The Butterfly Plague

by Timothy Findley

  Its threat welded their minds to a renewed effort.

  “Y’all got thirty-two seconds,” B.J. announced. “Thirty-one. Thirty. Twenty-nine.”

  “Don’t talk, Mama. We can’t concentrate.”

  “Twenty-eight—twenty-seven. Twenty-six,” B.J. continued, but in a kindly whisper.

  “Twenty-five.” She looked around the table.

  Mary Baker.

  Pete.

  Joe.

  Gloria.

  Marilyn.

  Charity.

  Josh.

  Michael (one year old, in a high chair).

  Michael.

  Josh.

  Charity.

  Marilyn.

  Charity.

  Marilyn.

  Charity.

  The untouched glass of orange juice sat between them.

  Charity.

  Glass.

  Marilyn.

  Marilyn.

  Glass.

  Charity.

  It dawned on both Pete and B.J. at the same moment.

  Marilyn.

  Glass.

  Charity.

  The missing child was Charity’s invisible friend.

  B.J. roared with laughter.

  Charity gave her mother a look of reproach and turned to the empty chair.

  “I told you there’d be trouble if you didn’t drink your orange juice up. Now we’ve all gotta do ‘Children’s Crusade’!” she said.

  Joe, aged five, burst into tears. He was one of the dead children, lying under a cross.

  Michael didn’t mind. He got to be carried by Pete.

  But Mary Baker Eddy was furious.

  “It isn’t Christian,” she raged, “to make us all Crusade in the morning!”

  “Very well,” said B.J., who could not much stand the idea of having them all inside at this particular hour, anyway. “You are forgiven. However,” she intercepted their stampede by raising her voice again, “however, Charity…”

  “Yes, Mama.”

  “That friend of yours will have to stay behind this morning and wash the orange-juice glasses.”

  “Yes, Mama.”

  Charity turned to her friend and made a face at him.

  “You ruin everything,” she said. “And I think I’m gonna find another friend. You’re just a spoilsport!”

  And with that she tramped off loudly, after the others, clanking her pail and shovel and banging all the doors.

  That noontime, at the table, there was one less chair. And Charity in mourning. Her friend had drowned.

  Across the base of “The Children’s Crusade” Noah had scratched: OF SUCH IS THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN—AND OF EARTH.

  10:00 a.m.

  Naomi was in pain.

  Miss Bonkers administered a needle.

  Ruth sat down by her mother, on the balcony, to wait for the pain to abate.

  “It’s going,” said Naomi. “It goes very quickly. The only problem is I can’t eat anything and I’m hungry.”

  “What about some soup?” Ruth asked.

  “Soup is the worst of all,” said Naomi. “So hot. I love soup. More than anything in the world, soup is what I love. And now I can’t even look at it. All your best friends turn against you.”

  She tried to laugh, and picked up her knitting.

  “I probably won’t ever finish this,” she said.

  “What is it?” Ruth asked.

  “A sweater,” said Naomi, holding parts of it up for Ruth’s inspection. “For chilly evenings in the grave.”

  “Oh, Mother. Don’t.”

  Ruth turned away.

  “It’s my death,” said Naomi. “I’ll say what I like.”

  Ruth gazed along the beach.

  The needles clicked like bones, Ruth thought. Miss Bonkers turned the pages of her book rapidly.

  Naomi said, “What’s the matter, Miss B.? Don’t you like that book?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Miss Bonkers, still with the same rapidity, turning pages. “But this is the bedroom scene and I just can’t stand it.”

  “Well, that’s funny,” said Naomi. “I thought that was why you were reading it. It has the worst reputation I ever heard of.”

  “Oh, well,” said Miss Bonkers, “that may be Mrs. Damarosch, but I read it for the war scenes. And they’re magnificent.”

  “Really?” said Naomi. Click. Click. Click.

  “War scenes always hold the very depths of my attention,” said Miss Bonkers. “Anything with a death is so sad. In a book.”

  “In a book, eh?”

  “Oh, yes. Just breaks the heart. And here, in all these war scenes, there must be twenty deaths on each page. And the most masterful thing is, every one hits you in the same way. Right in the heart.”

  Ruth got up and walked down onto the sand.

  The needles continued to click, and the pages to turn—more slowly. It was a long war.

  11:00 a.m.

  Mother looked back from the mirror.

  This morning she wore her hair bound and lightly powdered with iron gray. This morning her eye shadow was blue, her expertly sunken sockets a dark, unhealthy brown. Her lipstick? Try a little pink—add a little white. Perfect. For this morning.

  This morning was an “old” morning. Why not admit it? She felt old. Mother took such very good care of her son that sometimes she felt just a teensy bit tired. Diddums she. Mommums. But only tired sometimes. Only very rarely, hardly ever really, never most times—because down deep in her great big heart (so full of love and goodies) nothing, not even the very worst of ill health—her migraines, her stomach cramps, her arthritic hands, her backaches, her agonizing chest pains (brought on by scrubbing all those floors, taking in all that washing from rich folks up on the hill) could ever keep Mummy from the reward of putting herself into an early grave for Baby. Nothing could daunt her desire for his happiness. Nothing. Could it.

  No.

  Well, one or two things, maybe. She didn’t feel quite that old this morning.

  She removed the dark unhealthy bags from beneath her eyes.

  That was better.

  One mustn’t suffer too much.

  2:30 p.m.

  By afternoon Mother was feeling very sexy.

  She looked in the mirror at her long blond curly hair and brushed and brushed and brushed it.

  She adjusted her falsies.

  She was seated.

  Her cigarette dangled from the corner of her bee-stung lips. She went on brushing. And as she brushed, the bristles lightly touched her naked shoulders.

  Oh my, Mommy, didn’t that feel nice?

  Brush, brush. Harder. Harder.

  She took off her hair.

  To hell with brushing that! She’d brush her shoulders and her arms and her tummy and her thighs instead. My goodness! That was just too wonderful for words.

  Now. Where could Mommy go very quickly to get a man?

  She set the cigarette aside, took a long drink from her oversized brandy snifter, and thought about it.

  As she thought about it, she ate her ruby lipstick avidly, chewed it from her luscious lips, tonguing the lovely strawberry flavors and gulping hotly all the little greasy buds of dye.

  And in came Freddy Big Eyes.

  Poor Freddy had a thin, dying look. His soulful mind was wasting here in this hellhole of shady business deals that Mother wallowed in. Besides which, she had sold his precious instrument for gain.

  Mother saw him in the mirror, or tried to. Her triple-false eyelashes were so heavy with mascara that all save her own image, so close at hand, was a blur.

  “What can I do for ya, kid?” she said. “I suppose ya want some more a dem via-lin lessons. Well—I’ll hafta see what I can come up with. In the meantime, honey, you come on over here an’ give your mother a kiss. Say! You’re gettin’ kinda grown up, aint’cha, for your age? Well, now. You hobble back over there an’ peel me a kumquat, while I pull my nerves together. I’m feelin’ kinda blue.”

  Little Freddy B
ig Eyes thumped on his crutches across the room.

  Mother’s boudoir had mirrors in the ceiling. And her bed was a very large swan.

  Little Freddy Big Eyes soul fully peeled a kumquat with his very own precious fingers, but for a violinist he was often very clumsy and juiced things up so that Mother had to hit him with her brush.

  “You’re gettin’ kumquat juice on my one and only bearskin rug,” she said. Then she drew her robe up over her shoulders again and tied the cord more tightly around her sixteen-inch waist and put her hair back on.

  Sometimes Mother could be hard and cruel. But she loved him. Freddy knew that. Look what she’d done to her reputation to put him through school.

  Now Mother picked up her jeweled nail file and drank some more Martini from the oversized brandy snifter. She lit another cigarette and ground the last one out in an alabaster ashtray. She stole a loving mother’s look through her lashes at her crippled boy.

  “Listen,” she said to Freddy Big Eyes, “why don’t you stump ‘round the block to that Peggy O’Neill’s house. She’ll play parchesi with you, honey. Ya hear me?”

  Distant Freddy Big Eyes nodded.

  “Mother’s got a little business deal to cook.”

  So Freddy Big Eyes left the scene. He knew what business was.

  Mother sat there thinking. “Well,” she thought out loud into the mirror, “I gotta do something for that poor kid. Don’t I?”

  Her head bobbed and her wide, delicious hips seduced the velvet cushion she was seated on as her mind ground out her thoughts. She knew exactly what she had to do.

  “I’m gonna get someone up here t’ see me, an’ we’re gonna get that kid another via-lin.”

  5:15 p.m.

  Now Mother looked like her best set of Cecil Beaton photographs. What lovely hair she had.

  What poise. What gracious languor in her wrists.

  She sat before the mirror, posed. Mother was like that. Patrician.

  Her nose was a little tattletale of breeding. Somewhere in her family tree hid kings of France and also English dukes and duchesses. If Mother shook that tree just hard enough, heaven knows what artistocracy might fall. But Mother’s taste declined so rude a gesture. Surely one’s lovely self was all one needed. And one’s son.

  Where was one’s son?

  Perhaps out of doors in the paddock with Bogart, the groom? Did she not hear the distant neighing of purebred horses? Yes. So comforting.

  Ah, la! But was it not contentment itself to know that one’s son had all the best advantages?

  Mother was very comfy in her knowledge that she had provided to the last detail all that was needed. It had not been easy but Mother had graciously consented to lend her lineage to the marriage bed, and had been tireless in her labors to pull through with a son for Daddy. And for history. Now, there he was in the paddock. Her effort.

  Daddy was much too often away in New York City—and Mother usually had to converse with him by long distance telephone. So she was lonely. But Mother was conscientious. She knew that money did not grow on trees, not even family trees. So, Daddy sometimes had to work in order that one did not let down one’s side.

  And Mother was brave, too. A little loneliness did not harm one, if one endured it for one’s son. Which Mother did.

  Mother looked out at the swimming pool and at the gardener mowing the lawns and down the long circular drive toward the guards at the gate. Estates were lovely in the spring. She thought of their other place in the Adirondacks and of what that dreadful Mr. Roosevelt was doing to taxes. Dear, dear me!

  Oh well, it didn’t matter, Mother thought.

  Taxes are the burden of the aristocracy, and bear them one must.

  She powdered her long lovely nose and pulled her Molyneux cardigan around her gracious shoulders. Was it chilly? Surely not.

  There. Was her eyeliner subtle enough?

  Mother thought so. She gave her lacquered, lovely cheeks a tiny pat of high-tone rouge. Good. Very good. Just right.

  Now, Mother thought, let’s see who’s coming to dinner.

  She consulted the list. Only ten?

  My goodness, what were they coming to? She thought of the dinner parties of the past, when twenty-five or thirty appeared like clockwork every evening. And always in evening dress. But these days the men might appear for dinner in mere suits!! It was dreadful what was happening to the world.

  Still, Mother had other things to think about. Like one’s son.

  It was time for his bath.

  Mother smiled and rose. Her image in the mirror faded as she crossed the room. She would call him in from outside.

  Why, goodness—la! How swift, how prompt, how smartly obedient and quick he was. One’s son. It seemed mere seconds before he stood before her, removing his jodhpurs in the bathroom.

  She held his boots with a mother’s care and gazed at him in the steamy mirror. His breeding glowed.

  Bathing him is loveliness itself, Mother thought, bending over the tub. Now that he’s sixteen.

  8:00 p.m.

  The Alhambra Movie House on La Cienega Boulevard was crowded with its Thursday patrons. As was true all over America, there were those who went inevitably on Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday…and those who went on Saturdays twice—once with the kids and once without.

  Octavius went on Thursdays. Not every Thursday but when he did go, that was the night he went.

  He liked the movies. They told him what the world was like.

  Besides, he could sit there in the dark and not be bothered by the other people. And not be seen too clearly or too close.

  The movie tonight was the 1936 classic, Camille, with Greta Garbo and Robert Taylor.

  She had a scene where she ate little comfits from a box. She seemed to be so hungry. And this made him nervous. Also, she was dying, which was worse. He’d liked her better as Queen Christina, where she’d dressed as a man. She’d made an even prettier man than Robert Taylor did. But still…Robert Taylor was lovelier than Tyrone Power, he reflected, and Tyrone Power was lovelier than Leslie Howard. Leslie Howard was much too cold to be lovely. He was a little like Garbo.

  Octavius watched.

  Greta Garbo kept coughing all the time. It was quite unnerving, and by the time she’d finally died, Octavius was relieved, even glad. He wondered if it was true that she was a man. They said she was. He’d read that somewhere in a paper. And that was why she had such large feet.

  If she was a man, then playing that role in Queen Christina was a cheat. But if she was a man, then all the other roles she’d played were marvelous. Even Camille.

  While the cartoon was playing, Octavius thought about it.

  Greta Garbo wore his costumes so well. The padding was extremely well done. His hands were extraordinary. (Octavius waved his own gloved hands down in the darkness in blind imitation.) And Greta Garbo knew how a woman held her neck and her shoulders. He must have practiced that for hours in front of the mirror. Necks and shoulders were difficult. And just exactly how to walk. How not to hurry. Anywhere he went across the screen, Greta Garbo never ran.

  But best of all was Greta Garbo’s makeup and his wigs. They were just absolutely perfection to a tee.

  Octavius touched his elaborate hair and thought some more.

  He had noticed something else about Greta Garbo.

  He never played mothers.

  9:50 p.m.

  The newsreel came on. It was full of the old stuff. China, Spain, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

  Dr. Frank Buchman made a speech and told everyone to change. Hitler spoke.

  And then came the Hollywood News Vignettes. Little Judy Garland played a tennis game. Norma Shearer was making a movie with Clark Gable called Idiot’s Delight, and that was worth noting because Octavius had great respect for Norma Shearer. He’d seen her in Marie Antoinette, sitting through it three times just to see the ending over. “Oh, Mama! Oh, Mama!” she had cried, sitting in her tumbrel, “I’m going to be the Queen of France!”
It was very sad.

  Surely Norma Shearer was not a man.

  Then on came lovely Myra Jacobs to make a little speech for Jimmy Fiddler in a radio studio and finally there was a garden party given by Mr. Hearst.

  Mr. Hearst’s garden parties were something to behold. One saw so many movie stars at play. This was of great interest to Octavius, because it meant you saw the stars exactly as they really were, without makeup.

  Ajax Apollo, the new nineteen-year-old, did a high dive in a loincloth and Octavius was sorry he did not have a picture of that. Cary Grant and Randolph Scott were undressed, too, and that was quite exciting. Marion Davies fell down a flight of stairs and got up and laughed and said it was all a practical joke, but afterwards she limped and Octavius wondered.

  Rochelle Hudson put a rose in her mouth.

  And there was Louella.

  Then there was a movie star he’d never heard of.

  Letitia Virden.

  She was walking in the Roman part of the garden, with Mr. Hearst on one arm and Mr. Carter on the other. She was quite a tiny woman and the Voice of the Hollywood News Vignettes said her appearance there was startling. Octavius noted that the audience reacted very strangely when she came on, gasping and saying “good heavens” and finally applauding.

  The Voice of the Hollywood News Vignettes went on to say that Letitia Virden just might be back to make another film, and wasn’t that exciting, America? And there was more applause and Octavius was very mystified. Who was this star? She was called the Little Virgin. He certainly knew “America’s Sweetheart,” Mary Pickford, but why had he not heard of Letitia Virden?

  Mr. Hearst, from what you could tell, did not perhaps have much to say to Letitia Virden (maybe Miss Davies had something to do with that), but Mr. Carter certainly had lots to say to her and she smiled at him a lot. They seemed like friends.

  Octavius made a study of her. What a lovely walk she had. What elegant hands. Her clothes were simply stunning and her head was exquisitely shaped.