by Robert Bloch
I followed her. As she slid in her grip on the bottle wavered and I reached out to break its fall, but she tightened her hold in time and set the bottle down on the table.
“Leave me alone, I’m all right.” Her eyes narrowed. “Come on, quit playing games. They tell you to come after me?”
“They?”
“I forgot. They won’t be sending anyone now.” She shook her head, reached for the glass. “That’s why Harker picked a fight. He knows.”
“Knows what, Miss Manners?”
“About my contract. They haven’t renewed.” She downed her shot. “I can’t get to Morris, he won’t see me—it’s the old routine. They’re dumping me.”
The glass slammed down on the table and I stared at it. “But they wouldn’t do that. You’re a great box-office attraction—”
“Here.” Her hand gripped my shoulder, pulling me forward. “Take a good look, sonny boy. The corners of the eyes, that’s where the wrinkles begin. And the sag, under the chin, when you forget to keep your head up.”
“I don’t see anything—”
“The camera does. And what the camera sees, the audience sees.” She released me, shaking her head. “Maybe I could go to Griffith; he could shoot me under gauze. I’ll find something, but the word will be out. Coronet didn’t renew for three years, so let’s play smart and make it a two-year contract. Or one. Or just a single-picture deal. And the pictures will get fewer and farther between. And then—ahhh, to hell with it!” She rose unsteadily. “I’m going home.”
I slid out of the booth, took her arm. “Let me drive you, Miss Manners.”
“Suit yourself.”
The bartender gave us a bored nod as we departed. Outside the lights were already beginning to wink on; Sunset was in shadow. Nobody paid the slightest attention as I led Maybelle Manners to the car. I had a little trouble with the Pierce-Arrow’s fancy gearshift, but I got it started.
Maybelle Manners slumped beside me. “Know where I live?”
I nodded. “West Adams, isn’t it?”
“Good boy.” She closed her eyes and I drove through the gathering dusk—past the new Chaplin studio at La Brea, past Gower Gulch, and along the clutter of cubicles lining Poverty Row. The “quickies” were made here, the films ground out on a five-day schedule by the shoestring producers. Some made a fortune on their shoestrings and others ended up using them as a suicide’s noose. I wondered how long it would be before Maybelle Manners went to work for one of the shoestring operators—or went to beg for work.
We turned south on Western, heading down into the city, and now the lights blazed brilliantly. If I wished, I could have caught a clear glimpse of the face beside me, searched for the sag, the wrinkles she’d tried to show me. But I didn’t want to see them. I didn’t want to see her, or Harker, or myself too clearly. I’d already seen too much today, and I wanted to get away—
“Stop.”
I thought she was asleep, but she stirred now, sat up, tugged at my sleeve.
“Stop here—”
She glanced off to the right and I followed her gaze as I pulled over to the curb. We were in front of a movie house.
“Come on, let’s see the picture,” she said.
“But Miss Manners, are you sure you’re all right—?”
She didn’t answer, just opened the door of the car and started to get out. I came around my side just in time to take her arm.
Then I looked up at the marquee, saw the pictured promise of the posters, the bright beckoning of the box office. Suddenly I understood. She was right, this was what to do when you were down—the thing all America did. Forget your troubles and go to the movies.
So we did.
The film was one of Harker’s own—The Love Goddess. And it starred Maybelle Manners.
The short subjects were on as we came in. I caught a glimpse of Topics of the Day as she pulled me over to the stairs. “Sit in the balcony,” she murmured, above the organ’s drone. “Don’t want anyone to see—”
We climbed up into the shadows, found seats. She was right; the balcony was deserted at this hour. As we settled down a Sennett comedy skittered across the screen. Then the curtains closed, reopened to an accompanying crescendo, and the feature began. Maybelle Manners appeared and she smiled at me.
I sat there in the warm darkness as the organ soothed, sat there and surrendered myself to her smile. Mabel was gone gone and only Maybelle existed; Maybelle the Mona Lisa, with an eternity of enchantment in her eyes.
She was up there on the screen and she was real, bigger than life and infinitely better, to me and to everyone in the audience below. They were all seeing her, just as I did, and that meant the dream was coming true again. The dream was coming true and I could believe once more—in her, in Harker, in everything.
The woman in the seat beside me, smelling of cheap alcohol and expensive perfume, was just another moviegoer. A moviegoer who stared entranced at the vision before us, clutching my arm and squeezing it impulsively as the radiant Maybelle Manners embraced the hero. I didn’t recognize him.
“Who is he?” I whispered.
“Raymond Clarke.” To my surprise, she laughed softly. “Queer as a three-dollar bill.”
“He doesn’t look it.” And indeed he didn’t—in the prolonged close two-shot, his face wore a look of most convincing passion.
“I fixed him good,” she murmured. “Want to know how I did it?” Before I could answer her hand had left my arm and wandered into my lap. I felt her fingers fumbling, fondling, firming. “I knew it wouldn’t be in the shot,” she said. “Works pretty good, doesn’t it?”
Rigid with response I opened my mouth, just as her warm, full lips closed over it and her tongue moved—moved in rhythm with her fingers, fingers that first freed and then captured, captured and caressed insistently, insatiably. With her other hand she pulled me toward her, grasping my hip as she slumped low in her seat.
“Easy,” she whispered. “No noise—”
There was only the faint sound of her skirt rustling upwards as the fingers guided me, guided me there in the warm darkness as the organ throbbed and the lovers moved together and the love scene reached its climax up there, down here, up and down, organ rising, organ falling, and then—
Then, behind my head, the scene changed, and a brighter light flooded from the screen to fall upon the face before and below me; this time I saw her, saw her plain, and it was Mabel. Mabel, with the unmistakable sag at the jowls, the revealed wrinkles, the sweat-beaded forehead, the open mouth exhaling a sour stench. Framed by dishevelled hair, the puffy face peered up at me.
“It’s good, isn’t it?” she panted. “Isn’t it good, darling?” Her eyes were radiant with fulfillment.
But she wasn’t looking at me.
She was staring past me. Staring over my shoulder, up at the screen. That’s what she’d been doing all the time—staring at the image of Maybelle Manners.
Somehow I was back in my seat again and Maybelle Manners smiled down at me from afar, smiled down at a speed of twenty-four frames a second as I adjusted my clothing and tried very hard to avoid looking at the woman beside me who gasped out her adoration to that flickering fantasy of light and shadow looming over us.
I tried not to look at her when we left the theater, and was mercifully spared conversation when she dozed off into sodden slumber during the drive to the West Adams Street mansion just down the block from Fatty Arbuckle’s place.
After parking I roused her for a teetering trip up the walk. Becky answered the door and we must have said goodnight, but I can’t remember the words. There was nothing about her that I wanted to remember, now.
I walked until I reached a streetcar stop, boarded, transferred, headed home. Hollywood was a nine o’clock town and the lights were going out all along my route. I wondered if Aunt Minnie and Uncle Andy were waiting up for me; wondered if they’d talked it over and decided to tell me about my folks. Tell me what I needed to know, now more than ever in a
world where there must be something real to cling to.
The trolley rumbled and jolted but the sound lulled me and my head lolled.
Until I heard the noise. The deep roaring, and over it, the shrill wailing.
I looked up, looked through the window, saw the light blazing forth into the street.
The blazing light—
The trolley screeched to a halt and I swung off, running toward the searing source of light and sound. Running toward the flames, rising like burnished banners from the walls and roof of our bungalow.
I saw two fire trucks, a patrol wagon, an ambulance. A semicircle of police held the white rope of a cordon to hold back the crowd.
But nothing could hold back the flames that roared and crackled and consumed, sealing off all entry to doors and windows. Sealing off all entry, and all exit—
Fire hoses hissed and played vainly over the blaze; men in helmets and rubber coats bawled orders as inaudible as they were inadequate. As I watched, part of the roof gave way and a shower of fiery embers scorched the sky.
I grabbed the tall cop and shouted to make myself heard above bedlam. “Let me through—I live here!”
He shook his head. “Stand back.”
“My aunt and uncle—are they all right?” I knew he heard me, but he was looking away. “Did you get them out?”
Still he wouldn’t look at me. I shook his shoulder.
“God damn it, tell me!”
Then he looked at me and he didn’t have to tell me.
SIX
SOMETIMES the film speeds up and everything becomes a blur.
All I really remember about the next two days is that Arch Taylor took care of me. He got me into a room at the little hotel down the street from the studio, saw to it that I ate and slept. He took on the ordeal of identifying the bodies when what was left of them could finally be removed from the charred debris of the bungalow. He selected an undertaker and chose the caskets. And he talked to reporters, the police, the people from the fire department.
They couldn’t tell him very much. Apparently the blaze had started shortly before ten o’clock; a flash-fire spreading instantly. It could have been the fault of the electrical wiring, or a short in the cord of the iron. The half-melted metal legs of an ironing board were discovered in the front room, and there was a crumpled tin of cleaning fluid. Perhaps Aunt Minnie had forgotten to unplug the iron when she went to bed and if somehow the fluid had ignited—
But nobody knew and accidents will happen and life goes on and did your uncle have any insurance and you’ve got to be brave. Just a blur.
Strangely enough, when the funeral actually started I was all right again.
I sat there in the little chapel on Selma Avenue, watching the studio people come in. Almost everyone who wasn’t away on location showed up. Uncle Andy hadn’t been the most important man on the lot, but he had friends.
Some of them came up and spoke to me before the service started.
“Sure sorry about what happened, Tommy.” That was tall Dude Williams, strangely subdued as he moved past me with his tiny wife.
“My deepest condolences.” Emerson Craig gripped my hand, standing before me handsome and immaculate as though he’d just stepped off the screen.
Little Jackie Keeley was harder to recognize. He looked incongruous, somehow, without his trademark—the oversized checkered cap he always wore, even when balancing on the end of a flagpole while Mack Swain hacked at its base with an axe. But he wasn’t being funny today. “Terrible tragedy,” he muttered, moving past me.
The next man I couldn’t identify at all. I’d seen him a dozen times, of course, but never on our lot. And never like this.
“Karl Druse,” he said.
I couldn’t help but stare. For Druse was just a quiet middle-aged man with greying brown hair; neither fat nor lean, tall nor short. And I didn’t remember him that way, not from his films.
The Karl Druse I remembered was sometimes a giant, sometimes a dwarf. If Lon Chaney was the Man of a Thousand Faces, then Druse was the Man of a Thousand Bodies. I remembered a crook-backed King Richard, an obscenely fat rajah, a thin shadow of a vampire. Only the eyes were unchanged, the mirrors of a dark despair.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and that was all. I watched him walk away with that peculiar, stiff-legged gait of his, like a man on stilts. Maybe he wore platform heels; that might explain how he created the illusion of varied height in his roles. But a horror movie star who wore a derby—
There were other hands to clasp, other condolences to awkwardly acknowledge. Kurt Luzovsky and Madame Olga appeared, and I was glad to see them there. John Frisby, the director, and Sam Lipsky, even Miss Glint in a broad-brimmed black straw hat. Carla Sloane and Betty from the front office, but not Sol Morris—he, I knew, was attending an exhibitor’s convention in San Francisco. I didn’t see Maybelle Manners, either, but I’d hardly expected to and I was somehow relieved that she hadn’t come.
Just before I sat down, with Arch Taylor on one side and Luzovsky on the other, I noticed Theodore Harker entering; his black suit for once singularly appropriate to the occasion.
The services were mercifully brief. Neither Aunt Minnie nor Uncle Andy had been regular churchgoers and the hired reverend didn’t know them. But he said the appropriate things, and when Dude Williams broke down midway through the Twenty-third Psalm and his wife led him out, it was the signal for general sniffling.
Then the organ played and we filed past the caskets, the closed caskets that somehow had nothing to do with Aunt Minnie or Uncle Andy, and it was time to go to the cemetery.
While the crowd moved off I took advantage of the moment to visit the discreetly concealed front office and see Mr. Leffingwell, the head of the mortuary.
“About the bill,” I began.
He nodded. “Mr. Harker took care of it.”
“Harker?”
“Yesterday afternoon. He ordered that extra floral arrangement, too.” Leffingwell rose. “Are you riding out in the first limousine?”
“I’d prefer to go with Mr. Taylor,” I told him.
And I did. It wasn’t a long drive.
“You all right?” he asked.
“I guess so. I don’t know.” I sighed. “Maybe I’m crazy.”
“Tell me.”
“Well, all during the ceremony, I kept thinking it was just a scene. Something out of a picture, with the organ playing just the way it does in the theater. I kept watching the way the lighting hit the coffins, and when the minister came on I wondered if he was somebody Lipsky would cast in the part. The crowd was just a bunch of extras—even when Dude Williams started to cry it seemed like an act—”
“That was real enough,” Taylor said. “He’s not in good shape, I hear. Think he’s worried about it; he never used to work with a double on the stunt scenes.”
“Maybe he should have sent his double to the funeral,” I said. Then I began to blink and my throat tightened. “What’s the matter with me? Minnie and Andy gone, the only folks I’ve got, and I keep thinking about the whole thing as if it was a movie.”
“Nothing wrong with you.” His hand was firm on my shoulder, his voice was firm too. “Just shock catching up with you. You’ll get over it. From now on everything is real. Right?”
I knew that what he said was true, but I wasn’t entirely convinced. Although the bit at the cemetery seemed real enough. It was short and efficient; only about half of those present at the chapel had come out for the interment. The others had hurried back to the studio and their work.
It was a surprise to see Theodore Harker at the graveside. After the lowering of the caskets I left Arch Taylor with the Luzovskys and walked over to where Harker stood.
“Mr. Leffingwell told me what you did,” I said. “I wanted to thank you—”
“That’s not necessary.” He stared at the men who were arranging the wreaths and flowers over the graves. “The front office asked me to take care of it. They’ll reimburse me. Andy
was a good man. He’ll be missed.”
“Then you knew he wasn’t—?”
“Of course. That French accent was obviously false. But he was genuine enough. As was your aunt.” Suddenly the black eyes were looking straight at me. “What are your plans now?”
“Well, I’ve got to find a place to live. I think there’s some insurance money—Arch Taylor is checking into that—and of course I have my job.”
“Twelve dollars a week.”
I stared at him.
“Mr. Taylor has already spoken to me about you. He said you’re interested in becoming a writer. Of course you’re not ready for screenplays yet, that’s out of the question.”
“But—”
His gesture silenced me. “You need experience. The best way to begin is to work with a production unit and learn how to structure a story. Start with titles—they cover continuity, hold scenes together. A good title-writer can work his way up to scenarios.”
Harker’s eyes, and something behind them, studied me for a moment. “I talked to John Frisby this morning. He’s a competent director. They’re going to put him on the Jackie Keeley pictures and he’s willing to give you a chance. If you’re interested, report to him tomorrow morning.”
I found my voice. “Tomorrow?”
Harker nodded and gestured with his cane. “Forget this—it’s over and done with. Live for the present, plan for the future, don’t let anyone or anything interfere. Right now you may think it’s a tragedy to find yourself suddenly alone, but some day you’ll realize it’s better this way. You’ve got to travel alone. I know.”
He broke off abruptly, then turned and strode away down the path, swinging his cane.
I hadn’t even time to thank him.
Arch Taylor came up beside me. “Arch,” I said. “Did you hear the news—?”
Taylor smiled. “He told you? Good.”
And it was good, very good. That night I was able to sleep soundly and dreamlessly for the first time since the fire. The next morning I went to work for John Frisby.