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“What problems?”
“He’s extraordinarily … uh … pugnacious.” Bainbridge seemed happy to have found the word. “He’s constantly getting into fights. With everyone. No matter what age or size. On one occasion last term he even hit one of the instructors. General science. The instructor missed a whole week of classes. He’s very … adept … shall we say, with his fists, young Wesley. Of course, we like a boy to show a normal amount of aggressiveness in a school of this nature, but Wesley …” Bainbridge sighed. “His disagreements are not ordinary schoolboy fights. We’ve had to hospitalize boys, upperclassmen … To be absolutely frank with you, there’s a kind of, well, the only word is adult, adult viciousness about the boy that we on the staff consider very dangerous.”
Jordache blood, Thomas thought bitterly, fucking Jordache blood.
“I’m afraid I have to tell you, Mr. Jordache, that Wesley is on probation this term, with no privileges,” Bainbridge said.
“Well, Colonel,” Thomas said, “I have some good news for you. I’m going to do something about Wesley and his problems.”
“I’m glad to hear that you propose to take the matter in hand, Mr. Jordache,” Bainbridge said. “We’ve written i
“I propose to take him out of school this afternoon,” Thomas said. “You can stop worrying.”
Bainbridge’s hand trembled on the brass ca
“Well, I’m suggesting it, Colonel.”
Bainbridge stood up too, behind his desk. “I’m afraid it’s most … most irregular,” he said. “We would have to have his mother’s written permission. After all, all our dealings have been with her. She has paid the tuition for the entire school year. We would have to authenticate your relationship with the boy.”
Thomas took out his wallet and drew his passport from it and put it on the desk in front of Bainbridge. “Who does this look like?” he asked.
Bainbridge opened the little green book. “Of course,” he said, “your name is Jordache. But otherwise … Really, sir, I must get in touch with the boy’s mother …”
“I don’t want to waste any more of your time, Colonel,” Thomas said. He dug into his inside pocket once more and brought out the Police Department report on Teresa Jordache, alias Theresa Laval. “Read this, please,” he said, handing the paper to the Colonel.
Bainbridge glanced at the report, then took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes wearily. “Oh, dear,” he said. He handed the paper back to Thomas, as though he were afraid that if it lay around his office one moment more it would go permanently into the files of the school.
“Do you still want to keep the kid?” Thomas asked brutally.
“Of course, this alters things,” Bainbridge said. “Considerably.”
A half hour later, they drove out the gate of the Hilltop Military Academy. Wesley’s footlocker was on the back seat and Wesley, still in uniform, was up front beside Thomas. He was big for his age, sallow ski
“Tomorrow,” Thomas said, as the school disappeared behind them, “you’re going to get some decent clothes. And you’ve had your last fight.”
The boy was silent.
“Did you hear me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Don’t call me sir. I’m your father,” Thomas said.
Chapter 5
1966
For a few minutes at a time, while she was working, Gretchen forgot that it was her fortieth birthday. She sat on the high steel stool in front of the moviola, pushing the levers, gazing intently into the glass screen. She ran film and sound track together, her hands in dirty white-cotton gloves, emulsion stained. The spoor of film. She made swift marks in soft red pencil, giving the strips to her assistant to splice and file. From adjacent cutting rooms on the floor in the building on Broadway, where other companies rented rooms, came scraps of voices, screeches, explosions, orchestral passages, and the shrill gabble as track was run backward at high speed. Engrossed in her own labor she hardly noticed the noise. It was part of the furniture of a cutting room, with the clacking machines, the distorted sounds, the round tins of film stacked on the shelves.
This was her third picture as a head cutter. Sam Corey had taught her well as his assistant and then, after praising her highly to directors and producers, had sent her off on her own, to get her first independent job. Skilled and imaginative, with no ambition to become a director herself that would arouse jealousy, she was in great demand and could pick and choose among the jobs offered her.
The picture she was working on now was being shot in New York and she found the city’s impersonal variety exhilarating after the inbred, ambiguously jovial, big-family atmosphere of Hollywood, where everybody lived in everyone else’s pocket. In her free hours she tried to continue with the political activities that had taken up a great deal of her time in Los Angeles since Colin’s death. With her assistant, Ida Cohen, she went to meetings where people made speeches about the war in Viet Nam and school busing. She signed dozens of petitions and tried to get the important people in the movie business to sign them, too. All this helped her assuage her sense of guilt about having given up her studies in California. Also, Billy was now of a draftable age, and the thought of her one son being killed in Viet Nam was intolerable to her. Ida had no sons but was even more intense about the meetings, demonstrations, and petitions than Gretchen. They both wore Ban the Bomb buttons on their blouses and on their coats.
When she wasn’t going to meetings in the evenings, Gretchen went as often as she could to the theater, with a renewed appetite for it, after the years of being away. Sometimes she went with Ida, a small, dowdy, shrewd woman of about her own age, with whom she had developed a steady friendship, sometimes she went with Evans Kinsella, the director of the picture, with whom she was having an affair, sometimes with Rudolph and Jean, when they were in town, or with one or another of the actors she met when she visited the locations on which they were shooting.
The images passed before her on the glass screen and she grimaced. The way Kinsella had done the shooting made it difficult to get the tone that she felt the sequence needed. If she couldn’t somehow correct it by more ingenious cutting, or if Kinsella himself couldn’t come up with some ideas on it, she knew that eventually the whole scene would have to be reshot.
She stopped for a cigarette. The film tins she and Ida used for ash trays were always brimming with butts. Here and there stood empty coffee containers, lipstick stained.
Forty years old, she thought, inhaling.
Nobody today had as yet congratulated her. With good reason. Although she had looked for a telegram, at least, in her box at the hotel, from Billy. There had been no telegram. She hadn’t told Ida, now rewinding long strips of film on spools out of a big canvas basket. Ida was past forty herself, why drive in another spike? And she certainly hadn’t told Evans. He was thirty-two. A forty-year-old woman did not remind a thirty-two-year-old lover of her birthday.
She thought of her dead mother, forty years ago today. First born, a girl, to a girl scarcely more than twenty herself. If Mary Pease Jordache had known that day what words were going to pass between herself and the new infant in her arms, what tears would she have shed? And Billy …?