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Resist the temptation to tell the people who are now in charge of finishing Colin’s last picture how Colin wanted it to be done.
Give no interviews, write no articles. Do not be a source of anecdote. Do not be a great man’s widow. Do not speculate on what he would have done had he lived.
Commemorate no birthdays or a
Discourage retrospective showings, festivals, laudatory meetings to which you have been invited.
Attend no previews or opening nights.
When planes fly low overhead, leaving the airport, do not remember voyages you have taken together.
Do not drink alone or in company, whatever the temptation. Avoid sleeping pills. Bear in unassuaged silence.
Clear the desk in the living room of its pile of books and scripts. They are now a lie.
Refuse, politely, the folios of clippings, reviews of plays and films your husband has directed, which the studio has kindly had made up in tooled-leather covers. Do not read the eulogies of critics.
Leave only one hasty snapshot of husband on view in house. Pack all other photographs in a box and put them away in the cellar.
Do not, when thinking about preparing di
When dressing, do not look at the clothes hanging in the closet and say, “He likes me in that one.”
Be calm and ordinary with your son. Do not overreact when he gets into trouble at school, when he is robbed by a group of hoodlums or comes home with a bloody nose. Do not cling to him or allow him to cling to you. When he is invited with friends to go swimming or to a ball game or to a movie, tell him, “Of course. I have an awful lot of things to do about the house and I’ll get them done faster if I’m alone.”
Do not be a father. The things your son must do with men let him do with men. Do not try to entertain him, because you fear it must be dull for him living alone with a grieving woman on top of a hill far away from the centers where boys amuse themselves.
Do not think about sex. Do not be surprised that you do think about it.
Be incredulous when ex-husband calls and emotionally suggests that he would like to remarry you. If the marriage that was founded on love could not last, the marriage based on death would be a disaster.
Neither avoid nor seek out places where you have been happy together.
Garden, sunbathe, wash dishes, keep a neat house, help son with homework, do not show that you expect more of him than other parents expect of other sons. Be prompt to take him to the corner where he picks up the school bus, be prompt to meet the bus when it returns. Refrain from kissing him excessively.
Be understanding about your own mother, whom son now says he wishes to visit during the summer vacation. Say, “Summer is a long time off.”
Be careful about being caught alone with men whom you have admired or Colin has admired and who admire you and have been known to admire many other women in this town of excess women, and whose sympathy will skillfully turn into something else in three or four sessions and who will then try to lay you and will probably succeed. Be careful about being caught alone with men who have admired Colin or Colin had admired and whose sympathy is genuinely only that but who will eventually want to lay you, too. They, too, will probably succeed.
Do not build your life on your son. It is the most certain way to lose him.
Keep busy. But at what?
“Are you sure you’ve looked everywhere, Mrs. Burke?” Mr. Greenfield asked. He was the lawyer Colin’s agent had sent her to. Or rather, one of a huge battery of lawyers, all of whose names were on the door of the suite of offices in the elegant building in Beverly Hills. All of the names on the door seemed equally concerned with her problem, equally intelligent, equally well dressed, equally urbane, smiling, and sympathetic, equally costly, and equally helpless.
“I’ve turned the house upside down, Mr. Greenfield,” Gretchen said. “I’ve found hundreds of scripts, hundreds of bills, some of them unpaid, but no will.”
Mr. Greenfield almost sighed, but refrained. He was a youngish man in a button-down collar, to show that he had gone to law school in the East, and a bright bow tie, to show that he now lived in California. “Do you have any knowledge of any safety deposit boxes that your husband might have had?”
“No,” she said. “And I don’t believe he had any. He was careless about things like that.”
“I’m afraid he was careless about quite a few things,” Mr. Greenfield said. “Not leaving a will …”
“How did he know he was going to die?” she demanded. “He never had a sick day in his life.”
“It makes it easier if one thinks about all the possibilities,” Mr. Greenfield said. Gretchen was sure he had been drawing up wills for himself since he was twenty-one. Mr. Greenfield finally permitted himself the withheld sigh. “For our part, we’ve explored every avenue. Incredibly enough, your husband never employed any lawyer. He allowed his agent to draw up his contracts and from what his agent said, most of the time he hardly bothered to read them. And when he allowed the ex-Mrs. Burke to divorce him, he permitted her lawyer to write the divorce settlement.”
Gretchen had never met the ex-Mrs. Burke, but now, after Colin’s death, she was begi
Since Gretchen had had no separate bank account and had merely asked Colin for money when she needed it and allowed his secretary at the office to pay the bills, she found herself without any cash and had to depend upon Rudolph to keep her going. Colin had left no insurance because he thought insurance companies were the biggest thieves in America, so there was no money there, either. As the accident had been his fault alone, with no one else involved (he had hit a tree and the County of Los Angeles was preparing to sue the estate for damage to the tree), there was nobody against whom Gretchen could press claims for compensation.
“I have to get out of that house, Mr. Greenfield,” Gretchen said. The evenings were the worst. Whispers in shadowy corners of rooms. Half expecting the door to open at any moment and Colin to come in, cursing an actor or a cameraman.
“I quite understand,” Mr. Greenfield said. He really was a decent man. “But if you don’t remain in possession, physical possession, Mr. Burke’s ex-wife might very possibly find legal grounds for moving in. Her lawyers are very good, very good indeed—” The professional admiration was ungrudging, all the names on one door of an elegant building paying sincere tribute to all the names on the door of another elegant building just a block away. “If there’s a loophole, they’ll find it. And in law, if one looks long enough, there is almost always a loophole.”
“Except for me,” Gretchen said despairingly.