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“But what I really wanted to learn was how to ‘hide' things. How to make a movie within a movie. Max kept teasing me, talking round and about, telling me precisely nothing. It was a great magic act, all diversion and misdirection. What was the word he used? One of those ten-ton Hegelian abstractions.
Der
or
das
…
Unenthüllte.
That's it. By God, I remember.”

I flashed a glance at Clare, who had also picked up on the word. “Underhold,” I blurted out. I explained to Orson, “That's how Zip Lipsky remembered it. The underhold.”

“And it means … ?” Clare asked.

“The unrevealed, the hidden … ,” Orson answered. “Something like that. Spooky stuff, what? But maybe a whole new cinematic world waiting to be discovered on the other side of vision. Well, Max promised and promised, but he never delivered. Maybe he would have later on. But, as it turned out, there was no later on.

“Last time I saw him was at the Hollywood premiere of
Citizen Kane.
That would've been May 1941. I know he was pleased with the movie, even though I cut out two or three of his things. That night he was very distracted. He looked a wreck. Sickly, nervous, old before his time. He'd been drinking heavily, using lots of hashish. I know that he and John Huston had their heads together, working on
The Maltese Falcon.
Boozing the picture into existence, I gather. You might talk with John about those last days. I've always been curious how much Max contributed to the movie.

“Next thing I heard was that he'd been torpedoed in the Mediterranean—on his way, I don't know where. Quite a shock. And that was the last of Max.”

Orson settled back, snorting out a long, satisfied breath like a stallion that had just completed a long, hard race. I finally felt free to speak.

“Clare and I had the chance to see some of the
Heart of Darkness
footage. Zip Lipsky saved a few reels. It's pretty extreme, even by contemporary standards.”

Orson gave a confirming rumble. “You can imagine how it came across thirty years ago. The dance Olga Tell does with that marvelously phallic sword. I wish I'd kept a copy of that—for purely artistic purposes, of course. Very powerful.” Turning to Clare, he asked, “Don't you think so?”

Clare refused to show a trace of confirming enthusiasm. “Speak for yourself, my dear. Phallic ladies don't exactly turn me on.”

I pressed ahead quickly to find out all I could. “I've only seen some outtakes. Did Castle ever get anything produced?”

“Not really,” Orson answered. “He did manage to assemble a rough cut of what he wanted in the way of ‘unspeakable rites,' a rather hasty mélange of things he and Zip had shot in Yucatan: some gory Indian rituals, a big drunken powwow—with Olga's sword dance, of course, as the master scene. It was a damned clever job of intercutting from limited footage. Couldn't have run for more than three or four minutes, but it was enough to scare the pants off us. The financial pants, that is. We knew that if the boys in the front office ever laid eyes on what Max was after … well, they never did. By that time, the picture was dead.” He paused, thinking back across the years. “Odd thing was: Max was really very serious about that sequence. I mean, it wasn't just a bit of movie mumbo jumbo for him. He wanted it to be somehow … authentic. A real sacrificial rite.”

It was getting on toward three in the morning, but Clare's little hotbox of an apartment was becoming no cooler. Orson's caftan had become a second sweating skin, clinging to him from the shoulders down. He had by now downed enough cognac to glaze his eyes and slur the edges of his eloquence. The evening was winding down rapidly, but I had one more item to ask about and I wasn't going to forfeit the opportunity. “Did Castle ever mention anything about orphans?”

“Orphans?” Orson's brows dipped into a thoughtful frown. “Now that you ask … Let's see, what do I remember? Some kind of religious order, wasn't it? Took in abandoned children. Yes, Orphans of the Storm. I remember because there was a Griffith movie of that title. Am I right?”

“It's a church,” I answered. “It seems to run a network of orphanages. Max was raised in one of them. That's where he learned how
to make movies. There were other children who grew up to work in film, not only in this country.”

Orson brightened as he reclaimed the memory. “Two very spooky birds. Twins. What was their name?”

“The Reinkings.”

“Yes, that's it. They showed up at Max's parties. Film editors they were. Absolutely mute, never said a word. Max introduced them as Orphans of the Storm. They were supposed to be first-class cutters. But Max told me to stay away from them, I don't know why.”

“Did he ever tell you anything about the church?”

Orson wagged his head. “Not until the very last, at the premiere for
Kane.
He cornered me at the reception, said he'd decided to go to the orphans for money. Someplace in Europe. Switzerland?”

“That's right. Zurich.”

“He was certain he could get the money to make
Heart of Darkness
from them. I didn't understand about that. I considered the movie dead. Anyway, I wasn't listening very closely that night, but it sounded like a wild goose chase to me. I pitied him, little realizing that one day I'd be chasing all sorts of wild geese myself. Like Matthew here, who will, I hope, turn out to be a very tame goose, one that lays at least a few small golden eggs.”

Matthew gave a restrained but encouraging nod, and Orson's flagging attention turned to him. They exchanged some enigmatic words about one of Orson's several in-process productions, something called
The Other Side of the Wind,
reels of which seemed to be scattered through four cities in three countries. A half hour later, things were breaking up. Which meant that Matthew, Barbara, and I were preparing to leave. But not Orson. His caftan was a nightgown after all. And there was only one bed in the apartment.

As I rose from the table, Clare gave me a quick, dry kiss goodbye on the cheek, a disappointing token of minimal affection, no more than she bestowed on Matthew and Barbara. But before any of us could move into the hallway, Orson spoke up: a dramatic pronouncement.

“No, no. It isn't fair,” he huffed, his voice now down to a growly whisper. We turned as he laboriously hauled himself to his feet. “We've drunk to everybody under the sun—except Max. And who deserves it more?” Clare smiled, sighed, and dutifully poured out a finger of cognac for each of us. “I know exactly the right toast for Max,” Orson said. “Something from old radio days. One or two of
you will remember.” He summoned up a voice from long ago, an impressive imitation of his youthful self which I'd heard only on recordings. “
'Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows.'
And so does Max Castle, I'm willing to bet. To the shadow in all of us.” Orson raised his glass. We drank. “The shadow …” he murmured as he eased back into his chair. “Strange man, strange man. But he was one of us.”

We took it that we'd been excused from the august presence.

In the hallway, Clare held me back long enough for the Ferrers to depart on their own in the elevator. While we waited, I asked, “How long has he been in town?”

“About a week, not quite.”

That led me to voice a small grievance. “I wish I could have met him sooner. There's a lot more I wanted to ask.”

“I didn't want you to meet him sooner.”

“Why?”

“I was afraid he might tell you what he did tonight—about Castle and
Citizen Kane
. I didn't want you using anything he might say against him at your retrospective. He's a very generous, very trusting man. But just now he's having a hatchet job done on him by a gang of small-minded pedants who're telling the world he didn't write the screenplay for
Citizen Kane.
The last thing he needs is to have somebody announce he didn't direct it either. You take my point?”

I said I did, and blushed to think how eager I would have been to include everything Orson had told me in one of my lectures at the archives. Clare had wisely spared me the temptation.

“Besides,” she went on, “you can't take more than half of what he told you seriously. He loves a good story. If I were you, I wouldn't commit anything he said to print until I'd checked it out.”

“Does that include the … ” I groped for the word, but Clare knew what I was after.

“
Das Unenthüllte.
Well, I guess that's what little Zip meant. Even so, I wouldn't put it past Orson to embellish. Handle with care.”

Then, as we waited for the pokey elevator to make its way back to her floor, I asked, “Should I congratulate you?” She gave me a puzzled look. I nodded back toward her apartment. “Something permanent?”

She let a few beats go by, then answered. “Hardly. And that's for the best. It's an adventure to have him here, but otherwise … well, you remember your little fling with Nylana the Jungle Girl. Things don't always translate off the silver screen as you might like, do they?”
I agreed she was right about that. She allowed another, weightier, pause to set in. Then: “I don't have to tell you this, but whatever the disenchantments, he's the first man I've liked having around the house since I left L.A.”

Since
L.A. That could include me among the favored few. I wondered if it did, but I didn't have the nerve to ask. Instead I said, “You keep pretty busy, I imagine. No time for romance.”

“That's part of it. The least of it.” She released a long, weary breath. “Something's going wrong with the men. Have you noticed?” No, I hadn't. Why should I? “You can pick it up in the movies. All this buddy-buddy crap. Shoot ‘em up, gross ‘em out, hump ‘em and dump ‘em. Macho little boys making movies for macho little boys. They're scaring off women. Maybe it's a plot against procreation. It'll get worse.” I recognized what she was saying. It was a theme she'd been running through her reviews ever since
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
came along. “Anyway, it puts a woman in a certain frame of mind. You get sick of waking up to find Huckleberry Finn beside you.”

The elevator clunked into position, the door rattled open. Clare held it with one hand, drew me toward her with the other, gave me the kiss I had resigned myself to not having.

But why had she waited until my next-to-last day in town to give it?

“A triumph! A total, absolute, wall-to-wall triumph!”

Arlene Fleischer knew how to lard on the compliments. It was one way of making up for the meager stipend I'd received for staging the First Max Castle Film Retrospective. Another was the customary closing-night reception in the museum's banquet room. I'd been to three of these while working at the archives, cheery little tributes to
other visitors who had contributed to the museum's calendar. They were occasions to gush and bubble and wind down in a warm bath of mutual admiration. Many of the same people showed up each time—staff members and friends of the museum—to consume the same catered spread of economy champagne and microwaved canapés. Now, the evening before I was scheduled to leave for California, it was time for me to be hailed and bade farewell at the end of two glorious weeks of films, lectures, and nonstop movie talk.

There was a surprisingly large turnout. In the course of the evening I learned why. Word had gotten around that I was Clare's protégé; there was a rumor she might attend. In New York film circles, she was now a name that drew a crowd. “Will Clarissa Swann be here?” I was asked a dozen times that evening. “I've invited her,” I answered, not adding that I had little hope she would come. She didn't. Small talk with a motley collection of prattling film nuts wasn't her thing. She would have been as miserable at the event as Spinoza at a cocktail party, and caustically outspoken about it. I was relieved not to see her.

About the time people began to register Clare's no-show and drift away, Arlene rushed to propose a timely toast. “And we have Jonathan Gates to thank for this splendid success,” she concluded, giving me the well-practiced hug and a kiss I'd seen her bestow on others. There was a small shower of applause; I nodded gratefully, genuinely flattered to the point of blushing. It was, after all, my first experience as anybody's guest of honor. But even before the last of the canapés had vanished, I found Arlene huddling with others, swallowed up in a discussion of next month's program: a surrealist film series whose posters had already replaced Max Castle on the museum bulletin board.

Only a year earlier, it might have come as a traumatic letdown for me to realize that my star turn at the archives was merely a fleeting meteor on the busy New York scene. Now I greeted my approaching obsolescence with a secret sense of relief. By the time the retrospective had come and gone, I'd privately crossed a boundary of the mind that allowed me to see it for the minor academic exercise it was. Some old films discovered, selected for screening, and introduced with pedantic enthusiasm. That was the archives' business as usual. But I knew, as no one else did, that Max Castle was no ordinary filmmaker; not even an “ordinary genius” of a filmmaker. Where his retrospective ended, a greater and darker territory began.

It was as if I'd scaled a previously unclimbed peak and planted my flag for all below to see. The appreciative crowd sends up a cheer, a restrained one, since the achievement seems modest enough. But before the accolade dies away, I turn and discover a new range of heights that reduces the summit I stand on to a foothill. The ascent has only just begun, though no one watching from below can know that. From here forward, if I continued the climb, I would be leaving behind everything I'd relied on to bring me this far, including the well-oiled critical apparatus Clare had taught me to use so expertly. As Sharkey once said, Clare's standards were also her limits; I was at those limits. For the first time since my education began, I would have to go it alone.