“All right, Vicki, here’s your ring, and I guess you win. What’s the deal? A new contract? Sell Dimmy the stock? Do Queen of the Big House? Whatever it is, it’s all right, if you’ll only promise not to go through with this ghastly thing.”
“Is O. K., Sylvia. We mek new contract, big money for you, vary big money. Sell Dimmy a stock, yes, he pay fine price. Pay one twanny five. Is nize, ha? Do Quin a Big ’Ouse. Ah, Sylvia, is fine picture!”
“Just one little thing.”
She went over, stood very close, looking him in the eye, and spit in his face. He took out a handkerchief, wiped his cheek, and stood looking at the floor a long time. Several times he started to speak, and couldn’t: of all the insults she had offered him in the last hour, this one alone seemed to have reached the quick of his nature. His mouth had just started to throb when there was a light tap, and the door to the casino opened.
Chapter Four
The girl who now entered the room in a stagey green dress was a by-product of Hollywood that gets little attention in print, but that occurs with unhappy frequency in that enormous catch-basin of talent: the feeble residuary legatee of such life as remains in a family after some prodigious child has been born. Rarely on public view, they are to be seen in homes, clubs, and dressing rooms, these pale, futile, carbon-copies of greatness, having no identity of their own, no existence except what they can suck from somebody else. Most of them, however, are happier than the rest of us manage to be, for it is the irony of life that those whom they worship commonly love them to distraction, would do anything for them, try to do everything for them. The real story of many a celebrated actor, if anybody were cruel enough to print it, would turn out to be, not the romance that his fans talk about, or the success he has made in his profession, but his unremitting effort to bring Christmas into the life of some dimwit brother who means more to him than anything else on earth.
How much this girl actually looked like Sylvia it would be impossible to say. Her figure, while not quite the sculptor’s dream that Sylvia’s was, was quite striking nevertheless, and similarly formed. Her hair, whatever its original color, had been bleached to the same shade of blondness as Sylvia’s, though it lacked Sylvia’s little glint of gold. Her eyes, a medium blue, weren’t so far from the gray of Sylvia’s. Her features, certainly, bore rather a marked resemblance. Yet, one suspected that actual similarity went no further than it commonly goes between two sisters. What made her look like Sylvia in so startling, in so shocking a way, was the slavish imitation of Sylvia that she indulged in, with every slightest grimace. From her walk, to her facial mannerisms, to the little wistful smile, to the sad look into distant spaces, she was Sylvia, at least in her own imagination, and could never, for one waking moment, be anybody else.
She gave a little exclamation of delight at seeing her sister. “Has Vicki told you, Sylvia?”
“...Yes, Hazel, he has.”
“Are you going to forgive me?”
“You haven’t done anything to me, darling.”
“I wanted to tell you, but I was afraid.”
“Vicki has something to tell you.”
“No plizze, Sylvia, you tell.”
Sylvia’s arm went around her, and into her eyes came a queer look, like the look that comes into the eyes of a cat that smells chloroform. In a frightened, throaty whisper she asked what they meant, but it was a long time before Sylvia could answer. Then, miserably, she said: “Vicki’s not going to marry you, darling.”
“...Why?”
“I asked him not to.”
“But why?”
“I didn’t think it would be good for you.”
“You mean my trouble?”
“It wouldn’t work out.”
“But my trouble is all we ever talk about. He’s going to take me to Vienna when the war’s over, and there are doctors there that know all about it, and it’s going to be a simple matter for me to get cured.”
“It might not turn out that way.”
“But, Vicki—”
“Isn’t really much of a psychiatrist.”
Vicki, his mouth throbbing now in a veritable flutter, came over now, murmuring Hazel’s name in a frenzy of compassion. He patted her on the head, said: “I never know thees t’ing till Sylvia, today she tell. Todayheute I on’stan all. Is moch better, Hezzel, we do like Sylvia say. All lahve Sylvia, no? All t’ink Sylvia know best?”
For answer Hazel opened her handbag, took out a cigarette. Then she began walking around. In spite of Sylvia’s reminders that the doctors had told her not to smoke, she kept snapping the cigarette against her thumbnail, in nervous, ominous taps. Then she moistened her lips, in the way Sylvia moistened them before beginning a big scene. Then she spoke in the quiet, vibrant way that Sylvia spoke when these scenes opened, the way that suggested patience, restraint, all the idealistic things she stood for. She said: “What I want to know is, why did you agree to this? What did she say to you, Vicki, that made you decide to give me up?”
“I merely told him—”
“No, please. Let Vicki talk.”
“Say you nuts. Is all.”
“It couldn’t have been that. You knew that already.”
“Din on’stan about thees t’ing.”
“And it couldn’t have been about the money.”
Sylvia looked up, startled, and Vicki seemed to have turned to wood. Hazel went on: “Certainly it was nothing of a business nature. We’ve talked this over many times, and both agreed that Sylvia would be much better off to stay with Phoenix, and I had agreed to turn the stock over to you as soon as we were married, since I better than anybody else know what’s good for her. Was it about business?”
“Can be.”
“Vicki, I don’t believe you.”
She was sad, patient, detached, every inch Cavell rebuking a young nurse who had failed to bring a soldier his canteen of fresh water. After a pause in which she looked out the window with a little compassionate smile, she went on: “There’s only one other thing she could have told you... Dirt! Dirt!... Rotten, filthy dirt!”
This was the celebrated Shoreham change of pace, the pregnant whisper with which Sylvia could get more terrible punch into a scene than most actresses could get with a hundred foot of screaming. Sylvia, who had sat down, started to speak, didn’t. She leaned back, closed her eyes. She acted as though she had been through this many times before, and knew there was nothing to do but let Hazel have her head until she ran down, when perhaps she would become manageable. Hazel went on: “Oh yes, there have been men in my life. I’m human. All too human. I didn’t think it hurt anybody. That I could have a little romance, a little touch of beauty to look forward to. Little did I dream that my own sister—”
She broke off and stood with face twitching, tears welling into her eyes. This was another Shoreham specialty: a dead-end stop with tears, not with the assistance of a cut and glycerine, but straight into the camera, with real tears glittering in her eyes. After a long look at distant inspirations, Hazel went on: “My own sister. She’s been kind, you say. Yes, kind she has been. She feeds me, gives me a bed to sleep in, buys me shining raiment. She buys me silk, and costly furs, and fine motor cars, and little trinkets, to prove she loves me. But I, I have known the joy of giving, too. I have given a life. Little do they realize that I too might like to be an actress. Little do they know that I too crave admiration, that I too might like my name in shining lights from Maine to California, from China to Timbuctoo, from pole to pole and sea to sea and tiny isle to greatest continent. And it might be mine. Who knows? Am I not young? Am I not fair? But no. I renounced my share of the sun that she might shine. I gave up what might be mine, that she might have what should be hers. I, God help me, I loved her, and my reward was — this—”