by Thomas Tryon
“I went to a place where no one would find me, but they did—they always did. They gathered and sat and waited until I would come out.”
“Where was this?”
“In California, at Monterey. The Convent of Santa Margarita.”
Santa Margarita. Barry recalled the stories of the furor outside its doors, while Fedora sat peacefully in the garden with her secret.
“They were kind, the nuns; they told no one. But I had to go back, to earn a living. They smuggled me out under the reporters’ eyes, in the back of a bakery wagon.”
Her next film was to be Ophelie, and she liked the name, so she gave it to her child.
She had left it in the nuns’ safekeeping, visiting whenever possible. When things became safe, she leased a house in Pacific Palisades, where Viola arranged for Mrs. Balfour to come and keep the house and look after the child. The three lived there from 1927 to 1938, when Ophelie was twelve. The birth certificate had been falsified, and with the exception of Viola, Balfour, and a Mexican woman who came in to do the cleaning, no one was aware of the child’s existence. Her early schooling came from Mrs. Balfour, who had been at one time a teacher in England. Count Sobryanski had not married, and in 1936 Fedora informed him about his daughter. He came to Hollywood with his mother; together they tried to persuade her to wed Jan, but she remained adamant. Jan had threatened that if he could not have her he would have no one, but to ensure the family title he was obliged to marry, and this he did sixteen months later. They eventually had four children, two boys, two girls. The war threats had already begun, and afraid that she would be cut off from Vando, Fedora, too, returned to Europe.
Since a passport had been denied the doctor, and she felt it necessary to be close to him, she flew to New York, then to Halifax, where Balfour met her with Ophelie, then twelve years old. There Fedora parted with her housekeeper, and was not to see her again for nine years. She took refuge with the Sobryanskis in Switzerland, and through the war they lived together, Jan, his wife and children, the dowager countess, and in a separate wing, Fedora and Ophelie. There were other children as well, those of the servants and various Polish refugees, and at times there were as many as two dozen of them on the large estate. It was not difficult to lose Ophelie among the rest, and she had plenty of companions. She enjoyed a perfectly normal life, and in the guise of being one of the Sobryanskis, she accompanied her younger “sisters” to boarding school in Geneva. Her hair was short and parted on the side, and though she held the promise of a beautiful young woman, no one at the time could guess what a striking replica of her mother she was to become.
The war ended; people were again free to move from country to country. This Ophelie did, with the count and his wife and the other children. In the winter of 1946 they were taken to South America, while Fedora stayed with the dowager countess in Paris, and it was then that she had encountered Barry Detweiller in the Louvre. Shortly afterward, tragedy struck, one that came, ironically, at the hands of Dr. Vando. Unable to secure certain androgenic substances during the war, he had manufactured facsimiles in his laboratory. These synthetics proved effective for a time and she, now his sole patient, had undergone repeated courses of treatment. But it had not been without risk, and the compounds eventually proved disastrous. Shortly after Barry’s meeting with Fedora at the Louvre, the treatments began to fail. Her androgen balance had been upset, the rejuvenation process slowed, faltered, then failed altogether, she aged more and more quickly, then her looks overtook her years altogether. Her face was ruined; although she was only in her early fifties, she looked considerably older. She fled back to Montreux, where she hid herself away, refusing to see anyone.
“I knew then that it was over for me. Not just working, but everything. I felt I had been tricked, but of course it was only the trick reversed, and finally catching up with me. I had Ophelie, I had the Sobryanskis. I did not find it very amusing, however. I felt I had just been liberated, now I was a prisoner again. Ophelie came and shared the imprisonment with me. We were close in those days, ver-r-ry close. She watched me grow uglier and uglier while I watched her grow more and more beautiful. Sometimes we would run one of my old movies, and afterward she would mimic me in a scene. It was to make me laugh. Only those who knew her in those days know how wonderful she was. Then the idea came—it was not mine, it was not hers, it was ours together. Each of us had been thinking of it separately, and one day it just was there, the idea. It was not just the resemblance, you see, it was everything. She already had so many of my ways: of talking, of walking, of sitting; her laugh was the same; everything was the same, almost. One night she put on a dress that was like one I had worn in a film, and came down the staircase. It could have been me, so many years ago. We knew then, in that instant, what we were going to do. If we can both take the credit, we must both take the blame. I did not urge it on her, she wanted to do it. We plotted and planned, imagined, dreamed how it might be, what an enormous joke on the world. She would do a part in a picture, and later we would publish the hoax and have our laugh. So I began teaching her. Everything I knew. She learned quickly, she was so clever, so adroit. It was as if we were getting her ready for a giant masquerade party.”
Fedora brought out her old scripts, which Ophelie studied and memorized. Her mother taught her the rhythm of each scene, the motivations, the line-by-line readings. The count had collected most of Fedora’s films, and she ran them over and over, while Ophelie watched them until she could play each part perfectly. Time passed, Ophelie became more eager, and the work continued. She was taught Russian, and consequently could speak English with a Slavic accent. She could duplicate her mother’s voice to the slightest nuance, the merest inflection. She could hold her head precisely as her mother would, her hands could make the inimitable gestures, her eyes would assume the languorous half-lidded look. Still, Fedora was fearful that if Ophelie were to play a part, the camera would expose the fraud. Somewhere they would have forgotten something, some small but telling detail. Or people would realize she was far too young. But by then Fedora had forgotten how young she used to look; it had been so long.
There were certain facial discrepancies—the nose, the pointed chin of her father—but these noticeable faults were corrected by careful plastic surgery. Her hair was grown in to a full length, and styled as Fedora had often worn hers in newspaper photographs, her eyebrows were plucked to match her mother’s, test photographs were made; now it seemed impossible to tell the difference. For Fedora, seeing Ophelie was like looking in her mirror, but since she no longer dared face her mirror now she could look at her. The masquerade began. It was 1954, Ophelie was twenty-eight. They were in Tangier when Viola, who was a party to the plan, came from Rome: there was the role of the Holy Virgin, it was the perfect place to begin. Nothing taxing, no dialogue, but the face would be seen. It was a test; the test.
“They said she hid her age behind the radiance, a trick of light, but it was a triumph,” Fedora said excitedly. “We fooled them. Ophelie was delighted, and I urged her to play Nefertiti. When she remade Ophelie she was better than I. I hoped they would give her the award, but they did not. Neither of us.”
“Did you want the award?”
“Certainly I did,” she crackled. “It never happened for me, but I thought it might for her. Who knows how long she might have gone on?”
Who indeed?
“It was a game then, a mer-r-ry game,” she continued. “They could not imagine what was happening, after Jan married. How they wondered—and what did they think? Was Jan in love with Fedora, was Jan in love with his wife? Triangles, always the triangles. Oh, yes, they would say, how young she still is, how beautiful. La Déesse, La Serenissima. Very kind, the Venetians. But it was merry for only so long. Ophelie was beautiful, I was not.”
Where it had started to go wrong she couldn’t remember, but without realizing it she had become jealous. She had put her child in her place, hoping it would work; when it did she found she didn’t like it. “Goo
d,” she had prayed, “be good.” But not that good. She became angry that it was Ophelie on the screen, not herself. She felt that it was she who belonged there, that a matter of chemistry had denied her her rightful spot; she was displaced, passed by, forgotten. Whoever she had been, Maria Fedorovnya into Fedora, caterpillar into butterfly, she was no longer that person. The identity she had created for herself had evaporated.
And then Ophelie herself became miserable. She discovered that she resented forever playing the part of someone playing a part. She wanted to be herself, to be known as herself; she was neither Ophelie nor Fedora; she was no one. She would inscribe the name in lipstick on mirrors and walls: Ophelie, Ophelie, Ophelie. She no longer wanted to pretend Fedora, Fedora, Fedora. She was a legend, but it was not of her making.
And so they had crossed into each other’s territories and both were unhappy. They grew apart, and Fedora lost her. She began drinking, then the drugs. There were long periods when her mother would not hear from her; what news there was came from the count. The uglier stories were kept from Fedora, and she learned of Ophelie’s difficulties only when it began affecting her daughter’s work. She had not known what to do. By that time she was living on Crete, with Countess Sobryanski, and Ophelie would come to visit. They could no longer behave like mother and daughter. Ophelie was moody, intransigent, silent; she brought narcotics from Tangier, and spent her time indulging in frenzied drug trips. Meanwhile Countess Sobryanski had died, and there was the question of burial. She had insisted on interment in her native soil, but her anticommunist activities prevented this. To circumvent the authorities, her death was concealed, and her body was smuggled from Crete and taken to Poland, to be secretly buried on the edge of a wood near her old estate. As time went on, Fedora found it convenient to let people think the countess still lived, and when people from the beach looked up and saw her in the wheelchair, they saw not one of the most famous women in the world, but merely an old, anonymous Polish noblewoman.
“So my friend Maria was gone,” Fedora continued, “but there was still Ophelie. She would come back, always come back, and mock me, blame me. She said when I died I must be sure there was room for her in my coffin; we must share the same grave, the same stone. She said, please, could I die soon? It made her nervous; she wanted to be only one, not two people. The people she worked with disliked her, she hated them; she would destroy not only her Fedora, but mine, too. She went in hospital, and then out, and in again. Finally she had to stop working altogether. I couldn’t look after her, so it became Jan’s task. He is good, and kind; his wife is, too. They have had the worst of it, not I. She comes here, then goes away, but when she comes she is well; she goes when she is not. They always have her when she is not.
“But she is right: I am to blame. You see where one’s vanity may lead one. Such foolishness at the world’s expense. But more at my own.” She spoke with her old, characteristic ironic amusement of the pains that had been taken, which Barry saw went beyond mere wit or intelligence; they smacked of genius, to deceive for so long on such a scale. She had conspired with herself, her daughter, a handful of others, in a stupendous masquerade. She had created man—or woman—in her own image, but it had been for her nothing more than a joke.
“How I laughed. I thought it was so funny. But it was not, not in the end. She was not La Déesse, only La Scandalosa. It is foolish to try to be something one is not; one must always be oneself in all things. Poor Ophelie. She made only one mistake, you know.”
“What was that, madame?”
“The mistake of being human. She wanted to be somebody—herself—not me.”
Fedora had stood alone in her work and because of it she stood alone in her life. Her greatest suffering had come, though, not from her loss of beauty, her aging, but from Ophelie, whose existence had been such a disastrous replica of her own.
And so, little by little, day by day, she had given Barry the whole story of her life, correcting for him all the false facts that had made up the legend. The scene had changed; summer had gone, the Aegean blue turned gray, the chill wind blew the leaves onto the terrace, and though Kritos swept the flagstones each morning there were always more. She herself had the whisper of sere leaves about her; she was in a kind of mourning without the trappings, except for the hunter-red shirt which she kept around her shoulders. Then one day, when she had rung her bell, she leaned forward and slipped it off, and dangled it at him impatiently.
“Take it, take it; you’ll want it back, naturally. Something Fedora wore, you can tell them. For the sake of memory.”
“What was the worst of it, madame—being Fedora?”
“The worst? Having her face, I suppose. It was not an easy face to own. People always like people who have faces—as if a nose could make your fortune. They like people whose names are in electric lights, never thinking the bulbs may blow out at any time. But the worst was not to be able to go into the street like everybody else. People always looking, following, wanting to know—always to know. So I did not go out. I would not be seen. After a time I found I had forgotten what it was like to go about, to be in the streets, to watch the other people, shop, visit, eat in restaurants, to do the things people do together. I would not have known where to go, what to do, how to behave.
“Still, I have ended where I always wanted to be.” She pointed her cane out over the balustrade. “High up.”
“How is it—high up?”
“The view is considerably different—as you see. But if you look, you see how long a fall it is to down there.” She swept her cane down toward the beach, then sat nodding, thinking. Then, quite suddenly, she said, “I still owe you for a pack of cigarettes.”
Barry was surprised. “I didn’t think you remembered.”
“Certainly I remembered,” she snapped. “Nineteen forty-six, Paris, the Louvre. It was March, very cold. You were drawing the Perseus; rather badly, if I recall. You were waiting for some girl. You told me a dreadful story about wetting your pants because you were frightened by my movie. Not very gallant, to remind me how old I was, even then.” Barry was amazed; her clear recollection was astonishing. But she remembered even more. She said, “Did you ever go to the man at the Crillon? Jérôme?”
“He cut my hair for the rest of the time I stayed in Paris.”
“Then you must have looked somewhat better than you did when we met. I have sometimes thought of you. And here you are. It was why I had you brought to read to me—so I could see if you were the one to do the job. I am satisfied.” She started coughing. She pressed her hands to her flat breast and held them there for a few moments till she gathered her strength. “And the girl,” she went on after a moment. “I don’t imagine she stayed around very long.”
“As a matter of fact, she didn’t.”
“I told you you could not have it both ways. You could not have art and heart together.”
“I remember. Oil and water.”
“Exactly. It must be one or the other. But for me it was neither. I had no heart and I had no art. I told you that, too. Nor were we goddesses, either of us; we were only women. Foolish movies do not deify; there is no art in silly pictures.”
“You had great art, madame; no critic ever said no to that.”
“Cr-r-ritics?” She gave him a contemptuous look. “One does not pay attention to what critics say. It would be like feeding the hand that bites you. And between us, the two Fedoras, we did many more bad pictures than we did good. One does one’s work and performs what is there to be performed. But you keep your eyes open, and if you are smart, your mouth shut. Do you know of the anthropophagi?”
“Cannibals?”
“Precisely. That is what they are; they are so hungry for success and fame and the rest, they eat one another. They are a hungry lot. Flesh and blood and bone and hair—they will eat the whole. It is a dirty business, but if the picture is good it perhaps is worth it. After all, when one eats an egg it is not wise to think of where it came from. À demain.”<
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Kritos had come and was wheeling her away; Barry followed alongside her chair. He had the feeling that he wouldn’t be seeing her much longer, that she would never see another birthday.
“But,” she said, going, “when you see the Windsor duchess, tell her I stayed rich and I stayed thin.”
“And the others—what shall I tell them?”
“Who?”
“The world.”
“About what?”
“About Fedora.”
“Tell them that she had her face on a Dixie cup cover,” she returned, as the rubber wheels bumped over the threshold. “It was enough.”
Silence had fallen in Barry Detweiller’s living room. Marion leaned a little forward from the sofa, hands clasped between her knees, her fingertips tapping together as she looked up at the portrait.
“Well,” she said finally, breaking the spell. “There certainly were a lot of Fedoras.”