Seidel, Kathleen Gilles (33 page)

"That makes sense." Doug agreed after she explained her reasons. "Pompey supposedly knew the boys since they were born. He helped raise them. It might have been really hard on Booth if he had to watch him die."

"And if Bix was as good as we're saying, he wouldn't have thrown a character like that away. It would have been a big scene." Jill stood up. "Surely Charles would remember filming that."

Doug looked up at her; he was still sitting on the curb. "You'd think so... but I hate to ask him."

Jill pursed her lips, a little irritated. It wasn't Doug's fault; this was the whole family's rule, a part of their code: Charles must not be upset, Charles must be coddled, protected, he suffered such a terrible loss. For forty years this had been going on.

"Well, I don't mind asking him," she said flatly. "You don't have to come."

"No, no, I don't mind."

And an hour later they were sitting on Mrs. Ringling's front porch, talking to Charles.

"Do you remember the wrap party?" Jill asked him.

"Not very well, I am afraid. I remember that there was one, but if you're going to ask me who said what, I'm not going to be much help. It really was a long time ago, and wrap parties aren't very memorable. Everyone is so tired."

Jill was willing to believe him on that. "We found some pictures Bix took of the party. Would you like to see them?"

"Of course." Charles put on his glasses and extended his hand. He looked at the first two, then laid them all on his lap, took his glasses off, and, his expression pained, pressed his forefinger and thumb against the bridge of his nose.

Jill thought it a little too mannered a performance.

"This is very painful," he said. "May I keep these for a few days? Perhaps later..."

"Oh, of course," Doug said quickly. "We didn't mean to upset you."

Jill watched as Charles slipped pictures back into the envelope. That was, she felt, probably the last they would see of them. It didn't matter; Jake would have filed the negatives. Charles started to stand up, but Jill leaned forward, putting a hand on his arm, and he was too much of a gentleman to do anything but wait for her to speak.

"In those pictures Preston Havelock has a beard as if he had not been filming for a few weeks, and we also noticed that he and the horse never appeared together on the journey home at end of the movie. So we wondered—"

Charles interrupted her. "Well, yes... now that you mention it, I do recall that the first time we filmed it, he did die. His deathbed was a wonderful scene—he did such a magnificent job. How odd a thing memory is. How could I have ever forgotten that?"

Jill did not believe that he had. She, usually so patient, was ready to strangle Charles. Okay, he had never understood what the script as a whole was about, but he remembered a great deal more than he was letting on. Clearly, he was not going to tell them anything, not until they had pieced it together for themselves. Then he would pretend to "remember."

She had kept back the picture of her father and Alicia. She held it in front of him now. "Do you know when this was taken?"

He shook his head. "That's your father, isn't it? It must have been taken sometime during the retakes. That looks like a place in back of the sound stage where we used to take breaks. They were probably just chatting." He handed the picture back to Jill and, now that her hand was off his arm, stood up. "But I can't be sure."

He might not be sure, but Jill was. This picture hadn't been taken outside the sound stage; it was in the yard of whatever place Cass had been living. She recognized the drinking glasses sitting on the table; she used to own them. Five years before this picture had been taken, they had been used on the set of
Casablanca.

But what did any of this prove? What did it mean? Why was Charles lying?

Charles excused himself and went back into the house. On her own, Jill would have followed him, but Doug resisted. Charles was not to be badgered.

Doug's car was parked on the other side of the street, in front of his parents' house. Jill stopped at the curb to let an oncoming car pass, but Doug stepped out into the street, waving. The car honked back, and as it came closer, Jill saw his father, Ward, behind the wheel.

Ward turned into his driveway. "I didn't know you two were coming for lunch. You are coming for lunch, aren't you?" By now Grace Ringling was on the porch, having come out to greet her husband. "Grace, why didn't you tell me Jill and Doug were coming?"

"Because I didn't know." Grace kissed Doug and smiled warmly at Jill, patting her on the arm.

Doug explained why they had come, telling about the pictures.

"I'd like to see those," Ward said. "You know I had the wildest crush on Alicia back then. Poor girl, you have to feel sorry for her. Talk about awkward. Your husband's kid brother following you around like a lost beagle. What a nuisance I must have been... oh, well, there's nothing to do about it now. What are the pictures of?"

"There's one you'll love," Doug told him. "Alicia and Jill's father are sitting out in the sun. She looks gorgeous, and, Dad"—Doug's voice dropped conspiratorially—"one of the glasses has her lipstick smudge on it."

Ward clapped his hand over his heart. "Butterfly Pink."

Jill and Doug stared at him.

"Butterfly Pink," Ward explained sheepishly, "that was the name of her lipstick."

"You remember that?" Jill asked.

"Tell them the truth," his wife ordered.

Ward's face screwed up in the funny little-boy grin that he had obviously passed on to his son. "I stole one from her. She left it sitting on the library table Mother used to have in the foyer. I picked it up to give it back to her, and lo, temptation struck and I kept it."

"Do you still have it?" Jill asked. A week ago it never would have occurred to her to ask someone if they still had a lipstick purloined four weeks ago—much less forty years ago—but since then, she had learned a lot about other people and their attachment to objects.

"I haven't seen it in years," Ward answered. "I mean, I would never throw it out. To this day, I suppose if you found it and asked me if I wanted to take it in the one box of personal effects allowed in the nursing home, I imagine I'd find room for it. But I can't begin to know where to look." He turned to his wife. "Any ideas?"

"If it's anywhere," she answered, "it would be in that old cigar box with all your other treasures."

"So it would, but where is that?"

"If we've still got it, it's in the basement, probably in the box with my wedding dress. I can look for it."

Doug pulled open the front door. "I'll help."

So they all went inside, Doug and his mother disappearing down the basement steps. Jill turned to Ward. "Do you know when you took the lipstick? Was it around the time of the movie?"

"Definitely. It was the first time they came out, in the spring. I felt so guilty about it that when I heard they were coming back again, I thought about giving it back to her, but I didn't."

At last, here was someone who remembered what happened when.

"Actually it was on the last day of their stay," he went on. "There was some sort of confusion in train connections, and everyone had come back to Mother's to hang out. It wasn't a party, everyone was just milling around, drinking coffee, listening to the radio, and talking. It was raining, I think, so no one could go outside. That's probably why the trains were off schedule."

Doug emerged from the basement, carrying a cigar box tied with string, and in a moment his mother followed, carrying a parcel of white tissue paper.

"I don't feel any need to see my rival's lipstick," she said, "so if you'll excuse me..."

She started upstairs. Ward stopped her. "Where are you off to, Grace?"

She looked down over the bannister. "To try on my wedding dress." And with that she marched upstairs.

Both her son and husband watched her round the landing, and when she had disappeared, they glanced at each other, their eyes laughing.

They turned their attention to the cigar box. "Now you sit over there, children." Ward waved his hand toward the sofa. "I don't know as how everything in here is fit for young eyes."

Ward untied the box and, a light glowing from his face, opened the lid. He looked inside, touching nothing, just wearing a deliciously secret half-smile as he stood there contemplating his treasures. How healthy and well-adjusted he seemed; the past wasn't anything that frightened him.

Then he began to stir things around, and, suddenly, from around the lid of the box flashed a gold-toned tube of lipstick.

Jill reached out and took if, the label indeed said Butterfly Pink. Carefully she uncapped it and examined the cap. Then she extended the lipstick: heat and time had turned it into a sticky stub, a sticky stub of Butterfly Pink lipstick.

That's all it was, a lipstick. However rich a talisman to Ward, it told Jill and Doug nothing. No two-hundred-page script was rolled up into the cylindrical top. It was just a lipstick, and it told no tales.

"Oh, and look at this... how could I forget this?" Ward was smoothing out a handkerchief. "She blotted her lips with this." He passed it over to Doug. "Now tell me, son, isn't this the single most erotic thing you've seen in your life?"

"Without a doubt, sir."

Ward sighed. "I guess you had to have been there." He picked up the lipstick again. "Butterfly Pink. I used to think that those were the loveliest words in the English language, but now that I think about it, I can't rightly say I've ever seen a pink butterfly." He put it and the handkerchief back in the box. "I'm sorry," he said. "I'd hoped it would tell you something."

"That's all right." Doug grinned. "It told us all kinds of things about you."

Ward wagged a finger at him. "I've spanked you before, young man, and I'd be happy to do it again."

"Do you remember anything else about the day?" Jill asked. "What anyone said?"

"No. I imagine they were all fussing about the train. But, you know, the same time I picked up the lipstick, I also took that doodle of Bix's that Mother has framed in the stairway. I fell into full-scale kleptomania that day."

Jill and Doug stared at each other. A doodle of Bix's.

They were across the street in a flash. The house was unlocked, but quiet. A stray beam of sunlight caught at the gilt frame of the stern ancestor's portrait and reflected off the glass covering the doodle. Doug lifted the cheap black frame off its hook and side by side they sat down on the stairs. He flipped up the little wire brackets that held the frame's cardboard backing and pushed at the edge of the cardboard to get a finger underneath. It popped up.

Don't talk.

The words jumped off the top of the page. Again the back of a doodle was covered with writing.
Don't talk
was in Alicia's hand, hurried, but still dramatic and loopy, followed by Bix's tiny, precise penmanship. The two hands alternated, a dialogue written between the two of them in the corner of a crowded room on a wet spring afternoon.

Don't talk,
Alicia had written.
They can hear.

Bix—
Do you like the idea?

Alicia—
My part's a million times better. It will make my career.

What about the girl on Friday night in her best sweater?

Jill was puzzled for a moment, then remembered Alicia's response to Bix's early treatment of
Weary Hearts.
In her concern for the project's commercial value, she had wondered how much ordinary young women would like it.

She'll love it.

Bix—
But you don't?

No, it's wonderful.
Then Alicia's handwriting slowed into a stately dignity as if she were writing words that she had never spoken.
I
do not know that it is wise to act so many love scenes with you.

That was all. Even the lively, verbal Bix had no answer.

At least none that he had put into words. Jill was sure that there had been a look, a glance, that had spoken all that neither of them could allow themselves to say.

They had loved each other. Jill had no doubt.

Jill turned the page over. Down in the corner of his intricate drawing, Bix had drawn Alicia's lovely face, her hair swirling out into a pattern of vines and lilies. All three Ringling brothers had loved her. Young Ward's devotion would have been a tender embarrassment, something Charles and Alicia could have secretly smiled over. But Bix's passion might have been close to sin.

When had it started, their love? That day during the war when he had taken her to Winchester to meet the family? During those first years when the three of them were struggling to make names for themselves in Hollywood? Or perhaps they had only been friends until the movie. Perhaps, like Burton and Taylor, playing lovers had made them lovers. Perhaps Alicia did not want to act love scenes with Bix because she had already lived them.

What would it be like, Jill wondered, to be engulfed with a forbidden passion? She never had been. Her own relationships had always been tidy; she had never felt anything that she should not have felt. Yet, all of a sudden, she was drawn to the notion with a dizzying swirl... to feel that strongly, to be lured by dreams that overrode good sense and reason? What would it be like? The idea made her own life seem so pallid.

Doug was sitting close, rereading Bix and Alicia's dialogue. Did she want him to be forbidden to her? Would that make her feelings more intense? No. She was glad how easy this was. She was grateful to him for being so straightforward and sane. She really was. She slipped her hand through his arm and rested her cheek against the sleeve of his shirt.

He pulled his arm tight against his body, holding her hand close to him. "I wonder if this was the first time that they... you know, that either admitted caring about the other."

A shadow appeared at the front door. "Who cared about whom?" It was Ward. He came inside, the screen door swinging shut behind him. "What are the pair of you talking about?"

Jill straightened and waited for Doug to speak. This was his family.