The Legacy (15 page)

“Is he all right?” Barbara cried out. “Is he hurt?”

“No, ma'am, he is not hurt.”

“Please, I'll be there as soon as I can.”

Afterwards, recalling her mood and her thoughts during the drive from Beverly Hills to Santa Monica, a few miles along Wilshire Boulevard, Barbara could only remember a miasma of disaster. She, whose life had always been a thing of purpose and decision, was now rudderless and purposeless. She felt that since she had first come here a year before, to write a screenplay based upon her book, every turn of her life had been without volition or mind. She had let go; she was married to a man who was a stranger; she lived in a house she hated, surrounded by objects that had belonged to someone else; and a wall had grown up between herself and her son. Once, long ago, she had been easily given to tears, but now the tears had dried up along with everything else, and she drove on between the rows of used-car lots and junk-food emporiums in stony-faced silence.

Once in the police station at Santa Monica, Barbara demanded to see her son. The police chief, a heavyset, harassed man, assured her that her son was all right. “You'll see him, Mrs. Devron.”

“I want to see him now. Where is he? In a cell?”

“He's not in a cell, Mrs. Devron. Will you please calm yourself? He's in a room down the hall, and he's not hurt, and you can see him in a few minutes.”

“What has he done?”

The police chief looked at her bleakly. He had a glass of water and a package of Tums on his desk, and he picked off two of the Tums and swallowed them with a gulp of water. “My stomach,” he apologized. “Kids — why on God's earth do kids do what they do? Will you tell me that?”

“Please, what did he do?”

“He was up on the bluff over the Pacific Coast Highway. Three of them. The two other kids got away. They were tossing rocks down in front of the cars.”

“Oh, my God,” Barbara whispered.

“They hit a car. Smashed the windshield. The driver was hurt.”

“How badly hurt?”

“They took four stitches in his cheek. He was lucky. He managed to control the car, and there was a lot of flying glass but none of it in his eyes. He could have been blinded and he could have been killed. There's enough real crime without kids doing a thing like this.”

“You're sure my son — that he was the one.”

“We're sure. He talked. There was a police car right behind, and one of our officers got up on the bluff before the kids took off. I'm not saying your son threw the particular rock. They were all throwing rocks.”

“What will you do with him?” Barbara asked wanly.

“I don't know.” He took another Tums and chewed it. “I got a kid his age. I hate it when it happens to kids. We book him, and this man who was hurt — his name is Westcott — he prefers charges —” He shook his head angrily. “The kid's thirteen years old. Well, Westcott's here. You want to talk to him? Maybe you can settle this thing with him or maybe he wants to sue you. I don't know. No, I'm not going to charge the kid, Mrs. Devron. He's scared to death, and maybe he's been punished enough. If he was my kid, I'd take him home and whack the hide off him.”

Westcott was a small, skinny man, sitting on a bench in the police station, still shivering from his experience, a taped bandage on the side of his face. He kept shaking his head and muttering that he didn't know. “It was a terrible thing, a terrible thing, Mrs. Devron. How do kids do something like that?”

“I don't know. I'm so sorry.”

“The boy ought to be punished. It's a terrible thing.”

“I can't wipe out the experience,” Barbara said. “I agree with you. It's a terrible thing, and it shouldn't have happened. He's not a bad boy or a cruel boy. I don't know why it happened. I haven't seen him yet. But I can pay for the damage to the car and for — well, whatever …”

“I'm going to talk to my lawyer,” he said.

“Yes, of course.” Trying to keep her hand from shaking, Barbara wrote out a check for a thousand dollars.

“The car's insured,” he said, staring at the check.

“I'd rather pay for it.”

“This don't mean I'm not talking to my lawyer.”

“I know,” Barbara whispered.

He took the check finally, and then Barbara followed an officer down a hallway. The officer opened a door. “There he is. You can take him home.”

Sam sat behind a small wooden table on a kitchen chair. It occurred to Barbara that this was an interrogation room, and she had to wage an inner struggle to keep back the tears, to keep from embracing her son, to keep her face from revealing emotion. Sam stared at her. The officer left the two of them alone. Sam tried to speak, gulped wordlessly, and managed at last, “What are they going to do to me?”

“Nothing,” Barbara said. “We're going home.”

They walked out of the police station and got into the car. “Are they just letting me go?” Sam asked hoarsely.

“That's right.”

“You hate me, don't you?”

“No!”

“You think I did it on purpose.”

“I don't know what I think. The way I feel, it's hard enough for me just to drive. So you try to work out what you think, and I'll try to work out what I think. I don't want to discuss it until we're at home.”

Then they drove on in silence, with Sam huddled in the front seat, as far from his mother as the seat permitted. When they reached the big house on Rexford Drive, Barbara told Sam to go to his room and wait for her, which he did without even glancing at her. Barbara went into her bathroom and splashed cold water on her face and then rubbed her face dry. She wore no makeup during the day, and looking into her mirror, she saw a pale, drawn countenance. All her life, Barbara had lived with the security of being a beautiful woman. It was nothing she had earned or accomplished, but it was there, comforting her, sustaining her, regardless of a pretended and frequently studied indifference. As she often reflected, it was her luck; others were less lucky. She might at times resent it intellectually, but emotionally it was always there, like an enveloping and comforting security blanket. Now, for the first time, she saw nothing beautiful in the face that stared from the mirror, and then anger at herself, at Sam, horror at the whole incident drained away into a kind of sick fear.

“What are we doing to ourselves?” she whispered. “What has happened to us?”

She was forty-five years old, and tired and frightened, and her son had almost killed a man, a stranger, and almost killed him out of some mindless act of violence, and now she would have to deal with it, and deal with her husband, who would know about it because the newspapers knew about these things, and who was her husband? The last thought raced through her mind. Who was her husband? Who was this man she was married to? Who was this boy? She was a middle-aged woman married to a boy made out of plastic. Wasn't that her initial thought? Plastic.

“Oh, no, no, no,” she said aloud. “I am being so rotten unfair to one of the best men I've ever known. What has happened to me?”

She took several deep breaths, and then she stood absolutely silent for a long moment, and then she went into Sam's room. He was sprawled on the bed, and he lay there, his face turned away from the door, not moving. Strangely, since he was sprawled out, she realized for the first time how very tall he was for his age, an inch or two under six feet, his frame long and slender. She could have melted then, telling herself that her son was the one thing in the world that she loved above all else, her link with life and reality, with the past and the future; and she had the feeling that here and now, before her eyes, the boy was turning into a man. Don't lose him, she pleaded with herself. Try to understand.

“Sam, get up!” she said sharply, and when he didn't move, repeated, “Get up! Now!”

He turned and sat up.

“Over there. In that chair. We're going to talk.”

He pulled himself off the bed and slumped into the chair. “What's the use? I did it.”

“What you did,” Barbara said evenly, “has to do with what I did, and either we make some sense out of where we are or there's no damn hope for either of us.”

“I don't know what you mean,” he muttered.

“I think you do. How did you get out there to Pacific Palisades? That's miles from here.”

“I cut school. We hitched.”

“Why? Why did you cut school?”

“I hate it. I hate Beverly Hills. I hate the kids.”

“That's a lot of hate. Is that why you threw the rocks? Because you hate school?”

“I don't know why I threw the rocks,” Sam said. “I just did it.”

“You're bright. You're so bright that sometimes it frightens me. Yet you go out to the Palisades and throw rocks at people you don't know. Why?”

“I don't know why. I didn't know we'd hurt anyone. It was just something to do. I didn't want to hurt anyone.” He began to cry, and through his tears, he blurted out, “I didn't want to come here. You made me come here. I hate it here. Why can't I go home? First you sent me to that rotten school in Connecticut, and now you make me come here. I hate it here.”

“Stand up,” Barbara said softly.

He stood up, and Barbara put her arms around him and held him to her. “I love you very much,” she said softly. “This has been a bad day for both of us. Now I want you to take a shower and change your clothes. We'll talk about this later.”

“I didn't want to hurt anyone,” he pleaded.

“I know you didn't,” Barbara said.

Strange, she thought, something like this happens, and it's awful and frightening, yet I feel a crazy exhilaration, as if this proves something — only I don't know what it proves, unless it proves that we're alive, both of us, and it takes something as desperate as this to make us alive. And then she asked herself what she was thinking. “I hate this place,” she said aloud. “I hate it as much as he does, this house, Beverly Hills — no, I don't hate it,” as an afterthought. “I don't know where it is or where I am.” She enumerated what she didn't know; she didn't know herself, her son, or her husband. If she was in love with her husband, why had everything been chilled and dead inside of her until now, and what was happening to her now? Her thoughts went back to Italy and to the day she spent with Umberto Leone, but the recollection was nothing new. The memory of that day had been racing through her mind for weeks, and always with the question of why she had not permitted him to make love to her, and always answered with an equivocation of one sort or another. Now, for the first time she allowed the fantasy to play out, filled as she was with emptiness and hunger. Possessed of the certainty that she would never see him again, she could allow herself the desperate need to be with such a man, without comprehending why she had the need.

If Carson knew about the incident at Santa Monica, he made no mention of it. Barbara felt that he did not know, and she had decided not to tell him. Carson, on the other hand, was pleased with the change in his wife. Her mood of depression had passed. At a dinner party given by Phil Baker, the executive editor of the
Morning World,
Barbara appeared to be entirely at ease, gracious and charming. She enthralled the gathering with the story of how she had gone into Nazi Germany in 1939 and had been arrested by the Gestapo.

“But weren't you absolutely terrified?” Ceil Baker asked her. Ceil Baker was a golden California girl, much younger than her husband. It had to be explained to her who the Gestapo were. Barbara felt relaxed and expansive, and in no mood to condemn ignorance — or, as Carson defined it later — idiocy.

“I was very young and very romantic,” Barbara said. “My friends in Paris wanted desperately to make some contact with the underground in Germany, if there was one, which I doubt, and since I was without any politics and without even a modicum of common sense, and since I was a journalist, I volunteered. Oh, my editor back in New York loved the notion.”

“Which caused you to hate editors ever since,” Baker put in.

“Oh, no, not at all. But I went and tried stupidly to find a man who was already dead and then tried to interfere with the brutalization of some old Jews by Nazi thugs — and, well, I survived.”

“To Carson's good fortune.”

“Indeed. I'll drink to that,” Carson said.

Then the talk turned to politics, and someone mentioned the fact that Norman Drake had announced his candidacy.

“What every red-blooded American boy wants. Why not Norman Drake?”

“Why not indeed?”

“The little bugger's a vote-getter. He plays for keeps.”

Baker said nothing; he was aware of Barbara's history. Carson glanced at her uneasily.

“Will you fellers support him?” The question was put to Carson and Baker.

Baker shrugged. Carson said, “We haven't come to that.”

“You must be thinking about it.”

“We're thinking about it,” Carson agreed.

Back in their bedroom, in the house in Beverly Hills, Barbara sat in a chair and watched Carson unbutton his shirt. She had hardly spoken at all since leaving the Bakers', and now Carson wanted to know whether something was troubling her.

“You can't guess?”

“I thought you were having a good time.”

“I was.”

“Norman Drake?”

“What does it mean — you're thinking about it?” she asked coldly.

“You lost me somewhere.”

“Did I? Maybe. You said you were thinking about the paper supporting Norman Drake.”

“Yes.”

“That's all?”

“Bobby, what should I say? We're thinking about it. We're discussing it. People who know say he'll get the party's designation. We have to think about it.”

“Which means you could support him.”