Beauty and the Brain (22 page)

“Oh?” she said. “And exactly what criminal
act did he commit? Murder? Mayhem? Calling a tribe by the wrong
name?”

His lips tightened for a second. “No. As a
matter of fact, he left school without telling our parents or
anyone else.”

She blinked.

“He hared away from Pennsylvania and came
all the way out here to California without communicating his bolt
to a single other person. “

“That’s it?” She sipped her tea, watching
him over the rim of her cup as if she expected him to spring the
real story on her any second.

“That’s it?” He repeated her words
incredulously. “That’s
it
? What do you mean, ‘That’s it’?
Isn’t that enough?”

She didn’t answer immediately, but polished
off her egg. When she did speak, her voice was pitched to sound
reasonable, and it made Colin’s teeth grind. “Leaving school
doesn’t sound like such a terrible infraction to me. Maybe he
didn’t like college. Maybe he discovered he wasn’t much of a
student. I’m sure that’s an awful catastrophe in your family, but
it wouldn’t be for the majority of human beings in the world.”

If he ground his teeth together for much
longer, he’d wear them down to little pearly stubs. He unclenched
them with an effort. “I’m sure you place no value on education,
since you don’t have one—”

She sat up as if he’d slapped her. “Oh! Why,
you miserable, insensitive brute! Of course I value education!
That’s the very reason I’m sending my brothers and sister to
college, you rotten snob! But
they
want to go! If they
didn’t, I’d help them find some other type of work.”

He didn’t like being called a snob. It hit
too close to the bone. Nevertheless, he continued in the coldest
tone he could manufacture, “My family is and has always been
cognizant of the worth of a good education. Not only is an
education of inestimable value to the basic character growth of a
human being and a sure road to a successful career in any endeavor,
but education has been a highly prized achievement in my family for
generations. No one in the whole family has less than a basic
college degree.”

Brenda gazed at him, her lips a thin, tight
line. She didn’t look overly impressed, and her attitude infuriated
him. He continued, “The fact that George chose to drop out of
college without a word to anyone is not something any member of the
family will take lightly. It was neither right nor well considered
of him, and as far as I’m concerned, he has every reason to feel
abashed and ashamed of himself.”

She bit into her toast savagely and followed
it up with a swig of tea. Her anger was so great that she didn’t
even bother to appear ladylike, although she did anyway, much to
Colin’s disgust. He’d really like her to act like the filthy street
urchin she was underneath all her fine trappings, if only just
once.

“All right, Colin. I’ll grant that he was
wrong not to have consulted your parents before he made his
escape—”

“Escape!”

“His escape,” she repeated in a menacing
tone. “Because it must have felt like an escape to him or he’d
never have bucked family tradition. He was wrong not to tell
anyone. But he was undoubtedly fearful of encountering the very
condemnation you’ve been heaping on him since he walked into the
bar last night. I don’t blame him for it. You’re awful to him. And
all because he doesn’t want to continue his higher education.

“For heaven’s sake, Colin, I know you think
you walk on water and that scholarship is the only thing worth a
damn in the world, but there are tons of other ways to make a
living!” She took a deep breath. “I know you don’t like me, and I
know you think I’m silly and ignorant, but I’m not. And I never had
the opportunity to get an education! Everything I know I learned
from books or people who were kind enough to answer my
questions—unlike some people I know. Does that make me a bad
person?”

He’d like to say yes but couldn’t. “Of
course it doesn’t,” he growled angrily. “But at least you pursued a
career and made something of yourself.”

She threw her hands up in the air. “What’s
to say George won’t make something of himself?”

He leaned forward and almost spat the words
into her face. “For God’s sake, Brenda, he wants to be an artist!
An
artist
, for the love of God!” He threw his hands up, too,
as if he couldn’t even conceive of something more nonsensical than
a Peters wanting to be an artist.

“An artist?” She gazed at him blankly.
“What’s wrong with being an artist?”

He rolled his eyes in a gesture very similar
to the one she’d given him a few moments earlier. “It’s idiotic,
that’s what’s wrong with it! How many people do you know who make
their living via the arts?”

She shrugged, making the lilac silk of her
gown ripple in the morning sunshine sifting through the lodge’s
curtains and making him think of the fleshly treasures the fabric
hid from his eyes. Lord, she was gorgeous. He wished he’d stop
noticing. A person would think that, after a while, familiarity
would breed nonchalance. It hadn’t with him regarding Brenda, dash
it.

“Hundreds,” she said quietly. “I know
hundreds of people who make their livings in the arts, Colin
Peters. I’m one of them, in fact. And the opportunities are endless
here, in Southern California, in the motion-picture industry.”

“Motion pictures,” he said as if they tasted
bad. “I can’t believe you said that.”

“And why not? You’re earning a good salary
working for Peerless, aren’t you?”

“This job as research assistant is only a
summer stopgap job until school starts in the fall and I can begin
teaching at the new university in Los Angeles.” He glared at her
and felt like adding a
so there
, just like a little boy.

“But you
are
working in the
pictures.” Her gaze narrowed again, and she looked as if she were
pondering something for a second or two. “Is that why he came here,
do you think? Because he hoped you might be able to help him get a
job in the pictures?”

“I don’t have any idea!”

“Why not? Didn’t you ask?”

Her question tripped him up for a second. He
opted not to answer it, because he thought she’d use his no against
him. He said instead, “He oughtn’t have done it. That’s all I
know.”

She pressed her lips together. “I’m sure it
is. And I’m sure poor George wishes now that he’d braved the ire of
your parents. It couldn’t be any worse than your callousness.”

“Callousness? Is it callousness to believe
he ought to have faced up to his responsibilities like a man and
not run from them like a little boy? For God’s sake, you were only
twelve years old when you started making your way in the world! You
didn’t travel halfway across the country to snivel to your big
brother that you wanted to be an artist. For heaven’s sake!” He was
so wrapped up in indignation that it finally suffocated his words,
and he couldn’t go on.

She eyed him levelly for a moment. “Yes, but
my circumstances and those of your brother were different. My
parents were Irish immigrants and poor as church mice. When my
father died, it was either work or die. I didn’t have much choice
in the matter.”

“Nonsense. You could have sat in a corner
and cried.”

“I did plenty of that,” she said, and a
bleak expression entered her eyes.

He didn’t want to acknowledge that look,
which he knew resulted from deep pain in her past. “But you didn’t
stay there and whine! You got out and worked!”

“But isn’t that what George is trying to do?
He came here, to you, looking for work, didn’t he?”

“It’s entirely different.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, you’re wrong.” Colin decided he’d
taken enough abuse for one morning and rose abruptly. “I have to
get out there and make sure Martin doesn’t have the Indians singing
ragtime songs or something equally heinous.”

She lifted her cup so roughly that some of
the tea slopped into her saucer. She didn’t seem to notice, as she
was glaring arrows and spears at Colin. “It won’t matter if they
sing anything at all, since nobody watching the picture will be
able to hear them.”

“That’s not the point.”

“Oh.”

A frenzy of resentment overtook him. He put
his hands on the table and leaned over until he was nearly
face-to-face with Brenda. “And I don’t know why you’re blaming me
for this fiasco. It isn’t my fault George ran away from school. And
it isn’t my fault that I think he was wrong to do so without
consulting our parents first. I’m not the villain in this piece.”
Deciding with some satisfaction that this was as good an exit line
as he’d be likely to come up with under the circumstances, he
turned on his heel and marched out of the restaurant.

His heart was pumping like a piston, his
nerves were skipping like children playing hopscotch, his blood
felt as close to boiling as it ever had, and he wanted to break
something. Preferably George’s neck. Or Brenda’s.

He absolutely hated to acknowledge that he’d
much rather be making mad, passionate love to Brenda than doing
either of the above.

Brenda watched Colin stalk away from her and
wondered what had possessed her to attack him like that. It wasn’t
her business if George and Colin were having problems with each
other. And really, if she looked at the situation calmly, she
agreed with Colin. George’s action had been cowardly.

Of course, he was very young.

Then again, she herself had been even
younger when she’d begun supporting her family. Colin was right
about that, too.

But the circumstances had been so different.
George had been brought up with, if not wealth, then at least
comfort. Brenda’s family had never been comfortable. They’d always
existed on the slim, perilous edge separating survival from
starvation. In an odd and hideously ironic blow of fate, her family
had been better off without her father than with him.

That sounded unfair and cruel, although
Brenda didn’t mean it as such. She’d had to be intensely practical
almost from infancy, and old habits died hard. Financial
circumstances weren’t the only important aspects of life. She
sighed heavily.

She, better than most people, understood
that when people intoned in their superior, preacherly voices that
money didn’t matter, it was because they had plenty of it. And they
were right. If one had money, it didn’t matter a rap. If one didn’t
have money, it mattered almost more than anything else in life.

Darn it, why was she being so gloomy this
morning? Because she’d quarreled with Colin was why, and she knew
it. Blast her ready tongue.

She ate her orange in a moody silence,
wishing she could replay her last scene with him She’d hold back
her sarcastic opinions if she had it to do over again. It would
have been far more reasonable of her to have asked Colin civilly
what had brought George to California. If she’d done so, he might
even have allowed her to help him deal with his brother.

Fat chance of that now. She’d attacked, he’d
parried, and they’d been at each other’s throats in an instant.
Whatever was it that made Colin and her rub against each other so
irritatingly and so constantly? They caught fire like a match to
dry kindling every time they spoke to each other. She didn’t
understand it. She’d never, ever had trouble getting along with
people before she met him. She could get along with people she
hated, for heaven’s sake, and she didn’t hate Colin. Far from
it.

Unfortunately, real life, unlike life as
portrayed in the pictures, didn’t allow for second takes. She
smiled grimly, recollecting Martin’s always-present ambition to
capture every scene in one take.

With another hearty sigh, she sipped the
last of her tea and recalled her first meeting with. Colin. She’d
had such high hopes for a relationship between them. There seemed
perishingly little chance of that now. She wouldn’t blame him if he
didn’t even want to tell her about Indians any longer.

On that depressing thought, she left the
restaurant and ambled outdoors to watch the filming, which was
again taking place outside the lodge in the huge clearing that
formed the lodge’s yard. As she stopped in front of the lodge doors
and peered around, Brenda wondered how much forest had been cut
down to accommodate the human beings who chose to take holidays on
this spot. Had birds and animals been displaced? Lost their homes?
Died from having their sources of food eliminated?

Good God, she was getting positively morbid.
Instead of thinking about dead deer and birds, she ought to be
marveling at the beauty spread out before her. It took a little
effort, but she dragged her mood out of the swamp of misery in
which it seemed inclined to wallow and concentrated on the
magnificence of her surroundings.

There was a whole bunch of beauty around
here, and no mistake. She’d always loved the mountains. She used to
perform in the Catskills sometimes, and in the Adirondacks, at
various hotels and lodges. She’d loved the life available to her
there: long walks in the woods, swims in the lakes, boating,
fishing, even doing nothing but staring at the blue, blue sky and
making animals out of the clouds. She smiled slightly, remembering.
She’d been allowed very little of that sort of relaxation in her
life, as she’d been working constantly for years.

Not that she regretted a single instant of
the life she’d been forced to live. It had saved her family, it had
saved her, and it was, therefore, a blessing. Brenda knew that far
too many people perished when their lives were visited with the
type of tragedy that had hit her family. She was fortunate. She was
blessed.

Why the deuce wasn’t she happy, today of all
days, when the sun shone, the birds chirped, the squirrels
chattered, she was making tons of money, and her family’s welfare
had been secured for as long as any of them lived? Bother. Human
nature was so illogical and perverse sometimes. With a parting slap
on the paneling of the lodge doors, she quickened her pace,
descended the steps, and walked out to see what was going on with
the filming of
Indian Love Song
.