“No.”
She looked at him sharply. “I always knew somebody would someday. You never see it coming, though, do you?”
“It’s not coming now. This is just between us.”
“You think I’m afraid of this? There are pictures. Me and Aaron Silber, who later went on to-who knows? His father was a button supplier, he’s probably running that now. Anyway, we’re on a raft. In the lake. Cute. They ran it in the Daily Worker. My parents still have a copy, if that’s what you’re after.”
“I’m not after anything.”
“No, just curious. Want to know what it was like? Nice. We had a lake. Campfires. No running water in the bunks, but that was all right. Everything looks good when you’re eight. Eight.” She looked directly at him. “A child. Who didn’t know it was any different from the other places in the mountains. I felt lucky to go. The classes with the lessons? Only one a day and who listened in class anyway? Not with Aaron Silber around. Shows, too. I was on the stage. My parents came up for it. They thought it was wonderful. They thought the whole thing was wonderful. What the future would be like. One big Pine Hill.” She looked down, her voice lower. “Maybe I would have thought so, too. If I’d had that life. You see these fingers?” She held up her index and middle fingers. “My mother has no feeling in them. Ever operate a sewing machine?” She held her hands in front of her, mimicking pushing material toward a bobbing needle. “Sometimes it slips, you get your fingers caught under the needle. It hurts. Not like a saw or anything. You don’t lose them. But after a while, it happens enough, it kills the nerves, so you lose feeling. My father, with him it’s the cough. From the fabrics, the dust. It gets in your lungs, you never get it out, just keep coughing. So maybe they were right, what they thought. If you have that life.” She looked up at him. “But I don’t. I have this life. But there’s always somebody looking to dump you right back, isn’t there?”
“I’m not-”
“What did they do anyway, that was so wrong? Send me to camp. I’m supposed to apologize for that?”
“No. Stop,” he said, raising his hand a little.
“They’re my parents-”
He raised it higher, a halt. “My father was a Communist, Rosemary.” He looked at her. “So was Danny.”
“What?” Her head tilted, as if it had been literally jarred, hit by something.
“He never said?”
“No,” she said, still off balance.
“I thought he might have talked about it, that’s all. That’s the only reason I asked.” He trailed off, letting them both take a breath. “I’m not trying to-”
“Never. He never said anything like that,” she said, her voice vague, groping. “It’s true? He was?”
“In Germany. Then he changed. That’s what I’m trying to understand. What made him change.”
“But all this time,” she said, moving, her body restless, unsettled.
She dropped the cigarette with a willed half smile. “What my parents always wanted. A boy from-well, but not married.” She shook her head, a physical clearing out. “But how could it be true? He wasn’t like them. He wasn’t even interested.”
“It was a while ago. He was younger.”
“My parents never changed. Every time my father read the paperBut not Daniel. Not even that, what was in the paper. Or maybe he just never talked about it with me. Anything he cared about. Not with the girlfriend.”
“It wasn’t like that.”
“Oh, you know that, too? What he was thinking. Tell me. I don’t understand any of it. Why would he-?”
“I’ll tell you this. If he never asked you, it means he cared about you.”
“I don’t understand that, either.”
“He was protecting you.”
She looked at him quizzically, then smiled to herself. “Protecting me. It sounds better, anyway. Or maybe you like making him look good. What’s next? Maybe he was in love with me, too.”
“Maybe he was.”
She glanced up, her eyes suddenly moist, but her voice still edged. “Well, that’s something to hold on to.”
Riordan called late in the afternoon while Ben was drafting the last of the voice-overs.
“You’re going to love this.”
“What?”
“John MacDonald.”
“You found him?”
“Army records. Once you’re in-”
“He’s alive?”
“Wounded. Discharged ’forty-four,” he said, reading from notes. “VA Hospital over by Sepulveda until May. Then you follow the disability checks. They thought he was dead because they started coming back for a while, then the change of address came through.”
“So where is he?”
Riordan paused, a delivery line. “Care of Continental Pictures.”
“What?”
“But that’s not the part you’re going to love.”
Ben waited.
“Previous address?” Riordan said, teasing him with it. “Cherokee Arms.”
Ben sat for a minute afterward, his mind racing, then reached for the studio directory. No MacDonald. But had he really expected to find him there?
The mailroom was in the basement of the Admin building, filled with sorting boxes and the deep canvas bins for fan mail, hundreds of envelopes waiting to hear back from Dick Marshall, with his own signature on the photograph. One of the mail boys pushed an empty cart through the door.
“Help you?”
“I’m trying to find somebody. He’s not in the directory, but he gets mail here. So where does it go? You have a list or something like that? MacDonald.”
“Sure. Give me a sec.”
He went over to a clipboard hanging beneath the rows of pigeonholes and started flipping pages. An eternity of minutes, everything in slow motion. Or maybe it was just that Ben already knew what he would say.
“That goes to Mr. Jenkins’s office.”
Joel had only been working at the Cherokee since winter and had never heard of MacDonald, but the name was there on the rent rolls. A few months and then gone, no forwarding address. Danny hadn’t taken 5C until later, so there was nothing to connect them but coincidence. And Danny’s source entry in Minot’s file, familiar. And now Bunny collecting his checks.
But what did he do with them? Bunny got to the studio a little after the first makeup call and usually stayed late to watch the dailies. He took scripts home to an apartment on Ivar, handy to the studio, and seemed to have no personal life at all. According to his calendar, he spent Sundays making the rounds of tennis parties and open houses, and since he organized most of the Lasner dinners, there were frequent entries for Summit Drive, but otherwise the schedule was a long list of business appointments and business in disguise: a premiere, a night at Perino’s with an agent, a producer’s birthday. He was invited to Cukor’s for dinner about once a month and appeared to have standing dates with Marion Davies and Billy Haines, presumably old friends. He never saw Jack MacDonald.
Ben had actually followed him home a few nights, stopping short of his building, but Bunny had stayed in, the reading lamp burning in the corner window. A working Hollywood life, none of the samba bands and white furs that twinkled in Polly’s column every morning.
At the studio, Ben began staying closer to him, spending more time at Admin. Stein had pulled his pickets, which Bunny assumed was a favor to Ben, and a quiet Gower Street was worth an uneasy truce. He even included Ben in the sneak-preview car, usually restricted to the line producer.
“Always Glendale,” Lasner said.
“It’s anywhere.”
“This hour, it’s going to be kids.”
“We want kids,” Bunny said.
“With all the wiseass response cards. Go on the Boulevard, later, you get the swing shift, it’s a better crowd.”
“That was during the war, Sol. They’re not staying open late anymore.”
“They liked everything,” Lasner said stubbornly.
The Glendale audience, as young as predicted, seemed to like it well enough. There was the usual surprise when the unannounced movie came on, but no groans or jokey demands for the regular feature, and they clapped at Rosemary’s name in the credits, a good sign. The Continental group, sitting in the back, had already seen the picture so they watched the audience instead, a kind of seismic reading, alert to rustlings and murmurs and pockets of quiet. On the screen sequined women were dancing in a nightclub, the set of the wrap party, but Ben drifted, more interested in the men around him, seriously at work, one of whom had lied to him. A name he hadn’t heard in years, whose mail came to his office. It would be useless to ask him why. He’d already ducked once. Another question would be a warning, drive him further away.