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Way up at the very top, I thought I saw one of the gargoyles … move.
Oh, Roy, I thought, if that is you, forget revenge. Come away.
But the wind stopped and the breathing stopped and the line went dead.
I dropped the phone and stared out and up at the towers. Constance glanced and searched those same towers, where a new wind sifted flurries of dust devils down and away.
“Okay, no more bull!”
Constance strode back out on the porch and lifted her face toward Notre Dame.
“What the hell goes on here!” she yelled.
“Shh!” I said.
37
Fritz was way out in the midst of a turmoil of extras, yelling, pointing, stomping the dust. He actually had a riding crop under his arm, but I never saw him use it. The cameras, there were three of them, were just about ready, and the assistant directors were rearranging the extras along the narrow street leading into a square where Christ might appear sometime between now and dawn. In the middle of the uproar Fritz saw me and Constance, just arrived, and gestured to his secretary. He came running, I handed over the five script pages, and the secretary scuttled back through the crowd.
I watched as Fritz leafed through my scene, his back to me. I saw his head suddenly hunch down on his neck. There was a long moment before Fritz turned and, without catching my eye, picked up a bullhorn. He shouted. There was instant silence.
“You will all settle. Those who can sit, sit. Others, stand at ease. By tomorrow, Christ will have come and gone. And this is the way we will see him when we are finished and go home. Listen.”
And he read the pages of my last scene, word for word, page for page, in a quiet yet clear voice and not a head turned nor did one foot stir. I could not believe it was happening. All my words about the dawn sea and the miracle of the fish and the strange pale ghost of Christ on the shore and the bed of fish baking on the charcoals, which blew up in warm sparks on the wind, and the disciples there in silence, listening, eyes shut, and the blood of the Saviour, as he murmured his farewells, falling from the wounds in his wrists and onto the charcoals that baked the Supper after the Last Supper.
And at last Fritz Wong said my final words.
And there was the merest whisper from the mob, the crowd, the phalanx, and in the midst of that silence, Fritz at last walked through the people until he reached my side, by which time I was half-blind with emotion.
Fritz looked with surprise at Constance, jerked a nod at her, and then stood for a moment and at last reached up, pulled the monocle from his eye, took my right hand, and deposited the lens, like an award, a medal, on my palm. He closed my fingers over it.
“After tonight,” he said quietly, “you will see for me.”
It was an order, a command, a benediction.
Then he stalked away. I stood watching him, his monocle clenched in my trembling fist. When he got to the center of the silent crowd, he snatched the bullhorn and shouted, “All right, do something!”
He did not look at me again.
Constance took my arm and led me away.
38
On the way to the Brown Derby, Constance, driving slowly, looked at the twilight streets ahead and said: “My God, you believe in everything, don’t you? How? Why?”
“Simple,” I said. “By not doing anything I hate or disbel
ieve in. If you offered me a job writing, say, a film on prostitution or alcoholism, I couldn’t do it. I wouldn’t pay for a prostitute and don’t understand drunks. I do what I love. Right now, thank God, it’s Christ at Galilee during his going-away dawn and his footprints along the shore. I’m a ramshackle Christian, but when I found that scene in John, or J. C. found it for me, I was lost. How could I not write it?”
“Yeah.” Constance was staring at me so I had to duck my head and remind her, by pointing, that she was still driving.
“Hell, Constance, it’s not money I’m after. If you offered me War and Peace, I’d refuse. Is Tolstoy bad? No. I just don’t understand him. I am the poor one. But at least I know I can’t do the screenplay, for I’m not in love. You’d waste your money hiring me. End of lecture. And here,” I said, as we sailed past it and had to turn around, “is the Brown Derby!”
It was an off evening. The Brown Derby was almost empty and there was no Oriental screen set up way in the back.
“Damn,” I muttered.
For my eyes had wandered over to an alcove on my left. In the alcove was a smaller telephone cubby where the reservation calls came in. There was a small reading lamp lit over a podium desk, on which just a few hours ago Clarence Sopwith’s picture album had probably lain.
