Beautiful Ruins (43)

At a camp, miles from the pass, Woodworth tells Eddy a spring snowstorm has made it too dangerous to attempt—but Eddy won’t take no for an answer. He offers Woodworth’s men twenty dollars for every child they will carry over the pass. A few soldiers agree and they press on—and are nearly killed traversing the pass they’ve just crossed weeks earlier. Finally, Eddy and Foster and a handful of men stagger back into the Donner camp. It’s a scene from hell. Bodies cut up in the snow . . . pieces hanging like sausages in a deli. The smell . . . the despair . . . gaunt survivors unrecognizable as humans. William Eddy can barely muster the strength to walk to the cabin he built months earlier, where he and Foster left their families.

Foster’s son is still alive! Foster cries as he holds his boy. But for Eddy . . . he’s too late. His son died days earlier. William Eddy has lost his whole family. He goes into a rage and stands above the villain, Keseberg, who may have eaten the children, this man who is nothing more than an animal. Eddy looks down at this beast. He steps forward to kill the man . . . but he can’t. He falls down and stares at the sky again, at the very sky that dropped that first snowflake on him. And his head goes to his hands. Foster steps forward to kill Keseberg for him, but a voice comes from the heap that is William Eddy. “Leave him,” he tells Foster. Because Eddy knows that this evil lives in all of us, that we are all animals in the end. “Let him be,” he says.

William Eddy has simply . . . survived. And as he faces the horizon, we realize that maybe it’s all any of us can hope to do. Survive. Caught in the raging crosscurrents of history, of sorrow, and of certain death, a man realizes he is powerless, that all his belief in himself is a vanity . . . a dream. So he does his best, he squirms against the snow and the wind and his own animal hungers, and this is a life. For family, for love, for simple decency, a good man rages against nature, and the brutality of fate, but it is a war he can never win. Every love is the same love, and it is overpowering—the wrenching grace of what it is to be human. We love. We try. We die alone.

On-screen, in this snowy field, we see a hundred-fifty years pass in ten seconds, as train tracks come through, then roads are built, then houses, and the first cars begin to ply Truckee Pass on their way to Tahoe, and then an interstate, this once impassable place now just another stretch of freeway—and we are faced with the cruel ease of today’s passage, but we pull up and see the forest, and the truth of humanity remains. These trees, this mountain, the inscrutable face of nature, of death.

And as quickly as we saw this freeway, it is gone: a dream, a hallucination, a vision in the destroyed mind of a broken man. It’s just a remote mountain pass in the year 1847. The world around him quiet as death. It’s dusk. And William Eddy rides out alone.





8

The Grand Hotel



April 1962



Rome, Italy





Pasquale slept uneasily in an expensive little albergo near the terminal station. He wondered how guests in these Rome hotels slept with all the noise. He rose early, slipped into his pants, shirt, tie, and jacket, had a caffè, and then took a cab to the Grand Hotel, where the American film people were staying. He smoked a cigarette on the Spanish Steps as he prepared himself. Vendors were setting up cut-flower stands and tourists were already flitting about, clutching folded maps, cameras around their necks. Pasquale looked down at the name on the paper that Orenzio had given him and said the name quietly so he wouldn’t mess it up.

I am here to see . . . Michael Deane. Michael Deane. Michael Deane.

Pasquale had never been inside the Grand Hotel. The mahogany door opened onto the most ornate lobby he’d ever seen: marble floors, floral frescoes on the ceilings, crystal chandeliers, stained-glass skylights depicting saints and birds and glum lions. It was hard to take it all in and he had to force himself not to gape like a tourist, to appear serious and focused. He had important business with the bastard Michael Deane. People were milling about in the lobby, groups of tourists and Italian businessmen in black suits and eyeglasses. Pasquale didn’t see any film stars, but then he wouldn’t have known what they looked like, either. He rested for a moment against a white sculpted lion, but its face was so much like a human’s that it made Pasquale uncomfortable and he moved on to the front desk.

Pasquale removed his hat and handed the desk clerk the piece of paper with Michael Deane’s name on it. He opened his mouth to say his line, but the clerk looked at the paper and pointed to an ornate doorway at the end of the lobby. “End of the hall.” A long line of people stretched and winded out the doorway where the clerk pointed.

“I have business with this man, Deane. He’s in there?” he asked the clerk.

The man just pointed and looked away. “End of the hall.”

Pasquale made his way to the back of the line at the end of the hall. He wondered if these people all had business with Michael Deane. Maybe the man had sick actresses squirreled all over Italy. The woman in line in front of Pasquale was attractive—straight brown hair and long legs, maybe his age, twenty-two or twenty-three, wearing a tight dress and nervously fingering an unlit cigarette.

“Do you have a light?” she asked.

Pasquale struck a match and held it for her. She cupped his hand and breathed in.

“I’m so nervous. If I don’t smoke right now I’m going to have to eat a whole cake. Then I’ll be as fat as my sister and they’ll have no use for me.”