Lancelot (22 page)

The film company was shooting the last scene before the hurricane. The set was the front gallery of Belle Isle. It was the only remaining scene which could not be shot in Burbank. Following the scene, the crew planned to pack up their station wagons and go home.

It was not a long scene but it required many takes. In the scene the sharecropper, played by Elgin, and the sheriff, played by the actor who looked like Pat Hingle, come to Belle Isle accompanied by the Christlike hippy stranger, played by Dana, who has reconciled poor white sharecroppers, poor black sharecroppers, overseers, sheriffs, blacks, whites, and the half-caste girl, who was accepted by neither race. They have come to rescue the planter, played by Merlin, and his daughter the librarian, played by Margot, from the hurricane. The planter, however, fixed in his ancient prejudices and secretly liking the apocalyptic fury of the hurricane, decides to remain. He also expects his daughter to stay with him. The daughter decides to leave her father and go with the stranger. It is the farewell scene between father and daughter. After the farewell, the planter, who is not so much prejudiced as indifferent, caught up by aesthetic rather than social concerns, returns to the house alone, to his organ. Crashing chords of a Chopin polonaise fuse with the mounting fury of the hurricane.

“I want more of a Lear-like effect, Bob,” said Jacoby, turning off the hurricane machine after one of many takes. “You know, mad king raging on the heath, wild-eyed, hair blowing.”

“Yeah, right, Lear, okay,” said Merlin ironically, but Jacoby missed the irony.

Before the shooting began. I went to the bank and withdrew $75,000 from Margot's and my checking account.

“What the hail, Lance?” said Macklin Maury Lamar, my cousin, who was president of the bank.

“We're giving it to the American Negro College Fund.”

“Ah.”

I told him this for two reasons. One was that it was the only reason he would believe, believing as he did that I was still a liberal and therefore capable of any madness. (Yet curiously it was for him an understandable madness: you know how old Lance is, etc., etc.)

The other reason was that my explanation was, in a sense, true.

“Yeah,” said Macklin. “A wonderful cause. In fact I agree with you, that's what they need.”

What was worrying Macklin was not this particular withdrawal but the likelihood of losing Margot's and my half-million-dollar
checking
account. Or my asking him to pay interest.

“How do you want it, Lance?”

“In cash. Any denominations.”

“Why the cash, Lance?” asked Macklin, laughing heartily, eyes worried.

“I'm afraid your bank will blow down tonight. The money will be safer at Belle Isle.”

“There you go! Ha ha.” Macklin laughed and slapped his side, all the while keeping a sharp eye on me, trying to parse out craziness and horsiness, wondering whether I was ordinarily crazy as he always held me to be or possessed by some new craziness.

He gave me the $75,000 in hundreds in a locked canvas bag, handing me the little brass key separately.

After the shooting was finished at Belle Isle and the crew was busy dismantling the hurricane machine and packing their station wagons, I summoned Elgin to the pigeonnier and gave him the $75,000. He unlocked the bag with the little brass key. He looked at the money.

“How much money is this?”

“Seventy-five thousand dollars.”

“What's it for?”

“It's very simple. I have a great deal of money, more than I can use, and there are two things you want.”

“Yes?”

“One is to finish your education at M.I.T. despite the fact that your scholarship has run out.”

“Yes.”

“The other is you want to marry your classmate Ethel Shapiro and buy a house in Woodale, a subdivision of Concord, which though a cradle of American liberty is unwilling to sell houses to blacks or Jews especially blacks married to Jews. Yet you are determined to buy a house there despite all obstacles.”

“Not despite. Because.” Elgin looked down at the money. “Okay. But you don't owe me anything. I'd have done it for you anyway. It was an interesting problem. Sorry about the tape quality. The color was defective.”

“I liked it that way.”

“The sound was rotten, too. Jesus, I felt bad about that.”

“Don't worry about it. It was okay.”

“Well—” said Elgin, standing in the doorway. He was always standing in the doorway.

“Yes?”

“I have a feeling there is something else. Perhaps a condition.”

“A condition?”

“Something you want me to do.”

“Only two things.”

“What?”

“Leave now.”

“Now?”

“Now. In the next hour.”

“The other is, don't come back?”

“Right.”

“Okay.” We might have been discussing his chores for the day.

“Oh yes. Something else. Take Ellis and Suellen to Magnolia, Mississippi, where y'all have kinfolks. It's on I-55, on your way north. They can return after the storm. You won't have any trouble persuading them. They're both scared to death. They are the only people around here who have any sense.”

“Okay. Is that all?”

“That's all.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Me? I'm fine, Elgin.”

“Don't you need me to help you move all those folks out of here?”

“No.”

“Okay. Well—”

We shake hands. He gives me a level-eyed look. He's seen too many movies. Or maybe it's being in one. The level-eyed look means we understand each other and have been reconciled, perhaps by the Christlike stranger played by Dana. When the truth is, nobody understands anyone else, and nobody is reconciled because nobody knows what there is to be reconciled. Or if there is something to be reconciled, the way it is done in the movies, by handshakes, level-eyed looks, expressions of mute understanding, doesn't work.

Don't you agree? No? Do you really believe people can be reconciled?

“One more thing, Elgin.”

“Yes?” He was standing in the doorway in a way he learned from Jacoby. It was an actor's way of standing in a doorway at a moment of farewell, eyes fine, face slanted.

“When you shake hands with somebody, squeeze.”

“Okay,” he said frowning. He left slightly offended.

Did it ever occur to you in considering those instances of blacks who decide they want to act like whites and are very observant and successful in doing so (they are even better than the Japanese in imitating us—so much so that Elgin can act more like Mannix than Mannix) that no matter how observant one is, one cannot by observation alone assess the degree of squeeze in a handshake or even be sure there is a squeeze at all?

I was wrong about one thing. Merlin too had good sense and no taste for hurricanes. He was leaving.

For once I astonished myself: I wanted him to leave! I wanted him to get away, escape, the man who had made love to my wife in the Roundtowner Motor Lodge in Arlington, Texas, on or about July 15, 1968, and begot my daughter Siobhan.

Why?

Because he, poor old man, had come to as bad a place as a man can come to. Going back to Africa to find his youth. To see leopard. It was as if I had lit out for Asheville looking for dead Lucy. An old man should find new things. Shooting was too good for him. Anyhow I liked him and he liked me.

I caught him fidgeting up and down the gallery after the rest of the crew had gone.

“I was working on the causeway in the Keys when that son of a bitch (they had no women's names for hurricanes then) hit in 1928. They're no joke and I'd as soon not see another one.”

“Didn't some people get killed?”

“About five hundred. Christ, what I haven't seen in my life. What I haven't done. Three things I've loved—women, life, and art.”

“In that order?”

“In that order.”

“Well, you've got plenty of life left.”

He looked at me, then looked at me again.

“Right!” he said. “And I'm in good shape. I've got a good body. Feel that, Lance,” he said, making a bicep.

“Okay. Very good.”

“That's the arm of a young man. Feel my gut.”

“Flat and hard.”

“Hit me.”

“That's not necessary.”

“Go ahead, hit me. You can't hurt me.”

“I believe you.”

“I can beat the shit out of anybody here—except you, Lance. I believe you could take me.”

“I doubt it. I'm in rotten shape.”

“You want to arm wrestle?”

“No.”

“You've got a good body. You know what you ought to do?”

“No.”

“Kung Fu. You'd be great at it. You're a natural athlete, with an athlete's grace and strength. It would be good for you.”

“You may be right, Merlin. You know what you ought to do?”

“What?”

“Get out of here.”

“We're leaving the first thing tomorrow morning. Those other nuts want to spend the night.”

“Marie is arriving tonight. You may not be able to leave tomorrow.”

“I know. But those bastards want to make a party out of it. Margot ought to have better sense.”

“If I were you, I would leave now. It's all the same to me.” It was.

He paced the gallery, frowning, cocked an eye at the yellow sky.

“Or is Jacoby still the director?”

“Jacoby! That son of a bitch couldn't direct traffic in Boutee, Louisiana.”

“Well?”

He snapped his finger. “By God I will leave!” His spinning white-fibered eye looked past me into the future. He snapped his finger again. “You know what I'm going to do?”

“No.”

“I'm going to head north right out of this swamp. I'm going to drive straight to Virginia, up the Shenandoah Valley, and pick up Frances, who has a horse farm near Lexington. I'll say to her: Let's go back to Tanzania. We were there once. We lived in a Land Rover. We saw leopard. She's a soldier, a good girl. She might even—She's always been my love. I took her once to Spain and showed her the Ebro River, where I fought. Yes, Christ, I did that too. Can you believe it? She's a good girl, a comrade. She's a comrade, brother, daughter, lover to me. All I have to do is say, Honey, let's go back to the high country, and she'll go. Jesus, what an idea you've given me! I might even do a film. What do you think of a film about a man and woman who are good comrades, go on a hunt, and then have good sex together?”

“It sounds fine.”

“If it is fine, why do I feel so rotten? I've always been a man with a great longing and lust for life and love, Lance. Do you understand that?”

“Yes.”

“I know it could be good between me and Frances again.”

“It might be.”

“Tell me honestly.”

“It's possible.”

“It would be good even if—”

“Yes, it would.”

“I feel rotten now but it could be good between us. What do you think?”

“I think it might be good between you.”

“Frances knows me better than any other woman.”

“I'm sure of it.”

“She and I were always good together.”

“That's good.”

“We could be good together again.”

“I'm sure of that.”

“I might do something, a story, something, about the dying out of the wildebeest and the death too of human love and then a renewal and a greening, a greening and a turning back of the goddamn advancing Sahara. You understand?”

“Yes.”

“The Sahara of the
soul
too.”

“Yes, but right now you ought to think of leaving.”

“I'm leaving. I'll speak to the others.”

“What about the others?” I asked with a slight constriction of anxiety in the throat.

“To say goodbye. Christ, they wouldn't dream of leaving. Do you know what they're doing now?”

“No.”

“Raine is taking sandwiches and champagne up to your belvedere. They're going to have a party named Goodbye movie, hello Marie.”

I must have looked blank for he explained: “Goodbye movie hurricane, hello the real thing.”

“That's a good place to get killed up there. Too much glass.”

“Just try to tell them that.”

“I intend to speak to Margot.”

“On second thought why don't you tell her goodbye for me. As for the others, I'd as soon Marie blew their asses in the river. Do you know what those batbrains are doing?”

“No.”

“They're popping pills and hauling anisette and tequila up to the belvedere. They're going to have a party.”

“I know.”

Merlin gave me a long firm handshake with two hands and a long level-eyed stare clouded with hidden meanings. He'd been in the movies too long.

“Lucy, jump in your Porsche and take off for school. You've got thirty minutes.”

“Papaaauh!” She trailed off in a musical downbeat-up-beat, an exact rendering of Raine's famous mannerism.

“You heard me.”

“I want to stay with Raine through the hurricane.”

“No goddamn it. Now get going.”

Lucy looked surprised. Everyone acted as if I were an ancestor who had wandered out of his portrait and begun giving orders. Everyone obeyed from sheer surprise.

Later I heard Lucy ask Suellen, who was packing her metal candy boxes in Elgin's Plymouth Charger: “What's got into Papa?”

“Mr. Lance know what he doing, girl,” said Suellen conventionally but in truth relieved that somebody, anybody, was taking charge.

“What's the hurry. Papa?” asked Lucy, thinking of Raine again.

“Well, for one thing, they need you at the Tri-Phi house. I just talked to Mrs. Davaux. The freshmen are getting panicky even though the storm is only going to sideswipe them. Mrs. Davaux thinks you're the one to calm them. She says you have real leadership qualities. Otherwise you're going to lose half your pledges to the Chi O's—whose seniors are all back.” (I did talk to Mrs. Davaux and she did say something like that.)