Establishment (30 page)

“To hell with your apology! I want some explanations!”

“All right. I have been told by two people, both of them trustworthy, that Drake has been meeting with your son. One such meeting took place in Berkeley at Frederick's, and I was informed of this by a person who was there on the occasion. Another meeting took place here in San Francisco. On that occasion, your son gave Drake an amount of cash—how much I do not know. The person who supplied the cash to your son only told me that it was a substantial amount.”

“What in hell do you have, a private spy service?” Dan burst out. “What are you telling me?”

“The truth. I have friends. I hear things. I am sorry if you feel that I insulted you. I apologized. That's all I can do. I thought you knew about this, and that's why I was shocked to hear that your daughter was arrested and faces trial. Frankly, I thought there had been a payoff, but now I realize you had no knowledge of what your son is up to, whatever that may be. You see, there are more reasons than one why I cannot take your daughter's case.”

Dan took several long breaths before he trusted himself to speak, and then he said, very slowly, “I think it's my turn to apologize. I thank you for the time you have given me. I'm sorry this all had to come about.”

“As I am,” Judge Fredericks agreed.

Outside, Dan got into his car and then sat behind the wheel for a while with his eyes closed.
There's one thing I can't do
, he told himself.
I can't go through life as a cripple.
His rage had passed, but the anger was still with him; it burned like a low, cold fire.

He drove downtown and parked his car next to the towering pile of steel and glass that housed GCS. A bright new colophon in shining stainless steel, each letter five feet high, was fixed over the entrance. Dan went into the building and took the elevator up to the executive floor. Here, too, were the marks of the time—specially woven carpeting on the floor, nonobjective paintings on the walls, a receptionist whose yellow hair was as burnished as the chrome-plated telephone on her desk.

“I want to see Mr. Lavette,” Dan told her.

“Do you have an appointment?”

“I'm his father.”

Unmoved by this information, she told Dan that she would tell Mr. Lavette's secretary. The blood relationship counted, and he was passed through to an inner office, where a dark-haired woman introduced herself as Miss Loper. “So you're Mr. Lavette's dad. I wouldn't think so, you look so young—” Finding no response on the face of the big white-haired man, she added quickly, “He'll see you in a moment. He's on a call.”

Tom opened the door to his office. “Come in, come in,” he said to Dan. “You've met Janet—my good right arm. I'm glad you decided to drop in. I should have asked you weeks ago, but I've been snowed under.” He closed the door. “Sit down. Would you like a drink?”

Dan remained standing. Tom circled to his place behind an enormous, ebony-topped desk and seated himself slowly. “Something wrong?” he asked, puzzled.

“Tell me, have you been seeing Norman Drake?”

Tom hesitated. Then he said, “Is that what you've come here for, to ask me about Drake?”

“I asked you. Have you been seeing him?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact. I met with him two or three times.”

“Did you give him money?”

“That is a personal matter. I don't intend to discuss my relationship with him.”

“Did you ask him to drop the charges against Barbara?”

Again Tom hesitated, but for a longer interval. “No.”

“Why not?”

“Because Barbara can drop those charges anytime she wants to. All she has to do is stop being a goddamn Joan of Arc and answer the question they asked her.”

“Do you know that she was arrested yesterday?” Tom shrugged.

“She's digging the hole for herself.”

“All right,” Dan said, “you're my son. I find you a contemptible sonofabitch, but you are my son. If you weren't, I think I'd kill you here on the spot. As it is, I don't want to see your face ever again.” He slammed the office door behind him, strode past the astonished Miss Loper, and left the building.

That evening, he told Jean what had happened, leaving nothing out. “What in hell did we do wrong, Jean? How did this happen?”

“That way lies madness, Danny, so let it be. No one in this ridiculous society is equipped to raise children, the rich least of all. I don't like the notion of closing the door on Tom forever, but I am far more worried about you putting yourself through this kind of an emotional explosion. It's no good for you.”

“I'm all right. And if you want to see Tom, see him.”

“I certainly don't want to see him now. How I'll feel in six months or a year, I don't know. More to the point, what about Barbara? Do we tell her?”

“I have to tell her why Fredericks wouldn't take the case.”

“Tell her the other reasons. Don't drive any wedge between them, Danny. She has enough misery.”

***

One morning, about an hour after Joe had left for the clinic, Sally's telephone rang. The woman at the other end informed her that she was Alex Hargasey's secretary, and that if it were possible, Mr. Hargasey would like to see Mrs. Lavette at his office at three o'clock that afternoon. “Can you be there?” she asked Sally.

“You bet! Absolutely!”

“The Paramount Studios. The gate is at Marathon, just east of Gower. If you come down Melrose—”

“Yes, I know where it is.”

“We'll leave a pass at the gate. The guard will tell you where to go.”

Trembling with excitement, Sally put May Ling in her restraining chair in the car and drove to the clinic. Her car was an eight-year-old Ford that had fits of temper and whimsy, and now she prayed that it would perform through the day.

At ten o'clock, the clinic was overflowing, and she waited impatiently for Joe to come out of his consulting room. She sat at one end of the row of chairs, looking at the Mexican women and children and a sprinkling of men, all of them sitting listlessly, hopelessly, the way people sit in the waiting room of a free clinic, displaying a sort of subdued, sad patience.

Billy came out and saw her, and his face lit up. “Why didn't you tell us you were here?”

“Because Joe gets so angry when I interrupt him.”

“Ah, no. Joe doesn't get angry.”

“Billy,” she said, “will you be an absolute darling? You know that screenplay of mine. I sent it to Alex Hargasey at Paramount, and now he wants to see me. His secretary called, and I have an appointment at three. You talk to Joe, please. I need a baby sitter—just for a few hours. If you can come by at two, that will give me plenty of time.”

At that moment Joe came out, and Sally repeated her story. “Aren't you pleased?” she asked. “Isn't it exciting?”

“We have a terrible day. I need Billy here.”

“Is that all you can say? I don't believe you!”

“Come into my office,” Joe said. “I can't discuss it here.”

Billy had said nothing, only watching Sally in a kind of dumb admiration. In his office, Joe said, “You could have telephoned. You didn't have to drag the baby down here.”

“I thought you'd be at the hospital and I'd have to talk Frank into letting me have Billy for a few hours. This whole thing is crazy. Do you know what the chances are of selling an original screenplay—maybe one in a thousand—and they pay tremendous sums, sometimes twenty or thirty thousand dollars, perhaps more. And I finally get this chance, and it doesn't mean anything to you.”

“Of course it means something to me, Sally. All right, I got a little uptight. There are times when this place drives me insane. Our patient load gets bigger and bigger, and the city doesn't give a damn. No one gives a damn.”

“I know. I'll take May Ling with me. They'll survive the sight of a baby.”

“Forget that. I'll send Billy over.”

When Billy arrived that afternoon, Sally was still trying to come to terms with her face and hair. She applied lipstick and then wiped it off; she applied rouge and then wiped it off. She stuffed Kleenex into her brassiere and then removed it in disgust. She stared at her hair, thinking that it was straw, it had always been straw, and it would always be straw. She stared at her face—the high cheekbones, the deepset, bright blue eyes, the wide expressive mouth—and decided that nothing would help. She had changed clothes three times, deciding finally on a gray pleated skirt, a white blouse, and a gray cardigan.
I'm dowdy
, she told herself.
Always have been, always will be
. Then she said to Billy, “How do I look? Perfectly horrible? Go ahead, you can tell me.”

“I think you're the most beautiful woman I have ever known,” Billy said seriously.

“I think you're nutty. I should have known better than to ask you. Do you know, Billy, you have an absolutely crazy notion of what I am. I am not pretty. I am selfish, I am vain, and I'm slowly driving my husband out of his mind.”

“Oh, no, no. You mustn't be upset about the way Joe acts. You can't imagine what it's like these days. After you left, they brought in two kids who were in a knifefight, both of them bleeding like pigs. It took us two hours to stop the bleeding and sew them up, and then they needed blood, and we couldn't find a place to admit them for transfusions—”

“Do you know,” Sally interrupted, “this is all my life has been for two years now. Look, Billy, about May Ling. She's still napping. When she wakes up, she'll be wet. Can you change a diaper?”

“I think so.” He smiled.

“Then put her in the living room. Give her the teething stuff. She'll be fine, only keep an eye on her. She walks, you know.”

“I like her. We'll be all right.”

Sally put her arms around him and kissed him. “I like you. You're absolutely an angel, only you're too good to be true.”

Billy shook his head. “No, I'm hopeless.”

At the studio, the guard at the gate regarded Sally's car dubiously. “What can I do for you, miss?”

“I have an appointment with Mr. Hargasey. I'm Sally Lavette.”

He checked his board, then nodded. “You turn right, Miss Lavette, and then park anywhere along that wall. Then just follow the yellow line and you come to a kind of half-timbered building on your right. There's a receptionist there who'll show you where his office is.”

After she parked her car, it was still only ten minutes to three. Sally walked slowly through the studio grounds, treasuring each step. It was the first time she had ever been in a film studio, and she found herself utterly enchanted by the place—the great sound stages, the people in costume hurrying by, cowboys, Indians, lovely women in evening gowns and men in tails walking through the hot sunlight, two pretty blondes in Little Bo Peep dresses.
Oh, I do love this place
, she thought,
and wouldn't it be wonderful to work here!
A sign on a building to her left caught her eye:
writers building
.
I'd be there
, she thought,
right in there doing my own work and feeling that there is some reason for me to be alive. Well, we'll see…we'll see what Mr. Hargasey has to say. Who knows? Maybe I'll be in there tomorrow, revising my script.

She found the half-timbered building, and the receptionist told her that Mr. Hargasey was down the hall, number four. Her hand was trembling as she opened the door of number four. The room appeared palatial enough to house Mr. Hargasey, but it was evidently the habitat of his secretary, a well-rounded, pretty woman with bleached hair and heavy make-up who conformed to Sally's notion of what a desirable woman should look like.

“You're Mrs. Lavette,” she said, smiling mechanically. “Please sit down. Mr. Hargasey will see you in a few minutes. Would you like to look at the trades?”

Sally had not the vaguest notion of what the trades were, but she nodded, and the secretary handed her copies of
Daily Variety
and the
Hollywood
Reporter
. She leafed through them, feeling more and more a part of this wonderful world of filmmaking. Then the phone on the secretary's desk rang, and Sally was informed that she could now see Mr. Hargasey.

“Through there,” the secretary said, pointing to a connecting door.

Hargasey' s office was large, about twenty by twenty-five feet, all of it carpeted in oyster white. There was a couch, two overstuffed chairs in black leather, and an enormous desk. Hargasey rose from behind the desk as she entered, a totally bald, stocky man in his late fifties. “Sit down, sit down,” he said, smiling and pointing to the chair beside the desk.

He spoke with an elusive foreign accent, explained perhaps by a brass placard on his desk that read: “It's not enough to be Hungarian. You must also have talent.”

“So you're Danny's daughter-in-law,” he said. “By God, I am glad seeing anyone related to Danny Lavette. That is one hell of a man. How is he? Tell me.”

“He had a heart attack.”

“Oh—no.”

“But he's fine now, just fine. My husband—that's his son, my husband, he's a doctor—he tells me Dan made a fine recovery.” She was chattering nervously, foolishly.

“And that beautiful Chinese wife of his, she is still just as beautiful?”

“May Ling? No. Poor May Ling was killed at Pearl Harbor, almost eight years ago. My baby is named after her.”

“Ah! Such a damn shame! Such waste! You tell Danny my heart goes out to him, yes?”

Sally nodded. She waited. Hargasey was studying her with interest. The silence dragged on. Finally Sally said, “Can we talk about my screenplay?”

“Your screenplay?”

“The one I sent you.”

“Oh, yes. Positively. It stinks.”