The Englishman's Boy (42 page)

When I get out of bed at four o’clock the morning of my debut, I don’t feel at all well. In costuming and make-up the feeling grows worse. The girl rubbing grime into my face remarks how hot I am. I am, and then again I’m not. One second my scanty beggar’s rags are as stifling as a winter overcoat and the next I am shivering and my teeth are chattering. My legs ache. The scene is to be filmed at dawn, on a set with a cobbled street and a Parisian tavern. After standing for an hour waiting for props to deliver the aristocrat’s coach my bones feel tender and bruised. A slow stain of misery seeps through me; something is putting brutal thumbs to the back of my eyeballs.

I get the call, the coach has arrived. I wade through harsh, raucous light which skids off the papier-mâché tiles of the tavern roof and into my aching eyes. The director booms at me through a megaphone, the coach lurches around the corner and brakes dramatically at the tavern door. When I hold out my hand and cry for alms, I can feel fingernails scraping my throat.

At a touch of the cane I topple. Acting is not required. However, I collapse on my back, not my face. Somebody drags me to my feet as the director barks for another take. The coach circles the set and
rattles at me again, four horses, four madly spinning wheels. The tip of the cane thuds into my chest; I reel down into cold, glutinous muck. But I’ve forgotten my close-up. The director rages through his megaphone. Where is bewilderment? Where is wounded pride?
Where is the righteous rage of the dispossessed?

We do it again. We do it four more times. And each time is a greater failure than the last.

Someone takes me back to costuming and strips the soaked and filthy rags from my body. Somebody else climbs into them and rushes out the door and into my part while I sit on a chair naked, shivering. People bustle in and out of the room, the noise makes my head hurt. At last, I order my legs to stand and begin to put on my street clothes. With one hand I steady myself against the wall while the other painfully fumbles with buttons. I don’t try to tie my shoes, just shuffle out, laces dragging.

I board a streetcar. At first I hear people whispering all around me, even though the car is nearly empty, then I realize it is the hissing of the tramlines overhead. I’ve never been so tired in my life. I keep dozing off and waking, disoriented, whenever the streetcar bangs to a stop. The people boarding move in slow motion, sway sickeningly up the aisle. In my desperation to get home I have to stop myself from shouting, “Get a move on!” Watching them lurch unsteadily up the aisle, the hot California sunshine pressing against the glass of the windows, I am on the verge of puking at my feet.

So I close my eyes, struggling to hold the nausea at bay, and miss my stop. Walking the two blocks back to my apartment, everything seems bursting bright: the grass of the lawns a vitriolic, throbbing green, the violent blue of the sky shifting and tilting, making the earth do the same beneath my feet. I stop and vomit beside a fire hydrant. “Drunk,” a passing woman says disgustedly.

The longest walk of my life and the stairs in my building the longest climb. I have to rest on each landing, clinging to the banister. My feet are leaden and awkward; they fumble and paw the stair-treads. The lock refuses my key; I have to brace my right hand with my left to insert it. The light swims giddily in my head, I have to draw
the curtains in my apartment. But the darkness whirlpools, a vortex sprinkled with sparks makes a whooshing sound like a firehose. I sit on the sofa, clammy sweat soaking my shirt. Now and then I open my eyes and hold up my hands, not sure if they really belong to me, watch the madman tremble, the dim light between splayed fingers shaking in sympathetic agitation.

I sit like this for hours, my head flung back against the top of the sofa. Every time I try to move, I smell and taste my own vomit, the ceiling and floor slant or rear dizzily.

It isn’t until I find my way to the kitchen that I recognize my thirst. Lowering my head to the gushing tap I gulp an icy flood until my insides turn cold, until the sweat on my skin shrinks back into my pores. Propped against the sink, water-logged and dazed, I stare at the clock on the wall. It says five o’clock – that isn’t possible.

I tear off my clothes and burrow into my bed, weighted with water, weighted with an overwhelming need for sleep. Sunlight shimmers in a slit of the curtains like a candle flame. The flame slowly wanes and I sleep, burning.

I wake with a start. The sunlight no longer stands in the slit of the curtain, the candle has been snuffed. But light is coming from somewhere else; lifting my head I locate a crack of it under the bedroom door, drop back on the pillow. It feels late, the hushed, lonely silence of three o’clock in the morning. Can I have slept ten hours? I feel better, but not well. There’s a nasty, scummy taste in my mouth, like I’ve licked an ashtray clean. The fever is still there, but nearly burned out, restless and fitful, a dying fire. When I move my legs over the sheets, searching for a patch of coolness, they feel strange, weak, the muscles as reliable as ropes of water.

No, I’m not well. Beyond the door I can hear the whispering of the streetcar again. A tramline running in my apartment? Lines overhead, suspended in darkness, rustling with a low insistent rumour. Whisper, whisper, whisper. Monotonous. Was that a word? I thought I heard a word. Now the trolley stops. To take someone on. Who?

Who? Somebody is out there.

“Rachel?”

A mocking voice, a man’s voice. “Rachel?”

It’s not sickness now, just my heart drumming. I pull myself up in bed. Night and a stranger in your house.

“Who is it?”

“Rachel?” the voice calls again.

“Be quiet,” someone says.

Emphatic footsteps. I’m too weak to get out of bed. The door opens and I see two silhouettes cut out of black tin. One of them moves along the wall; I can hear him sweeping the wallpaper with his hand, a faint sandpapery sound. He finds the light switch, my hand flies up to my eyes, but even in that instant of blindness I know who the intruders are.

“Hello, Harry,” says Chance.

The two are dressed identically in linen motoring coats which hang to mid-calf like the dusters cowboys wear. Like cowboys, both are burned brown as berries by sun and wind, a fine layer of dust powdering their features. Chance is thinner, his bones rise under the skin, stark in his face. Fitz is leaner too, stands with his arms folded across the front of his stained coat, reclining against the door frame.

“How did you get in?” My mouth is parched by fever; I have trouble forming the words.

“We knocked and got no answer,” says Chance. “You ought to lock your door when you go to bed, Harry.” He grins. “Not that that would have mattered. Fitz has a way with locks.”

“What time is it?”

Chance glances at his watch. “Four o’clock.”

Fitz laughs harshly.

“What the hell were you doing out there – in my apartment?” Suddenly I’m angry and suspicious.

Chance looks up at the ceiling, smiles to himself.

“Looking for papers,” announces Fitz. “Papers?

What papers?”

“Now, Harry, don’t bristle,” Chance chides me. “It occurred to us you might have neglected to give us everything relating to the picture.
Research notes, drafts of the script, material we wouldn’t want to see circulating, people putting their noses into. We wanted to make sure all the loose ends were tied up. Seeing to legalities, as it were.”

“And what did you two detectives find? Nothing. Because I gave you everything, just like I said I did. And speaking of legalities, you happen to be housebreakers.”

“Why don’t you shut the fuck up,” says Fitz.

“Yes, please shut up, Harry, and don’t be difficult. I assure you that everything we disturbed is back in its place. Any letters of a clearly personal nature were not read. Besides, we had another reason for our visit. We bring news which is naturally of great interest to you.”

“What news?”

“We’ve finished shooting the picture. Four months of hard work. Harry, you can’t imagine the difficulties we had to overcome. And now Fitz and I have been driving day and night to rush film back for cutting. An arduous, exhausting journey. Some of those roads in Montana, Wyoming, and Utah are disgraceful, little better than cow trails. You’ll understand if I sit?” He doesn’t wait for permission but picks up a chair and places it at the side of my bed, sinks on it with a sigh. “There,” he says, “much better.”

The thought of Chance settling in panics me. “If you don’t mind -I’ve been dreadfully sick all day – dead on my feet –”

“Do you hear that, Denis? Harry’s been sick all day, dead on his feet. Now that he mentions it, I have to say he doesn’t look himself. Wouldn’t you agree?”

“Looks like shit, you ask me.”

“I feel like shit. And you’re not making me feel any better.”

“I think you’ll be very pleased with our picture.” Chance eases himself back in the chair, crosses his legs under the spreading skirts of his motoring coat. “In particular, the performance of the young man who portrays Shorty McAdoo. He conveys magnificently Mr. McAdoo’s visionary ruthlessness.”

“Then he’s conveying what isn’t there. And so are you. Shorty McAdoo is just an unhappy, guilty old man.”

“Yes, but he was young once, wasn’t he? Come, come, Harry, no sour grapes. And no false morality either, please. False morality is what I found so disappointing in your letter of resignation. It wasn’t that I needed you – I never
needed
you – but to find that the man to whom I had opened my heart and revealed what was at stake could attempt to wash his hands of his actions, that was most disappointing.”

“I explained myself in the letter. I couldn’t write the scenario because I was too inexperienced, too untalented –”

Chance reaches across the bed to lay an intimidating finger to my lips, stopping me. “There, there, Harry,” he says coldly. “I’m not a fool. I know the sort of things that go through a young man’s mind. You want to believe you obeyed your conscience. I find that sheer hypocrisy. Because all along you had no qualms about lying to McAdoo, misleading him. Why? I’ll tell you why, Harry. Because you have a sick mother in an expensive asylum and I was paying you a lot of money to mislead him. But more important, I think, is that you are an intelligent young man who pulled himself up by his bootstraps, but only far enough to realize that to get any higher you would need help. I was the man who could give it. Isn’t that so?”

I refuse to answer.

“I suppose you justified yourself by the argument of necessity. You had to do it. And I sympathize, Harry.” He touches my arm in his best bedside manner. “Because I happen to believe that true morality consists in recognizing necessity and then summoning up the courage to act in accordance with it. Which you did – after a fashion. But where we seem to part ways is that I believe this morality is only truly honourable when we follow it to its logical conclusion, and let it be our guide in the large questions as well as the petty ones.”

“Large questions? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Was it something I said about the Jews that got you up on your high horse, Harry? Fitz tells me you’re romantically involved with a Jewess – Rachel Gold I think he said her name is. Now I have no objections to such alliances when they are purely physical ones. Surrender your body to a woman if you must, but remember to keep your independence and integrity intact. I suspect this woman has been a bad
influence on you. The Jews are a sentimental and emotional people, Harry. We need only look at the pictures they make to confirm it. Which is why they are so dangerous. The morality of necessity – of survival – has no room for sentimentality. The Bolsheviks are not sentimental. The Fascists are not sentimental. The Americans who made this country were not sentimental. Far from it. Do you need proof? While I was researching our picture I made a point of reading the diaries and journals of early traders and settlers. One entry in particular made a great impression on me. It was simply two lines written on September 30, 1869. ‘Dug potatoes this morning. Shot an Indian.’ That was all. It was not accompanied by any tortured self-examination of conscience. Because the diarist knew his enemy would not have indulged in anything of the kind if he had killed
him.
The Indian, we might say, was a Bolshevik in a loincloth. Kill or be killed. They both understood compromise between them was impossible.”

“Perhaps it was not up to the Indian to compromise. Ever consider that?”

“What would you advocate, Harry? Offering your throat to the knife because you might be wrong? History deals us our hand and we must play it. We do not choose our enemies. Circumstances choose them for us. I see the enemies who threaten my country. But I refuse to offer my throat to them.” He tips forward in his chair, one hand resting on the bed. “I am not preaching anything new, Harry. I am only saying what Christ and Abraham Lincoln said before me, ‘A house divided against itself cannot stand.’ That is a fact.”

“What are we talking about? Immigrants?”

“In part.”

“Immigrants like Fitz. Paddies and bog-trotters.”

“Fuck you,” says Fitz from the doorway.

“Harry, you answer clear thinking with half-baked cleverness. Don’t you believe Fitz is capable of writing, ‘Dug potatoes this morning. Shot an Indian’?”

The shooting of the picture has obviously taken a toll on Chance; the once plump face has been brought to the brink of haggardness, and the eyes – the eyes are pleading with me.

“The house
must
stand. Lincoln fought a war to keep it standing, pitted blood brother against blood brother. And then Mr. Griffith made a picture, made
The Birth of a Nation
, and reconciled the blood of North and South in the chalice of art. Now it is necessary to go one step further. If Griffith wrote history in lightning, the time has now come to
rewrite
history in lightning. Yes, rewrite the history of the foreigner, erase completely those sentimental flowers of memory and light their minds with the glory of American lightning.”

“You mean your lightning.”