In the Beauty of the Lilies (55 page)

Alma’s husband, Caleb Wentworth, didn’t realize for six days, as he busied himself with a bachelor’s rounds in Boston—his State Street office, his Chestnut Hill home, Monday night at the Tavern Club, Wednesday lunch at the Country Club, Thursday dinner at the Somerset—that this religious maniac whose murderous clan figured in the front section of the
Globe
and claimed a few seconds of the Channel Five news every evening was the same one that his stepson, whom he hardly knew, was involved with. At about the same time, the reporters realized it also.
SON OF FIFTIES MOVIE STAR AMONG THOSE UNDER
SIEGE
.
From “Safe at Your Peril” to Real-Life Drama
. When her husband reached her by phone, they could hardly hear each other. “I
can’t
come back,” she screamed. “There’s three weeks left of shooting, all of it of
me
! Anyway, what can I
do
? You know how hysterical the media are; I’m surprised, dearest, you’ve fallen for it.” Ahead of her was the filming of the murder of the tourist, the exoneration by the court, and the final
coup de grâce
of fate, worthy of bloody Euripides.

But once she was back in Hollywood, ten days before Christmas, Shirley Frugosi urged her to fly to Colorado and show the world a mother’s heart. Alma’s name hadn’t been in the news so much for years. Not just interview requests but real offers were coming in, including the part of a zany mother in a biracial sitcom that had Cosby money in it and was sure to run five years at least.

Her maternal phone call, placed a few days after her return from Greece, had not been very satisfactory. All calls to the Temple went through an FBI switchboard, and it was a four-hour wait before she was cleared through and Clark came to the phone. “How was Greece?” he asked. His voice seemed deeper, brisker.

“Hot, darling. My skin dried and cracked so much I looked like a Gila monster but this twit of a girl director thought it was all wonderful. The more wrinkles the better, from her point of view. I’m just a
monster
to these younger people coming up. They assume I’m dead; it’s like being poor Rita, only without the Alzheimer’s. But how are
you
, sweetheart, is more to the point.”

“I’m good. Things are good, Mom. We’ve settled into a routine and Jesse seems happy. When he’s happy, we’re all happy.”

“Oh,
Clark
,” she burst out. “You sound so
brain
washed!”

As was his way with her, he stayed polite. He was a real Wilmot in that. Where had his father’s Hungarian flair gone to in this boy? “That’s the sort of thing people say,” he mildly conceded, “but my head’s never been clearer, actually. When I think back to Hollywood I was always in a daze. Not your fault—we had to live there, for your work. You did your work, I’m doing Jesse’s work. He’s sort of like what Harry Cohn was for you—crude, but inspired. The real thing.”

“But, b-but, baby, wh-what’s going to
hap
pen?”

“Don’t stutter, Mom; nobody’s asking you to feel guilty.”

“You-you’re surrounded by a virtual army and they’re surely going to put you all in jail, for that one p-p-policeman being killed, though of course you had n-nothing to do with it.”

“I said, calm down. It’s just a life. Mine, I mean. A time to be born, a time to die—you’ve heard that. We have wonderful feeling here right now. It’s like we’re one mystical body. I’ve lost a lot of flab, but there’s enough basic provender to last to spring at least. We’ll just have to wait to see what the Lord ordains. Read Revelation, especially the last chapters, if you want to know more. Everything’s in there, once you know how to look.”

“I’m c-coming out there. This is ree-ree-ridiculous, to hear you t-talk like such a simpleton.”

“Mom, I can’t advise it. You can’t get a motel room within fifty miles. You’ll get pestered to death by reporters. They’re all out here, hundreds of ’em, and are starving for something to happen. You know those people in New York that get out on ledges and everybody yells ‘Jump’? It’s like that. Well, fuck ’em—we’re not jumping, at least till we get a sign.”

She laughed, she was so relieved to hear him sound halfway like himself. “Don’t jump, Clark. I love you.”

He gave no sign of hearing. “Till Jesse gets the sign, I
should have said.” But perhaps he had heard, for his tone became more confidential: “It’s a media circus, and I’m the coördinator at our end of it. I just wish those dickheads at Nova who said I was too abrasive to handle sensitive talent could see me now.”

“I’m sure they’re reading about it, darling.” She was over a hump, the blockage of self-doubt, and spoke fluently. “You’d be interested in a story Shirley was telling me. Apparently, when they approached Spielberg and told him they thought it would sex up the new Indiana Jones if they brought in Sean Connery, he’s supposed to have said—”

“Mom, incoming calls are limited to three minutes.”

“Oh. You mean the FBI—”

“No, they don’t care, they’d love it if we’d gab all day and give ’em some ideas. It’s Jesse’s rule; he says the outer world distracts us from God.”

“From him, he means. Clark, I know his type. This town is full of megalomaniacs; it’s the environment. Any man who can sleep with a new girl every night of the week naturally gets to think he’s God. Then they get in so deep embezzling and lying they can’t back out. I’ve been studying this man’s photographs in the paper and he’s one of those bluffers.”

“Mom.”

“When it catches up with them they don’t honestly think they’ve done anything wrong. At Columbia, even after they had all this evidence against Begelman—”

“Mom. Goodbye.”

“Clark? G-g-g-” She couldn’t say it, couldn’t get past the “g.” This simple word. He hung up while she was still trying. His own mother, and all those FBI eavesdroppers listening to her humiliation. “Goodbye,” she said in her bedroom to herself, looking into one of her mirrors, tilting her head this way
and that. “Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, you idiot,” furious with herself.

He had scared her about the motel rooms. She had had experience of motel rooms, back in Basingstoke—little musty shacks huddled between the road and a strip of woods, next to a roadhouse, with the sheets on the bed smelling of mildew at best. She telephoned Bighorn Mountain, Uncle Jared’s private number. She blamed him for Clark’s involvement with this grotesque sect anyway. An unexpected voice—a New York voice, overripe and elderly and almost ironically smooth, like a butler in Thirties comedy—answered. “I’m sorry, miss, but my father died this October. To whom am I speaking, please?”

“Patrick? Is it you? Don’t you know my voice? When did he die?”

“Essie. My Lord. Didn’t you get the announcement? It made the Denver papers, but I guess not L.A. The whole funeral was agog at the thought that you’d show, but you didn’t. Your father didn’t make it either. My mother was quite hurt, and said the Wilmots had never liked Jared marrying a Catholic.”

“How ridiculous. We loved it. Ama loved underdogs. I was away for two months making a movie in which I kill somebody. My first onscreen victim.
Very
satisfying. My secretary is supposed to sift through the mail for what’s important. Darling, I’m so sorry. How old was he? Incredibly old, I suppose. And you—you’re incredibly rich now, I suppose.”

“Always hopeful—God, I love you. The perpetual ingenue. No, it turns out that by the time Dad was done wheeling and dealing he only owned a sliver of the mountain, something under an eighth. And the ski resort loses money all the time. The smart people go to Aspen or Vail, or like to be helicoptered into the Bugaboos. I’m just out here to tidy up the
wreckage. Your son, by the way, has been making quite a name for himself, if you favor the Christian right. I must say, Pope John Paul Two looks almost reasonable, compared to what you heretics come up with.”

“Clark is compensating—you mustn’t mock. But it’s about that, yes. I need to come out and where could I stay?”

“Where else but with me, who made you what you are? Essie, it would be bliss. Only no towel-dropping this time.”

“I d-don’t know what you’re talking about. I have a perfectly lovely husband, a proper Bostonian.”

“God, if you could have seen yourself that day. I should have had a camera. So young, so lovely. Your hips had points, you were so skinny. You probably had Band-aids on your knees, and scraped elbows. The waif from below Wilmington. You thought it was part of the drill, you poor dear thing.”

“Well, it often was,” she said, and sniffed. “You’re making a motel sound not so bad.”

“Don’t be huffy, cousin. We’re
family
.”

He met her at the Burr County airport; he had filled out, so in his black chesterfield and white muffler he bulked like Jimmy McMullen in the newspaper photographs Ama had kept in a scrapbook back on Locust Street, when the financier was being hauled into court for fraud. Patrick’s black hair, long as a musician’s, had grayed becomingly, in white sweeps above his ears, but age had emphasized a pugnacious Irish coarseness to his nose and upper lip. In Uncle Jared’s topaz Cadillac Brougham, with a silver bighorn ram for a hood ornament, they drove east and north. “An awful lot of nothing,” Alma said, gazing out the window at the darkness as they climbed.

“Wait till you see Lower Branch. It’s Times Square before they cleaned it up.”

They drove through the crossroads hamlet on the way to
the mountain. Snow had been plowed into heaps that went halfway up the telephone poles. Feebly blinking Christmas lights were strung on a cement-block building that must be the town hall, and on a steepleless wooden church across the street. Between the heaps of snow dirtied by the flickering polychrome tints, dark crowds of people—media people, she supposed—clustered like bees in agitated, buzzing swarms outside the entrances to the one bar and the one hash joint, called Mildred’s. Even the 7-Eleven was being overrun, in the cold fluorescent light of the Total station. So many cars and television vans were parked at improvised angles that the main street became one-way traffic in spots. A silhouette in a parka and headphones waved them forward; it was not a policeman but a drunken newscaster, who had nearly arranged a head-on collision, amid encouraging chaotic shouts, with a car coming the other way. It was a dismal carnival such as might be held on a frozen shelf of Hell.

In another forty-five minutes, along a winding road with an endless pine forest to the right and on the left a deep long valley holding a ragged receding lake white under the moon, and then an abandoned mass of gray buildings saying
HENDERSON
tucked into a mountainside, Alma was brought to the family condominium at Bighorn. Among the framed photographs on Uncle Jared’s dresser, she found herself as a little knock-kneed girl, with a bathing-suited little brother and two young parents pale as lard in the summer sun of a Delaware day before the war. Patrick would have sat up for hours serving weak Scotch-and-sodas and trying to relive old New York days, days when flesh merchants like Wexler and Arnie Fineman had the power of gods over a young model, and a girl could ride the subways at any hour without fear, and the art world still produced something you could call art, instead of
this trash that was worse than performance trash because it stayed there, on the wall, with its glued-on broken crockery and absolutely hopeless drawing copied from old
Life
magazines which supposedly makes it very ironic. “Nobody is
buy
ing it, thank God; the Eighties are over and money is terrified of everything except Treasury Bonds.” She couldn’t rise to his prattle; the altitude or some deep black fatigue Alma was still carrying from Greece or this melodramatic business with Clark got to her; she could scarcely keep her eyes open. It depressed her to realize, from the way Patrick was trying too hard to bring back their common past, that knowing her for those few years back then—he who had seemed so suave and superior and in command when she first met him—had become a high point of his life, a justification of his inconsequential, sterile, mannered existence, an acquaintance he must peddle to others; the story of the towel had no doubt been told and retold, in cheerful, gleeful betrayal. That innocent wanton girl and that closeted, pained, elegant young man had deserved at least privacy. Patrick showed her her room and practically put her into bed, for all she could remember. She was too limp to even do her night cream. In her dreams something very big was pressing, pressing at an elastic door, growling and spitting; but in the morning, as the ski lifts started up, she deduced that it had been the sounds of the Sno-Cats grooming the slopes through the night.

“Tell me about your new marriage,” Patrick said at breakfast. In morning light he looked puffy from drink, his jowls still glossy from being shaved, and touching, his old handsomeness come down to a mere dignified bulk, too dignified now for the scramble of the art world, with its violent young bodies and wills. (“Everybody’s mutilating and puncturing themselves, these girls come in with the faces like absolute
sieves
, God knows what they’ve done to the rest of their bodies, it’s
ter
rifying,” he had complained last night.) His close-shaved face was a blue-pink old querulous queen’s.

“It’s heaven,” she answered. “A stable older man. Why did I keep marrying those ridiculous boys before?”

“Because you were a ridiculous girl, my dear. Where do you and Number—is it?—Four live?”

“Well, that’s complicated right now,” Alma said. “When Coca-Cola sold Columbia to Sony for that insane mark-up in the billions—the
poor
Japanese, really—it left Caleb without a job, after all he had done to get TriStar started, so he went back to Boston of course, which his heart had never left. But I hate to give up the Coldwater Canyon house after all these years, and even the cottage in Malibu, the capital-gains taxes would
kill
me if I sold, so that’s how it stands.” Patrick’s lips mockingly quivered, and she said with all her actressy dignity, “Caleb and I are apart a good deal, yes, but what we give each other we don’t need to be physically present to receive. He loves my fame, and I love his dear old money.”