From their expressions I was sure they had been talking about Stahr. Stahr had ordered something or forbidden something, or defied Father or junked one of La Borwitz’ pictures or something catastrophic, and they were sitting there in protest at night in a community of rebellion and helplessness. Rosemary Schmiel sat pad in hand, as if ready to write down their dejection.
“I’m to drive you home dead or alive,” I told Father. “All those birthday presents rotting away in their packages!”
“A birthday!” cried Jacques in a flurry of apology. “How old? I didn’t know.”
“Forty-three,” said Father distinctly.
He was older than that – four years – and Jacques knew it; I saw him note it down in his account book to use some time. Out here these account books are carried open in the hand. One can see the entries being made without recourse to lip-reading, and Rosemary Schmiel was compelled in emulation to make a mark on her pad.
As she rubbed it out, the earth quaked under us.
We didn’t get the full shock[37] like at Long Beach, where the upper stories of shops were spewed into the streets and small hotels drifted out to sea – but for a full minute our bowels were one with the bowels of the earth – like some nightmare attempt to attach our navel cords again and jerk us back to the womb of creation.
Mother’s picture fell off the wall, revealing a small safe – Rosemary and I grabbed frantically for each other and did a strange screaming waltz across the room. Jacques fainted or at least disappeared, and Father clung to his desk and shouted, “Are you all right?” Outside the window the singer came to the climax of I love you only, held it a moment and then, I swear, started it all over. Or maybe they were playing it back to her from the recording machine.
The room stood still, shimmying a little. We made our way to the door[38], suddenly including Jacques, who had reappeared, and tottered out dizzily through the anteroom on to the iron balcony. Almost all the lights were out, and from here and there we could hear cries and calls. Momentarily we stood waiting for a second shock – then, as with a common impulse, we went into Stahr’s entry and through to his office.
The office was big, but not as big as Father’s. Stahr sat on the side of his couch rubbing his eyes. When the quake came he had been asleep, and he wasn’t sure yet whether he had dreamed it. When we convinced him he thought it was all rather funny – until the telephones began to ring. I watched him as unobtrusively as possible. He was grey with fatigue while he listened to the phone and dictograph; but as the reports came in, his eyes began to pick up shine.
“A couple of water mains have burst[39],” he said to Father, “ – they’re heading into the back lot.”
“Gray’s shooting in the French Village,” said Father.
“It’s flooded around the Station, too, and in the Jungle and the City Corner. What the hell – nobody seems to be hurt.” In passing, he shook my hands gravely: “Where’ve you been, Cecilia?”
“You going out there, Monroe?” Father asked.
“When all the news is in. One of the power lines is off, too – I’ve sent for Robinson.”
He made me sit down with him on the couch and tell about the quake again.
“You look tired,” I said, cute and motherly.
“Yes,” he agreed, “I’ve got no place to go in the evenings, so I just work.”
“I’ll arrange some evenings for you.”
“I used to play poker with a gang,” he said thoughtfully, “before I was married. But they all drank themselves to death.”
Miss Doolan, his secretary, came in with fresh bad news.
“Robby’ll take care of everything when he comes,” Stahr assured Father. He turned to me. “Now there’s a man – that Robinson. He was a trouble-shooter – fixed the telephone wires in Minnesota blizzards – nothing stumps him[40]. He’ll be here in a minute – you’ll like Robby.”
He said it as if it had been his life-long intention to bring us together, and he had arranged the whole earthquake with just that in mind.
“Yes, you’ll like Robby,” he repeated. “When do you go back to college?”
“I’ve just come home.”
“You get the whole summer?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll go back as soon as I can.”
I was in a mist. It hadn’t failed to cross my mind that he might have some intention about me, but if it was so, it was in an exasperatingly early stage – I was merely “a good property.” And the idea didn’t seem so attractive at that moment – like marrying a doctor. He seldom left the studio before eleven.
“How long,” he asked my father, “before she graduates from college. That’s what I was trying to say.”
And I think I was about to sing out eagerly that I needn’t go back at all, that I was quite educated already – when the totally admirable Robinson came in. He was a bowlegged young redhead, all ready to go.
“This is Robby, Cecilia,” said Stahr. “Come on, Robby.”
So I met Robby. I can’t say it seemed like fate – but it was. For it was Robby who later told me how Stahr found his love that night.
Under the moon the back lot[41] was thirty acres of fairyland – not because the locations really looked like African jungles and French châteaux and schooners at anchor and Broadway by night, but because they looked like the torn picture books of childhood, like fragments of stories dancing in an open fire. I never lived in a house with an attic, but a back lot must be something like that, and at night of course in an enchanted distorted way, it all comes true.
When Stahr and Robby arrived, clusters of lights had already picked out the danger spots in the flood.
“We’ll pump it out into the swamp on Thirty-Sixth Street,” said Robby after a moment. “It’s city property – but isn’t this an act of God? Say – look there!”
On top of a huge head of the Goddess Siva, two women were floating down the current of an impromptu river. The idol had come unloosed from a set of Burma, and it meandered earnestly on its way, stopping sometimes to waddle and bump in the shallows with the other debris of the tide. The two refugees had found sanctuary along a scroll of curls on its bald forehead and seemed at first glance to be sightseers on an interesting bus-ride through the scene of the flood.
“Will you look at that, Monroe!” said Robby. “Look at those dames!”
Dragging their legs through sudden bogs, they made their way to the bank of the stream. Now they could see the women, looking a little scared but brightening at the prospect of rescue.
“We ought to let ’em drift out to the waste pipe,” said Robby gallantly, “but DeMille[42] needs that head next week.”
He wouldn’t have hurt a fly, though, and presently he was hip deep in the water, fishing for them with a pole and succeeding only in spinning it in a dizzy circle. Help arrived, and the impression quickly got around that one of them was very pretty, and then that they were people of importance. But they were just strays, and Robby waited disgustedly to give them hell while the thing was brought finally into control and beached.
“Put that head back!” he called up to them. “You think it’s a souvenir?”
One of the women came sliding smoothly down the cheek of the idol, and Robby caught and set her on solid ground; the other one hesitated and then followed. Robby turned to Stahr for judgment.
“What’ll we do with them, chief?”