“I say, shall we get on with it?”

Chris turned, disconnected. “Yeah, sure, Burke. Let’s do it.”

“Thank heaven.”

“No, wait!”

“Oh, good Christ!”

She complained about the tag of the scene. She felt that the high point was reached with her line as opposed to her running through the door of the building immediately afterward.

“It adds nothing,” said Chris. “It’s dumb.”

“Yes, it is, love, it is,” agreed Burke sincerely. “However, the cutter insists that we do it,” he continued, “so there we are. You see?”

“No, I don’t.”

“No, of course you don’t, darling, because you’re absolutely right, it is stupid. You see, since the scene right after it”—Dennings giggled—“well, since it begins with Jed coming into the scene through a door, the cutter feels certain of a nomination if the scene before it ends with you moving off through a door.”

“Are you kidding?”

“Oh, I agree with you, love. It’s simply cunting, puking mad! But now why don’t we shoot it and trust me to snip it from the final cut. It should make a rather tasty munch.”

Chris laughed. And agreed. Burke glanced toward the cutter, who was known to be a temperamental egotist given to time-wasting argumentation. He was busy with the cameraman. The director breathed a sigh of relief.

Waiting on the lawn at the base of the steps while the lights were warming, Chris looked toward Dennings as he flung an obscenity at a hapless grip and then visibly glowed with satisfaction. He seemed to revel in his eccentricity. Yet at a certain point in his drinking, Chris knew, he could suddenly explode into temper, and if it happened at three or four in the morning, he was likely to telephone people in power and viciously abuse them over trifling provocations. Chris remembered a studio chief whose offense had consisted in remarking mildly at a screening that the cuffs of Dennings’s shirt looked slightly frayed, prompting Dennings to awaken him at approximately 3 A.M. to describe him as a “cunting boor” whose father, the founder of the studio, was “more than likely psychotic!” and had “fondled Judy Garland repeatedly” during the filming of The Wizard of Oz, then on the following day would pretend to amnesia and subtly radiate with pleasure when those he’d offended described in detail what he had done. Although, if it suited him, he would remember. Chris smiled and shook her head as she remembered him destroying his studio suite of offices in a ginstoked, mindless rage, and how later, when confronted by the studio’s head of production with an itemized bill and Polaroid photos of the wreckage, he’d archly dismissed them as “obvious fakes” since “the damage was far, far worse than that!” Chris did not believe he was an alcoholic or even a hopeless problem drinker, but rather that he drank and behaved outrageously because it was expected of him: he was living up to his legend.

Ah, well, she thought; I guess it’s a kind of immortality.

She turned, looking over her shoulder for the Jesuit who had smiled when Burke had uttered the obscenity. He was walking in the distance, head lowered despondently, a lone black cloud in search of the rain. She had never liked priests. So assured. So secure. And yet this one…

“All ready, Chris?”

“Ready.”

“All right, absolute quiet!” the assistant director called out.

“Roll the film,” ordered Burke.

“Rolling!”

“Speed!”

“Now action!”

Chris ran up the steps while extras cheered and Dennings watched her, wondering what was on her mind. She’d given up the arguments far too quickly. He turned a significant look to the dialogue coach, who immediately padded up to him dutifully and proffered his open script to him like an aging altar boy handing the missal to his priest at solemn Mass.

They had worked with only intermittent sun, and by four, the sky was dark and thick with roiling clouds.

“Burke, we’re losing the light,” the AD observed worriedly.

“Yes, they’re going out all across the fucking world.”

On Dennings’s instruction the assistant director dismissed the company for the day and now Chris was walking homeward, her eyes on the sidewalk, and feeling very tired. At the corner of Thirty-sixth and O she stopped to sign an autograph for an aging Italian grocery clerk who had hailed her from the doorway of his shop. She wrote her name and “Warm Best Wishes” on a brown paper bag. Waiting for a car to pass before crossing the road at N Street, she glanced diagonally across the street to a Catholic church. Holy Something-or-other. Staffed by Jesuits. John F. Kennedy had married Jackie there, she had heard, and had worshiped there. She tried to imagine it: John F. Kennedy among the votive lights and the pious, wrinkled women; John F. Kennedy with his head bowed down in prayer; I believe … a détente with the Russians; I believe, I believe … Apollo IV amid the rattlings of the rosary beads; I believe in the resurrection and the life ever—

That. That’s it. That’s the grabber.

Chris watched as a Gunther beer truck lumbered by on the cobbled street with a sound of quivering, warm, wet promises.

She crossed, and as she walked down O and passed the Holy Trinity grade school auditorium, a priest rushed by from behind her, hands in the pockets of a nylon windbreaker. Young. Very tense. In need of a shave. Up ahead, he took a right, turning into an easement that opened to a courtyard behind the church.

Chris paused by the easement, watching him, curious. He seemed to be heading for a white frame cottage. An old screen door creaked open and still another priest emerged. He nodded curtly toward the young man, and with lowered eyes, he moved quickly toward a door that led into the church. Once again the cottage door was pushed open from within. Another priest. It looked—Hey, it is! Yeah, the one who was smiling when Burke said “fucking”! Only now he looked grave as he silently greeted the new arrival, putting his arm around his shoulder in a gesture that was gentle and somehow parental. He led him inside and the screen door closed with a slow, faint squeak.

Chris stared at her shoes. She was puzzled. What’s the drill? She wondered if Jesuits went to confession.

Faint rumble of thunder. She looked up at the sky. Would it rain? … the resurrection and the life ever…

Yeah. Yeah, sure. Next Tuesday. Flashes of lightning crackled in the distance. Don’t call us, kid, we’ll call you.

She tugged up her coat collar and slowly moved on.

She hoped it would pour.

A minute later she was home. She made a dash for the bathroom. After that, she walked into the kitchen.

“Hi, Chris, how’d it go?”

Pretty blonde in her twenties sitting at the table. Sharon Spencer. Fresh. From Oregon. For the last three years, she’d been tutor to Regan and social secretary to Chris.

“Oh, the usual crock.” Chris sauntered to the table and began to sift messages. “Anything exciting?”

“Do you want to have dinner next week at the White House?”

“Oh, I dunno, Marty; whadda you feel like doin’?”

“Eating candy and getting sick.”

“Where’s Rags?”

“Downstairs in the playroom.”

“What doin’?”

“Sculpting. She’s making a bird, I think. It’s for you.”

“Yeah, I need one,” Chris murmured. She moved to the stove and poured a cup of hot coffee. “Were you kidding me about that dinner?” she asked.

“No, of course not,” answered Sharon. “It’s Thursday.”

“Big dinner party?”

“No, I gather it’s just five or six people.”

“Hey, neat-o!”

She was pleased but not really surprised. They courted her company: cabdrivers; poets; professors; kings. What was it they liked about her? Life?

Chris sat at the table. “How’d the lesson go?”

Sharon lit a cigarette, frowning. “Had a bad time with math again.”

“Really? That’s strange.”

“Yeah, I know; it’s her favorite subject.”

“Oh, well, this ‘new math.’ Christ, I couldn’t make change for the bus if—”

“Hi, Mom!”

Her slim arms outstretched, Chris’s young daughter had come bounding through the door toward her mother. Red pigtails. A soft, shining face full of freckles.

“Hi ya, stinkpot!” Beaming, Chris caught her in a bear hug and kissed her pink cheek with smacking ardor; she could not repress the full flood of her love. “Mmum-mmum-mmum!” More kisses. Then she held Regan out and probed her face with eager eyes. “So what’djya do today? Anything exciting?”

“Oh, stuff.”

“So what kinda stuff? Good stuff? Huh?”

“Oh, lemme see.” She had her knees against her mother’s, swaying gently back and forth. “Well, of course, I studied.”

“Uh-huh.”

“An’ I painted.”

“Wha’djya paint?”

“Oh, well, flowers, ya know. Daisies? Only pink. An’ then—oh, yeah! This horse!” She grew suddenly excited, eyes widening. “This man had a horse, ya know, down by the river? We were walking, see, Mom, and then along came this horse, he was beautiful! Oh, Mom, ya should’ve seen him, and the man let me sit on him! Really! I mean, practically a minute!”

Chris twinkled at Sharon with secret amusement. “Himself?” she asked, lifting an eyebrow. On moving to Washington for the shooting of the film, the blonde secretary, who was now virtually one of the family, had lived in the house, occupying an extra bedroom upstairs. Until she’d met the “horseman” at a nearby stable, at which point Chris decided that Sharon needed a place to be alone, and had moved her to a suite in an expensive hotel and insisted on paying the bill.

“Yes, himself,” Sharon answered with a smile.

“It was a gray horse!” added Regan. “Mother, can’t we get a horse? I mean, could we?”

“We’ll see, baby.”

“When could I have one?”

“We’ll see. Where’s the bird you made?”

At first Regan looked blank, then she turned around to Sharon and grinned with a mouth full of braces and shy rebuke. “You told!” she said before turning to her mother and snickering, “It was supposed to be a surprise.”

“You mean…?”

“With the long funny nose, like you wanted!”

“Oh, Rags, you’re so sweet. Can I see it?”

“No, I still have to paint it. When’s dinner, Mom?”

“Hungry?”

“I’m starving.”

“Gee, it’s not even five. When was lunch?” Chris asked Sharon.

“Oh, twelvish,” Sharon answered.

“When are Willie and Karl coming back?”

Chris had given them the afternoon off.

“I think seven,” said Sharon.

“Mom, can’t we go Hot Shoppe?” Regan pleaded. “Could we?”

Chris lifted her daughter’s hand; smiled fondly, kissed it, then answered, “Run upstairs and get dressed and we’ll go.”

“Oh, I love you!”

Regan ran from the room.

“Honey, wear the new dress!” Chris called out after her.

“How would you like to be eleven again?” mused Sharon.

“I dunno.”

Reaching for her mail, Chris began sorting through scrawled adulation. “With the brain I’ve got now? All the memories?”

“Sure.”

“No deal.”

“Think it over.”

Chris dropped the letters and picked up a script with a covering letter from her agent, Edward Jarris, clipped neatly to the front of it. “Thought I told them no scripts for a while.”

“You should read it,” said Sharon.

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yes, I read it this morning.”

“Pretty good?”

“I think it’s great.”

“And I get to play a nun who discovers she’s a lesbian, right?”

“No, you get to play nothing.”

“Shit, movies are better than ever! What in freak are you talking about, Sharon? What’s the grin for?”

“They want you to direct,” Sharon exhaled coyly along with the smoke from her cigarette.

“What?”

“Read the letter.”

“Oh, my God, Shar, you’re kidding!”

Chris pounced on the letter, her eyes snapping up the words in hungry chunks: “… new script … a triptych … studio wants Sir Stephen Moore … accepting role provided—”

“I direct his segment!”

Chris flung up her arms, letting loose a hoarse, shrill cry of joy. Then with both her hands she cuddled the letter to her chest. “Oh, Steve, you angel, you remembered!” Filming in Africa, drunk and in camp chairs watching the vermilion and gold end of day. “Ah, the business is bunk! For the actor it’s crap, Steve!” “Oh, I like it.” “It’s crap! Don’t you know where it’s at in this business? Directing. Then you’ve done something, something that’s yours; I mean, something that lives!” “Well, then do it, love! Do it!” “Oh, I’ve tried, Steve. I’ve tried; they won’t buy it.” “Why not?” “Oh, come on, you know why: they don’t think I can cut it.” “Well, I think you can.”

Warm smile. Warm remembrance. Dear Steve…

“Mom, I can’t find the dress!” Regan called from the landing.

“In the closet!” Chris answered.

“I looked!”

“I’ll be up in a second!” Chris called. She flipped through the pages of the script, and then stopped, looking wilted as she murmured, “I’ll bet it’s probably crap.”

“Oh, I don’t think so, Chris! No! I really think it’s good!”

“Oh, you thought Psycho needed a laugh track.”

“Mommy?”

“I’m coming!”

“Got a date, Shar?”

“Yes.”

Chris motioned at the mail. “You go on, then. We can catch all this stuff in the morning.”

Sharon got up.

“Oh, no, wait,” Chris amended. “No, I’m sorry, there’s a letter that’s got to go out tonight.”

“Oh, okay.” Sharon reached for her dictation pad.

A whine of impatience. “Moth-therrrr!”

Chris exhaled a sigh, stood up and said, “Back in a minute,” but then hesitated, seeing Sharon checking the time on her watch. Chris said, “What?”

“Gee, it’s time for me to meditate, Chris.”

Chris eyed her narrowly with fond exasperation. In the last six months, she had watched her secretary metamorphose into a “seeker after serenity.” It had started in Los Angeles with self-hypnosis, which then yielded to Buddhistic chanting. During the last few weeks that Sharon was quartered in the room upstairs, the house had reeked of incense, and lifeless dronings of “Nam myoho renge kyo” (“See, you just keep on chanting that, Chris, just that, and you get your wish, you get everything you want…”) were heard at unlikely and untimely hours, usually when Chris was studying her lines. “You can turn on the TV,” Sharon generously told her employer on one of these occasions. “It’s fine. I can chant when there’s all kinds of noise.”

Now it was Transcendental Meditation.

“You really think that kind of stuff is going to do you any good, Shar?”

“It gives me peace of mind,” responded Sharon.

“Right,” Chris commented tonelessly, and then turned and started away with a murmured “Nam myoho renge kyo.”

“Keep it up about fifteen or twenty minutes,” Sharon called to her. “Maybe for you it would work.”

Chris halted and considered a measured response. Then gave it up. She went upstairs to Regan’s bedroom, moving immediately to the closet. Regan was standing in the middle of the room staring up at the ceiling.

“So what’s doin’?” Chris asked Regan as she hunted in a closet for the dress. It was a pale-blue cotton. She’d bought it the week before, and remembered hanging it in this closet.

“Funny noises,” said Regan.

“Yeah, I know. We’ve got friends.”

Regan looked at her. “Huh?”

“Squirrels, honey; squirrels in the attic.” Her daughter was squeamish and terrified of rats. Even mice upset her.

The hunt for the dress proved fruitless.

“See, Mom, it’s not there.”

“Yes, I see. Maybe Willie picked it up with the cleaning.”

“It’s gone.”

“Yeah, well, put on the navy. It’s pretty.”

After a matinee screening of Shirley Temple in Wee Willie Winkie at an art-house cinema in Georgetown, they drove across the river on the Key Bridge to the Hot Shoppe in Rosslyn, Virginia, where Chris ate a salad while Regan had soup, two sourdough rolls, fried chicken, a strawberry shake, and blueberry pie topped with chocolate ice cream. Where does she put it, Chris wondered. In her wrists? The child was slender as a fleeting hope.

Chris lit a cigarette over her coffee and looked through the window on her right at the spires of Georgetown University before lowering a pensive and moody gaze to the Potomac’s deceptively placid surface, which offered no hint of the perilously swift and powerful currents that surged underneath it. Chris shifted her weight a little. In the soft, smoothing light of evening, the river, with its seeming dead calm and stillness, suddenly struck her as something that was planning.

And waiting.

“I enjoyed my dinner, Mom.”

Chris turned to Regan’s happy smile, and, as so often had happened before, caught a quick, gasping breath as once again she experienced that tugging, unsummoned little ache that she sometimes felt on suddenly seeing Howard’s image in her face. It was the angle of the light, she often thought. She dropped her glance to Regan’s plate.

“Going to leave that pie?”

Regan lowered her eyes. “Mom, I ate some candy before.”

Chris stubbed out her cigarette and smiled.

“Come on, Rags, let’s go home.”

They were back before seven. Willie and Karl had already returned. Regan made a dash for the basement playroom, eager to finish the sculpture for her mother. Chris headed for the kitchen to pick up the script. She found Willie brewing coffee; coarse; open pot. She looked irritable and sullen.

“Hi, Willie, how’d it go? Have a real nice time?”

“Do not ask.” Willie added an eggshell and a pinch of salt to the bubbling contents of the pot. They had gone to a movie, Willie explained. She had wanted to see the Beatles, but Karl had insisted on an art-house film about Mozart. “Terrible,” she simmered as she lowered the flame. “That dumbhead!”

“Sorry ’bout that.” Chris tucked the script underneath her arm. “Oh, Willie, have you seen that dress that I got for Rags last week? The blue cotton?”

“Yes, I see it in her closet this morning.”

“Where’d you put it?”

“It is there.”

“You didn’t maybe pick it up by mistake with the cleaning?”

“It is there.”

“With the cleaning?”

“In the closet.”

“No, it isn’t. I looked.”

About to speak, Willie tightened her lips and scowled. Karl had walked in.

“Good evening, Madam.”

He went to the sink for a glass of water.

“Did you set those traps?” asked Chris.

“No rats.”

“Did you set them?”

“I set them, of course, but the attic is clean.”

“Tell me, how was the movie, Karl?”

“Exciting,” he said. His tone of voice, like his face, was a resolute blank.

Humming a song made famous by the Beatles, Chris started to leave the kitchen, but then abruptly turned around.

Just one more shot!

“Did you have any trouble getting the traps, Karl?”

His back to her, Karl said, “No, Madam. No trouble.”

“At six in the morning?”

“All-night market.”

Chris softly slapped a hand against her forehead, stared at Karl’s back for a moment, and then turned to leave the kitchen, softly muttering, “Shit!”

After a long and luxurious bath, Chris went to the closet in her bedroom for her robe, and discovered Regan’s missing dress. It lay crumpled in a heap on the floor of the closet.

Chris picked it up. The purchase tags were still on it.

What’s it doing in here?

Chris tried to think back, then remembered that the day she had purchased the dress she had also bought two or three items for herself.

Must’ve put ’em all together, she decided.

Chris carried the dress into Regan’s bedroom, put it on a hanger and slipped it onto the clothes rack in Regan’s closet. Hands on her hips, Chris appraised Regan’s wardrobe. Nice. Nice clothes. Yeah, Rags, look here, not over there at the daddy who never writes or calls.

As she turned from the closet, Chris stubbed her toe against the base of a bureau. Oh, Jesus, that smarts! Lifting her foot and massaging her toe, Chris noticed that the bureau was out of position by about three feet.

No wonder I bumped it. Willie must have vacuumed.

She went down to the study with the script from her agent.

Unlike the massive living room with its large bay windows and view of Key Bridge arching over the Potomac to Virginia’s shore, the study had a feeling of whispered density; of secrets between rich uncles: a raised brick fireplace, cherrywood paneling and crisscrossed beams of a sturdy wood that looked as if hewn from some ancient drawbridge. The room’s few hints of a time that was present were a modern-looking bar with suede and chrome chairs set around it, and some color-splashed Marimekko pillows on a downy sofa where Chris settled down and stretched out with the script from her agent. Stuck between the pages was his letter. She slipped it out now and read it again. Faith, Hope and Charity: a film with three distinct segments, each one with a different cast and director. Hers would be “Hope.” She liked the title. Maybe dull, she thought; but refined. They’ll probably change it to something like “Rock Around the Virtues.”

The doorbell chimed. Burke Dennings. A lonely man, he dropped by often. Chris smiled ruefully, shaking her head, as she heard him rasp an obscenity at Karl, whom he seemed to detest and continually baited.

“Yes, hullo, where’s a drink!” he demanded crossly, entering the room and moving to the bar with his glance averted and his hands in the pockets of his wrinkled raincoat.

He sat on a barstool looking irritable, shifty-eyed and vaguely disappointed.

“On the prowl again?” Chris asked.

“What the hell do you mean?” Dennings sniffed.

“You’ve got that look.” She had seen it before when they’d worked on a picture together in Lausanne. On their first night there, at a staid hotel overlooking Lake Geneva, Chris had difficulty sleeping. At a little after 5 A.M., she flounced out of bed and decided to dress and go down to the lobby in search of either coffee or some company. Waiting for an elevator out in the hall, she glanced through a window and saw the director walking stiffly along the lakeside, hands deep in the pockets of his coat against the glacial February cold. By the time she reached the lobby, he was entering the hotel. “Not a hooker in sight!” he snapped bitterly as he hurriedly walked past Chris without even a glance, and then entered an elevator that whooshed him up to his floor and to his room and to bed. When Chris had teasingly mentioned the incident later, the director had grown furious and accused her of promulgating “gross hallucinations” that people were “likely to believe just because you’re a star!” He had also referred to her as “simply raving mad,” but then pointed out soothingly, in an effort to assuage her feelings, that “perhaps” she had seen someone after all, and had simply mistaken him for Dennings. “Not out of the question,” he’d offhandedly conceded; “my great-great-grandmother happens to have been Swiss.”

Chris moved behind the bar and reminded him of the incident.

“Yeah, that look, Burke. How many gin and tonics have you had already?”

“Oh, now, don’t be so silly!” snapped Dennings. “It so happens that I’ve spent the entire evening at a tea, a bloody faculty tea!”

Chris folded her arms and leaned them on the bar. “You were where?” she said skeptically.

“Oh, yes, go ahead; smirk!”

“You got smashed at a tea with some Jesuits?”

“No, the Jesuits were sober.”

“They don’t drink?”

“Are you out of your mind? They swilled! Never seen such capacities in all my life!”

“Hey, come on, hold it down, Burke! Regan can hear you!”

“Yes, Regan,” said Dennings, lowering his voice to a whisper. “Of course! Now where in Christ is my drink?”

Slightly shaking her head in disapproval, Chris straightened up and reached for a bottle and a glass. “Want to tell me what on earth you were doing at a faculty tea?”

“Bloody public relations; something you should be doing. I mean, my God, the way we’ve mucked up their grounds,” the director uttered piously. “Oh, yes, go ahead, laugh! Yes, that’s all that you’re good for, that and showing a bit of bum!”

“I’m just standing here innocently smiling.”

“Well, now someone had to make a good show.”