“Miss April Lalear of the cinema, if you please,” Voyd said. They paid no attention to him; they glared at one another across the table.
“Ah,” he said, quiet and rigid, his lips scarcely moving. “So I am to blame for this too, am I? I made my daughter a bitch, did I? Maybe you will tell me next that I made my son a f—”
“Stop!” she cried. She was panting now; they glared at one another across the suave table, across the five feet of irrevocable division.
“Now, now,” Voyd said. “Don’t interfere with the girl’s career. After all these years, when at last she seems to have found a part that she can—” He ceased; his father had turned and was looking at him. Voyd lay in his chair, looking at his father with that veiled insolence that was almost feminine.
Suddenly it became completely feminine; with a muffled halfscream he swung his legs out to spring up and flee but it was too late; Ira stood above him, gripping him not by the throat but by the face with one hand, so that Voyd’s mouth puckered and slobbered in his father’s hard, shaking hand. Then the mother sprang forward and tried to break Ira’s grip but he flung her away and then caught and held her, struggling too, with the other hand when she sprang in again.
“Go on,” he said. “Say it.” But Voyd could say nothing because of his father’s hand gripping his jaws open, or more than likely because of terror. His body was free of the chair now, writhing and thrashing while he made his slobbering, moaning sound of terror while his father held him with one hand and held his screaming mother with the other one.
Then Ira flung Voyd free, onto the terrace; Voyd rolled once and came onto his feet, crouching, retreating toward the French windows with one arm flung up before his face while he cursed his father. Then he was gone. Ira faced his wife, holding her quiet too at last, panting too, the skillful map of makeup standing into relief now like a paper mask trimmed smoothly and pasted onto her skull. He released her.
“You sot,” she said. “You drunken sot. And yet you wonder why your children—”
“Yes,” he said quietly. “All right. That’s not the question. That’s all done. The question is, what to do about it. My father would have known. He did it once.” He spoke in a dry light pleasant voice: so much so that she stood, panting still but quiet, watching him. “I remember. I was about ten. We had rats in the barn. We tried everything. Terriers. Poison. Then one day father said, ‘Come.’ We went to the barn and stopped all the cracks, the holes. Then we set fire to it.
What do you think of that?” Then she was gone too. He stood for a moment, blinking a little, his eyeballs beating faintly and steadily in his skull with the impact of the soft unchanging sunlight, the fierce innocent mass of the flowers.
“Philip!” he called. The Filipino appeared, brownfaced, impassive, with a pot of hot coffee, and set it beside the empty cup and the icebedded glass of orange juice. “Get me a drink,” Ira said. The Filipino glanced at him, then he became busy at the table, shifting the cup and setting the pot down and shifting the cup again while Ira watched him. “Did you hear me?” Ira said. The Filipino stood erect and looked at him.
“You told me not to give it to you until you had your orange juice and coffee.”
“Will you or won’t you get me a drink?” Ira shouted.
“Very good, sir,” the Filipino said. He went out. Ira looked after him; this had happened before: he knew well that the brandy would not appear until he had finished the orange juice and the coffee, though just where the Filipino lurked to watch him he never knew. He sat again and opened the crumpled telegram and read it, the glass of orange juice in the other hand. It was from his secretary: MADE SETUP BEFORE I BROKE STORY LAST NIGHT STOP THIRTY PERCENT FRONT PAGE STOP MADE APPOINTMENT FOR YOU COURTHOUSE THIS P.M. STOP WILL YOU COME TO OFFICE OR CALL ME.
He read the telegram again, the glass of orange juice still poised. Then he put both down and rose and went and lifted the paper from the terrace where Voyd had flung it, and read the half headline: LALEAR WOMAN DAUGHTER OF PROMINENT LOCAL FAMILY. Admits Real Name Is Samantha Ewing, Daughter of Ira Ewing, Local Realtor.
He read it quietly; he said quietly, aloud:
“It was that Jap that showed her the paper. It was that damned gardener.” He returned to the table. After a while the Filipino came, with the brandy-and-soda, and wearing now a jacket of bright imitation tweed, telling him that the car was ready.
II
His mother lived in Glendale; it was the house which he had taken when he married and later bought, in which his son and daughter had been born — a bungalow in a cul-de-sac of pepper trees and flowering shrubs and vines which the Japanese tended, backed into a barren foothill combed and curried into a cypress-and-marble cemetery dramatic as a stage set and topped by an electric sign in red bulbs which, in the San Fernando valley fog, glared in broad sourceless ruby as though just beyond the crest lay not heaven but hell.
The length of his sports model car in which the Filipino sat reading a paper dwarfed it. But she would have no other, just as she would have neither servant, car, nor telephone — a gaunt spare slightly stooped woman upon whom even California and ease had put no flesh, sitting in one of the chairs which she had insisted on bringing all the way from Nebraska.
At first she had been content to allow the Nebraska furniture to remain in storage, since it had not been needed (when Ira moved his wife and family out of the house and into the second one, the intermediate one, they had bought new furniture too, leaving the first house furnished complete for his mother) but one day, he could not recall just when, he discovered that she had taken the one chair out of storage and was using it in the house.
Later, after he began to sense that quality of unrest in her, he had suggested that she let him clear the house of its present furniture and take all of hers out of storage but she declined, apparently preferring or desiring to leave the Nebraska furniture where it was. Sitting so, a knitted shawl about her shoulders, she looked less like she lived in or belonged to the house, the room, than the son with his beach burn and his faintly theatrical gray temples and his bright expensive suavely antiphonal garments did.
She had changed hardly at all in the thirty-four years; she and the older Ira Ewing too, as the son remembered him, who, dead, had suffered as little of alteration as while he had been alive. As the sod Nebraska outpost had grown into a village and then into a town, his father’s aura alone had increased, growing into the proportions of a giant who at some irrevocable yet recent time had engaged barehanded in some titanic struggle with the pitiless earth and endured and in a sense conquered — it too, like the town, a shadow out of all proportion to the gaunt gnarled figure of the actual man.
And the actual woman too as the son remembered them back in that time. Two people who drank air and who required to eat and sleep as he did and who had brought him into the world, yet were strangers as though of another race, who stood side by side in an irrevocable loneliness as though strayed from another planet, not as husband and wife but as blood brother and sister, even twins, of the same travail because they had gained a strange peace through fortitude and the will and strength to endure.
“Tell me again what it is,” she said. “I’ll try to understand.”
“So it was Kazimura that showed you the damned paper,” he said. She didn’t answer this; she was not looking at him.
“You tell me she has been in the pictures before, for two years. That that was why she had to change her name, that they all have to change their names.”
“Yes. They call them extra parts. For about two years, God knows why.”
“And then you tell me that this — that all this was so she could get into the pictures—”
He started to speak, then he caught himself back out of some quick impatience, some impatience perhaps of grief or despair or at least rage, holding his voice, his tone, quiet: “I said that that was one possible reason. All I know is that the man has something to do with pictures, giving out the parts. And that the police caught him and Samantha and the other girl in an apartment with the doors all locked and that Samantha and the other woman were naked.
They say that he was naked too and he says he was not. He says in the trial
