Mask of Silver

by Rosemary Jones

  I was, from the first, the odd one out. The only one obviously Chinese-American amid a group of girls abandoned by fate to the care of the nuns. Because I was frail due to a bout of influenza, small for my age, and, later proved to be good at school, the nuns made something of a pet of me. Which didn’t help in the dormitory where daughters of Italian, Mexican, and Irish immigrants, tired of being called dirty names outside the convent walls, decided to knock down someone even more obviously other. Many didn’t realize that Renee was my sister until she punched them on the nose or knocked their legs out from under them. Then Renee was disciplined for fighting. I would stay beside her in the kitchen, drying the dishes that she washed, and talking about what we could do when we finally left Oakland.

  “For we are not staying here,” she said. “There’s nothing here for us.”

  “Where will we go? San Francisco?”

  “There’s nothing there either,” said Renee with decision.

  “Tye Leung,” I said, very bravely disagreeing for once with my big sister. “She lives in San Francisco.” My heroine was the first Chinese-American woman to cast a vote in 1912. I carefully cut out all the newspaper stories and pictures of her and pasted them in a scrapbook for us both.

  “New York or Los Angeles, that’s where we should go,” said Renee, whose interest in politics was then and forever minimal compared to her interest in the movies. “Some city where we can be in pictures. That’s what we will do. Become famous. Look at the Gish sisters.”

  “There’s sisters in the movies?” I said.

  “Of course. Dorothy Gish and her sister Lillian. They are renowned beauties of the cinema.” That last sentence I recognized as a quote from one of Renee’s magazines. She had a fearsome memory and could repeat a line days after she read it or remember a dance step after only one try.

  Renee snuck out to the nickelodeon once and loved Dorothy Gish in Little Meena’s Romance. After that she’d bartered and begged for newspapers and magazines about movie stars. She slipped scraps and smiles to the garbageman’s son. He saved things up for her. She never minded if a story was weeks old, as long as she could read it out loud to me and the other girls in the kitchen or in the back of the choir loft. Anywhere that the nuns didn’t hear us. There was as much debate then as now on whether the pictures destroyed a young girl’s morals or improved her knowledge of the world. The nuns, except for Sister Theodora, fell firmly into the camp that cinema was a fearful source of sin. Sister Theodora was known to catch a picture at one of the many nickelodeons in the neighborhood.

  “I rather think it does no harm,” she once said to us, quietly after hours when we had finished putting all the dishes away and she was inspecting our handiwork. She ignored the stained movie magazines spread on the clean kitchen table. “To have some place where a body can go, and see something that makes them laugh or makes them cry, and know that everyone around them, no matter where they came from, is feeling just the same. That might be a powerful force for good. For not since the Tower of Babel fell have we all been able to understand each other. It may be that the pictures will be our common language given back to us.”

  Many years later, Sydney expressed the same view but from a quite different motivation than Sister Theodora.

  As soon as she turned eighteen, Renee decided that Hollywood was closer than New York, and easier to reach on the small sum that the nuns had given her upon graduation to purchase clothing for an office job, also arranged by the diocese. Renee spent her money on the two cheapest train tickets possible to carry us out of Oakland. Then she packed what clothes we both had into the cardboard suitcase, walked down the stairs, and said a very cheerful goodbye to the nuns. Many regarded her docility with suspicion. Sister Theodora just shook her hand and winked at me.

  That night I dutifully followed Renee’s directions, climbed the correct tree, and ran off to the train station with everything I cared about, namely my sketchbook and pens, stuffed in a satchel that I had won for good deportment. Years later, when I told Fred some but not all about running away from the orphanage, he asked “But weren’t you scared?” Of course I wasn’t scared. I was with my big sister, who had protected me all my life, even though I just called her my friend when discussing this with Fred. Being without Renee would have frightened me, would have broken my heart, for she was all the family that I had. As for our destination, the whole world was moving to California in pursuit of a fortune in pictures. Hadn’t Fred done just the same once his war was over and the army let him go?

  “But it is different for men,” said Fred, who joined the army the same year that we boarded our train for Hollywood.

  I swatted him with a fabric swatch for that comment. “It wasn’t different for me,” I said. “Hollywood was the place where I could do what I wanted to do. Isn’t that why we all ended up in Sydney’s little troupe? Because he let us be us.”

  Fred had to agree.

  In 1917, while being jostled by soldiers of all types in a slow-moving train down the center of California, we made the discovery that made all the rest even easier. Outside the orphanage, much as inside, people did not take us for sisters. “Who’s your shy little friend?” one sailor asked Renee. “Where did she come from? Shanghai or Singapore?”

  I started to say “Oakland”, but Renee pressed down on my foot. I resented the “shy” comment, something so many assumed just because I wore an orphanage dress and walked behind the nuns to church. I was about to tell the sailor that I was as bold as brass, brave as Tye Leung, because I climbed a tree to freedom that very night. I wasn’t shy, but it was hard to get a word out before Renee started talking. Over the years, I developed the habit of letting her speak first. Otherwise she’d kick my ankle in that way that didn’t bruise but definitely smarted. As much as I loved my sister, I knew from age three that it was best to let her do most of the talking.

  “Where do you think that I’m from?” Renee asked, opening her hazel eyes wide and staring straight at the sailor.

  “San Francisco,” chorused several returning soldiers. “All the beauties are from there!”

  “New York,” said another.

  “St Paul,” said a third. “You’ve got cheekbones like a Swede. And you’re tall like the girls I knew there.”

  Renee smiled and then picked a city straight out of our geography lessons. “Providence, Rhode Island,” she said. Then she added the plot of Little Meena, mixed with stories that we had read in the Saturday Evening Post. “But my family was Dutch. I was educated in Paris and all over the world. That is how I met my friend, Miss Jeany Lin. She kindly agreed to accompany me to Hollywood.”

  The soldiers may have hollered and hooted a little at that, but nobody out and out called her a liar. As Renee said later, nobody ever says they come from Providence, Rhode Island, and it did sound pretty grand.

  “But’s what your name, lovely?” asked the first sailor who had forgotten all about me when Renee started talking. That was something else that I was used to having happen and one of the things I noticed first about Fred, when we met him. Fred was friendly with everyone, but he never lost track of me when Renee was in the room. Now he did tend to lose track of everyone when he had a new invention going, but that’s just Fred being Fred. I’m the same when I’m drawing or sewing, said Renee, more than once.

  With a gleam in her eye, my not shy older sister told the entire train car, “Why, I am Renee Love.”

  So my sister acquired her new name. Later that night I swore to her that I would never tell what her name was before Renee Love. And I never have.

  It was during that train ride that I took on the role that Renee had cast me in: best friend. After we arrived in Los Angeles and started making the rounds of the studios looking for work, she never told anyone that we were sisters. We shared a room in a boarding house, one run by a Japanese landlord who wasn’t going to make trouble for me but wasn’t too sure about R
enee living in the neighborhood.

  Renee started by playing the same parts that every newcomer was cast in: the partygoer, the maid, the hatcheck girl, and so on. But she quickly caught the attention of directors at the studio with her penchant for adding just a little extra to a role. A turn of the head, a way of walking, that wasn’t quite like the other girls. Because she was an extra, she had to supply her own costumes, and that’s where I came in. After her first picture, the other girls started asking me to help fit their dresses or add some trim to make them as noticeable. I did help, but I saved my best ideas for Renee’s characters. Then Renee played the fortune teller who cursed a queen, and Sydney snapped her up to star in his movies. By their third picture in 1919, the movie magazines dubbed them the king and queen of terror. Eventually the studio bowed to both Sydney’s and Renee’s demands for a piece of the box office profits. One night, pooling our money on the worn little table in our shared room, Renee announced, “I’m moving into Alhambra Luxury Apartments and so are you.”

  “Together?” I said. We rarely admitted we lived in the same building, let alone the same apartment. We took different streetcars at different times from the studio to get home and practiced other small deceptions.

  “You’ll have an apartment upstairs. I’ll have a garden apartment downstairs. It’s all arranged.”

  “And what about Sydney?” By then they were tangled in a romance. How deeply, I did not know, and tried hard not to think about it. She was my older sister. I didn’t want to know, mostly because of the one fact that I was certain of. She could not marry Sydney. Not without lies or leaving the state. He was white. She had a Chinese mother. The state of California had laws against such marriages.

  “Sydney’s divorce is final and he’s deeding the house to his wife. He’s taking an apartment at the Alhambra as well,” Renee said. Sydney married an heiress from Pittsburgh at the end of 1918, just before he arrived in Hollywood and met Renee. The heiress financed his first films and built a mansion with a great seashell-shaped saltwater swimming pool. Sydney held exactly one party there for all the cast and crew, but we never met her. As we were leaving, stumbling a little in the early morning light after hours of dancing, swimming, and an impromptu tennis match in the empty ballroom, I’d looked back at the mansion and seen the silhouette of a woman in a lighted room on the second floor. I wondered at the time if that was Sydney’s wife and what she thought of us. What she thought of Sydney became the stuff of legend in the newspaper articles that came out after Arkham. It all added to his reputation. But at the time of the divorce, she remained quiet and faded from view. At least, from our view. I don’t think we ever knew her full name.

  “Well, she paid for the house,” I said, a little spitefully. “It is only right that Sydney gives it to her.”

  “He says that no man needs two mansions, and he’d rather keep the one that his family built,” Renee said, ignoring my tone and answering in a way that told me that she understood my unvoiced objections to Sydney all too well. I had my own romances, mostly sweet boy-and-girl stuff like drinking a soda or going to the movies. But after Renee started working with Sydney, and insisted on me making all the costumes for her pictures, I found myself wanting to do even more. I worked with Sydney’s chauffeur turned cameraman, Fred, on how to create ghosts or werewolves for Sydney’s terror pictures. Designing props as well as costumes consumed more of my time, and romances with silly actors seemed a waste of it.

  “Sydney has a family mansion?” I asked that night as we discussed moving out of our boarding house and into separate apartments.

  “Yes, he comes from some town called Arkham.”

  “Well, why doesn’t he live there?” I said, and was instantly a little ashamed of how petty that sounded. I tried hard not to be jealous of Renee’s relationship with Sydney. But I didn’t like the deceit that had to go with it, with Sydney’s marriage and Renee’s heritage. And, of course, I never quite trusted Sydney’s charm. He switched it on so easily, and there was always something rather cold about the way that he’d watch people in a movie theater. Of course, all directors did that. Went to their own pictures to watch not what was on the screen but how the audience reacted. But with Sydney, it seemed more calculating, more considering, as if he was waiting for something other than a scream or a sigh from the collected people in the theater.

  “Sydney is in Hollywood because he needs to make movies starring me,” said Renee with her wicked grin that undercut all the conceit in her statement. That’s why everyone loved her on set. She never acted like a leading lady, even when she had top billing. And that’s why, even after Arkham, people asked after her and wondered how great a star she could have been, if only the shadow had not consumed her.

  Chapter Four

  Sydney’s family home was not what we expected. Although in Arkham proper, it gave off an air of isolation, hidden behind a high hedge and iron gates. But once past those gates, a short drive led to a pleasant country house, weather grayed to a dull silver on the outside. The back of the house revealed an altogether different aspect, with a steep lawn leading down to a tangle of woods.

  The other houses of French Hill were hidden behind the trees or the high hedges that bordered the back lawn as well. There was something about the entire neighborhood that made me feel strangers were not welcome in this part of Arkham. Once we drove up the drive, the high hedges around the Fitzmaurice house effectively cut off all views of the neighbors. It was as if we were alone on an empty island. Empty except for a flock of crows that cawed and wheeled overhead, streaming like a black cloud past the crooked chimneys and sagging roofline of the Fitzmaurice house to destinations unknown.

  “There’s a gate to the woods, and a path leading to a pond,” said Sydney as we climbed out of the cars that brought us and the luggage from the train station. Max paid the drivers, who seemed eager to be away after they dumped our trunks in the drive and on the porch. Sydney ignored this activity, describing instead his ancestral grounds. “We will need to investigate the woods. I have an idea for a scene out there.”

  “But, Sydney, we are not staying here, are we?” asked Renee, looking a bit forlorn surrounded by all her luggage on the front veranda. “Isn’t there a hotel?”

  “We have twenty-two rooms and five baths here,” said Sydney. “And my idea is to film at all hours of the day and night. It will be much easier if we are together in the house.”

  “But what about meals?” said Fred, who would have slept in the barn as long as he knew he would be fed.

  “I telegraphed my old housekeeper, Mrs Mayhew. She’s already arranged all the rooms as well as a cook for the days. There’s Humbert, too, he lives down the road, to handle the outdoor work.”

  Inside, the house continued to reveal its divided nature between Colonial antique and country summer house. Obviously some attempts had been made to update it, probably when it was electrified, so the lower floor rooms had been joined together with arches and columns, each room flowing into the next. The electric lights snapped on without any fuss. Fred expressed his satisfaction with the fuse box positioned in the kitchen and even wandered down to the basement to check on the furnace arrangements. With summer heat already making its sticky impact, we were unlikely to need the furnace. Fred just wanted to see what was there and how it worked.

  But the house was odd. A row of long, thin mirrors hung in the downstairs hallway. Although all the same size, each mirror’s narrow frame bore distinctly different hieroglyphics around the edge. With the opening of King Tutankhamen’s tomb the year before and the popularity of Bara’s Cleopatra movie last decade, Egyptian motifs were common in Hollywood. But these mirrors appeared much older than even Bara’s 1917 smash hit. Standing in the center of the hallway, I realized that the mirrors captured the reflections in strange and crooked ways. Walking into the dining room, I had the clearest view of the front door, and the shadows of people moving around on the veran
da, even though I had turned a corner from the entry to get to where I was. It felt like I was spying on everyone. Or something else was spying on all of us.

  Beyond that, I felt warned off as I wandered through each downstairs room. Although warm enough inside, shivers coursed through me as I looked at the interiors where we were supposed to film. I sensed that strangers were never welcomed here.

  “Ghost catchers,” said Betsy, looking down the hall lined with mirrors.

  “What?” I said.

  “My mother used to talk about it. How ghosts can be caught in a mirror. How you should cover a mirror during a funeral to keep the ghosts out.”

  “I never heard that.”

  Betsy laughed. “I used to have a Halloween card, one that proclaimed that I could see my fate in a mirror. How did it go? On Halloween look into the glass and your future husband’s face will pass.”

  We both glanced at the mirror. Max’s reflection could be seen as he moved across the veranda to talk to Sydney. For a moment he paused. In the narrow mirror, it appeared as if he stood shoulder to shoulder with Betsy.

  Betsy winked at me. “Do you think it counts if it isn’t Halloween?”

  I laughed, shaking off my depressed reaction to the strange mirrors. My uneasy feelings stemmed from the difficulties of filming in such a location and nothing more, I told myself. Discussing Betsy’s interest in mirrors and marriages was a far more cheerful subject. “Who knows. Maybe your rhyme counts double. We are here for a month or more. Isn’t June the month for weddings? You could honeymoon on the trip back to California.”

  Betsy’s pursuit of Max waxed and waned. Sometimes she seemed set on attracting his attention. Other times she talked solely of her career and plans. Betsy was smart and she had an amazing confidence, something that Max, who was often overset by Sydney, didn’t seem to share. “I don’t think he sees himself quite as wonderful as I do,” she told me once. “And some days, I’m not sure if I should wait for him to find out how truly magnificent I am.”