Don turned the speakers off. For ten minutes he watched the lipsticked little actor gaze soulfully at Vilma Banky, topple villainous "waterfront scum," run about on boats: he hoped that if Eva Galli would appear in this butchered version, he would recognize her. Vilma Banky's bar housed a number of women who draped themselves over the customers and languorously sipped tall drinks. Some of these prostitutes were plain, some of them were stunning: any of them, he supposed, could have been Eva Galli.
But then a girl appeared framed in the doorway of the bar, studio fog boiling behind her, and pouted at the camera. Don looked at her sensual, large-eyed face, and felt his heart freeze. He hurriedly switched on the soundtrack.
"… the notorious Singapore Sal," crooned the announcer. "Will she get to our hero?" Of course she was not the notorious Singapore Sal, that was an invention of whoever had written the inane commentary; but he knew she was Eva Galli. She sauntered through the bar and approached Barthelmess; she stroked his cheek. When he brushed her hand away, she sat down on his lap and kicked one leg in the air. The actor dumped her on the floor. "So much for Singapore Sal," gloated the announcer.
Don yanked out the speaker leads, stopped the film and backed it up to Eva Galli's entrance, and watched the sequence again.
He had expected her to be beautiful, and she was not. Beneath the makeup, she was just a girl of ordinary good looks; she looked nothing like Alma Mobley. She had enjoyed the business of acting, he saw, playing the part of an ambitious girl playing a part had amused her-how she would have enjoyed stardom! As Ann-Veronica Moore, she had played at it again; even Alma Mobley had seemed fitted for the movies. She could have molded that passive beautiful face over a thousand characters. But in 1925, she had miscalculated, made a mistake: cameras exposed too much, and what you saw when you looked at Eva Galli on screen was a young woman who was not likable. Even Alma had not been likable; even Anna Mostyn, when truly seen-as at the Barnes's party-seemed coldly perverse, driven by willpower. They could for a time evoke human love, but nothing in them could return it. What you finally saw was their hollowness. They could disguise it for a time, but never finally, and that was their greatest mistake; a mistake in being. Don thought he could recognize it anywhere now, in any nightwatcher pretending to be man or woman.
22
At the beginning of April Peter Barnes came to visit him. The boy, who had seemed to be recovering from their terrible winter, slumped into a chair and ran his hands over his face. "I'm sorry to interrupt you. If you're busy I'll go away again."
"You can always come to see me," Don said. "You never have to think twice about it. I mean that, Peter. I'll never be anything but happy to see you. That's a guarantee."
"I was hoping you'd say something like that. Ricky's leaving in a week or two, isn't he?"
"Yes. I'm driving them to the airport next Friday. They're both very excited about their trip. But if you want to see Ricky now, all I have to do is call him up. He'll come."
"No, please don't," the boy said. "It's bad enough I'm bothering you…"
"For God's sake, Peter," Don said. "What's the matter?"
"Well, it's just that I've been having an awful time lately. That's why I wanted to see you."
"I'm glad you did. What's wrong?"
"I keep seeing my mother," Peter said. "I mean, I dream about her all the time. It's like I'm back in Lewis's house, and I'm seeing that Gregory Bate grab her again-and I keep dreaming about the way he looked on the floor of the Rialto. All those smashed-up pieces of him moving around. Refusing to die." He was close to tears.
"Have you talked to your father about it?"
Peter nodded. "I tried. I wanted to tell him everything, but he won't listen. Not really. He looks at me like I'm five years old and telling him some made-up nonsense. So I stopped before I really started."
"You can't blame him, Peter. Nobody who hadn't been with us could believe it. If he can listen to part of it and not tell you you're crazy, maybe that's enough. Part of him was listening. Maybe part of him believes it. You know, I think there's another problem too. I think you're afraid that if you give up the horror and fear, that you'll also be giving up your mother. Your mother loved you. And now she's dead, and she died in a terrible way, but she put her love into you for seventeen or eighteen years, and there's a lot of it left. The only thing you can do is carry on with it."
Peter nodded.
Don said, "I once knew a girl who spent all day in a library and said she had a friend who protected her from vileness. I don't know how her life turned out, but I do know that nobody can protect anybody else from vileness. Or from pain. All you can do is not let it break you in half and keep on going until you get to the other side."
"I know that's true," Peter said, "but it just seems so hard to do."
"You're doing it right now. Coming here and talking to me is part of getting to the other side. Going to Cornell will be another big part of it. You'll have so much work to do that you won't be able to brood about Milburn."
"Can I see you again? After I'm in college?"
"You can come to see me anytime at all. And if I'm not in Milburn, I'll write to let you know where I am."
"Good," Peter said.
23
Ricky sent him postcards from France; Peter continued to visit, and gradually Don saw that the boy was beginning to let the Bate brothers and Anna Mostyn fade into the background of his experience. In warm weather, with a new girlfriend who was also going to Cornell, Peter was beginning to relax.
But it was a false peace, and Don still waited. He never let Peter see his own tension, but it grew every week.
He had watched new arrivals to Milburn, had managed to look at all the tourists who checked into the Archer Hotel, but none of them had given him the thrill of fear Eva Galli had projected across fifty years. Several nights after drinking too much, Don dialed Florence de Peyser's telephone number and said, "This is Don Wanderley. Anna Mostyn is dead." The first time, the person at the other end simply replaced the phone in its cradle; the second time, a female voice said, "Isn't this Mr. Williams at the bank? I think your loan is about to be recalled, Mr. Williams." The third time, an operator's voice told him that the telephone had been switched to an unlisted number.
The other half of his anxiety was that he was running out of money. His bank account had no more than two or three hundred dollars in it-now that he was drinking again, enough for only a couple of months. After that he would have to find a job in Milburn, and any sort of job would keep him from patrolling the streets and shops, searching for the being whose arrival Florence de Peyser had promised.
He spent two or three hours every day, now that the weather was warm, sitting on a bench near the playground in Milburn's only park. You have to remember their time scale, he told himself: you have to remember that Eva Galli gave herself fifty years to catch up with the Chowder Society. A child growing up unobtrusively in Milburn could give Peter Barnes and himself fifteen or twenty years of apparent safety before beginning to play with them. And then it would be someone everybody knew; it would have a place in Milburn; it would not be as visible as a stranger. This time, the nightwatcher would be more careful. The only limit on its time would be that it would want to act before Ricky died of natural causes-so perhaps it had to be ready in ten years.