“Oh, I’ve been working.”
One minute later I was in a big chair in front of the fire, with a bottle of the white port I had always liked beside me, a little pile of buttered English biscuits beside that, he was across from me with those long legs of his hooked over the chandelier or some place, and we were off. Or anyhow, he was. He always began in the middle, and he raced along about Don Giovanni, about an appoggiatura I was leaving out in Lucia, about the reason the old scores aren’t sung the way they’re written, about a new flutist he had pulled in from Detroit, about my cape routine in Carmen, all jumbled up together. But not for long. He got to the point pretty quick. “What’s this about Hollywood?”
“Just what I told you. I’m sewed on a goddam contract and I’ve got to go.”
I told him about it. I had told so many people about it by then I knew it by heart, and could get it over quick. “Then this man — Gold, did you say his name was? — is the key to the whole thing?”
“He’s the one.”
“All right then. You just sit here a while.”
“No, if you’re doing something I’ll go!”
“I said sit there. Papa’s going to get busy.”
“At what?”
“There’s your port, there’s your biscuits, there’s the fire, there’s the most beautiful snow I’ve seen this year, and I’ve got the six big Rossini overtures on the machine — Semiramide, Tancred, the Barber, Tell, the Ladra, and the Italians, just in from London, beautifully played — and by the time they’re finished I’ll be back.”
“I asked you, where are you going?”
“Goddam it, do you have to bust up my act? I’m being Papa. I’m going into action. And when Papa goes into action, it’s the British Fleet. Sip your port. Listen to Rossini. Think of the boys that were gelded to sing the old bastard’s masses. Be the Pope. I’m going to be Admiral Dewey.”
“Beatty.”
“No, I’m Gridley. I’m ready to fire.”
He switched on the Rossini, poured the wine, and went. I tried to listen, and couldn’t. I got up and switched it off. It was the first time I ever walked out on Rossini. I went over to the windows and watched the snow. Something told me to get out of there, to go back to Hollywood, to do anything except get mixed up with him again. It wasn’t over twenty minutes before he was back. I heard him coming, and ducked back to the chair. I didn’t want him to see me worrying. “... I was astonished that you missed that grace note in Lucia. Didn’t you feel it there? Didn’t you know it had to be there?”
“To hell with Lucia. What news?”
“Oh. I had forgotten all about it. Why, you stay, of course. You go on with the opera, you do this foolish broadcast you’ve let yourself in for, you sing for me, you make your picture in the summer. That’s all. It’s all fixed up. Once more, Jack, on all those old recitatives—”
“Listen, this is business. I want to know—”
“Jack, you are so crass. Can’t I wave my wand? Can’t I do my bit of magic? If you have to know, I happen to control a bank, or my somewhat boorish family happen to control it. They embarrass me greatly, but sometimes they have a kind of low, swinish usefulness. And the bank controls, through certain stocks impounded to secure moneys, credit, and so on — oh the hell with it.”
“Go on. The bank controls what?”
“The picture company, dolt.”
“And?”
“Listen, I’m talking about Donizetti.”
“And I’m talking about a son-of-a-bitch by the name of Rex Gold. What did you do?”
“I talked with him.”
“And what did he say?”
“Why — I don’t know. Nothing. I didn’t wait to hear what he had to say. I told him what he was to do, that’s all.”
“Where’s your phone?”
“Phone? What are you phoning about?”
“I’ve got to call the broadcasting company.”
“Will you sit down and listen to what I’m trying to tell you about appoggiaturas, so you won’t embarrass me every time you sing something written before 1905? Varlets in the bank are calling the broadcasting company. That’s what we have them for. They’re working overtime, calling other varlets in Radio City and making them work overtime, which I greatly enjoy, while you and I take our sinful ease here and watch the snow at twilight, and discuss the grace notes of Donizetti, which will be sung long after the picture company, the bank, and the varlets are dead in their graves and forgotten. Are you following me?”
His harangue on the appoggiaturas lasted fifteen minutes. It was something I was always forgetting about him, his connection with money. His family consisted of an old maid sister, a brother that was a colonel in the Illinois National Guard, another brother that lived in Italy, and some nephews and nieces, and they had about as much to do with that fortune as so many stuffed dummies. He ran it, he controlled the bank, he did plenty of other things that he pretended he was too artistic even to bother with. All of a sudden something shot through my mind. “Winston, I’ve been framed.”
“Framed? What are you talking about? By whom?”
“By you.”
“Jack, I give you my word, the way you sang that—”
“Cut out this goddam foolish act about Lucia, will you? Sure I sang it wrong. I learned that role before I knew anything about style, and I hadn’t sung it for five years until I went on with it last month, and I neglected to re-learn it, and that’s all that amounts to, and to hell with it. I’m talking about this other. You knew all about it when you called me.”
“... Why, of course I did.”
“And I think you put me in that spot.”
“I-? Don’t be a fool.”
“It always struck me pretty funny, that guy Gold’s ideas about grand opera, and me, and all the rest of it. Anybody else would want me in grand opera, to build me up. What do you know about that?”
“Jack, that’s Mexican melodrama.”
“What about this trip of yours? To Mexico?”
“I went there. A frightful place.”
“For me?”
“Of course.”
“Why?”
“To take you by the scuff of your thick neck and drag you out of there. I — ran into a ’cellist that had seen you. I heard you were looking seedy. I don’t like you seedy. Shaggy, but not with spots on your coat.”
“What about Gold?”
“... I put Gold in charge of that picture company because he was the worst ass I had ever met, and I thought he was the perfect man to make pictures. I was right. He’s turned the whole investment into a gold mine. Soon I can have seventy-five men, and ‘Little Orchestra’ will be one of those affectations I so greatly enjoy. Jack, do you have to expose all my little shams? You know them all. Can’t we just not look at them? After all they’re nice shams.”
“I want to know more about Gold.”
He came over and sat on the arm of my chair. “Jack, why should I frame you?”
I couldn’t answer him, and I couldn’t look at him.
“Yes, I knew all about it. I didn’t tell Gold to be an ass, if that’s what you mean. I didn’t have to. I knew about it, and I acted out one of my little shams. Can’t I want my Jack to be happy? Wipe that sulky look off your face. Wasn’t it good magic? Didn’t Gridley level the fort?”
“... Yes.”
I got home around eight o’clock. I rushed in with a grin on my face, said it was all right, that Gold had changed his mind, that we were going to stay, and let’s go out and celebrate. She got up, wiped her snoddy nose, dressed, and we went out, to a hot-spot uptown. It was murder to drag her out, on a night like that, the way she felt, but I was afraid if I didn’t get to some place where there was music, and I could get some liquor in me, she’d see I was putting on an act, that I was as jittery inside as a man with a hangover.