The Butterfly Plague

by Timothy Findley

  “What, then? Tell me.”

  “Why, ‘America the Beautiful,’ of course.”

  “Of course,” said Cooper Carter. “‘America the Beautiful’…How else could it end?”

  Reflected in the mirror, the Virgin seated—Cooper Carter standing behind her, they began to hum the anthem—very slightly out of tune. But that hardly mattered. The point was—they were singing it together.

  9:30 p.m.

  George Damarosch had wandered the streets all afternoon, seeking out bars where he would not be known, bartenders who would not take one look at him and say, “Get out!”

  This part of the city was rarely visited by celebrities. Their haunts were in Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, and Hollywood. Los Angeles itself was a city of bums and businessmen, clerks and secretaries, salesladies and hardware salesmen, religious fanatics and writers.

  The bars were for truck drivers and garbage men, resting prostitutes and people going to and fro from perfectly ordinary, everyday jobs. Their faces were plain and uncomplicated. Their minds were engaged in college football, the news from China, and how to pay back the bank. They paid no attention to George. George was only one of them.

  He came out into the evening and found himself near Sherman Square. He went in.

  He sat on a bench.

  Nearby, a pervert was trying to attract the attention of a student who was reading a book under a lamp. Yesterday’s Santa Claus, now out of work, rested peacefully on another bench, feeding an occasional pigeon with stolen peanuts. A man and a woman, whose home was breaking up, argued about their possessions in low, unemotional monotones. A young girl was weeping. Two children climbed a palm tree. Or tried to.

  George closed his eyes.

  He knew that it was over. The long dream that had pushed and prodded him and kept him from total collapse—was over. Letitia was re-entering history without him and he didn’t know what to do.

  He had vowed he would destroy her. But wasn’t it true already that she had destroyed him? And how could the destroyed destroy his destroyer?

  How?

  How could Letitia Virden be destroyed? The Little Virgin. The years had not destroyed her. Scandal had not. Age never would, so long as film could attest to her youthful presence. Society wouldn’t. History couldn’t. He could not.

  How could he?

  He’d loved her so. It seemed to George that he had always loved her, but of course he hadn’t. In his heart of hearts he knew that if he’d had her, had her when he first wanted her, she would now be long forgotten. But he hadn’t had her, and now he could never forget her.

  He thought about death.

  Naomi was dead. And now Adolphus. Would he die? George?

  No. He was indestructible. There was no place for death in George’s life. He would drift, but not toward death.

  He’d killed once.

  He remembered it.

  Again it was that fateful day.

  The day of Ruth’s birthday party, 1922.

  George, when he was George—the George Damarosch—had had a fearful temper. He spoke in tirades and he dreamed in broadsides.

  “Motion pictures will die with the advent of sound. They will cease to be an art and become a mere industry, fulfilling the needs of the public, and never again the needs of the artists.”

  “The history of ancient Rome, the history of Europe, the history of the British Empire—these all belong in books. The history of America will be told on film.”

  And perhaps his most famous epithet: “Beware of a future that does not mirror the past.”

  Attention. He had had a great deal of attention when, all those years ago, he had been the famous George D. Damarosch.

  Now he was a derelict sitting in a park, regretting his memories.

  His mind was full of shouts—his own voice raised against himself.

  Why did I miss it? Why?

  He sat on the steps with Letitia. He wooed her and he lost her to Bully Moxon.

  How long ago it was he could not calculate—not in his heart. In his heart it seemed like yesterday. In his mind he knew that it was sixteen years ago, at least, but his mind was full of anger. The love was in his heart. George’s heart and mind had never met. They argued from a great distance. They were never reconciled. He was split—not down the middle, but in half.

  He had been just so, that faraway afternoon. Letitia had rejected him in the heart—and when he fled from that scene, he was confronted by his wife and son—rejected in the mind.

  He tore his life apart with words that afternoon, for it should not be forgotten that tantrums and tirades change the lives of their instigators as well as the lives of those they scream and yell at. Naomi was not the only loser. George also lost. Her. His children lost their father—but he also lost them. They were willfully misplaced, but still lost to him. His tantrum cost them all their futures. He broke them into individuals.

  The park darkened.

  The pervert left without the student.

  The girl stopped crying and the children sat beneath, instead of high in, the tree.

  George remembered that when he had left Naomi standing in the library at Falconridge, he had rushed out into the midst of his guests. He’d run (an unusual sight, George Damarosch running), tipping over friends and tables all the way to a private arbor at the rear of the house.

  Three people were there already.

  Letitia Virden. Bullford Moxon. And a Chinese-American gardener by the name of Ping Sam.

  Ping Sam was unusually conscientious. Even on the day of the giant party, when he might have had every excuse not to work in the gardens, there he was, in his coolie hat and blue-denim uniform, weeding the flower beds and trimming the roses.

  Letitia, a mere girl, it seemed (as George cast his eye back on the scene), dressed in blue, was seated on a wooden bench. Bully was standing. Ping Sam, about ten feet away, unaware of either film star, was fingering and hoeing out weeds in a bed of red and white carnations.

  George, in the white heat of his brainstorm, arrived in the arbor gasping for breath. There was something desperately silent about him. He wanted to cry out in his anguish, but language rejected him. Voiceless, he remained undetected.

  Bully had just said, “I love you,” to Letitia, and she, the nominal guardian of a nation’s virginity, had cast down her eyes in the secret admission that she, by some girlish miracle, loved him.

  Bully, sensing his victory, rejoicing in it, and ecstatic with anticipation, danced out of the arbor over to the carnation bed. He clapped Ping Sam on the back and he said, “Today, my good fellow, I am loved. Give me one of those flowers.”

  Ping Sam leaned against his hoe, pushed back his coolie hat and laughed. He often went to the pictures and, like all Americans, he knew and adored this odd little man before him, and the tiny sainted woman in the arbor. He watched approvingly as Bully plucked the fatal flower.

  The dancing man returned to the Virgin.

  He did a strange thing.

  He did not present her with the flower.

  Instead, he adorned his own lapel with it, and took her by the hands and danced away with her onto the lawns and among the guests and over the nasturtium beds and along the terrace past Ruth and under the windows from which Adolphus watched while the doctors stemmed the flow of his blood and down the Star Steps and into the parking lot and through the assembled motorcars and out among the trees and onto a bank of hybrid grass and into Letitia’s astounded arms and into the future of her unmasking—generating, flooding her with child and with his own rejoicing. And all of this was seen or known (in his rage, he mentally saw what he did not actually see) by George Damarosch, who turned, now, white and furious, to the Chinese-American gardener, Ping Sam.

  “Why?” he said, his voice shaking with his sense of incalculable loss, “why did you let him do that?”

  Ping Sam blinked and reached for the hoe and returned to his weeding. Mr. George was often angry. Work and silence were the answers.
r />   But not this time.

  George advanced over the flowers, marched like an army over the carnations and roses and lilies.

  “Why did you allow it?” he screamed. “What have you done?” he roared. “Why did you stand there, hoeing your Jeedy weeds? Ping Sam? Why have you done this to me?”

  In his mind, George had leaped far ahead of Bully. He saw the child, he saw the son he would not have of Letitia, saw it rising in the world of the healthy and the whole, running away from him. A son that was not Adolphus, who must die. An object, not a being.

  Ping Sam began to retreat, with his wide black eyes on George’s face. He tripped over his hoe. He made his way, backward, to death.

  And George pursued him with all the vehemence and hatred at his command. A strangely malevolent torrent of words descended on Ping Sam. Scalding rain. He was castigated for disloyalty. Roared at for his virility (Ping Sam was the father of eight sons) and lashed for the providence of his bright and beautiful offspring and his handsome, silent wife. He was even decried for the rape of America’s Little Virgin. And murdered for his part in the destruction of George’s hopes and plans—his exploded future—his exploded dream.

  George reached out with both his hands.

  Ping Sam reached out with his.

  The canyon beyond Falconridge is deep. Now, it was haunted.

  George returned to the birthday party his hands behind his back. This was to become a characteristic stance for the remainder of his life.

  He looked at his daughter, Ruth.

  Her hair had not yet turned to its shade of premature white. It was long and brown, done up with ribbons.

  George thought, “The perfect image of a girl. A murderess.”

  Like her mother, she carried the blood.

  The infamous, killing blood.

  Damn her.

  Ruth blushed, as though she had known what was in his mind.

  George turned and walked away.

  All his dreams had faded and gone out in one blinding afternoon.

  Now, in the park, he opened his eyes and stared hopelessly into the dark sky and the faraway stars.

  “Oh, God,” he prayed, “if there is one, kill me now.”

  He waited.

  Nothing happened.

  “Kill me now,” he pleaded. “Now.”

  Still nothing happened.

  “This is a sign,” George thought. “A sign that there is something still to do.”

  He wondered what it was.

  “Kill me now,” he had prayed. “Kill me now.”

  Then he knew what it was—the thing he had to do. The meaning of the sign.

  He had killed before.

  The second time is nothing.

  And as he bided, he wondered.

  When?

  It was the day after Christmas, and the lights were still ablaze as George rose, and with a jaunty air, hands neatly, firmly and calmly folded behind his back, walked out of Sherman Square and down along the boulevard toward the nearest shining bar which beckoned him with electric messages of hope. And cunning.

  To kill is to destroy. He hadn’t thought of that.

  Till now.

  Sunday, January 1st, 1939:

  Topanga Beach

  New Year’s Day 1939 fell on a Sunday. There was nothing extraordinary about it. Those who had had too much to drink woke up with headaches. Those who went to bed with problems still had them in the morning. Those who had rashly proposed marriage under the midnight mistletoe awoke to the question of how to tactfully break the vow. The happy were still happy, the sad still sad. The doers did and the nondoers didn’t. It would be a year like any other.

  Ruth had spent the night on the beach.

  First of all she had sat on the balcony, watching Noah and B.J.‘s bonfire, and later, when everyone had gone to bed, she had walked along the sand and paused beside its embers.

  This fire was going out. But others still burned. For Ruth, it had been a year of fires. Real fires, imaginary fires, symbolic fires. All burning—all eating—most of them conjuring death.

  She slipped her hand under the loose blouse of her beach pajamas. There it was—whatever it was—whatever it would be. It should be born in June 1939. That sounded grand.

  A blue-eyed baby, with blond hair and fine, long limbs, a straight mind and a health-infested system. She would will it. She was convinced of this.

  What would Bruno think—if Bruno should ever find out? Had it been done at his instigation? Certainly the blond man had followed her all the way from Germany, as though by plan, as though obeying orders, proceeding by rote.

  In that case, Bruno would know. He would doubtless rejoice. Well. Let him. This was her child. Not his. Not Germany’s. Hers.

  It was a butterfly child, she thought. Conceived and born in the butterfly year—an era of plagues and ruin. But that didn’t matter. What he grew toward—the years in which he would flourish and mature—they would be different years, not years of anguish, as these were.

  She thought of what he would miss. He would never know his father. But she would tell him, somehow, some persuasive story. She would make him believe in her belief, in the children of determined hope.

  He would never know Dolly, and that was a greater loss than the loss of his father. Not to have known Adolphus—that was a desperate thing. But then, it could not be so desperate to those who only heard his name or read about him, or were told how odd and strange he was.

  And Naomi.

  Probably George.

  They would all be gone then.

  Certainly this world he was being born into would be gone.

  It would all change. Be changed. Would vanish.

  Ruth did not know how sick her heart really was in the midst of this world, until she thought of that word—the word “vanish.”

  It will be over, she thought, before he grows to be a man. When I am old and he is my age, what a wonderful thing it will be to look back and to say, it never happened. The dreamers did not die; Bruno did not exist; the butterflies were beautiful—whole treefuls of them—loved and applauded by everyone who saw them; Hitler is dead. No more wars. No more threat of wars. No torment. No apprehension. And a cure for every disease…

  She smiled. She even laughed out loud.

  She was dreaming everyone’s dream.

  A strange, unnerving thought crept into her mind, taking her by complete surprise while she was laughing, throwing out the romance of her generalized Eldorado. It crept in and sat, hugging its knees, waiting for her attention.

  It was a picture. At least, it seemed to be. There were no words connected with it. The thought did not speak to her. It just sat there, watchful and cruel.

  The picture was of her womb.

  Empty.

  She didn’t know what this might mean.

  It could mean the child had been born.

  It could mean she was remembering herself as she was before its conception.

  It could mean it was never there.

  The thought blinked a little and smiled and waggled its fingers and shifted on its haunches.

  Not there. The child. Not there.

  How could it not be there? Everything was happening, progressing, functioning exactly as it should.

  But she hadn’t been to a doctor. She had no verification beyond her own instinctive sense of pregnancy, her own knowledgeable (but hardly professional) appraisal of the facts.

  Not there.

  It was there.

  She walked around the embers, making a nervous, uncertain circle.

  It was there.

  It had happened.

  Why, in a matter of months, just a few short months, the baby would be kicking her and then it would be born.

  What baby?

  This baby inside of me.

  1939. The year of the Butterfly Plague.

  It’s there.

  It isn’t there.

  The thought began to rise and, having risen, to walk around her mind, explo
ring the crowded rooms, calculating where it would rearrange things, reschedule tables of habit, refashion beliefs, relieve reason.

  Ruth watched it, literally felt as though she could watch it, as it studied the situation inside her and laid the groundwork for takeover.

  It wore boots. It was beginning to wear a long leather coat. It put on a helmet. It crashed about on studded heels. It carried a baton, a neat little baton, and it was counting, but not out loud.

  I’m pregnant.

  The thought paused, shook its head and beat a few messages into the palm of its hand with the stick.

  Ruth closed her eyes.

  She placed her fingers against her left temple, then her right. She massaged very gently.

  The thought assumed a stance. It stuck its chin out.

  Ruth fought to reclaim the image of the blond man. Of the moment in the hills. Of the incident at Alvarez.

  She would say, “You were born in the year of the Butterfly Plague. What better designation could there be?”

  Not there.

  She placed her hands on her stomach.

  Her panic increased.

  She looked around her, as if someone might help her. But there was no one there.

  And then there was.

  A woman was walking down by the sea. A woman in a long dress, with elaborate hair and with what appeared to be a veil.

  The moon was out. The sea reflected light. There was even phosphorous at the water’s edge. Not enough light to see color by, but ample to see features—to judge expression.

  The woman was about fifty yards distant, walking very slowly.

  She was becomingly small, with the same stature that had made Naomi a successful image for her times. The sort of stature known as petite, which is not the stature of a midget, but a normal stature, finely modeled and proportioned.

  This was no woman that Ruth had ever seen. At least, sitting by the embers of Noah’s fire, she thought not. She was more elegant than anyone Ruth could think of, offhand. This elegance was studied and exact. Almost performed, certainly not inherent. But nevertheless, beautifully done. The carriage was astounding. The figure floated. The head was erect and could not have been more perfect, for every nuance of the profile could be studied at a precise and unwavering angle. The arms moved, just so. The legs stepped with just enough assurance not to be accused of mincing, but with such exact precision that the knees did not disturb the fall of the dress. There was not a single awkward angle in the whole appearance. It was perfect.