Kitabı oxu: «Promises»

Prologue

With some nervousness, Carla Gearhart glanced at herself in the makeup mirror which was ringed its entire circumference by soft-ray bulbs that provided light but little glare, and illuminated every part of her face. A long time had passed since she dared to examine her reflection in this manner, afraid that she would look so weary, so prematurely aged that no amount of makeup would compensate. Yet she realized that, somehow, she actually seemed younger than she had just two years before.

That fact was why she continued to stare at the image as it really was and yet questioned whether she was simply deceiving herself, precisely what she might have done at another time, another place.

Lord, surely this is not real, what I am seeing. Surely I’ve got to be fantasizing, she thought. After all that has happened, all that pain, those long hours of doing nothing but worry and cry, how in the world could I look this good?

But the mirror was not deceiving her, nor was she deceiving herself.

Her flame red hair was healthier looking, and a bit longer than before, flowing like a river of molten fire that bordered on iridescence—the once deep-set circles under her eyes, evidence of a life lived recklessly had vanished. Her skin glowed, her complexion having lost a certain paleness, and she could also actually count less wrinkles, crow’s-feet and the like, not more, a self-analysis that surprised Carla with its results.

Lord, I have been to hell and back! she exclaimed, and yet the years seem to have fallen away from my face. I looked older than this the morning after I won my Oscar for Best Actress of the Year.

One hand happened to be resting on a relatively new red leather-bound Bible, the other on a gold-framed color photograph of a young man in his late twenties, square-jawed, with a slight scar slicing through his left eyebrow.

Older…

He looked older, over thirty in fact; his shirt off, showing a chest that was muscular but not grotesque, more like that of a champion surfer than a body builder.

I suspect that that was the problem, she told herself. If you had appeared as young as you truly were, I doubt that I would ever have—

Carla stopped that thought, suspecting all too well that there was no way she could have predicted anything about their relationship because, after all, he would have been the same person he was regardless of his age, and nothing about her would have changed except perhaps her expectations.

How she did love this man! How wise he seemed!

Though only half a dozen years older by the calendar, Carla Gearhart was much more than that in terms of her experience in a life that had had more peaks and valleys, it could be said, than much of Switzerland itself.

“By contrast, you seemed to have lived like a monk in some monastery,” she said out loud. “And that innocent, modest manner of yours. You were so different from anyone I’d ever known.”

Kissing…

A flashing memory of his lips touching her own took her back to the first time they had held one another.

We were standing on the deck of a riverboat that was cruising down the Mississippi toward New Orleans, Carla remembered. I told you I felt nervous about the performance I was scheduled to give there and I told you I had prayed about it. And you stood back, and looked at me as though you were seeing me for the first time, then you leaned over and kissed me, and we stayed like that for what seemed like the rest of that little journey but which probably was only a few minutes, lost to everything and everyone around us.

She brought her fingers to her lips.

I had not been kissed like that since high school, she told herself, with such tenderness and even a little uncertainty.

Carla sighed as her finger moved up to her lower eyelids and wiped away a tear that had formed.

You seemed so strong, she recalled, but nothing like any of the other men I had known—

Carla cut herself off, tears starting to pour in earnest down her cheeks, causing her makeup to streak.

What a mess, she told herself as she looked again at the mirror, and the sad reflection that it now gave back to her. The makeup girl will—

The door!

Lost in her thoughts, preferring the company of even bittersweet memories to the harsher present reality, Carla was startled when someone began knocking on the door to her star’s dressing room.

“Are you okay, Carla?” the stage manager asked apprehensively. Despite himself, he had developed some affection in recent months for a woman whom he once had found quite intolerable but who now was very different, changed so drastically that some idle, jesting-type scuttlebutt was actually suggesting that she might be an identical twin who had taken on the task of impersonating the real Carla Gearhart.

At first she could not answer, hoping that he would come back later, that for the present she could be left alone.

“Are you—?” the voice started to repeat with a bit more urgency.

“I will be, Albert,” she interrupted, “God knows I have to be.”

“That He does, Carla. Bless you.”

A second of silence, then: “Five minutes and you’re on.”

Five minutes!

Under ordinary circumstances, getting her makeup back on would take at least half an hour. How could she possibly reconstruct it in a fraction of that time, especially since her makeup girl was nowhere around.

“Are you still there, Albert?” she asked quickly, hoping to catch him before he was involved in some other task.

“Yes, Carla, I am.”

“I wanted to say something else.”

“Go ahead, Carla.”

She could think of few times in her adult life when she was tongue-tied but this was surely one of them.

“Thank you for being a friend, thank you for your concern, though I wonder if I deserve it,” she said without telling him what was going on inside her head, but meaning the word friend more than she had ever thought possible, since she once had been prone toward treating stagehands and assistant directors and others of their ilk as servants who had to do her bidding or she would make matters totally miserable for them.

“You never called me that before,” he acknowledged. “But I do now, Albert, and it comes from my heart, dear man.”

“I’ll be back in four minutes.”

“I know I can count on that.”

Carla glanced at that photo on the makeup table, knowing how great a part Kyle had played in her transformation from show business haridelle to what she had become, and speculating where she would be without him in her life.

Kyle, she thought, my love, my impossible love.

Carla reached out and brushed the year-old photo with her fingers, pretending that, by doing so, she could somehow touch Kyle himself, that the glossy paper it was pnnted on was a kind of portal, and he could be found on the other side, and all she had to do was reach through, and he would be there waiting to hold her again.

If only you were here tonight, she told herself, if only you were in the audience and I could sing my heart out to you in front of everyone, and tell you before tens of thousands of witnesses what it means to me that I have been able to love you.

How she hated those two words.

…if only.

It might be that they were the cruelest in the English language, forcing her mind and emotions back over territory that it might have been better not to revisit.

…if only.

That second time, the tears came in a flood that could have proven unstoppable but she was still a woman of exceptional will, a will that used to be so dominant that it sought to control others but which now focussed only on herself, and how badly she had treated people before Kyle and she had met. And Carla knew that she could never let sorrow and despair get the best of her, could never let visions of the past few months squander her present, for that would not have pleased Kyle, that would have upset and alarmed him terribly and brought him hurrying to her side as he begged her, “You must stop this, you must not destroy yourself. I am not worth it, my dearest Carla.”

Despite her melancholy, she chuckled at that.

I am not worth it, my dearest Carla.

As she put her hand back on the Bible, enjoying the texture of its leather binding, she said out loud, “Not worth it, Kyle? God brought you into my life. If for no other reason, that makes you more precious than you could ever realize.”

She picked up the Bible slowly and leafed through it, then stopped as she came to Romans, and then on to 8:28: “All things work together for good to those who know and love the Lord.”

Written by Paul the apostle at a point in his life when death seemed close, a death implicit with ridicule in front of a bloodthirsty crowd of people excited by the sight of someone dying, his sentence given at the maniacal command of a gloating emperor who had sought that moment for a long time, it seemed almost incomprehensibly joyful, a grand delusion under the circumstances, and yet she was drawn to a second verse much like the first, Philippians 4:11: “I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content.”

Another knock.

“One minute, Carla,” Albert called in to her.

Her hands were trembling. In a flash she had lost her courage, and would now have to give in to her pain.

“No, I can’t,” she replied sadly. “I can’t do this. It is too soon after all. Tell them I am not ready. You must do that for me.”

Silence, for only a few seconds, but it seemed longer.

Albert asked, “May I come in, Carla?”

“Yes…”

She was not keen on spending any time with him at that moment because she could easily guess what he would say, knew what he would try to accomplish, knew that she did not want to hear any of it. And since she was the star, she could order him or anyone else to respect her every wish—at least the old Carla Gearhart would have done that.

Albert was young and rather good-looking but Carla knew that he had survived some hard times—survived only by finding his faith.

Albert saw that her hand was on the Bible.

“Still wondering?” he asked since he knew the details of what had happened, and could understand her feelings. “Still searching?”

“Wondering? Searching?” Carla repeated. “Yes, I am, Albert. I begin to wonder if I will ever stop wondering.”

She stared at him with a look that was akin to desperation.

“What has happened is still new, fresh,” Albert added. “If you cut your arm, it won’t heal in a day or even a week perhaps. Depending upon how deep the cut is, that healing might take the better part of a month. And, remember, Carla, that is a simple cut. Your pain is much more severe because the wound itself is.”

“I am afraid it will never stop hurting,” she said, her voice quavering. “How could I endure that? How could I ever endure that? Getting up each morning only to face—”

Carla stopped, embarrassed.

“I see you now, the way you are, as part of the good that came out of knowing Kyle. The two of you might not have met otherwise.”

“That’s true, Carla,” Albert acknowledged. “I might have been headed straight for an eternity in hell.”

“I don’t know about that.”

She was still uncomfortable with discussion along those lines, though the idea of hell had seemed a natural part of Kyle’s faith.

“Oh, I would have,” Albert reiterated. “My life was all wrong. I felt so weary more often than I could count. The drugs aged me a lot, you know. And they messed up my mind. I was dangerously close to cursing God. I know what that would have done to my spiritual destiny.”

“We are not so different,” she told Albert. “We lived, we sinned and we had to have ourselves cleansed.”

“There’s no past tense involved,” he reminded her. “It will be a constant battle that goes on until the day we die.”

Carla nodded, hating the truth as he presented it but knowing that truth for what it was, an unassailable series of facts from moment to moment.

“Will you get ready now?” Albert asked. “You’ve got more than fifty thousand people waiting for you out there.”

Carla had been slumping slightly in her chair but that brought her up straight.

“What?” she blurted out. “That’s capacity, isn’t it?”

“And then some, Carla. Extra seats had to be brought in. If the fire department doesn’t find out, it’ll be a miracle.”

“My biggest live audience…” she muttered.

“A record. Nobody’s got that kind of draw, and you’ve got to be aware of that. Remember, too, that there are no supporting acts, which is unusual in itself. You’re the whole show.”

“Half of me feels dead right now, and yet I’m the whole show,” she said with some irony.

“Now wait a minute!” he exclaimed sternly as he pointed toward the mirror. “Don’t you see how you look?”

“Younger…”

“That’s right, Carla. Knowing Kyle has done that to you.”

Yet she scoffed at her appearance.

“I feel ancient.”

“With that kind of attitude, you could start your slide all over again, Carla, and find yourself in a place that’s emptier and even more hopeless than you ever did before.”

His words struck a nerve and she remembered the old days, sliding from the giddy ones after the Oscar ceremony to where she could not get out of bed without drugs, nor go to sleep at night without downing a quantity of pills that could only be called dangerous.

“Kyle saw you, and look at what happened!” Albert exclaimed. “Was all that he did for nothing?”

Carla waved one hand impatiently through the air.

“All right, all right,” she replied. “Give me a few minutes.”

He smiled slightly.

“What do I tell them, Carla?” he asked. “What am I asking fifty thousand human beings to believe?”

“That this is my first gig since…since—”

She was starting to choke up, and Albert interrupted before she put more stress on herself.

“I’ll think of something,” Albert said as he stooo. “Maybe I could do some kind of comedy act.”

He kissed her on the forehead.

“Pray for strength,” he whispered with some warmth. “The Lord will give it to you, Carla.”

Then he closed the dressing room quietly, leaving her alone again.

Carla’s hands were trembling as she wiped the streaked makeup off her face, and started to apply as little as possible to replace it, just enough to give her lips some color under the glaring spotlights and soften the puffiness tears had caused around her eyes.

After she was finished, she got to her feet and turned toward the door. Then she stopped as she told herself that Albert was only one of many who were expecting too much of her. Her audiences always made such heavy demands that she was bound to crack sooner or later as she tried so hard to please every man, woman and child who paid for the privilege of watching her perform.

“Forgive me, Kyle, for I just don’t have your strength, I’m afraid,” she said out loud as she opened the door and turned toward the exit, not the auditorium.

Empty.

That was odd. It was usually too busy, with people forever bumping into one another, especially as showtime approached.

No sounds, nothing except—

She stopped abruptly, listening.

A voice.

A voice that sounded distant and she had to strain her ears to hear it, a voice that was speaking her name.

Carla!

That was what the voice said, and so distinctly that she spun around to see who had come up behind her.

No one.

Shrugging, chalking it up to her nerves, she continued toward the exit a few feet ahead of her.

Carla!

There it was again.

She had heard it that second time or thought she did but still could not tell the direction from which it was coming.

“Who are you?” she asked. “Why are you doing this? Leave me alone.”

Carla reached the exit door.

Don’t leave, please.

“Stop it!” she screamed. “I can’t go out in front of those people and pretend that I feel like entertaining them!”

Yet pretense had been a part of her life since the beginning of her career.

As an actress, she always pretended to be someone else when she played a role in a movie. As a singer, she was role-playing, too, someone happy and bursting with energy, someone an audience would pay to see so that they could have a couple of hours of escape from their own problems.

“I’d only garble the lyrics, get the rhythms all wrong, miss the cues, make a fool of myself,” she said. “Tens of thousands of people would leave and talk, how, yes, yes, how they would talk, about me washed up, that I should have retired years before, and not tricked them into paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to sit and watch a broad like me pretend that I had no crosses to bear.”

Carla hesitated, half expecting the voice to say something else immediately.

She was wrong.

Only sounds from the auditorium behind her could be heard as Albert told the awaiting thousands something that the speaker system magnified a little too loudly so that the volume had to be turned down.

“Carla Gearhart will be with you soon,” he said.

Feet began to stamp in impatience and protest.

“Now I want to tell you why there is a delay,” Albert continued, pausing for effect, then continuing.

She held her breath.

Albert is pretty smooth, she acknowledged. He should be able to keep them from walking out for a little while, anyway.

Her insides were trembling.

What about later? she worried. What if they leave the auditorium and start spreading the word about me? What will happen to my career then?

She was instantly ashamed of that egocentric thought, and pushed the exit door open, a winter chill hitting her cheeks full blast, feeling like a hand slapping her across the face.

An alley.

She gasped as she saw it.

An alley, a dismal, dirty alley, beset with odors that seemed more Like those in a filthy rest room…

Inside the theater building were once-adoring thousands of clerks, accountants, teachers, computer salesmen, housewives, many others, along with the requisite bright lights, glitter at every turn, however fake it might have been, as well as all the other aspects of a million dollar engagement.

Yet outside—

None of this was unusual except on Broadway perhaps, and even in that fabled district of Manhattan, derelicts managed to hide briefly behind trash Dumpsters or use sections of each alley as not-so-private outdoor rest rooms.

Oh, God, Carla thought prayerfully. This is where I’m headed if I don’t stop myself tonight. Oh, God, I need Your help’ I can’t end up this way, my guts eaten up by drugs or maybe in a cheap motel, dying after taking a hundred sleeping pills.

A filthy back alley seemed a metaphor for what her life would have been like without Kyle Rivers—dark and filled with all manner of trash and with no real hope that any of this would ever change.

Go back inside…

That voice!

She pressed her palms against her ears but it would not stop since she now realized that it seemed to be coming from within her.

Kyle loves you, Carla. Whatever happens, remember that. And don’t give up. That’s what the enemy of your soul wants.

She answered instinctively, pointing out the sheer ugliness of that alley, and its putrid odors.

“Yes, I know that he loves me,” she spoke. “And I love him enough to know that without him in my life, what do I have left? This is where I could be someday, eating scraps that others have thrown away.”

God is with you.

“Sounds like an old story, often repeated,” Carla retorted sarcastically. “Isn’t there anything new to say?”

She clenched both hands into fists.

“Why give me hope, and then snatch it right from my grasp?” she begged. “Why show me my true love and—?”

Never mind any of that, Carla. You must go back inside and trust God Without trust, your faith is a charade.

But still she resisted though less certainly, taking one step, then another away from the stage door and down the alley toward the street beyond it.

Suddenly she saw movement.

A middle-aged derelict had pushed aside a pile of cardboard boxes under which he had been sleeping. In his hand was an old rusty trumpet.

Carla walked faster, a bit afraid because she was well dressed, obviously “from money” and he was a typical panhandler. Normally these people, she had heard, were not violent but then desperation was a wild card in anybody’s life.

She was almost at the end of the alley, just a few feet from the street outside.

“You can just walk ‘way and leave everythin’ and everyone behind you,” the derelict spoke. “I can’t. I’s stuck where I am, can’t do nothing about it.”

…you can just walk ‘way and leave everythin’ and everyone behind you.

Carla stood still. Suddenly she could not move.

Her band.

She was leaving every member of it behind her, betraying them along with fifty thousand customers, part of that great mass of people who had made her the success she was.

How can I do this, Lord? she prayed. How can I stab them in the back like that?

She took one more step toward the street.

The derelict let out a cry of despair that hit her like a very large block of ice, chilling, it seemed, every nerve in her body.

Slowly Carla turned, and saw him standing in the middle of that alley, and seeming very much a part of it, as dirty, as smelly, as filled with debris but his trash was different, for apart from his wretched clothes, it was inside him, the refuse of a life that apparently had been inexorable in driving him to that alley that night. She walked back into the alley, and approached him, standing there, wanting to say something but not yet quite sure what the words should be.

“Hey, lady, what are you starin’ at?” he snarled defiantly, having learned the bad habit of being offensive to everyone.

“You,” she told him honestly.

“What about me? You ain’t seen no bums before?”

“None with a trumpet in one hand.”

He looked at it, and chuckled as he said, “You got that right, lady. I’m one of a kind I am.”

“Why are you carrying it like that?” she asked.

“Only thing I got left from the old days. I never let go of it. I’ll be buried with it, yes, ma’am, I surely will.”

“You have played the trumpet professionally?”

“Shoot, lady! I was tops years ago. Lookin’ at me now, you’s probably thinkin’ I’m dreamin’ or somethin’. But I ain’t. Gene Krupa, those other guys, they were no better than me, no, ma’am, they sure enough weren’t.”

“Do you have any family left?” Carla asked, aware that scaring him by talking about his eternal destiny would only have made him shut her out.

“Not any more. All dead, or so disgusted with me that they might as well be. My parents were the last to go. I’ve been all alone since then. Nobody wants me, you see. Nobody cares no more.”

She glanced more closely at the trumpet, saw that there was a possibility it could be repaired.

“You could play that instrument,” she offered. “If you were as good as you say, you’d get gigs even now.”

He scratched his dirt-streaked hair.

“Who would sit still and listen to a has-been or maybe some guy who never was?” he spoke, sighing forlornly. “Maybe all I ever did have was my stupidity in thinkin’ that I was any good, you get what I’m sayin’, lady?”

“I can help you,” she insisted.

He coughed convulsively and Carla’s heart went out to him.

“Sorry…” he told her as he caught his breath again and seemed to mean it. “What’s some slick broad like you able to do for a godforsaken guy like me?”

“You think God has turned His back on you?”

“You blind or somethin’? I ain’t seen nothing and no one showing me God’s love lately.”

“I am an entertainer myself. There are fifty thousand people inside this building who have paid to watch me.”

“Oh…” he said, impressed but growing more uneasy. “Well, I’ll be goin’ now. You can’t be late. Audiences hate that.”

“I am very late already, mister,” Carla remarked ruefully “A few more minutes could never matter.”

She reached out for his arm.

“Let me take you inside,” she said, understanding why he would hesitate, given his appearance and the body odors coming from him.

“I stink.”

Carla had no need of being convinced of that.

“Yes, you do, mister, very badly,” she agreed. “But a good shower can take care of that. And there are some stage clothes you can slip into. Would you tell me your name?”

“Thomas…” he blurted out, narrowed his eyes, the cynicism that was part of the outlook of most homeless people, especially the ones as bad off as he was, an instinctive fact of life that most of them never shed. “Thomas Gilboyne.”

“God doesn’t want you to end up like this, Thomas,” she told him.

“And you speak for God, lady?” he asked. “Then ask Him to snuff me out like He does everybody else sooner or later.”

Thomas coughed again, nearly collapsing to the ground and Carla thought for an instant that he was indeed dying, right before her eyes. She gripped his arm and held him upright, fighting her revulsion as she inhaled the rank odor of his body and filthy clothes.

As Carla glanced around desperately for help her silent prayer was answered when two stagehands appeared at the exit door. They stepped into the alley, both apparently about to light up cigarettes, since smoking was not permitted in most of the backstage area.

“Randy! Jeff!” Carla called out to them.

The young men ran over to her and she read the confusion on both faces as they took in the sight of Carla supporting the derelict musician. “Help me get him into the theater, please,” she instructed. “He’s sick. He needs a doctor.”

“But Carla…” Randy began. He glanced nervously at the other stagehand.

“If you won’t help, I’ll do it myself,” she insisted. She took a stumbling step forward doing her best to support the sick man and suddenly, Randy and Jeff moved to help her.

The company always traveled with a doctor and Carla knew her specific request to have Thomas examined and given the best possible medical care would not be ignored. He would in fact most likely get better medical attention here, she reflected, than in any of the city hospitals that would accept him as a patient.

The two stagehands gently carried Thomas Gilboyne between them, and as Carla opened the stage door, they took him inside.

He was beginning to regain consciousness, his bloodshot eyes widening.

“Am I where I think I am?” Thomas asked, casting a longing glance in the direction of the stage. “What did I do to deserve this?”

“You were God’s instrument,” she said, “and that makes you special.”

“God used me?”

“He did, my new friend, he did use you in a wonderful way,” Carla assured him as she smiled broadly.