American Dreams (66 page)

In a Chamber of Commerce pamphlet picked up downtown, the
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plant was called 'Detroit's Own Crystal Palace.'

Mr. Ford's architect, Albert Kahn, had designed the unique building, and in it Ford had refined and implemented the idea of creating the world's first moving assembly line. Carl heard it clanking and clanging its song through all of the windows, which stood open despite the rain and wintry .air.

A guard wearing a Ford employee's badge on his slicker and swinging a billy sauntered through the gate.

'They aren't hiring.'

'I'm not looking for a job. How many work here now?'

'Why do you want to know?'

'I worked here once myself. Well, not here, Piquette Avenue.'

That softened the man slightly. 'About twelve thousand five hundred on the payroll. Last year we rolled out better'n three hundred thousand automobiles.

Should do a lot better this year, demand keeps growing.'

'Mr. Ford's some kind of genius. I hear people are talking of him for senator.'

'Or

president. What did you say your name was?'

'Carl Crown. Mr. Ford wouldn't remember.'

'I expect that's right, he's a real bigwig now. Captain of industry.'

Carl nodded, smiled, walked away with feelings of awe, and a certain nostalgia, as the rain turned to sleet.

A black family lived in Jesse Shiner's cottage on Columbia. The woman, scrawny and stoop-shouldered with an infant in her arms, told him she didn't know where Jesse lived now, but he worked at Sport's, on the east side.

'That's a barber shop. For the colored,' the woman added, to be sure he understood. With the rain changing to sleet, Carl trudged away.

Sport's Tonsorial was a neat little establishment, four chairs. A stout, authoritative man, blue-black and bald, stepped away from a customer he was shaving in the first chair.

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'I think you got the wrong shop, brother.'

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From the rear, the last chair, someone said, 'No, Sport. I know him.'

'Jesse!' Carl tromped to the rear, leaving a trail of water on the linoleum, which Sport eyed with disapproval. The shop was comfortingly warm, fragrant with talc and hair oil and pomades. Jesse was little changed, spare as ever, though some age spots marked his coffee-and cream face now. When he hoisted himself out of his chair, he listed as he walked. It brought back that terrible night when the hoodlum had sunk the gaff hook in Jesse's leg.

'How are you, Jess?'

'Surviving. Used to joke about being in this trade, and look at me.

Never expected you to show up again. Where you bound?'

Carl explained, then said, 'I want to see Tess. Do you know anything about her?'

'Come on to the storeroom, let's talk.'

Carl followed him to a crowded back room piled high with boxes of barber supplies. Jesse snapped on a hanging lightbulb, sat on a bench, offered Carl a cigarette. Carl shook his head.

'Don't know much about her 'cept what 1 read now and then. Mrs.

Sykes her name is.'

Carl's face wrenched. 'She married that son of a bitch?'

'Yeah, but he was killed a couple of years ago. Out joyriding with two roadhouse girls, all of 'em high. The car turned.over. Broke his neck. The chippies were snoozing in back, they got out with scratches. Guess there's some justice after all.'

'Anything more?'

'Don't think so. Oh, yeah -- she and Sykes, they had a little boy. She's back in her pa's old house on Piety Hill. He's in some kind of old folks'

home. Clymer car company's gone. Competition got too fierce.' Jesse puffed his cigarette. 'From all I can tell, that Tess is a fine woman. I 'spect you were a damn fool to leave her.'

'At the time 1 couldn't do anything else. Can I buy you lunch?'

'Sport gives us a half hour. Not till twelve, though.'

'I'll wait.'

That night, with the sleet abating and a north wind howling out of
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Canada, Carl shivered in front of the Clymer mansion on Woodward Avenue. It was the same splendid house he remembered, three stories, I

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ablaze with lights. He was surprised and a little hurt that Tess had married Wayne Sykes, the man he'd beaten half to death. But she'd always had pressure from her father, and he supposed the little bastard was a good catch. He couldn't have expected Tess to be loyal when she assumed he was never coming back to her.

He almost turned away from the iron gate, but he recalled the softness of Tess's embrace that long-lost day they made love, and the luster of her eyes, dark blue as he imagined the South Seas must be. He had to open the gate and take his chances.

A man in livery answered the bell, reacting to Carl's wet-dog appearance with predictable disdain.

'Tradesmen at the rear. We do not hand out--'

'I'm a friend of Mrs. Sykes's.' The man's expression said that was highly doubtful. 'Is she at home?'

'Mrs. Sykes is not receiving anyone this evening.'

'That isn't what I asked, I asked if she's home. If she is, tell her Carl would like to see her.'

'Your last name?'

'Just Carl.'

He shut the door. The November wind brought a few snowflakes whirling past the street lamps. He shivered.

The door opened again. Tess stood there, stouter now, wearing reading spectacles. A great electric chandelier in the foyer put glinting lights in her blond hair. For a moment she seemed unsteady; he thought she might swoon.

'I never thought I'd see this moment, Carl.'

Awkwardly: 'Well, I didn't either. I'm passing through. Catching a boat in Montreal, on my way to France.'

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, 'Dear Lord in heaven. Always the wanderer. You must be frozen. Please come in.'

As she closed the door against the wind, he saw the large engagement diamond on her left hand, the slimmer wedding band. He said, 'My friend Jesse told me you'd gotten married but lost your husband. I'm awfully sorry to hear that.'

Tess drew a long breath. She was as pleasingly round as he remembered from those aching days of love and loss. 'I never loved Wayne. I married him because Father always wanted it, and with you gone - well, no need to bring up the past, is there?'

From the back of the house, a small boy of five or six bounded through 416

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a swinging door. He raced up to Carl, looked him over, stuck out his hand. 'Hello. You're the company. What's your name?'

'Carl,' he said, amused. They shook hands. The boy was sturdily built, with short legs and wide shoulders. He had brown eyes like Carl's, but Carl saw mostly Tess in his face.

'Henry's my name,' the boy said with great seriousness.

'My Prince Hal,' Tess said, ruffling his hair affectionately. She patted his bottom. 'Bedtime.' Henry ran up the stairs, waving to Carl. 'Henry is my father's middle name,' Tess explained. She took his hand, gently tugged him toward a lighted parlor. 'Tell me why you're off to Europe.'

Tess rang for the manservant, who treated Carl with more deference as he served him a whiskey, and hot tea in a gold-rimmed cup for Tess. Her eyes were soft and warm as she indicated the scarf. 'Still fighting the dragons and Saracens?'

'I guess you can say that. I'm going to fly in the French air corps. I've been piloting aeroplanes for a few years now.'

'It's against the law for American citizens to involve themselves in the war, isn't it?'

Carl shrugged; the fine old bourbon whiskey thawed him a little. 'I don't think Wilson will send detectives to arrest me, or anyone who helps the Allies. My friend Rene - he's the man who talked me into this - he convinced me we're wrong to stay neutral in this fight.'

'But how can you join up when it's forbidden?'

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'It isn't forbidden to join the French Foreign Legion. You sign up with them in Paris, they shuffle papers and reassign you to the air corps.

Woodrow's content, thinking you're standing guard someplace in the desert.' He gestured with the glass. 'I had enough of that old fool when he threw me out of Princeton. Did I ever tell you about that?'

'How he lost his best football lineman? You did.'

'Jesus, we talked a lot, didn't we?'

'In such a short time,' Tess said with a searching look. 'How I wish it could have gone on, and on--' There was a rush of color in her cheeks.

She averted her eyes to her teacup.

They reminisced for an hour. Then Carl rose to leave. Tess slipped her arm through his; the touch of her round breast roused old desires, old conflicts, within him.

'You have a fine son,' he said at the front door.

'Yes. I wish you could stay and get to know him.'

i promised to meet Rene in two days.'

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She sighed. 'There are always more dragons.'

'But not so many Saracens. The Huns killed them.'

The feeble humor disturbed her. She pressed her cheek fiercely against his chest. 'Don't joke. This war is terrible. We'll be in it no matter what Wilson says. Millions of boys are dying. Don't let one of them be you.'

Tears brimmed in her lovely eyes. 'Kiss me goodbye for old times'

sake?'

He swept her into his arms. It was all he could do to break the embrace, touch her smooth, soft cheek one last time, and go out into the bitter night.

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Fritzi worked on her new comedy with such energy that she was ready to swoon from exhaustion every night. Unexpectedly, she liked making Paper Hanger Nell. She
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added some little tricks of technique she'd learned by studying Charlie's tramp comedies. With a raised eyebrow, a sad smile, a lovelorn glance, Charles gave comedy an extra dimension of pathos that made it all the richer.

Fritzi's picture started with Nell's father, an impecunious paper hanger, breaking his leg on a sidewalk banana peel just before starting a big job.

Nell took over to save the business. She blundered her way through mishaps with dripping paste brushes, leaky buckets, shaky scaffolds, and collapsing ladders. She fell in love with a building inspector but lost him to a shapely blonde. At the end of the second reel Nell was left alone with big white glob of paste on her nose, like a sad clown. With a little shrug she scraped it off and flicked it out of the frame -- into the eye of a passing policeman. Fadeout.

Hobart noticed Fritzi's manic energy. He had survived Macbeth without causing or being involved in a major accident. For the last day of shooting, on the lot, Hobart was costumed as the Thane of Cawdor in a blue velvet robe, crape hair beard, cardboard crown with paste jewels. He and Fritzi ate onion sandwiches and drank root beer in camp chairs in the sunshine.

'What has come over you, dear child?' Hobart said. 'You're flushed. You chatter at everyone like a Maxim gun.'

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'I'm working hard, that's all.'

i might suspect a different cause. 1 am informed you have a friend, some kind of Wild West cowhand. I hear he's madly attractive.'

She poked his stomach. 'Stay away. He's mine.'

Hobart laughed. 'How splendid that you're happy. I'll have you know I too am in the same blissful state. Polo and I have become friends. Close friends, if you take my meaning.'

'Love is in the air?'

'You're such a clever child,' he sighed, adjusting his crown.

She saw Loy every day their schedules allowed, which wasn't often. He was working again, this time in a western that substituted autos for hardtofind horses. The picture starred a second-string actor named Brix, and was shooting on a ranch near Ojai. On a warm autumn Sunday they drove out there in the studio Packard, Fritzi at the wheel. In a secluded stable Loy showed her one of the animals from the picture, a quarter horse
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named Geronimo.

'See how small he is?' The horse nuzzled Loy's hand. 'Barely fourteen hands. He's fast, agile on rough ground - a hell of a lot better than the big stable hacks they usually rent. We shot a chase today, Western Eighteen.

That's eighteen frames a second. Projected at normal speed, the chase goes like lightning.'

'What's the name of this epic?'

'Bud Brix in Blazing Bullets.'

She giggled. 'Will we actually see the bullets on fire?'

'I know it's stupid. I didn't think it up, I'm only a hired hand.'

The stable was quiet, deserted. A convenient hayloft offered itself. Loy made no move to repeat the night of lovemaking, and though Fritzi longed for it, she was too embarrassed to be forward a second time. She sensed he'd pulled back. Once more she was just a pal.

Even so, she was happy. All day long, at unexpected moments she broke out in song. Lily knew she was wrapped up in thoughts of Loy. 'You two could live together. Take a room in some hotel downtown. Hell, you can afford a flat, even a small house.'

'He'd never do it.'

'Why not?'

'He just won't. He's footloose. Every day I wake up and wonder if he might have left in the middle of the night.'

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Lily clucked her tongue. 'Poor kid.' She gave Fritzi a long and heartfelt hug! .

In the picture colony people gossiped about Griffith's Civil War epic, The Clansman, scheduled to be shown for the first time early next year. Their envy was even more evident when they discussed Fritzi's friend Charlie.

The whole country had come down with a case of 'Chaplinitis.' Dance orchestras were playing 'That Charlie Chaplin Walk.' Department stores filled their shelves with Chaplin dolls for Christmas. Newspapers ran 1

Chaplin cartoons and Chaplin interviews.

¦

The autumn's big hit, Tillie's Punctured Romance, spread the epi
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Idemic.

The six-reel feature, which took nearly that many weeks to film, was adapted from a popular stage comedy. Charlie had made the picture I

as one of his last for Mack Sennett. He currently earned a well-publicized $1,250 a week at Essanay. Fritzi's $150 a week which she'd been receiving since the first of the year was a pittance by comparison. A sense of injustice was beginning to gnaw on her.