quite differently now. I thought I was adopted, you know. My mother … I mean Janet … she was marvelously good to me, considering. And finding that my father is really my father after all. It’s a bit of a shock after adjusting to it being the other way. I’ve been staring at myself in mirrors. I do look like him. And a bit like her. Once you know, it seems obvious.”

It was, Jason realized, an extraordinary maturity for a boy of thirteen. But he had been away at school for five years, and exposed to one of the world’s most comprehensive educational systems.

“I had it out with father last night,” the boy said, and his voice broke slightly.

“It isn’t easy for him either, Matthew.”

“I realize that. He phoned Aunty Beth and explained I’m staying with him for a bit and he’ll be sending me along later. He worked for a time and then came to my room. I was taping some of his discs. It’s really a tremendous machine,
far better than what he would have gotten me. Too good, really. I expect that bothers him somewhat. It was fearfully expensive. He asked me if he might sit down and speak with me. Father is terribly correct, you know.”

“Yes. I know.”

“And he is a shy man, I think. He sat down and he told me that it was a very bad age for this to have happened. Were I younger, he could give commands. And if I were older, I could be given the chance to make up my own mind about … things. He said that in fairness to me, he would have to talk to me as a man. And he did. It was very difficult for him. But he explained about being in New York for specialist study and treating Jenny and falling in love with her, even though he and Janet were married. But Janet was here, of course. He told her everything, and she agreed they should adopt me. But there was one part of all of it he could not explain to me.”