Till We Meet Again (45 page)

Time, that Freddy had thought so unlimited, so inexhaustible, suddenly vanished with her pulsing, passionate need to know him completely, to be completely known. Impatiently she opened her legs in a foreign signal of which she would not have believed herself capable. Mac understood, but he was reluctant, he hesitated, until she pushed so insistently toward him that he entered her. Suddenly he stopped. He had reached the barrier he had forgotten. “No, no more, I’ll hurt you,” he muttered.

“I want you to,” she cried, consumed with love and desire. “I want you, I want you,” she cried again, and when he still held himself resolutely motionless, she gathered herself together, roughly, impatiently, arching upward with all the strength of her back and legs and hips, so that the choice was no longer his to make. Now they strained forward, with a
single will, a single need, and a single goal. The innocent girl and the experienced man reached it together, so deep was their love, so well did they know each other, so often had one taught the other what had been the most important thing in the world to them until they had turned to each other with the truth of their love.

13

P
AUL de Lancel was not a man who had been formed by nature for rage. His upbringing in Champagne had been influenced, day by day, by the tranquility that rose like a mist from the gentle slopes of the fruitful countryside. He had come to maturity in the peaceful years before the Great War. He had been well trained in the artistic compromises of diplomacy, and he had lived in joy with the woman he adored for almost two decades.

Now, with Freddy’s cool act of defiance, a state of rage, relentless, unreflective rage, had invaded him. It was an absolute rage, all the more unforgiving because he had never learned, as a naturally irascible man might, that it is unproductive to sustain rage at full pitch over a long length of time. He was so transformed by rage that Eve was unable to discuss it with him, because he would not even allow her to say Freddy’s name. He dug himself into his rage with the same blind determination as a prisoner making an escape tunnel, for like a prisoner he had no other way to avoid the reality of the situation.

She must be taught a lesson. A lesson she’d never forget. Someone had to obey him!
All his rage was contained in these words, as if he were a third-rate lion tamer rather than a reasonable member of a pragmatic profession. He allowed himself to think no further.

Freddy was paying for all the deflected, unabsorbed fury Paul felt toward Bruno, the son who treated him only with the politeness due a stranger, the son who had rejected him for reasons too painful to explore. Freddy was paying for all the recent bitterness of the disappointment Paul felt toward Delphine, the daughter whose conduct was so duplicitous and dubious, the daughter who had left him powerless to do anything to upset the
fait accompli
of her contract with Gaumont.

His impotence as a father, with all three of his children,
was so ultimately maddening to Paul de Lancel that he could not bring himself to think about it consciously. It was easier to cast Freddy utterly out of his life, to reject her once and for all. She deserved nothing. She could do without her family, could she? Then so be it.
Someone
had to obey him!

Freddy became the focus of all his unutterable frustrations with Bruno and Delphine. Freddy’s conduct—her unforgivable mutiny—was the final insurrection against which he would stand fast, no matter what it cost.

Eve barely recognized her husband in the weeks after Freddy left. He woke up so early that he often departed for the Consulate before she went downstairs for breakfast, leaving her only a message with Sophie, the cook. He returned home and buried himself in the newspapers, scarcely speaking to her, until dinner. During dinner, he poured himself three times as many glasses of wine as she had ever known him to drink, which enabled him to maintain a meaningless conversation with her about the details of their separate daily routines, and after dinner he took himself out for a long, solitary walk, coming home only to inform her that he had slept so badly that he was going to go to bed. He hadn’t laughed out loud since Freddy left, and he kissed Eve as if it were a duty.

Was he angry at her too, Eve wondered. She had to believe that he was, although he would never admit it. After all, it was she who had talked him into letting Freddy continue with her flying lessons after her solo; she had lent Freddy her car. Paul couldn’t consider her blameless, but since he would tolerate absolutely no mention of Freddy, Eve could not shoulder her fair share of the events that had led up to Freddy’s act of anarchy.

She was not even able to give her husband news of Freddy, for every week Eve received a brief phone call from her daughter at a time when Paul was at work. Freddy didn’t give Eve details of her life. She didn’t say where she was lodging, but she reassured her anxious mother that she was well and safe. Her happiness was evident in her voice. Eve had tried to pass the news on to Paul, but he had stopped her as soon as he realized what she was beginning to tell him.

“It does not concern me,” he said, in a tone of voice so unyieldingly filled with a killing fury that she left the room without another word, terrified, for the first time in her life, of the man she had married.

Eve endured the misery of this life until shortly before Christmas of 1936. Paul could, at any time, have found out where Freddy was working, with a telephone call to any of his studio contacts. It was a call he would never make, she realized, even if he were willing to admit that he didn’t know where his own daughter was. But she was beyond worrying about his pride after almost three months, she thought angrily, and made the call herself. She craved the sight of the girl, she needed to hold her child in her arms. A day later she had her answer, and she headed out in her car to the farm near Oxnard where the
Tail Spin
company was working.

“Yes, ma’am?” inquired the guard at the wire fence that had been built all around the fields on which part of the film was being made, to keep out the curious locals.

“I’m expected,” Eve answered briskly. He swung back his gate without further questions. She left her car behind a group of sheds where she saw other cars parked, and walked toward the largest shed with a firm step. She felt no shyness about intruding on the surroundings of a movie on location. Someone who had starred at the Olympia was free forever of any trepidation about venturing into that area of the
spectacle
that was officially closed to the public. Backstage was backstage, wherever she came across it, and as much her world today as it had ever been in the reign of Jacques Charles.

“Is Freddy de Lancel around?” she asked the first person she saw who looked as if he might know.

“Freddy? You’ll have to ask over there. I don’t know the stunt schedule,” the man answered, pointing at another shed that contained an improvised production office.

“The stunt schedule,” Eve said, able to keep the surprise out of her voice.

“Yep.”

“What about the precision flying? Shouldn’t I ask there?”

“Same thing, lady.”

“Like … aerobatics? Exhibition flying?”

“Stunts—exhibitions—six of one, half a dozen of another.”

“Thank you.” She turned toward the shed he had indicated. She wouldn’t think about it until she knew more, she thought in dismay. The technical terminology of whatever it was that Freddy was doing was obviously so sloppy that one thing meant another or a third or a fourth.

In the production office they directed her toward another building, a hangar several hundred yards away. Eve walked
toward it, feeling the dry wind of a Santa Ana wind whip the skirt of her smart dark green suit and almost lift off her soft felt hat. The sky was far away, unimportant, painted in the flat, cloudless blue wash caused by the wind that was to California as the Mistral was to the South of France. The field she crossed was the dry, slightly scruffy yellow of a California winter before the coming of the rains of January, that herald the spring. As she walked, as trim and elegant at forty as she had been at twenty, her gray eyes still fascinating in their darkness, her hair still a romantic strawberry blond, Eve aroused a wave of appreciative, curious glances from the busy technicians, who always managed to spare the time to eye a beautiful woman.

Eve looked into the hangar, dim after the sunlight outside. There were several people gathered around a plane that appeared as modern and powerful as any she had seen in newspaper photographs of the Air Races. As she approached them, she recognized Alice Faye, wearing a cream-colored shirt, tailored with so many flaps and pockets that it looked like a military uniform, tucked into a matching pair of the tightest slacks Eve had ever seen. A cream suede belt was wrapped around her small waist, a white silk scarf was casually flipped around her neck, and the unmistakable platinum blond of her long bob curled out from under her cream-colored leather helmet. Goggles were pushed back on top of the helmet, revealing her entire face, the familiar black eyebrows, the big eyes fringed in exaggerated black eyelashes, the brightly lipsticked, luscious lips that made such an intriguing counterpoint to her aggressive blondness.

Two men bent with her over the cockpit of the plane, one a plump, almost middle-aged man, and one a younger man, whom Eve recognized as Spencer Tracy. He was taller than she’d thought. Then, as she walked much closer, still unnoticed, she saw that he wasn’t Tracy after all, just an actor who looked like him. The two men were in animated conversation about the shoulder straps that were intended to hold the pilot in the seat of the racing plane, the younger man plainly dissatisfied with them.

“I don’t give a damn, Swede, if this is the best available equipment in the whole damn world. Make new ones. They’ve got to be three times as strong, or Freddy doesn’t fly,” he insisted as Eve approached.

“We’ll lose a day,” Swede Castelli protested, “maybe two.”

“You heard the man, Swede,” Alice Faye said. “Anyway, there’s too much wind to fly today. The camera plane would bounce around.”

“Freddy,” Eve breathed.

Alice Faye whirled around. “Mother! Oh God, I’m glad to see you! Oh, Mother, Mother, how are you? Give me a kiss. How’s Daddy? How’s Delphine? Tell me everything! How’d you find me? Give me another kiss. Oh … this is Swede Castelli and this is Mac—Terence McGuire. Guys, this is my long-lost mother. Bet you didn’t think I had one, did you, Swede? Oh, I’ve got lipstick all over you, Mother. Let me wipe it off. Lend me your hanky, there’s no room in this dumb outfit for anything but me.”

Freddy was dancing around Eve in joy, hugging her and then holding her away so that she could get a good look at her, and then hugging her again. The child certainly wasn’t starving, Eve thought in bewilderment, for she seemed not only to have grown taller but to have filled out so that her lanky frame had become that of the voluptuous screen star. Freddy saw her surprise. “It’s padding, Mother, not me. I’m still your little girl inside this costume.”

“You fooled me,” Eve said breathlessly. “I didn’t recognize you. I thought you were Alice Faye.”

“That’s the idea, Mrs. de Lancel,” Swede Castelli said, beaming. “You should see her as Connie Bennett, she’s a dead ringer.”

“Swede, let’s take my mother for a cup of coffee. We’re finished in here anyway, aren’t we?” Freddy asked.

“I’ve got to go and get that safety harness made, Freddy. I also have to talk to Roy Del Ruth about a few things. You and Mac take off. I’ll see you here tomorrow morning if I have to sew it myself.”

“Swede, what’s your rush? You’ve got time for a cup of coffee,” Freddy insisted as the four of them walked from the hangar to the temporary commissary.

“I’d better get going. Nice to meet you, Mrs. de Lancel. See you again, I hope.” He went off hurriedly to find the director of the picture before he tackled the problem of the shoulder harness. With Mac rigging all of Freddy’s stunts, Castelli estimated that days and days of production had already been spent meeting his safety demands and his redoubled
precautions. On the other hand, once Freddy was flying, they saved far more time than they lost, and there had never been stunts in the history of the business about which he felt less anxiety. Nor had there been more convincing flying shots of a woman in the history of film.

As she drank her coffee and ate the Danish pastry that Freddy insisted she have, Eve felt herself struggling with a series of impressions that confused her. It wasn’t just the garish makeup and the platinum wig that made Freddy seem so much like a stranger. There was something … she couldn’t tell what … but something different about her. Her voice was the same, her affectionate attention was the same, but something basic had changed. It wasn’t just that she had grown up, that she was making her own living and leading her own life—both topics that Freddy and Eve avoided by mutual consent—it was something else that Eve couldn’t identify. Something new.

Eve ventured to ask Mr. McGuire a few questions to see if anything he said might give her a hint as to the change in her daughter, but his answers were just what she would have expected from the instructor who had taught her daughter to fly—measured, calm and reasonable. He explained the mechanics of several of the stunts to her in a way that she could understand. He was an exceptionally reassuring man, she thought as she listened to him, and if she had met him before, she would have been certain that Freddy was in good hands while she’d been taking lessons.

She’d come back another day, Eve thought, and see if she could talk to Freddy alone, when she wasn’t wearing makeup that acted like a mask. But she was sure of the single vital thing she had come out to discover; Freddy was, indeed, all right. Perhaps she could figure out some way to get that reassurance through to Paul. Even if she failed, at least she and Freddy were back in contact.

Eve was very careful not to fall into an overly maternal attitude. Not only had there been a three-month break over the issue of Freddy’s clearly declared independence, but Mr. McGuire, a stranger, was present. She would never discuss family matters unless she and her daughter were alone. She didn’t ask where Freddy was living, or who cooked her meals, or how she got her laundry done, or what her plans were once this picture was over. She was content to just sit, in her vague but insistent confusion, and let her child’s
evident happiness wash over her. Freddy was working at the thing she loved and, according to Mr. McGuire, doing it brilliantly. That knowledge was enough for today, she thought, as she left to drive back home.