The Drowning Pool

Chapter 4

I moved to the center of the room and leafed through a Theatre Arts magazine that was lying on a table. In a little while Marvell came back with a bowl of ice, glasses, Scotch, and soda, clinking together on a myrtlewood tray. “Excuse the delay, old man. The housekeeper’s busy making canapés, and gave me absolutely no help at all. Do you like it strong?”

“I’ll pour my own, thanks.” I made a tall highball with plenty of soda. It was still early, a few minutes after five by my watch.

Marvell made himself a short one and took it in two gulps, his Adam’s apple bobbing like a soft egg caught in his throat. “The Slocums aren’t inhospitable,” he said, “but they’re nearly always late. One has to fend for oneself. Cathy informs me you’re a literary agent?”

“Of a kind. I work for a man who buys fiction if he thinks it has movie possibilities. Then he tries to interest a producer, or make a package deal with a star.”

“I see. Would I know the gentleman’s name?”

“Probably not. I’m not allowed to use his name, anyway, because it’s worth money. It bids up prices.” I was improvising, but I knew twenty men in the game, and some of them operated like that.

He leaned back in his chair and hitched one thin knee over the other. His legs were pale and hairless above the drooping socks. His pale blond gaze seemed lashless. “You don’t seriously think my play is cinematic? I’ve sought a rather difficult beauty, you know.”

I dipped my embarrassment in whiskey and soda, and waited for it to dissolve. It stayed where it was, a smiling mask on my face. “I never make snap decisions. I’m paid to keep tabs on the summer theaters, and that’s what I do. There’s a lot of young acting-talent floating around. In any case, I’ll have to see all of your play before I can make a report.”

“I noticed you there this afternoon,” he said. “What did happen before that frightful scene between Cathy and her father?”

“I wouldn’t know. I was watching the play.”

He got up for another drink, moving sideways across the room like a shying horse. “The girl’s quite a problem,” he said over his shoulder. “Poor dear James is positively hag-ridden by his womenfolk. A less responsible man would simply decamp.”

“Why?”

“They bleed him emotionally.” He smiled palely over his second drink. “His mother began it when he was a very small boy, and it’s gone on for so many years that he actually doesn’t know he’s being imposed upon. Now his wife and daughter are carrying on the good work. They’re wasting the dear man’s emotional substance.”

He realized then that he was talking too much, and changed the subject abruptly: “I’ve often wondered why his mother chooses to live on a barren slope like this. She could live anywhere, you know, absolutely anywhere. But she chooses to wither away in this dreadful sun.”

“Some people like it,” I said. “I’m a native Californian myself.”

“But don’t you ever weary of the soul-destroying monotony of the weather?”

Only of phonies, I thought. Of the soul-destroying monotony of phonies I wearied something awful. But I explained, for the hundredth time, that Southern California had two seasons, like any Mediterranean climate, and that people who couldn’t tell the difference lacked one or more of the five senses.

“Oh, quite, quite,” he told me, and poured himself another stiff drink, while I was still sipping the dregs of my first. The whisky didn’t seem to affect him at all. He was an aging Peter Pan, glib, bland and eccentric, and all I had really found out was that he was fond of James Slocum. Everything he said and did was so stylized that I couldn’t get at his center, or even guess where it was.

I was glad when Maude Slocum came into the room, her straight white smile gleaming in the amber light from the windows. She had left her emotions on the veranda, and seemed in control of herself. But her eyes looked past me, and far beyond the room.

“Hello, Francis.” He half rose from his chair, and slumped back into it. “You really must forgive me, Mr. Archer, I’m a most unsatisfactory hostess—”

“On the contrary.” She was dressed to attract attention in a black-and-white striped linen dress with a plunging neckline and a very close waist. I gave her attention.

“Francis,” she said sweetly, “would you see if you can find James for me? He’s somewhere out front.”

“Right, darling.” Marvell seemed pleased with the excuse to get away, and trotted out of the room. Nearly every family of a certain class had at least one hanger-on like him, dutiful and useless and untied. But unless Maude Slocum and he were smooth actors, Marvell wasn’t the apex of her triangle.

I offered to make her a drink but she poured her own, straight. She wrinkled her nose over the glass. “I hate Scotch, but James so loves to make the cocktails himself. Well, Mr. Archer, have you been probing the household secrets, rattling the family skeletons and so on?” The question was humorously put, but she wanted an answer.

I glanced at the open window and answered in a lower tone: “Hardly, I’ve had some talk with Marvell, and some with Cathy. No light. No skeletons.” But there was electric tension in the house.

“I hope you don’t think Francis—?”

“I don’t think about him, I don’t understand him.”

“He’s simple enough, I should think—a perfectly nice boy. His income’s been cut off by the British government, and he’s trying desperately to stay in the United States. His family’s the fox-hunting sort, he can’t abide them.” The chattering stopped abruptly, and her voice went shy: “What do you think of Cathy?”

“She’s a bright kid. How old?”

“Nearly sixteen. Isn’t she lovely, though?”

“Lovely,” I said, wondering what ailed the woman. Almost a total stranger, I was being asked to approve of herself and her daughter. Her insecurity went further back than the letter she had given me. Some guilt or fear was drawing her backward steadily, so that she had no enthuse and emote and be admired in order to stay in the same place.

“Loveliness runs in the family, doesn’t it?” I said. “Which reminds me, I’d like to meet you mother-in-law.”

“I don’t understand why—”

“I’m trying to get a picture, and she’s a central figure in it, isn’t she? Put it this way. You’re not so worried about who sent the first letter—that’s safe in my pocket—as you are about the possible effects of a second letter. If I can’t stop the letters at their source, I might be able to circumvent their effects.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. The main thing is that your husband, and your daughter, and your mother-in-law, shouldn’t take the letters seriously. Your husband might divorce you, your daughter might despise you—”

“Don’t say that.” She set down her glass peremptorily on the coffee-table between us.

I went on evenly: “Your mother-in-law might cut off your income. I’ve been thinking, if I launched a poison-pen campaign against the whole family, and made a lot of different accusations, the one that hurts could get lost in the shuffle, couldn’t it?”

“God no! I couldn’t stand it, none of us could.” The violence of her reaction was surprising. Her whole body heaved in the zebra-striped dress, and her breasts pressed together like round clenched fists in the V of her neckline.

“I was only playing with the idea. It needs refining, but there’s something there.”

“No, it’s horrible. It would cover us all with filth to hide one thing.”

“All right,” I said, “all right. To get back to your mother-in-law, she’s the one that would break you, isn’t she? I mean it’s her money that runs the house?”

“It’s really James’s, too. She handles the income in her lifetime, but his father’s will requires her to provide for him. Her idea of providing is three hundred a month, a little more than she pays the cook.”

“Could she afford to pay more?”

“If she wanted to. She has income from half a million, and this property is worth a couple of million. But she refuses to sell an acre of it.”

“A couple of million? I didn’t realize it was that big.”

“There’s oil under it,” she said bitterly. “As far as Olivia is concerned, the oil can stay in the ground until we all dry up and blow away.”

“I take it there’s no love lost between you and you mother-in-law.”

She shrugged her shoulders. “I gave up trying long ago. She’s never forgiven me for marrying James. He was her pampered darling, and I married him young.”

“Three hundred a month isn’t exactly pampering, not if she has a couple of million in capital assets.”

“It’s the same as he got in college.” The details of her grievances poured out, as if she’d been waiting for a long time to borrow somebody’s ear. “She never increased it even when Cathy was born. For a while before the war we managed to live on it in a house of our own. Then prices went up, and we came home to mama.”

I put the important question as tactfully as I could: “And what does James do?”

“Nothing. He was never encouraged to think of making a living. He was her only son, and she wanted him around. That’s the idea of the allowance, of course. She’s got him.”

Her eyes were looking past me at a flat desert of time that stretched backward and forward as far as she could see. It occurred to me for an instant that I’d be doing her a favor if I showed her mother-in-law the letter in my pocket, and broke up the family for good. It was even possible that that was her own unconscious wish, the motive behind her original indiscretion. But I wasn’t even certain that there had been an indiscretion, and she would never talk. After sixteen years of waiting for her share, and planning for her daughter, she was going to wait for the end.

She rose suddenly. “I’ll take you to meet Olivia, if you must. She’s always in the garden in the late afternoon.”

The garden had fieldstone walls higher than my head. Inside, the flowers broke the light into almost every shade of the spectrum, and held it glowing. The sun was nearly down behind the western mountains and the light was fading, but Mrs. Slocum’s flowers burned brightly on as if with fires of their own. There were fuchsias, pansies, tuberous begonias, great shaggy dahlias like separate pink suns. Olivia Slocum was working among them with a pair of shears, when we came up to the gate. Of indeterminate shape and size in a faded linen dress and a wide straw hat, she was bent far over among the blooms.

Her daughter-in-law called to her, with a slight nagging tone in her voice: “Mother! You shouldn’t be straining yourself like that. You know what the doctor said.”

“What did the doctor say?” I asked her under my breath.

“She has a heart condition—when it’s convenient.”

Olivia Slocum straightened up and came toward us, removing her earth-stained gloves. Her face was handsome in a soft, vague, sun-flecked way, and she was much younger than I’d expected. I’d imagined her as a thin and sour lady pushing seventy, with gnarled hands grasping the reins she held on other people’s lives. But she wasn’t over fifty-five at most, and she carried her age easily. The three generations of Slocum women were a little too close for comfort.

“Don’t be ridiculous, my dear,” she said to Maude. “The doctor says mild exercise is beneficial to me. Anyway, I love to garden in the cool of the day.”

“Well, as long as you don’t overtire yourself.” The younger woman’s voice was grudging, and I suspected that the two never agreed on anything. “This is Mr. Archer, mother. He came up from Hollywood to see Francis’s play.”

“How nice. And have you seen it, Mr. Archer? I’ve heard James is quite distinguished in the leading role.”

“He’s very accomplished.” The lie came easier as I repeated it, but it still left a bad taste on my tongue.

With a queer look at me, Maude excused herself and went back to the house. Mrs. Slocum raised both arms to take off her woven straw hat. She held the pose a moment too long, and turned her head so that I could see her profile. Vanity was her trouble; she was fixed on her own lost beauty, and couldn’t grow old or let her son grow up. The hat came off after the long moment. Her hair was dyed bright red, and combed over her forehead in straight bangs.

“James is one of the most versatile people in the world,” she said. “I brought him up to take a creative interest in everything, and I must say he’s justified my faith. Of course you know him only as an actor, but he paints quite passably, and he has a beautiful tenor voice as well. He’s even taken to writing verse lately. Francis has been a great stimulus to him.”

“A brilliant man,” I said. I had to say something to stem her flow of words.

“Francis? Oh, yes. But he doesn’t have a tithe of James’s energy. It would be a boon to him if he could rouse some Hollywood interest in his play. He’s been urging me to back it, but naturally I can’t afford to speculate in that sort of thing. I presume that you’re connected with the studios, Mr. Archer?”

“Indirectly.” I didn’t want to get involved in explanations. She chattered like a parrot, but her eyes were shrewd. To change the subject, I said: “As a matter of fact, I’d like to get out of Hollywood. It’s ulcer territory. A quiet life in the country would suit me fine, if I could get a piece of property in a place like this.”

“A place like this, Mr. Archer?” She spoke guardedly, and her green eyes veiled themselves like a parrot’s eyes.

Her reaction surprised me, but I blundered on: “I’ve never seen a place I’d rather live in.”

“I see, Maude sicked you on me.” Her voice was unfriendly and harsh. “If you represent the Pareco people, I must ask you to leave my property at once.”

“Pareco?” It was the name of a gasoline. My only connection with it was that I used it in my car occasionally. I told her that.

She looked closely into my face, and apparently decided I wasn’t lying. “The Pacific Refinery Company has been trying to get control of my property. For years they’ve been laying siege to me, and it’s made me a little suspicious of strangers, especially when they express an interest in real estate.”

“My interest is entirely personal,” I said.

“I’m sorry if I’ve maligned you, Mr. Archer. The events of the last few years have embittered me, I’m afraid. I love this valley. When my husband and I first saw it, more than thirty years ago, it seemed our earthly paradise, our valley of the sun. When we could afford to, we bought this lovely old house and the hills around it, and when he retired we came here to live. My husband is buried here—he was older than I—and I intend to die here myself. Do I sound sentimental?”

“No.” Her feeling for the place was stronger than sentimentality, and a little frightening. Her heavy body leaning on the gate was monumental in the evening light. “I can understand your attachment to a place like this.”

“I am a part of it,” she continued throatily. “They’ve ruined the town and desecrated the rest of the valley, but they shan’t touch my mesa. I told them that, though they’ll never take no for an answer. I told them that the mountains would be here long after they were gone. They didn’t know what I was talking about.” She rolled a cold green eye in my direction: “I believe you understand me, Mr. Archer. You’re very sympathetic.”

I muttered some kind of an affirmative. I understood a part of her feeling all right. A friend of mine who lectured in economics at UCLA would call it the mystique of property. What I failed to understand was the power of her obsession. Perhaps it was explained by the fact that she felt besieged, with her daughter-in-law a fifth column in the house.

“I sometimes feel that the mountains are my sisters—” She cut herself off short, as if she’d suddenly realized that she was going off the deep end. I was thinking that she had enough ego to equip a dictator and leave enough over for a couple of gauleiters. Perhaps she noticed the change in my expression.

“I know you’re wanting to go to the party,” she said, and gave me her hand briefly. “It was nice of you to come and talk to an old woman like me.”

I started back to the house through an aisle of tall Italian cypress. It opened on a lawn in which a small swimming-pool was sunk, its filter system masked by a cypress hedge. At the far end a burlap-covered springboard stuck out over the water. The water in the pool was so still it seemed solid, a polished surface reflecting the trees, the distant mountains, and the sky. I looked up at the sky to the west, where the sun had dipped behind the mountains. The clouds were writhing with red fire, as if the sun had plunged in the invisible sea and set it flaming. Only the mountains stood out dark and firm against the conflagration of the sky.