“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 that he was framed — tricked; that they were trying to blackmail him into giving them parts in a picture; that they fooled him into coming there and arranged for the police to break in just after they had taken off their clothes; that one of them made a signal from the window.
Maybe so. Or maybe they were all just having a good time and were innocently caught.” Unmoving, rigid, his face broke, wrung with faint bitter smiling as though with indomitable and impassive suffering, or maybe just smiling, just rage. Still his mother did not look at him.
“But you told me she was already in the pictures. That that was why she had to change her—”
“I said, extra parts,” he said. He had to catch himself again, out of his jangled and outraged nerves, back from the fierce fury of the impatience. “Can’t you understand that you don’t get into the pictures just by changing your name? and that you don’t even stay there when you get in? that you can’t even stay there by being female? that they come here in droves on every train — girls younger and prettier than Samantha and who will do anything to get into the pictures?
So will she, apparently; but who know or are willing to learn to do more things than even she seems to have thought of? But let’s don’t talk about it. She has made her bed; all I can do is to help her up: I can’t wash the sheets. Nobody can. I must go, anyway; I’m late.” He rose, looking down at her. “They said you telephoned me this morning. Is this what it was?”
“No,” she said. Now she looked up at him; now her gnarled hands began to pick faintly at one another. “You offered me a servant once.”
“Yes. I thought fifteen years ago that you ought to have one. Have you changed your mind? Do you want me to—”
Now she stopped looking at him again, though her hands did not cease. “That was fifteen years ago. It would have cost at least five hundred dollars a year. That would be—”
He laughed, short and harsh. “I’d like to see the Los Angeles servant you could get for five hundred dollars a year. But what—” He stopped laughing, looking down at her.
“That would be at least five thousand dollars,” she said.
He looked down at her. After a while he said, “Are you asking me again for money?” She didn’t answer nor move, her hands picking slowly and quietly at one another. “Ah,” he said. “You want to go away. You want to run from it.
So do I!” he cried, before he could catch himself this time; “so do I! But you did not choose me when you elected a child; neither did I choose my two. But I shall have to bear them and you will have to bear all of us. There is no help for it.” He caught himself now, panting, quieting himself by will as when he would rise from bed, though his voice was still harsh: “Where would you go? Where would you hide from it?”
“Home,” she said.
“Home?” he repeated; he repeated in a kind of amazement: “home?” before he understood. “You would go back there? with those winters, that snow and all? Why, you wouldn’t live to see the first Christmas: don’t you know that?” She didn’t move nor look up at him. “Nonsense,” he said. “This will blow over.
In a month there will be two others and nobody except us will even remember it. And you don’t need money. You have been asking me for money for years, but you don’t need it. I had to worry about money so much at one time myself that I
