I Could Go on Singing (12 page)

At twenty after eleven, Jason walked over and stood behind her and said, “Five minute warning.”

She looked at her watch. “Damn! Another fifteen minutes would have done it.”

He put his hands on her shoulders and bent and kissed the nape of her neck. She froze. “Don’t,” she whispered.

He released her and moved away. She sat with her head lowered. “I swear I had no idea of doing that until I did it.”

“Don’t do things like that.”

“I’m sorry.”

She got up and went to a mirror and patted her hair. She fixed her mouth. She looked at him in the mirror and looked away. “Let’s go,” she said.

Ida was in the sitting room of the suite, mending a small tear in the silk lining of a sable cape. She had arranged bottles, glasses and ice on a small table. She moved into her bedroom and closed the door. In a few moments Jenny, George and Sam Dean arrived together. They had met in the lobby.

Jenny came sweeping in, full of a vitality that seemed to fill the room. “Lois, darling, a steep one with one rock. My God! What is my favorite color? Can you imagine that, dears? Truly a star question. A vast audience hanging breathlessly on my shy answer.”

“Absolutely dead-pan she answered, ‘plaid,’ ” George said.

“Thus sewing up the Scots,” Sam Dean said.

“Sam, there’s sherry for you, and probably a better brand than you deserve,” Jenny said. “Are you going to ask me my favorite color? Thank you, Lois dear.”

Sam Dean poured his own sherry and took the glass over to the couch. “Your favorite vice, maybe. What is it lately?”

She looked at him over the rim of her glass as she sipped her drink. She tossed her wrap on a chair. “What it always has been, darling. Recklessness. Bad judgment. Selfishness. A combination of the three. Call it Jennyism. Bowmanism. You can say I abuse the privilege of having talent. But you’d be repeating yourself, wouldn’t you?”

Sam smiled. “Excellent sherry. I don’t mind repeating myself. Jenny, dear, why don’t you get yourself into some real gummy mess so I can have a new crusade?”

“As a special favor to you, Sam?”

“To my vast readership. Three million plus.”

“What does that come to, dear. A little less than two percent of the country?”

He colored slightly. “A poor thing, but mine own.”

She went over to him and sat beside him and patted his arm. “Why do we always take the knives out, Sam? I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll give you the absolute truth. Look at George! He’s the color of wet cardboard.”

“Don’t anybody get between me and the window,” George said.

“It won’t make very good copy for you, Sam, because it will sound like some sort of devious plug. I’m seriously thinking of canceling out the rest of this jazzy tour. And if you put that in, it will sound like a plug for the tour. And I definitely feel squeamish about the cruddy moving picture Wegler wants me to do. Put that in and you’ll be plugging the picture. But honest and truly, Sam dear, I’m bored. I’ve had too much of too much for too long, and I’m going stale and I want to lease an island someplace and hide for a whole beautiful year. I’m so serious about it, it’s making George horribly nervous.”

Sam Dean looked intently at her. “Do you mean that?”

“If you really want a nasty, you can say very accurately that my voice is going.”

“Hey now!” George said.

“Shut up, Georgie. You know it. Herm knows it. I’m doing a lot of faking lately. And I’ve had to drop some tried and trues because the range just isn’t there.”

“That just isn’t true, damn it!” George said.

“If I even get through this tour, I’ll be astonished.”

Sam Dean got up slowly and went over and poured more sherry. He turned and looked at Jenny. “Otherwise?”

“You mean aside from that? Just minor disasters, Sam. Like tax audits, nuisance suits, chronic indigestion, plane sickness, too many contracts, too big a payroll, lousy arrangements, no new songs.”

Sam walked slowly back to the couch and sat beside her. He patted her arm. “And here you had me hoping you were in a real jam. Jenny darling, you’ve been making the same threats for years.”

“But this time I
mean
them!”

“No you don’t,” George said soothingly.

“Don’t push,” she said. “You might get a hell of a shock, Georgic.” She stood up. “Sam, I don’t want you to feel abused, but you really didn’t give us any warning, you know. I could talk to you again tonight, after midnight, if you want.”

Sam finished his sherry and put the empty glass on the coffee table. His eyes were sleepy and hooded behind the thick lenses. His gold frames, tie tack, cuff links and watch band twinkled in the shadows of the sitting room.

“Thank you, darling,” he said, “but it would just be for old times sake, and the old times I’ve given you have been bad times. I’m afraid you’ll make lousy copy right now. I’ll be around when you get in a real jam.”

“Thanks a lot.”

He got up and said formal good-bys to Lois, George and Jason. At the door he turned suddenly and said, “By the way, Jenny dear, why did you always avoid coming to London until now?”

She smiled and tapped her throat. “A batch of specialists said to keep this throat out of this climate.”

“But you came here anyway?”

“I got a new batch of specialists. They said Callas thrives here.”

George went out with him and closed the door. Jenny looked wide-eyed at Lois and Jason and held up both hands, her fingers crossed. Lois and Jason duplicated the gesture. They were all like that when George came back in. George slammed the door, walked over to her and hugged her and kissed her. He held her at arm’s length and said wonderingly, “What’s an actress like you doing wasting her time singing?”

“He bought it?”

“He said you should be on tranquilizers. I told him you ate them like peanuts. He said he wouldn’t trade jobs with me for a thousand dollars a minute. He went away shaking his evil little head and muttering to himself.”

“See?” Jenny said. “Trust me, George. You should always trust me. I’m really very very clever.”

“You are really very very stupid, Miss Bowman. But sometimes lucky. Going to change for lunch?”

Ida came out and looked at them. She smiled. “You either fooled him or killed him. Should I look under the sofa?”

Lois put her hand over her eyes. “Not yet, Ida. Please. It’s still twitching a little.”

“No jury will ever convict,” Ida said firmly. “I’m buying myself a drink. Any objections anybody?”

“A fast one for everybody,” Jenny said. “We’ll drink to crime, sin, Rugger scrums,
Pinafore
and my favorite color.”

At Amen Court off Cheapside, Lois Marney said, “This stone?”

“Yes.”

She touched it. She closed her eyes for a moment. “I made a wish. Is that against the rules?”

“No. That’s what I did. Sort of a simple-minded ordinary wish. I wished I wouldn’t get killed.”

She turned and looked speculatively at him. “That isn’t too entirely different from what I wished. But I can’t tell you, of course.”

They walked slowly along the narrow walk and out of the court. A shabby woman stared at them with a look of bleak suspicion.

“All stones are very old, of course,” she said.

“But not many walls are old.”

“How did you look then?”

“Thinner A little adenoidal. Sort of hazy, I guess. Unfocused. There was a captain who kept complaining to the sergeant about the way I looked in a uniform. They all gave up, finally. They’d walk away from me, kicking at the ground and muttering.”

“Were you a good soldier?”

“Except for the way I looked.”

“Did you have a girl?”

“As a matter of fact, I had one right here in London. Jocelyn. And after I’d rejoined the company, she was killed here. Cued up for a movie, her father told me later, and a buzz bomb landed in the street right in front of the theater.”

“How horrible!”

“By then it seemed … sort of remote. I told you, I was as yet unfocused. Not that I’m aimed any too damned well now.”

“Did you love her?”

“I thought so.”

“Do you think so now?”

“I needed her then. And she needed me. We felt very small in the middle of a war, and we tried to act as if we were born to it. But nobody is. That’s sort of how I got to writing, I think. Trying to put down the essence of Jocelyn because there wasn’t anything left of her. Nothing at all except what was in my mind, and that didn’t seem to be enough.”

“Can I read what you wrote?”

“I could never make it work.”

“Will you try again some day?”

“I never thought I would. But now I think I might.”

“I want to read it when you do.”

“You will.”

“We’ll have to hurry to get you back at four, Jason.”

In the taxi on the way back to the Mayfair section she seemed pensive and remote. “What are you thinking about?” he asked.

“Something you said. Twisting it around, sort of. Thinking of people feeling small in the midst of life, and trying to act as if they were born to it. But nobody is. There could be a book about that.”

“Most of them are about that, Lois.”

She turned and smiled at him, her mouth wry. “I get the feeling everybody is full of this terrible competence, and I’m the only one not sure of anything. But it’s the same way with everybody. Even that Sam Dean. Even Jenny. But we do hearten each other, don’t we? Like after Sam Dean left, everybody trying to make everybody feel things were going to be all right. And yet everything is so … precarious. There must be records someplace somebody could dig up. Or that doctor or Jenny could be trapped into saying the wrong thing. And then they would all come swooping down on the doctor and the boy and Jenny with their strobe lights and tape recorders, all asking questions at once, sneering and excited, and make the whole thing sickening and dirty. Then all the self-appointed moralists would write letters and make speeches about Jenny Bowman. That’s the thing that would shame her and break her, because she never could explain it to them. Maybe because she can never explain it to herself, really.”

He studied her. “Then what Jenny did was wrong?”

Lois scowled at him. “Of course it was wrong! You know it. She knows it. If I had a child, I would never let it go. That doesn’t make me a better person. It makes me more primitive, I guess. You talk about all the pressure they put on her. The career and all. And what was best for the baby. That’s all rationalization. The guilt is still in her, Jason. And that’s what is driving her now. Oh, she was very good with Sam Dean, but maybe without even realizing it, she
wants
it all to come out. Maybe she’s waited long enough for punishment.”

“But she would be punishing the boy too.”

“Has she thought it out that far?”

“She doesn’t think things out. She rides on instinct, Lois.”

“And dreams?”

“Yes. But what particular dream right now?”

There was a slightly contemptuous twist to Lois’s mouth. “A gooey one, Jason. Famous singer abandons career to marry an old love and reclaim her son, becomes wife of noted surgeon, builds happy nest, becomes ornament in London society. What a mess of delusion!”

“Couldn’t it work?”

She looked at him in astonishment. “Really, Jason! Because she might want to act out a part doesn’t mean he would go along with it. And she forfeited his respect a long long time ago. What would the scandal do to his career? How long could she endure the housewife role? Six months? A year, even? And, for goodness sake, what kind of a relationship could she have with a sensitive boy once he found out she had given him away as soon as he was born? He’s young enough, probably, to be hooked on the glamor, of it. It is one of the daydreams of childhood to suddenly learn you’re really the child of some famous person. But he would know she had rejected him, and he never would really be able to understand, no matter how carefully they explained it to him. He could understand superficially, but not in the heart, where it counts.”

For a moment all the warmth of her, the capacity for indignation, compassion, understanding, was exposed, her face very alive. And then she settled back in the seat and her face became still and she retreated back into herself, as though she had spread some bright fabric before him and, when he had begun to notice it she had become aware of his attention, and had swiftly folded it, tucked it into the back of a drawer and closed it firmly and solidly.

“We should make it on time,” she said in a small casual voice. She was back behind all her walls, crouched and safe.

George told him she was still in a good mood. Jason waited in the sitting room until quarter after four when Ida said it was all right to go in. Ida held the door for him and closed it behind him. The draperies were drawn. Jenny lay on the shadowy bed in a bulky white terry robe, face wiped clean of makeup, dark hair on stacked pillows. She held her hands out toward him and he went over and kissed lips that tasted soft and sweet and very young, and then sat on the edge of the bed, holding her hand.

“Recharging,” she said. “Building up the batteries.”

“How is it going?”

“Some of the newspaper ones are pretty fierce, Brownie. They ask questions you wouldn’t believe. They try to make you mad so you’ll say something they can use to make you look ridiculous. It’s a strain being on guard all the time without looking as if you’re on guard. Golly, it’s good to have you here!”

“That’s what I want to talk about.”

“Honestly, Brownie, I can’t really put my mind on that script. You know how I feel about things and you know what I do best. Why don’t you just fake it, darling? I’ll back you up on it. I love the script, really. If you see some places where you can make it fit me a little better, just change them and tell Wegler I insisted.”

“It can be the best thing you’ve ever done.”

She yawned, with a small cat-like sound. “That’s what they tell me about everything, dear. This time you might be right. But I don’t even want to think about it. Please.”

“Wegler is very excited about having you do it. He’s budgeting it big.”

“Sid is an animal. Like Sam Dean. There’s a pair! One big rocket. Shoot them to Mars, Pow!”