Wayfaring Stranger (Holland Family Saga 1)

“I feel sorry for you,” she replied.

“Oh?”

“Is he ‘capable’ of hurting your wife? He’s capable of anything. He used to make his son beat him.”

“I don’t know if I heard you correctly.”

“When Roy didn’t fulfill his father’s expectations, Dalton would lie across the bed and make Roy whip him with a razor strop to demonstrate how much pain his son was causing him. You ask what he’s capable of? The answer is anything.”

“I see,” I replied, not knowing what to say.

“I doubt that. You’ve entered a world you have no knowledge of. You remind me of the man who was king because he had one eye in the kingdom of the blind. Isn’t that the kind of place where you grew up? A kingdom of blind people where the gentry have the astuteness of Cyclopes? It must be harrowing to find yourself in an environment where you’re never sure whether you should go to the front or the back door.”

/> “I’ve never had anyone say something like that to me,” I said, getting up to go. “This has been quite an experience.”

“Don’t put on self-righteous airs with me, Mr. Holland. You brought Mrs. Pine into our lives. I know my husband’s propensities. He has the appetites of an adolescent. When they wane, he comes back home, repentant and talking about tennis and his coin collection, just like a little boy. Next time he’ll be at it with the maid. She would be the logical step down from your business partner’s wife.”

I looked again at the hand-crank record player. Normally, I would have thought it was completely out of place. In this instance I did not. I had come to think of Roy and Clara Wiseheart as people who lived inside an inner sanctum where the difference between death and life was hardly noticeable; it was a place where the bizarre and the pathological were norms.

“I’ll find my way to my car,” I said. “No need to see me out. I’m sorry I intruded upon your privacy.”

“You wanted to be a gamesman,” she said. “Now you are. Enjoy it. An actor I knew before I met my husband once called it a ‘divine and sweet, sweet sewer.’ That was right before he killed himself. Maybe you won’t drown in it, Mr. Holland. Your friends probably will.”

As I walked away, I heard her start up the phonograph. I turned around, the air even colder now, the leaves of a transplanted swamp maple lit like fire against the sun. “Is that Bunny Berigan?” I asked.

“It’s ‘I Can’t Get Started with You.’ Roy gave it to me on our second date. I guess I still have my sentimental moments.”

Are we our brother’s keeper? Her face was a Grecian mask of callousness and cynicism so blatant, you wondered if it was pretense. Did she fear the Great Shade? Did she know the last names of her servants? Did she ever experience joy? As I looked around, I wondered if I was standing inside a necropolis. That night I wrote these words in my journal: Dear Lord, Thank you for my dear wife. Thank you for the wonderful life you’ve given us. God bless all those who work and play in the fields of the Lord. This is Weldon Avery Holland signing off again. Amen.

Chapter

20

LINDA GAIL’S FLIGHT back to Houston had been canceled because of bad weather, so she took a cab to Union Station and bought a stateroom ticket on the Sunset Limited, an expenditure she previously would have thought unimaginable. It was late afternoon when the train pulled out of Los Angeles, and in no time she found herself gazing through the lounge window at orange groves and palm trees and painted deserts and a red sunset that seemed created especially for her.

She ordered a glass of sherry and took her fountain pen and monogrammed stationery from her bag and began writing Hershel a letter she would ask the conductor to mail at one of the stops. When she thought about Hershel, she had to reconstruct her mental fortifications one brick at a time so an inconvenient truth or two didn’t steal its way into her peace of mind. It was a difficult task. He would never be able to understand the complexity of her situation, she told herself. Why burden him unnecessarily? She had made a conscious choice to enter into an affair with Roy Wiseheart, that was true. Yes, it was morally wrong and indefensible and even treacherous, but it had happened. That was it, it had happened. Things happened. Passive voice. And there was nothing to do about it. So enough about that.

She had stayed true to Hershel when he was overseas, hadn’t she? There had been temptations, many of them, potential boyfriends lurking around the edges of a dance floor or looking at her from a back pew in the church. What about Hershel? No French or Italian girl ever tempted him? Had anyone thought of that?

People were weak, she told herself. Her infidelity didn’t mean she was indifferent toward him. He doted on her and would give her anything she wanted. She wasn’t unappreciative. It wasn’t his fault that he didn’t understand the creative world and the people who dedicated themselves to the arts and humanities and the making of great films. There was a simple way of putting it all in context: She had grown up in a place where she didn’t belong, and she had finally found her milieu. It was no one’s fault. That was life.

Dear Hershel, she wrote in a navy blue calligraphy that had been the envy of everyone in her high school English classes, I’ll probably be home before you receive this. But no matter. I just wanted to organize my thoughts and put them down on paper for you to look at. I’ve been thinking about building a home in Santa Monica, not far from the ocean. I think my commitments are going to keep me there much of the time. Would you object if I talked to an architect? A small house on one of the bluffs would be a grand place for you to relax, and it wouldn’t cost much. It’s not Malibu.

The train pulled into a biscuit-colored stucco station covered with a Spanish-tile roof and surrounded by an oasis of date palms that reminded her of an illustration from the Arabian Nights. She could see the ice and mail wagons on the loading platform, and the marbled pink and purple stain of the sun’s afterglow on the hills and desert floor, and car lights tunneling through the dusk out on Highway 66. She looked down at the flowery design on the borders of her stationery, and the blue swirls in the letters that comprised the words she had written to her husband, her heart becoming sicker and sicker at the betrayal she was making a systemic part of her life.

She had to stop this self-flagellation, she told herself. Adults needed to behave as adults and deal with the world as it was. Guilt solved nothing. She began another paragraph.

I think from a financial perspective, the investment would be a good one. One home in River Oaks and another by the beach in Santa Monica! Who would have ever believed that? It’s funny how things work out. Remember when we met at the dance? Boy howdy, life can be a jack-in-the-box, can’t it?

She felt her face shrink at her hypocrisy. She tore the stationery into strips and put them in her bag just as the train jolted forward and two men in suits and fedoras, one of them with a Graflex Speed Graphic, entered the lounge and sat down on the horseshoe-shaped couch across from her. The photographer raised his camera and popped a flashbulb in her face.

“Good heavens, who are you fellows?” she said innocently.

“We almost got you at the airport, but you were too quick for us,” the other man said. “Can you give us an interview?” He held a notebook and pen in his right hand.

“Who’s it for?”

“It’s a wire story about the new girl at Warner Brothers,” he said.