James Cain - Serenade

“To hell with Lucia. What news?”

“Oh. I had forgotten all about it. Why, you stay, of course. You go on with the opera, you do this foolish broadcast you’ve let yourself in for, you sing for me, you make your picture in the summer. That’s all. It’s all fixed up. Once more, Jack, on all those old recitatives—”

“Listen, this is business. I want to know—”

“Jack, you are so crass. Can’t I wave my wand? Can’t I do my bit of magic? If you have to know, I happen to control a bank, or my somewhat boorish family happen to control it. They embarrass me greatly, but sometimes they have a kind of low, swinish usefulness. And the bank controls, through certain stocks impounded to secure moneys, credit, and so on — oh the hell with it.”

“Go on. The bank controls what?”

“The picture company, dolt.”

“And?”

“Listen, I’m talking about Donizetti.”

“And I’m talking about a son-of-a-bitch by the name of Rex Gold. What did you do?”

“I talked with him.”

“And what did he say?”

“Why — I don’t know. Nothing. I didn’t wait to hear what he had to say. I told him what he was to do, that’s all.”

“Where’s your phone?”

“Phone? What are you phoning about?”

“I’ve got to call the broadcasting company.”

“Will you sit down and listen to what I’m trying to tell you about appoggiaturas, so you won’t embarrass me every time you sing something written before 1905? Varlets in the bank are calling the broadcasting company. That’s what we have them for. They’re working overtime, calling other varlets in Radio City and making them work overtime, which I greatly enjoy, while you and I take our sinful ease here and watch the snow at twilight, and discuss the grace notes of Donizetti, which will be sung long after the picture company, the bank, and the varlets are dead in their graves and forgotten. Are you following me?”

His harangue on the appoggiaturas lasted fifteen minutes. It was something I was always forgetting about him, his connection with money. His family consisted of an old maid sister, a brother that was a colonel in the Illinois National Guard, another brother that lived in Italy, and some nephews and nieces, and they had about as much to do with that fortune as so many stuffed dummies. He ran it, he controlled the bank, he did plenty of other things that he pretended he was too artistic even to bother with. All of a sudden something shot through my mind. “Winston, I’ve been framed.”

“Framed? What are you talking about? By whom?”

“By you.”

“Jack, I give you my word, the way you sang that—”

“Cut out this goddam foolish act about Lucia, will you? Sure I sang it wrong. I learned that role before I knew anything about style, and I hadn’t sung it for five years until I went on with it last month, and I neglected to re-learn it, and that’s all that amounts to, and to hell with it. I’m talking about this other. You knew all about it when you called me.”

“... Why, of course I did.”

“And I think you put me in that spot.”

“I-? Don’t be a fool.”

“It always struck me pretty funny, that guy Gold’s ideas about grand opera, and me, and all the rest of it. Anybody else would want me in grand opera, to build me up. What do you know about that?”

“Jack, that’s Mexican melodrama.”

“What about this trip of yours? To Mexico?”

“I went there. A frightful place.”

“For me?”

“Of course.”

“Why?”

“To take you by the scuff of your thick neck and drag you out of there. I — ran into a ’cellist that had seen you. I heard you were looking seedy. I don’t like you seedy. Shaggy, but not with spots on your coat.”

“What about Gold?”

“... I put Gold in charge of that picture company because he was the worst ass I had ever met, and I thought he was the perfect man to make pictures. I was right. He’s turned the whole investment into a gold mine. Soon I can have seventy-five men, and ‘Little Orchestra’ will be one of those affectations I so greatly enjoy. Jack, do you have to expose all my little shams? You know them all. Can’t we just not look at them? After all they’re nice shams.”

“I want to know more about Gold.”

He came over and sat on the arm of my chair. “Jack, why should I frame you?”

I couldn’t answer him, and I couldn’t look at him.

“Yes, I knew all about it. I didn’t tell Gold to be an ass, if that’s what you mean. I didn’t have to. I knew about it, and I acted out one of my little shams. Can’t I want my Jack to be happy? Wipe that sulky look off your face. Wasn’t it good magic? Didn’t Gridley level the fort?”

“... Yes.”

I got home around eight o’clock. I rushed in with a grin on my face, said it was all right, that Gold had changed his mind, that we were going to stay, and let’s go out and celebrate. She got up, wiped her snoddy nose, dressed, and we went out, to a hot-spot uptown. It was murder to drag her out, on a night like that, the way she felt, but I was afraid if I didn’t get to some place where there was music, and I could get some liquor in me, she’d see I was putting on an act, that I was as jittery inside as a man with a hangover.

I didn’t see him for a week or ten days, and the first broadcast made me feel good. I said hello to Captain Conners, and there was a federal kick-back the next morning. Messages to private persons are strictly forbidden. I just laughed, and thought of Thomas. There was a federal kick-back on that “Good night, Mother,” too, and they told him he couldn’t do it. He just went ahead and did it. That afternoon there came a radiogram from the SS. Port of Cobh: TWAS A SOAP AGENTS PROGRAM BUT I ENJOYED IT HELLO YOURSELF AND HELLO TO THE LITTLE ONE CONNERS. So of course I had to come running home with that.

I made some records, went on three times a week at the opera, did another broadcast, and woke up to find I was a household institution, name, face, voice and all, from Hudson Bay to Cape Horn and back again. The spig papers, the Canadian papers, the Alaskan papers, and all the other papers began coming in by that time, and I was plastered all over them, with reviews of the broadcast, pictures of the car, and pictures of me. The plugs I wrote for the car worked, the horn worked, and all of it worked, so they had to put more ships under charter to make deliveries. Then I had to get Winston’s program ready, and began seeing him every day.

I didn’t have to see him every day to get the program up. But he dropped into my dressing room one night, the way he had done before, and it was just luck that it was raining, and she still had a hangover from the cold, and had decided to stay home. She was generally out there when I sang, and always came backstage to pick me up. There was a big mob of autograph hunters back there, and instead of locking them out while I dressed, the way I generally did, I let them in, and signed everything they shoved at me, and listened to women tell me how they had come all the way from Aurora to hear me, and let him wait. When we walked out I apologized for it and said there was nothing I could do. “Don’t ever come around again. This isn’t Paris. Let me drop up to your hotel the morning after, and we’ll have the post-mortem then.”

“I’d love it! It’s a standing date.”

From the quick way he said it, and the fact that he had never once asked me where I was living, or made any move to come and see me, it came to me that he knew all about Juana, just like he had known all about Gold. Then I began to have this nervous feeling, that never left me, wondering what he was going to pull next.