Seidel, Kathleen Gilles (23 page)

"I'm not. But I don't let them work out all their feelings about money on my time."

"That's the difference. Most people have stronger feelings about money than they do about Phillip Wayland."

"Except me."

He smiled. "Except you."

Instead of coming north on the Interstate, Doug had taken a back road, a narrow ribbon of blacktop with dirt shoulders falling off into shallow drainage ditches that sparkled with wildflowers. The road rose and fell with each swell of the earth, sweeping past the stone churches, the sagging, vine-covered barns, the crisp clusters of convenience stores and roadhouses at the crossroads.

They were in Winchester now. The outskirts of town were full of appliance stores and car lots, Pizza Huts and video stores. They drove by a decent-sized mall that had, Doug said, killed the downtown. A few turns brought them suddenly into a small town with narrow streets and old sycamores. This was the historic district. Doug stopped the car in front of a good-sized, square brick house with white trim and a two-story bay window. The yard was fenced in by iron railings.

"This is your grandmother's house?"

Doug nodded. "My parents live across the street. They were going to come this evening, and then my sisters started inviting themselves until it got to the point that Gran put down her foot and told everyone to stay home."

Jill was still looking at the house through the car window. It reminded her of Briar Ridge. Of course, it was smaller than the house in the movie, and Briar Ridge had a cleaner, more Federal look, while the scrolling white brackets that trimmed the porch of this house and the elaborately turned balusters were mid-Victorian Italianate. But the two houses had the same solid Southern feel to them.

Which shouldn't be a surprise. Bix Ringling had grown up in this house, Jill reminded herself, and if he had indeed first conceived of the story during the dark hours of his confinement in a German P.O.W. camp, he would be drawn to a setting like his childhood home.

The front door, with its large oval of beveled glass, was open. There was a screen door that obviously had been installed much later. Doug opened it without knocking.

"Come in, come in," a woman's voice called from the back of the house. "If I come out and be polite, we'll lose this gravy. Come in and make yourselves at home."

Jill stepped into a square high-ceilinged foyer that took up a quarter of the first floor of the house. A fading Oriental rug was centered on the polished wood floors, and a little spinet piano sat under the bend in the mahogany staircase. Doug drew Jill over to the staircase wall. Next to a dark oil portrait of a stern-looking ancestor was a cheap, black dime-store frame enclosing an intricate line drawing of shooting stars and flowers exploding into peacocks and train cars.

A voice came from the other side of the house. "That was Bix's."

Jill turned. Through a wide arch was the parlor. A man was sitting in a wing chair, his legs covered by an afghan. It was Charles Ringling. He was much older than he had been when he had played Booth—much, much older, his hair silver rather than fair. But there was still no doubt as to who he was.

"Bix was always doodling," he continued. "He'd do it whenever he was sitting down. He had so much energy, he had to pour it out in something. We kept that one because he drew my wife's face."

Doug pointed, and Jill peered at the drawing. Down in the corner, almost off the paper, framed by lilies, was a woman's face. Mary Deas, or as she would be known in this house, Alicia Burchell, Mrs. Charles Ringling.

"She was beautiful." Jill crossed the old Oriental and went into the parlor, taking the hand that Charles extended. He did not rise.

"We did lose something when Bix died," he said.

Jill knew that, before World War II, Charles had trained as a lawyer. After the plane crash he had stayed in his family home and had gone back to the law, opening a small, quiet practice writing wills and doing real estate closings. He had retired a number of years ago.

The furniture in this room was dark and ornate, upholstered in fading velvets, the tables topped with marble. The pictures on the walls were hunting prints and portraits, framed in deep gilt. A set of pocket doors with insets of frosted glass separated the parlor from the dining room.

"Why don't you offer Miss Casler something to drink?" Charles said to Doug. "Have you ever had Virginia wine?" he asked Jill.

"No, but I'd love to try some. And please, call me Jill."

"I would like that." Charles gestured for her to sit down. "The Valley's been talking for days about your coming. I'm so pleased you could spare an evening for us. I have wanted to tell you how much I admired your father and his work."

"I appreciate that," Jill answered. No one else had said that. This was what she was used to, people saying this first. "I truly do."

"Then I want you to tell me which of his films is your favorite... and to show you that I'm not asking for compliments, we shall only talk about the ones he directed."

Cass had been the editor and, along with Bix, the co-screenwriter of
Weary Hearts,
but not its director. "Then, for me it would be
Nancy."

"More than
Mustard Lane?" Mustard Lane
won Cass his second Oscar, and most critics considered it his best work.

"It's a personal choice. It was shot in England and I was on location almost the whole time."

Doug returned from the kitchen with the wine. He handed her a glass. "That was the one about the pilot and his daughter, wasn't it?"

Jill nodded. Although it had been made in the early seventies,
Nancy
was set right after World War II. The hero was an R.A.F. pilot, one of Churchill's "few" to whom so many had owed so much. His wife having been killed during the Blitz, he went to the country to pick up his ten-year-old daughter, who had spent the war in a large country house to which she had been evacuated. Even at the time, Jill sensed that the picture was infused with Cass's love for her.

"Did you know that was from an old Valley story?" Charles said. "A Colonel Barnhope, he was with Stonewall at Sharpsburg—what a terrible day that was. His wife died during the war, and he was left with his little girl. I never completely understood why your father changed the setting, but it was a lovely picture. I remember being so saddened by it, wishing that my wife and I had had a child. It might have made her death easier to bear."

Charles still had Booth's voice—slow and rich, promising strength and safety. It was hypnotic to sit amid this worn Victorian graciousness, the late afternoon sun filtering through the lace panels that hung behind the velvet curtains. Jill felt like she was in a dream, lifted out of time. It wasn't quite real, hearing Charles talk about the battle of Sharpsburg as if it had been fought only yesterday. The Civil War and World War II, Charles and Booth, Alicia and Mary Deas, Bix, Phillip, and Doug, they all blurred together. Like a soft Madras plaid, the colors bled into one another, making lovelier, more glowing patterns than when each color stood on its own.

A crisp voice broke the spell. "I do declare," an elderly woman said, coming out from the kitchen, untying her apron, "I've been making gravy for coming up on seventy-five years now. You'd think I wouldn't let it get away from me like that. Don't get up," she said to Jill. "The turkey's got to sit for ten more minutes. Then we'll have Doug carve it."

Marie Ringling had her son's beautiful silver hair, which she wore twisted into a soft, thick knot. She seemed like a brisk, practical woman.

"It was so nice of you to have me," Jill said. "It sounds like you weren't given much choice."

"Don't worry yourself. I had plenty of choice. Doug offered to take us all to a restaurant, but Charles isn't one for going out, not since the old Hotel became a homeless shelter." She sat down on one of the wing chairs. "I'm old enough and tired enough to make a fool of myself. Tell me about all the famous people you know. The nice-looking boy, Payne Bartlett, is he your boyfriend?"

Jill liked people who were direct and so the conversation through dinner was lively. Jill, Mrs. Ringling, and Doug did all the talking. Charles seemed to be listening interestedly, but he said little, and Doug functioned as the host, carving the turkey, refilling the wine glasses.

Mrs. Ringling had made a pie for dessert. She brought it out to the table along with the coffee in the plastic pot from the Mr. Coffee machine, which she set down next to an exquisite cream and sugar set.

Mrs. Ringling's china had been nothing more than pretty, her flatware did not have marvelous heft of the best sterling, but this cream and sugar were extraordinary, ornately patterned silver with long triangular facets ending in tiny engravings of Oriental faces.

"These are," Jill said truthfully, "among the loveliest things I've seen in a private home."

"Do you like them?" Mrs. Ringling seemed pleased. "My mother's people were Ropers. They're from them."

"Tell her about the dent." Doug handed Jill the sugar bowl, turning it so she could see the large dent in its side.

"When the Yankees looted Charleston—that's where the Ropers are from—they took most everything in the house, certainly every scrap of silver. A neighbor saw these in the gutter and brought them to the family."

"They must have been thrilled to get them back." Jill curved her hands around the sugar bowl, her palm pressing into the dent, perhaps made by a cobblestone, perhaps by a horse's hoof.

"I don't know," Mrs. Ringling replied. "Apparently old Mrs. Roper used to say having them only reminded her of everything that was gone. But she never sold them, and God knows she would have needed the money badly enough. I've always had half a mind to take the thing in to be repaired, but I don't know—the dent adds something."

Charles had his coffee and appeared to be waiting for the cream and sugar, so reluctantly Jill set the bowl down. She had been so calm about having her house swept away. She had been quite proud of herself, thinking she had been so wonderful and sane. But maybe it was easy to be wonderful and sane about lost objects when you lived in a world where the oldest things were the glasses used on the set of
Casablanca.

Jill offered to help Mrs. Ringling with the dishes.

"No, no. I've got my own system. You sit here with Charles. I know you all came to talk to him."

Charles watched the kitchen door swing shut behind his mother. "But, alas, I don't know what Charles has to say." His rich voice filled the room. "I know you're interested in Bix's version of the movie, but I never saw his rough cut, and I never read the whole script. I'm an intuitive actor, I work inductively, I build. I don't pay attention to the whole."

Jill noticed that he was using the present tense, he who had not acted in more than forty years. "But surely you knew something was up."

"Of course. In fact, my wife was one of the first to tell Bix that the studio wasn't going to like his script. She read a draft. I remember her writing him a note about it. Of course, we knew what he and Mr. McClay were doing."

"What was it like on the set? Was there an 'in' crowd of people who knew?" Doug had talked about a little group being in the plan. "Were you a bunch of Boy Scouts playing a practical joke? Or were you serious, Cassius and Brutus plotting to kill Caesar? Did it feel like a prank or a conspiracy?"

"I think everyone took it very seriously. The stakes were high; we could have destroyed our careers. But it felt worth it. Everyone involved felt that strongly about what Bix had written."

"How many were involved?"

"I honestly don't know. There was a code of silence about it. No one ever talked about it so you never knew for sure who knew and who didn't. My wife and I, even when we were alone, didn't discuss it. For me, it helped my performance because it made for an unsettling atmosphere, very isolating. It kept you from ever feeling completely at ease with anyone."

"Do you know if Miles Smithson knew?"

"I don't for sure, but I doubt it."

"Then there must have been some sort of mastermind committee." Jill now believed that a secret script had been filmed, but she still couldn't imagine how it had been done. "To fool the producer... it would have been such a complicated undertaking. Someone would have had to keep track of who knew and who didn't. All the paperwork, the footage counts, the budgets would have had to be doublechecked. It's staggering."

"You'd have to have known my brother. Bix was as clever as they come. Remember, he outwitted the Germans."

"So you think he was capable of pulling this off?"

"My dear, he was capable of anything."

That was a worthless answer. No one was capable of anything. But whatever the details of the deception, clearly Charles had not been involved.

"We did have one tremendous advantage," he continued. "The studio wasn't paying any attention to us."

Jill thought back to her bridge luncheon. In one hand she had mismanaged her board entries completely, but her opponents were paying no attention, and so had led back to the winning tricks.

But Miles Smithson had not been at a ladies' bridge luncheon. Paying attention had been his job. "How could Smithson not be paying attention? This was his unit. He was responsible."

"Circean Nights,"
Charles answered. "Everyone in Mr. Smithson's unit was caught up in that."

Circean Nights.
Of course. Jill had forgotten that that had been filmed during the summer of '48... and the spring and the fall. Miles Smithson had had a lot more to worry about than the narrative structure of a low-budget war movie.

Circean Nights
had been to the studio what
Cleopatra
had later been to Fox and
Heaven's Gate
to United Artists—the swelling, self-indulgent, seemingly unstoppable epic that was threatening to sink the studio. With all the chaos and the heart-stopping costs of
Circean Nights,
who would have paid much attention to a tiny-budgeted war movie being shot in Virginia?

So a little pony named Bix might well have shot between the legs of the thundering thoroughbreds.