Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [136]
surfboarding in the Hawaiian breakers. Yes, though you may not think it now, Yvonne has been submerged in burning lakes, suspended over precipices, ridden horses down ravines, and she's an expert at "double pick-offs." Yvonne laughs merrily today when she remembers the frightened determined girl who declared she could ride very well indeed, and then, the picture in progress, the company on location, tried to mount her horse from the wrong side! A year later she could do a "flying mount" without turning a hair. "But about that time I was rescued from Hollywood," as she smilingly puts it, "and very unwillingly too, by my Uncle Macintyre, who literally swooped down, after my father died, and sailed me back to Honolulu!" But when you've been a "Boomp Girl" and are well on your way to being an "Oomph Girl!" at eighteen, and when you've just lost your beloved "Boss-Boss," it's hard to settle down in a strict loveless atmosphere. "Uncle Macintyre," Yvonne admits, "never conceded a jot or tittle to the tropics. Oh, the mutton broth and oatmeal and hot tea!" But Uncle Macintyre knew his duty and, after Yvonne had studied with a tutor, he sent her to the University of Hawaii. There--perhaps, she says, "because the word 'star' had undergone some mysterious transformation in my mind"--she took a course in astronomy! Trying to forget the ache in her heart and its emptiness, she forced an interest in her studies and even dreamed briefly of becoming the "Madame Curie" of astronomy! And there too, before long, she met the millionaire playboy, Cliff Wright. He came into Yvonne's life at a moment when she was discouraged in her University work, restless under Uncle Macintyre's strict regime, lonely, and longing for love and companionship. And Cliff was young and gay, his rating as an eligible bachelor was absolutely blue ribbon. It's easy to see how he was able to persuade her, beneath the Hawaiian moon, that she loved him, and that she should leave college and marry him. ('Don't tell me for Christ sake about this Cliff," the Consul wrote in one of his rare early letters, "I can see him and I hate the bastard already: short-sighted and promiscuous, six foot three of gristle and bristle and pathos, of deep-voiced charm and casuistry." The Consul had seen him with some astuteness as a matter of fact--poor Cliff!--one seldom thought of him now and one tried not to think of the self-righteous girl whose pride had been outraged by his infidelities--"businesslike, inept and unintelligent, strong and infantile, like most American men, quick to wield chairs in a fight, vain, and who, at thirty still ten, turns the act of love into a kind of dysentery...") Yvonne has already been a victim of "bad Press" about her marriage and in the inevitable divorce that followed, what she said was misconstrued, and when she didn't say anything, her silence was misinterpreted. And it wasn't only the Press who misunderstood: "Uncle Macintyre," she says ruefully, "simply washed his hands of me." (Poor Uncle Macintyre. It was fantastic, it was almost funny--it was screamingly funny, in a way, as one related it to one's friends. She was a Constable through and through, and no child of her mother's people! Let her go the way of the Constables! God knows how many of them had been caught up in, or invited, the same kind of meaningless tragedy, or half-tragedy, as herself and her father. They rotted in asylums in Ohio or dozed in dilapidated drawing-rooms in Long Island with chickens pecking among the family silver and broken teapots that would be found to contain diamond necklaces. The Constables, a mistake on the part of nature, were dying out. In fact, nature meant to wipe them out, having no further use for what was not self-evolving. The secret of their meaning, if any, had been lost.) So Yvonne left Hawaii with her head high and a smile on her lips, even if her heart was more achingly empty than ever before. And now she's back in Hollywood and people who know her best say she has no time in her life now for love, she things of nothing but her work. And at the studio