The Butterfly Plague

by Timothy Findley

  Tuesday, November 15th, 1938

  There is a sea drift in morphine, and Naomi gradually began to float upon it.

  Her mind hung back in the past where the waves of old events licked at it—gently one moment, violently the next; but through it all, through memory and fear, amusement and regret, she did not alter course. It could not be altered now, either by turning back or by turning aside. There was only following, forward.

  Thus, on the drift, she perceived her wavering dream; on the sea drift of morphine and memory:

  George’s loved ones. His women. They were a subject of amusement to Naomi. They always had been. She would see him walking, hands at war behind his back, making love-circles down in the gardens at Falconridge. The current mistress (or the woman currently being wooed, as the case might be) would always look her best in these garden walks. She would have worn her best dress. Been to her hairdresser and received the best treatment. She would be at her best silence. Silence was important in a woman, so that George could make noises.

  In the gardens, which were cunningly laid out in circles (a circle mesmerizes, lulls) George would walk his ladies with passionate steps. He led; they followed gracefully after.

  Lying in her woolen bed-coat, Naomi saw them all as of old, name by name, face by face, and she drifted.

  She moved through a selection of times, never pausing where she did not care to pause, remembering—reliving swiftly what had taken years to endure and years to survive. Other events, short in themselves, required hours of circling—a wide and long approach—a certain charming wariness.

  The building and organization of Falconridge was ignored. It had taken four years of dust, carpenters, stonemasons, and yelling. Now, she only saw it as it was—or had been—finished and resplendent. Twenty servants. All those Chinamen. In hats.

  Her birth was ignored. Her distant parents wavered on the brink of memory where both had been killed in a railroad accident in the year when Naomi was ten. She and her sisters had grown up in the home of her grandparents—more vividly remembered. Her grandfather had manufactured pianos. The house seemed endlessly filled with visiting celebrities—pianists—conductors—touring opera stars—even, from time to time, actors and actresses. Thus, the bug had bitten when she was sitting, in fact, upon the knee of Edwin Booth in 1892, the year before his death. She was twelve. She had provided a small drama in her grandma’s parlor that day, by asking Mr. Booth to recount for her his memories of the shooting of Mr. Lincoln. No one had thought to forewarn her that the subject of assassination was taboo and, in fact, no one had thought to inform her that Mr. Booth was not the Mr. Booth, but only his brother. However, Naomi forgave him for not being the assassin she imagined him to be, because he recited so beautifully for her Caesar’s speech from Shakespeare: “Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once.” Naomi never could nor ever did forget the flavor of that voice, nor the lack of reproach in his eyes, nor the somber, bony grandeur of his knees.

  But George. She always, by whatever channel, returned to George—and Falconridge.

  He was already entertaining mistresses. She knew there was no real difference between their experience and her own. Naomi had insisted on marriage, that was all. And being in a position of responsibility (the whole country was looking at his films), it was easy for George to be convinced that he needed the image of a father and a husband.

  This is not to say that George did not love Naomi. He did. But he was like a man with worms. His appetite was appalling. It could not be satisfied.

  His mistresses had a few things in common. “George’s List,” Naomi called them. They were all wealthy. Each had fine ankles. Each had large eyes and each had an unending sense of the possibilities of her own femininity. They did not at all (but for the size of eye and the shape of ankle) resemble one another physically. Some were tall, some tiny. Some had busty bosoms, some had none. Some smoked and swore, some were dainty. They all were women of rare beauty. Most of them were film stars, stage actresses, singers, and this, of course, was all taking place in the Dream of 1905 to 1922.

  Seventeen years.

  They were married in New York in 1904. She was twenty-four years old. It took Naomi three years to decide that she would brook fate and have a baby. Ruth was born. That was good. Ruth being a girl, she need not and did not remark on her blood to George.

  In 1910 they began making movies in earnest. (Before that it had been almost a pastime, between stage plays.) In 1910 George went back to having his mistresses.

  Naomi became popular.

  She appeared not only for George but for Griffith and Mendes. She made eleven films in one year.

  They moved to Hollywood in 1914. They were the first. The others followed.

  Meanwhile, Adolphus had been born.

  This was the beginning of Naomi’s nightmare. She kept the secret for eleven years. Until 1922.

  Then George found out.

  It wasn’t that Dolly didn’t bleed in that first year. He did. But Naomi rushed him in a blinding parlay of speed and secrecy to the right people at the right times, and many tragedies were successfully aborted.

  In Russia, the Tsarina was going through much the same thing. Naomi read of it all with great interest. The figure of Rasputin loomed large in her dreams. She sought religious cures herself, in secret, from priests and charlatans. Many hands were raised above Dolly. Many prayers were said. But there was only one Rasputin. And his days were numbered. Ultimately, he died, very much against his divine will, and soon afterward the Tsarina and the stricken Tsarevitch, her son, were murdered, too. Shot with guns. They bled to death. After all that staunching and praying.

  There was nothing left to read in the papers. Hope dwindled. So Naomi sought out and read the histories of the European royal houses. What had they done? Suffered. That was all. Endured and died. Many died in accidents. Carriage deaths and motorcar deaths. Assassinations. Plots. Europe was cruel to its kings and princes. They were cruel to themselves.

  Whatever she read, it was collectively a history of scratches and disasters. A hemophilic child cannot, like every other child, be stung by bees, pick up nails, cut out paper dolls, fall down, have boisterous friends, or stand by windows.

  Invention is the enemy of such a child.

  To be a parent to this child is to know, never, any peace. Any sleep that is not afraid. Any pause in searching.

  There is no medicine. There are no doctors.

  There are only Rasputins. And they die.

  Naomi, however, was able to have a career, and this provided her sanity. You are aware of this career. More’s the pity if you aren’t. Those eyes! That nose. The laughter—always silent. She was retired before sound. Small-waisted, dressed in ankle-length chiffons and silks, she stormed the hearts and imaginations of America. Naomi Nola. Sprung from the forehead of Jove and the knee of Edwin Booth.

  Oddly enough, she had no public abroad. She was totally American. She exuded (in silence) sweetness of breath and softness of touch. Her allure was circular. Round-eyed, round-minded. She maintained the promise of virginity without its pallor. She was marvelously alive. She bespoke, before the fact, wholesome American motherhood. (Irony.) She excelled in three basic emotions which were much cherished by her public: laughter (an emotional state all its own), sadness (undefined, just”sadness”—a sort of tranquil melancholy), and gaiety. Gaiety is not laughter. Having watched her, you know that. It is a state of mind. But Naomi was gay. She was beginning to understand.

  She was perhaps not a great star. But she was wonderfully popular. She founded George’s reputation, and when the time came to retire (twelve years is a long time for one face and one smile) she retired with absolute composure. She always knew when something was over. It did not disturb her.

  Her contemporaries (Mary Pickford, Theda Bara, Pola Negri, the Gishes, Letitia Virden) came back and back and back. They wanted more. Naomi smiled. In 1923, Theda Bara made a comeback. It was tragi
c. But funny. A comeback in 1923! Movies were ten years older, but it seemed, sometimes, they were only ten years old.

  Now it was 1938.

  And there was still the dream, and the drift, as she remembered.

  Her screen lovers—her husband—her children—her home.

  She had loved retirement.

  Perhaps it was the fact of her great beauty that made her retirement professionally easier. She did not have to fret about what she had been. She had been perfect. And knew it. Simply.

  It was a chapter. She closed it finally, with love.

  Now she was a mother. And a wife.

  It is hard to know which comes first, or should be placed first. You chose to love your husband. You love your children without choice. One involves privilege. The other—wonder.

  George tampered with the mechanics of their marriage. He was off on a journey of his own that more and more rarely involved either his wife or his children. One of his objectives was a bigger—a better—a more astounding film than he had ever made before. The other objective was a mystical bed, filled with made-up, imaginary women.

  George’s greatest gift as a film maker had been his devotion to self-improvement. Unlike so many others in that “industry” (Naomi hated the word; George hated it, but it was becoming increasingly a fact of life), unlike so many others, George never set out to better or to beat another man’s product. Only his own. There were many screenings on the specially whitewashed wall in the Falconridge library. (George liked the granular texture of a wall more than the new and always-being-improved textures of professional screens. He said walls were an ingredient of his ideal film. A wall gave substance. It had those wonderful lumps and dots. It added depth to the projection.)

  Naomi sewed and knitted, did petit point, and even painted pictures (water colors, flowers, birds, beasts, and insects). She was beginning to celebrate life. She watched her husband’s creations. They grew in stature, but she sensed that there was something missing—something that George had not thought of. She did not know for a long while what it was. Ultimately (he made Tarnish and Rust, his lyric masterpiece, in 1921), the films no longer reached the public he had made them for. Tarnish and Rust had left both critics and audiences speechless and spellbound. The decline began immediately after this work. It was slow and at first unnoticed. He invited his elder brother to join him. Then his younger brothers, one by one (they “offered” to come; discreetly). George was beginning to look under stones for his ideas. He panicked. But that was later. By the time the cousins were arriving in what seemed to be droves, George had forgotten what he was looking for. He was looking for “something”—and that was all.

  What had happened to his films and to him and what Naomi puzzled over and wondered at and could not define (and afterward, could) was that following Tarnish and Rust, the films ceased to imitate life and to celebrate life. They began to imitate and to celebrate film. He ceased to be an artist. He commenced the life of an industrialist. He might as well have made furniture. Pianos.

  Then there was the party.

  1922.

  Ruth’s birthday. She was fifteen.

  It is not known why this birthday party was to have been so special. No one was going anywhere. Nothing had happened. Perhaps George was simply showing off to his daughter. It was too bad that he had not chosen to show her off, instead.

  Ruth wore a blue dress. How well Naomi remembered all of this. Each single detail. Her own dress was rose and gray. Dolly’s suit, specially tailored, was white and had satin facings. He wore long white stockings, the way children had before the war. Naomi maintained always a sense of her own period. It had been right for her. Fashionably, she never grew out of it, until these recent weeks, the weeks of her death, when she had broken her own traditions to celebrate such colors as orange and green and turquoise and yellow.

  And this is her dream of celebrations.

  Ruth’s fifteenth birthday.

  It was an exemplary day for nature. All that was best, existed. The flowers were more spectacular than they had ever been; there were more of them and they shone with brighter colors and scented the air with deeper mysteries. The lawns were like emerald rugs made in China or Turkey. The trees filled up with birds (so many of them, in fact, and so brilliantly colored that someone remarked to George that he must have hired a wandering company of opera singers and induced them to stand among the trees in their costumes for The Magic Flute. This same someone credited George with the wrong imagination; Naomi might have done this, but not George).

  The air was crystal clear and cool. The temperature hovered just over seventy-two degrees. Not a single cloud appeared.

  The coolies wore their blue uniforms and their hats. Some were in silks. They threaded the crowded lawns with large straw trays of sandwiches and hors d’oeuvres. They passed drinks on inverted brass gongs. The glasses were tall and each was encased in woven raffia of bright colors.

  The guests themselves had nothing whatever to do with a fifteen-year-old child or with her birthday, and Ruth remained alone. (She was an early romantic; she believed in undiscovered princesses. It was the following winter she began to swim. Disillusionment? Naomi never knew.)

  Everyone was in love with Bully Moxon that year. He was everywhere.

  A vaudevillian, he told visual jokes and danced. His art was movement. Mimic art. He rarely, even in theatres, needed words. His films were noted for their lack of printed titles. He was not handsome. He was downright ugly. He drank too much. He was afraid of women. He worshipped them. He had an exemplary cleanliness, a sense of neatness and correctness of dress common among alcoholics. His shoes were like stars, always shining brightly. His cravats were exquisite. He changed his collars four times a day. He ate peppermint drops to keep his breath from startling the effect of his appearance. He parted his hair in the middle. He gave such pleasure and like a child was capable of so much adoration and wonder that you could not revile him. He wore flowers and Naomi remembered him with tears.

  He came across the lawns of memory. He always came in silence.

  In this dream in the heart of Naomi Nola, Bully dances toward her with gloves on his hands. He is mock serious. He presses her fingers to his lips. He exudes peppermint and bourbon, a delightful aroma of mixed sweetness and acid, the aroma of a comically wicked child.

  He lisps kisses onto her fingers and they play the game. There is no laughter. Not even a smile. Naomi blinks with mischievous alarm, retrieves her hand, and assumes one of her more famous poses. “I am not to be had for a kiss and a smile!”

  Bully bowed. Naomi grinned.

  “Dear Bully…”

  “Madame!”

  “No. Now, be serious, Bull. No more games. Tell me how you are.”

  (Every word. She could remember every word.)

  He slackened his hold. For a moment she could see an honest feeling struggling to hide itself in the comedy of his eyes.

  “I am in love,” he said.

  “You always are,” said Naomi. “Dear, dear Bully.” She took and held his white-gloved hands. Both of them. (She recalled the little padded fingers, the fact that the gloves were made of cotton. Waiter’s gloves. An old routine.)

  “No,” he said. And this was absolutely true. “No. I have never been in love before.”

  “Is it me, Bully?” (She wanted to help him. She knew it wasn’t.)

  “No, my dear. You I simply adore. That is all.”

  “Thank you.”

  He looked off over the lawn.

  He struggled for a line—a joke—a dance—anything for relief.

  It was Letitia. There she was.

  The Virgin.

  He stared down at his feet. Once more he kissed Naomi’s fingers. Silent, he drifted away.

  Later he danced for them.

  On the nasturtium bed.

  And stole a white carnation from the garden.

  And went into some kind of private history.

  And would never be forgotten. />
  Until now, when Naomi must wake.

  Wednesday, November 16th, 1938: 8:45 p.m.

  Naomi stirred. The dream always became unhappy. She wished that she could master that. Then she went back again, searching.

  There were two incidents.

  The first was a death.

  One of the Chinamen fell over the cliff into the canyon, and died. This was one of those scandals of silence, in the same vein as Myra Jacobs’s shooting Mr. Danton. It happened at the party. Ruth’s birthday party. The circumstances were clouded. Very little was said. The police came, were paid, and went away. It had something to do with George. Naomi never knew what. She did not glean the connection with her husband for many years.

  At any rate, it was on this day, at the birthday party, that George discovered her secret.

  It was on this day that he dismissed her from his presence.

  The discovery was made in the following manner:

  Adolphus was sitting under a table…

  (Miss Bonkers entered the room on the toes of her white shoes, and approached the deathbed.)

  “Hello, my dear. Hello, my dear. Hello,” she said, very softly, very carefully enunciating every syllable of every word. But there was no response. Her patient’s eyes were open, and they gave her a look that was distant, but alive. Still, there was no real response—no indication that Naomi wanted to have or to say anything.

  Miss Bonkers gave the folded hands a gentle pat and wandered over to the window.

  The pelicans were flying…

  Miss Bonkers sat down in her chair. She did not care to read. She had her book there, but she held it almost as though it were offensive—carefully, to one side. She would watch now, instead, and see what really happened.)

  Adolphus was sitting under a table…

  He often did this if there were large numbers of people. He did it because his mother and his doctors had made him aware that he was safe under tables and chairs. He was afraid of feet. And of falling.