Seidel, Kathleen Gilles (37 page)

"No." Cathy was, Jill thought, the original success-snob. "How did you meet him?"

"He was doing some custom built-ins. He's not just a carpenter... no, no, I don't mean that. I'm trying not to think that. He is a carpenter; that's really what he plans on doing with his life. He has a Ph.D. in history and he makes a good living at carpentry, and it leaves him time to read and think and meet me for lunch. It's just wonderful to be with someone who isn't crazed about his career. Now, what about your basketball player?"

"He's not as clear about what he's doing as your carpenter, but he'll get there," Jill said confidently. "He's a marvelous man, funny and kind, warmer than I would have ever dreamed a man could be."

"Is he weird about your money?"

"I don't think so. He jokes about it, but he doesn't pitch a fit every time I pay for something."

"And he's not going to run up a lot of bills on your credit cards?"

"Lord, no."

They were both smiling, laughing. Cathy started to shake her head. "We're really terrible group members, aren't we?"

She was right. They really were. This was unconscionable, such an intimate conversation outside the group. "Are you going to report back?" Jill asked.

Cathy wrinkled her nose and very nearly giggled. "No."

"I'm not either."

There was some turbulent air in the Midwest, and Jill got back to Courthouse the next morning just as Doug and Randy were leaving for their morning coffee. She went along with them. As soon as Randy had drifted off to talk to other men in the parking lot, she turned to Doug.

"I love you."

He folded the sports page back to the box scores. "It looks like David Ahearn hit a triple last night."

"Did you hear what I said?"

"Of course." He went on reading the sports page. "But it's old news. Your stepfather hitting a triple, that's hot."

It might be old news to him, but it wasn't to her. "Do you love me?"

"Would I be here if I didn't?"

"Yes. You're too lazy to make your own coffee. Of course you'd be here."

"You don't need to be so literal."

"And you don't need to be so blase."

"Blase?" He looked at her over the newspaper. "Am I too blase for you? Then how's this?"

He sent the newspaper flying over his shoulder and knocked both their coffees to the ground. He grabbed her, and in the best Phillip-Wayland fashion, bent her over backwards, kissing her long and hard. Over the ringing in her ears, Jill could hear the men in the parking lot cheer.

CHAPTER 15

When Jill was in California on Tuesdays, she tried to find out more about
Weary Hearts.
She located an electrician and an assistant cameraman who had been part of the crew. Neither remembered anything of the scripts, but they confirmed her sense of the mood on the set: serious, intense, a silence charged with noble purpose.

The assistant cameraman knew that something had been going on, that secrets were being kept from the studio. How extensive the secrets were, he did not know.

"Didn't you try to find out?" Jill asked him.

"No. Except for Mr. McClay—and we knew he was doing what Bix was telling him—we were all vets, even Miss Burchell had done her part. A soldier either trusts his lieutenant or he doesn't. We trusted Bix. We had a real 'us against them' attitude, us being those who had fought, them being the guys in suits at the studio."

"Why didn't any of you ever say anything over the years?"

"Because it was still us against them. Bix and everyone dying didn't change that. And what was there to say? I didn't know what was going on. Maybe they were just padding expenses... although I'd never believe that of Bix, not in a million years. He was really something, that kid. It's a shame you didn't know him, Miss Casler, a real shame."

Doug came out to California with Jill a few times, but even their combined efforts produced nothing. A little more material turned up in the studio files. Sketches of the sound-stage interiors and of the costumes were found, as were the notes of the lighting designer, but there was nothing about the location work, not even the expense records. Nor did the collectors have anything. Collectors were secretive, passionate, often eccentric people who were devoted to owning movies although generally they could acquire them only illegally. Jill had sent discreet inquiries on their underground grapevine, but no one had come forward with any material.

"I just don't get it," Doug said as Jill came home on the third Tuesday in June, again with no new information. "How can there be nothing?"

"I told you," she answered patiently, "that Hollywood never had any sense of history. It makes you sick when you think about all that has been lost."

"But this is so complete. Sure, some stuff might fall through the cracks, but you'd think we would turn up some kind of scrap of something."

She had to agree. In all those other searches for lost footage, people had found something: the cutting continuities for
Lost Horizon,
the sound track for
A Star Is Born,
the silent footage for
Lawrence of Arabia,
the home movie of the
Wizard of Oz
"Jitter Bugs" dance. Even when no footage had been found, there were production stills: the "Triumphal Return" sequence from the
Wizard of Oz,
the slaves' share of the Twelve Oaks barbecue in
Gone With the Wind.

But of the material cut from
Weary Hearts,
there was nothing, not a single photograph, not a stray call sheet, not a loose expense record. If Doug's grandfather had not told him, no one would ever have any idea that there had been a secret script.

And Hollywood was usually not that good at keeping secrets.

"It's just too clean," Doug insisted. "It feels deliberate. Like nobody wanted us to know what was in the script."

"Are you saying there was some kind of cover-up?" Part of Hollywood etiquette was—or used to be—to keep silent about all conflict that happened during production. But Doug was suggesting something far larger, a cover-up by the studio executives to suppress the existence of Bix's fully filmed script. The scripts weren't lost, the production records weren't misfiled, the stills not routinely winnowed. He was suggesting that it had all been deliberate, so that no one would ever know that any of this had happened.

"I think we ought to consider it. It's not out of the question, is it?"

"But to what end?" Jill was perplexed. Certainly none of the studio executives would want to admit that they had been deceived, but no one person, not even Miles Smith-son, could have engineered such a cover-up just to protect his job.

One theme had emerged from everyone who knew anything about the production—almost all of the crew had been World War II veterans. "What were Bix's politics?" she asked Doug. If Bix had written a script that glowed Red, the studio might have tried to protect him and itself by destroying all traces of the script.

"I don't really know for sure," Doug answered. "A Harry-Byrd Democrat, I suppose. That's what the family tended to be. He probably would have voted for Truman, but Stevenson might have been too liberal."

"He wasn't a Communist sympathizer?"

"A Red Ringling? I doubt it. And if that had been the problem with the script, Alicia would have said something in that note, wouldn't she have? Her objections didn't sound political—I don't think that's what the girl in her best sweater on a Friday night would have been worried about."

Jill agreed. "So much for the cover-up theory."

"Not necessarily. Maybe they had some other reason... like they didn't want anyone to know how good Bix was."

"No." Jill shook her head, silently reminding herself that they still had no proof that Bix's writing was that good. She now longed for it to be true almost as much as Doug did. Bix had such personal charm, he was so well liked, that she hated the thought that he might have been a two-bit con man. But unlike Doug, she still remembered that they had no proof of his abilities. "The studio executives were businessmen," she went on.
"Weary Hearts
made plenty of money right from the start. It's not like anyone needed to justify a bad decision. From the bottom-line point of view, the studio most likely made the right one. Who on earth would benefit from a cover-up?"

Doug didn't answer. There was something soft in his eyes, something it took her a moment to identify—concern, pity.

She sat down. "No."

"I'm lucky," he said. "My father, all my coaches... I've never felt betrayed by any of them, and I can't imagine—"

"No."

This was getting worse and worse. But Doug had a point. If Cass had stolen credit for the revised script, then such a cover-up would have been necessary.

Cass had revered history. Jill had grown up hearing him talk about the cathedrals bombed and the art lost during World War II, about the family homes burned in 1864. His anguish had been genuine. He felt a responsibility to the future, a sense of stewardship about the past. He was a Virginian. He never would have destroyed a dead man's work. He was a gentleman, a man of honor.

But maybe his anguish for these lost artifacts had been guilt over what he had destroyed. Maybe his reverence for the dead had been expiation for what he had stolen from a dead man.

Jill felt Doug's hand lightly pass over her hair.

"Sometimes I regret ever having brought this to you." His voice seemed to be coming from a long way off. "It's turned out that there's a lot at stake for you."

Yes, there was. On the line was her whole sense of her father, the one person whose love she had trusted.

"But then"—Doug was still speaking, his voice infinitely gentle, infinitely kind—"if I hadn't, we never would have met, and I can't endure the thought of that."

Jill couldn't either. He was still stroking her hair, his hand warm and light. Why did it feel like a choice? That having Doug meant losing her father?

When nitrate film deteriorates, the picture goes first. The image discolors and then fades, growing fainter and fainter until the film stock is nearly clear. Jill closed her eyes, unable to look at the picture of her father on the nightstand. Was his image fading too?

The next day was dark, the sky charcoal and low. Bursts of sharply slanting rain tattooed against the windows. It was no day for Jill and Allison to share their weekly ride.

Jill was disappointed. The loose rose-lavender clusters of the purple-flowering raspberries were now blossoming along the stream banks. But it was too wet. She and the men didn't even drive to the 7-Eleven. She brewed coffee and Doug scrambled eggs at home.

When the men left, Jill pulled down the attic stairs that slid smoothly out of a framed opening in the ceiling of the upstairs hall.

Jill had worked in the attic once before, and she had seen instantly that Doug's grandmother had been right. Aunt Carrie's attic was far worse than Mrs. Ringling's. The convenient access had been a curse. Had Aunt Carrie needed to climb a vertical ladder to reach her attic, she might not have saved all those boxes of used Christmas paper. The sliding stairs made it too easy.

Jill had already found some fascinating things: someone's naturalization papers, someone else's World War I uniform, a faded quilt with a note pinned to it: "yellow flower— my Sunday school dress; green stripe—Mother's summer housedress; solid blue—shirt T. ripped at Memorial Day picnic." The pin had left a rust stain on the quilt and there was no explanation of who any of the people were. Jill laid it aside, hoping that Brad or Dave might know.

There was also a tremendous amount of junk, the saddest being the children's things. The toys were worn out and battered, many of them looking as hopeless and weary as Aunt Carrie's dreams of motherhood.

But they were old enough to have been made out of metal and wood. The little trucks were of a quality that even Jill's wealthy friends had trouble finding now. So Jill felt like she needed to sort through them, keeping out the ones that could still be played with. Such was her project for this rainy day.

The several boxes labeled "Old Dress-up Clothes" were disappointing. The garments were flimsy, postwar synthetics with a sleazy gleam to them that sent shivers up Jill's spine as she tossed them into the forty-gallon trash bags. One of the boxes had accessories: shoes, belts, purses. Jill decided some of the costume jewelry was worth saving, but the rest she threw out. The only thing that had been well made was a green clutch; the other purses and shoes were—

A green clutch. Jill stared at it. It was scuffed; the soft emerald-dyed leather was stained with water spots. She touched it gingerly, feeling the shape of objects inside.

It was a pretty, green thing...

Could it be? Alicia's purse had been green. Might Aunt Carrie have picked it up, not knowing whose it was and stored it all these years as a plaything for the children who never came?

Jill snapped open the tarnished clasp. The light from the overhead bulb glinted against a compact, softened on the lawn of a white handkerchief. She took out the compact. Once silvery, it was now dulled to gunpowder grey. Jill tilted it to read the swirling monogram: A. B. R.—Alicia Burchell Ringling.

Alicia's lovely face flashed into Jill's mind—the warm smile of her publicity portrait; her dark, troubled eyes as she stood next to the white, billowing drapes of her bed, listening to Phillip's footsteps outside her door; the tiny line drawing Bix had done of her.

This was her purse, she who had once been alive. She had bought herself this handkerchief, she had laundered it. She had touched up her face in the mirror of this compact. She had written herself notes, put money in this wallet. She had married one brother and fallen deeply, desperately, in love with the other.

Carefully, respectfully, Jill emptied the purse, item by item. The handkerchief had a scrolling "A" embroidered on it. The comb was clean. The lipstick was "Butterfly Pink." There was a wallet, a notepad, some postcards.

The wallet had forty dollars in it, which would have been a lot of money back then. But Alicia had been a woman traveling without her husband; Charles stayed home to regain the weight he had to lose for the movie's final sequence. The postcards—pictures of the Valley—were blank; Alicia must have bought them to send and then never had. The notepad had a list—"pick up mail, call Evie, key"—all the routine chores she was planning on doing when she got home.