But he would—for the plane was unmistakably going down, down, down, like Alice in the rabbit hole. Cupping my hand against the window I saw the blur of the city far away on the left. The green sign “Fasten your belts—No smoking” had been on since we first rode into the storm.
“Did you hear what she said?” said Mr. Schwartze from one of his fiery silences across the aisle.
“Hear what?” asked Wylie.
“Hear what he’s calling himself,” said Schwartze. “Mr. Smith.”
“Why not?” asked Wylie.
“Oh nothing,” said Schwartze quickly. “I just thought it was funny. Smith.” I never heard a laugh with less mirth in it: “Smith!”
I suppose there has been nothing like the airports since the days of the stage-stops—nothing quite as lonely, as somber-silent. The old red-brick depots were built right into the towns they marked—people didn’t get off at those isolated stations unless they lived there. But airports lead you way back in history like oases, like the stops on the great trade routes. The sight of air travellers strolling in ones and twos into midnight airports will draw a small crowd any night up to two. The young people look at the planes, the older ones look at the passengers with a watchful incredulity. In the big transcontinental planes we were the coastal rich, who casually alighted from our cloud in mid-America. High adventure might be among us, disguised as a movie star. But mostly it wasn’t. And I always wished fervently that we looked more interesting than we did—just as I often have at premieres, when the fans look at you with scornful reproach because you’re not a star.
On the ground Wylie and I were suddenly friends, because he held out his arm to steady me when I got out of the plane. From then on, he made a dead set for me—and I didn’t mind. From the moment we walked into the airport it had become plain that if we were stranded here we were stranded here together. (It wasn’t like the time I lost my boy—the time my boy played the piano with that girl Reina in a little New England farm house near Bennington, and I realized at last I wasn’t wanted. Guy Lombarde was on the air playing “Top Hat” and “Cheek to Cheek” and she taught him the melodies. The keys falling like leaves and her hand splayed over his as she showed him a black chord. I was a freshman then.)
When we went into the airport Mr. Schwartze was along with us too but he seemed in a sort of dream. All the time we were trying to get accurate information at the desk he kept staring at the door that led out to the landing field, as if he were afraid the plane would leave without him. Then I excused myself for a few minutes and something happened that I didn’t see but when I came back he and White were standing close together. White talking and Schwartze looking twice as much as if a great truck had just backed up over him. He didn’t stare at the door to the landing field anymore. I heard the end of Wylie White’s remark….
“—I told you to shut up. It serves you right.”
“I only said—”
He broke off as I came up and asked if there was any news. It was then half past two in the morning.
“A little,” said Wylie White. “They don’t think we’ll be able to start for three hours anyhow, so some of the softies are going to a hotel. But I’d like to take you out to The Hermitage, Home of Andrew Jackson.”
“How could we see it in the dark?” demanded Schwartze.
“Hell, it’ll be sunrise in two hours.”
“You two go,” said Schwartze.
“All right—you take the bus to the hotel. It’s still waiting—he’s in there.” Wylie’s voice had a taunt in it. “Maybe it’d be a good thing.”
“No, I’ll go along with you,” said Schwartze hastily.
We took a taxi in the sudden country dark outside, and he seemed to cheer up. He patted my kneecap encouragingly.
“I should go along,” he said. “I should be chaperone. Once upon a time when I was in the big money, I had a daughter—a beautiful daughter.”
He spoke as if she had been sold to creditors as a tangible asset.
“You’ll have another,” Wylie assured him. “You’ll get it all back. Another turn of the wheel and you’ll be where Cecelia’s papa is, won’t he, Cecelia?”
“Where is this Hermitage?” asked Schwartze presently. “Far away at the end of nowhere? Will we miss the plane?”
“Skip it,” said Wylie. “We ought to’ve brought the stewardess along for you. Didn’t you admire the stewardess? I thought she was pretty cute.”
We drove for a long time over a bright level countryside, just a road and a tree and a shack and a tree, and then suddenly along a winding twist of woodland. I could feel even in the darkness that the trees of the woodland were green—that it was all different from the dusty olive-tint of California. Somewhere we passed a Negro driving three cows ahead of him, and they mooed as he scatted them to the side of the road. They were real cows, with warm fresh, silky flanks and the Negro grew gradually real out of the darkness with his big brown eyes staring at us close to the car, as Wylie gave him a quarter. He said “Thank you—thank you” and stood there and the cows mooed again into the night as we drove off.
I thought of the first sheep I ever remember seeing—hundreds of them, and how our car drove suddenly into them on the back lot of the old Laemmie studio. They were unhappy about being in pictures but the men in the car with us kept saying:
“Swell?”
“Is that what you wanted, Dick?”
“Isn’t that swell?” And the man named Dick kept standing up in the car as if he were Cortez or Balboa, looking over that grey fleecy undulation. If I ever knew what picture they were in I have long forgotten.
We had driven an hour. We crossed a brook over an old rattly iron bridge laid with planks. Now there were roosters crowing and blue-green shadows stirring every time we passed a farm house.
“I told you it’d be morning soon,” said Wylie. “I was born near here—the son of impoverished southern paupers. The family mansion is now used as an outhouse. We had four servants—my father, my mother and my two sisters. I refused to join the guild, and so I went to Memphis, to start my career, which has now reached a dead end.” He put his arm around me. “Cecelia, will you marry me, so I can share the Brady fortune?”
He was disarming enough so I let my head lie on his shoulder.
“What do you do, Celia? Go to school?”
“I go to Bennington. I’m a junior.”
“Oh, I beg your pardon. I should have known but I never had the advantage of college training. But a junior—why I read in ’Esquire’ that juniors have nothing to learn, Cecelia.”
“Why do people think that college girls—”
“Don’t apologize—knowledge is power.”
“You’d know from the way you talk that we were on our way to Hollywood,” I said. “It’s always years and years behind the time.”
He pretended to be shocked.
“You mean girls in the East have no private lives?”
“That’s the point. They have got private lives. You’re bothering me, let go.”
“I can’t. It might wake Schwartze, and I think this is the first sleep he’s had for weeks. Listen, Cecelia, I once had an affair with the wife of a producer. A very short affair. When it was over she said to me in no uncertain terms, she said: ’Don’t you ever tell about this or I’ll have you thrown out of Hollywood. My husband’s a much more important man than you.’”
I liked him again now, and presently the taxi turned down a long lane fragrant with honeysuckle and narcissus and stopped beside the great grey hulk of the Andrew Jackson house. The driver turned around to tell us something about it but Wylie shushed him, pointing at Schwartze, and we tiptoed out of the car.
“You can’t get into the Mansion now,” the taxi man told us politely.
Wylie and I went and sat against the wide pillars of the steps.
“What about Mr. Schwartze?” I asked. “Who is he?”
“To hell with Schwartze. He was the head of some combine once—First National? Paramount? United Artists? Now he’s down and out. But he’ll be back. You can’t flunk out of pictures unless you’re a dope or a drunk.”
“You don’t like Hollywood,” I suggested.
“Yes I do. Sure I do. Say! This isn’t anything to talk about on the steps of Andrew Jackson’s house—at dawn.”
“I like Hollywood,” I persisted.
“It’s all right. It’s a mining town in lotus land. Who said that? I did. It’s a good place for toughies but I went there from Savannah, Georgia. I went to a garden party the first day. My host shook hands and left me. It was all there—that swimming pool, green moss at two dollars an inch, beautiful felines having drinks and fun —
— And nobody spoke to me. Not a soul. I spoke to half a dozen people but they didn’t answer. That continued for an hour, two hours—then I got up from where I was sitting and ran out at a dog trot like a crazy man. I didn’t feel I had any rightful identity until I got back to the hotel and the clerk handed me a letter addressed to me in my
