Missing Reels

by Farran S Nehme

  “Why would he want you out? You’re the least trouble of anyone in the building.”

  “Not to a landlord I’m not.” Miriam put a hand to her mouth and whispered, “Rent control.”

  “How did he find out you had a washer?”

  “As the English say, somebody shopped me.” Miriam stopped just short of the laundromat door. “I’m sorry. These days I don’t suppose you care what the English say.”

  “It’s fine,” said Ceinwen, feeling happy about it all over again. “Matthew and I got back together.”

  An honest-to-goodness smirk from Miriam. “I thought that might happen.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “You seemed quite taken with each other.” Miriam opened the door and braced it with her back. “Thank you dear, but I can handle things from here.”

  “I’m not in a hurry,” said Ceinwen. She wheeled the basket in.

  “All right then, keep me company a bit if you like,” said Miriam. “Eight o’clock on a weekday morning this place is basically a morgue. Of course,” she added, looking around, “it’s never cheery at the best of times, is it.”

  They were the only ones there besides the attendant. The laundromat’s floor was covered in chipped, warped tiles, the dusty machines were a hideous yellow and the walls were mottled with scorch marks from a fire that Mr. Rodriguez at the Thrifty Mart said had happened in 1978. Her head felt foggy and achey. If she was going to introduce the topic of the clip at the Brody in anything resembling a smooth way, Ceinwen figured she was going to need coffee. They had pulled up in front of a washer and Miriam was untying the top of the bag.

  “Let me put this in the washer for you and then I’m going to grab a cup of coffee,” she said.

  “Ceinwen,” said Miriam, with great firmness. “You have nice manners. I’m sure they were very proud of you back in Mississippi. But I can handle getting the laundry in the machine. I promise you, I will not collapse.” Ceinwen hesitated. “Go on, get some coffee.”

  “You want some too?”

  “From where, the Thrifty Mart? Thanks, but no.” Miriam was already putting towels in the washer, and Ceinwen gave up and left for Thrifty. She bought a cup of coffee, a can of Cafe Busted and a pack of cigarettes, and while Mr. Rodriguez was ringing her up and telling her she should really get a tan or something, she decided the best approach was to bring up the book first, and then introduce the Brody’s fragment.

  When she returned, Miriam was sitting in one of the rows of attached plastic chairs, watching the washer swish the soap through the towels. Ceinwen took off her coat, sat down and peeled back part of the coffee lid.

  “I’ve been thinking about your movie,” she began.

  “That doesn’t surprise me.”

  Miriam always had the same tone when movies came up. “Did you know there was a book about it?”

  “A book? No. There was a professor who wrote something about it a while back. Out at USC.”

  “That’s the one,” she said, a little disappointed that Miriam already knew. “It’s a monograph.”

  “Eh. Fancy name for a long-winded paper. He contacted me when he was writing it. Gundlach, was that his name?”

  “Yes, that’s him. What did he want to talk to you about?”

  Miriam made a fly-swatting motion. “He didn’t want to talk to me. He wanted to talk at me, the gasbag. On and on about German Expressionism and Emil’s influences.” Miriam turned and narrowed her eyes. “Hold on, young lady. How do you know about this?”

  She had made another major tactical error. She took another sip of coffee and hoped the caffeine would kick in soon. “I, um, well. I was just talking to a collector and I asked if he’d heard of the film. And he’s got so much stuff about silent movies that he happened to have a copy of the book.”

  “You were just talking to a collector.” Miriam folded her arms. “I hope you didn’t mention me. Did you?”

  “Oh no,” Ceinwen said, relieved she could be truthful. “I told him I’d heard of the movie because I liked the novel.”

  “Fell for that, did he.”

  “I did like the novel!”

  “So you said.” Miriam shook her head. “I guess it’s my fault for not saying so, but I do hope you won’t run around telling anyone about our conversation.”

  “I would never,” she said, with a sudden guilty thought of Matthew, cooking dinner and saying bad things about Emil.

  “I don’t want anyone else coming around and prying, you understand? Not that most people would care. But silent-movie obsessives are an odd bunch. And you never know when some bright young reporter person will hear of you and take it into his head that you’re a human interest story. Happened to an old friend. You know. ‘Alone on Avenue C lives an elderly woman, with nothing but memories of a magical, long-lost time in Hollywood to keep her company.’” Miriam pulled a finger across her throat. “No. Absolutely not. I’d rather have hives.”

  “Gundlach asked about you and Emil?” The monograph hadn’t had a word about the affair.

  “That would have been a lot more normal. No, he couldn’t have cared less about the human element. It was all about using the movie to make a point about the coming of sound.” The book did have a section at the end, about how ways of seeing film were changing at the end of the twenties, but since Gundlach’s observations about the shifting gaze of the spectator were almost as exciting as Andy discussing projection speeds, she had skipped it. “The only personal thing he wanted to know was whether Emil was Jewish.”

  That was a brand-new wrinkle. “Was he?”

  “Probably.”

  “You don’t know for sure?” She flashed on an image of Emil, smashing his fist against a wall at the idea of going back to Berlin.

  “No, and Gundlach never found out anything from me, because that was when I threw him out. He thought he’d offended me and tried to explain that émigré Jews were already shaping a new aesthetic, and I showed him the door. He hadn’t offended me at all, he was putting me to sleep. Honestly, the way some intellectuals talk about movies, they could make the Marx Brothers boring.”

  She swigged her coffee again. “What made him think Emil was Jewish?”

  “He tried to get some simple records from Germany and hit a dead end. And of course, that doesn’t generally happen with German records. He thought maybe Emil changed his name. I didn’t tell him that had occurred to me a long time ago. If Emil wanted to bury the past I wasn’t going to dig it up for some nosy academic.”

  “Why would he want to hide it?” For the first time, she was getting a look from Miriam that told her she’d said something truly dumb. “Of course I understand why he might not want to bring it up in Germany, but in Hollywood he’d have had plenty of company.”

  Miriam shrugged. “Different times. If people thought nobody Jewish was around they’d say all sorts of things. Sometimes they’d say things even if somebody was right there. And after he was dead, I thought back to how Emil would get very cold and quiet if anybody used a slur or complained about Jewish bankers or studio bosses. He was blond and everybody assumed he was a gentile. But he never talked about his parents or much of anything before the Great War. And I went along with it. I thought he was above petty things like background, because he was so left-wing, and once I fell in love with him I decided I was, too.” Miriam raised her voice and shook her fist like a street-corner ranter. “What does it matter where you came from! What matters now is that you stand with the workers!” She coughed. “I can still sing the ‘Internationale,’ but I never could stay on key.”

  “And you started thinking he’d changed his name.”

  “Not until the war. I was reading the newspaper about a battle near a Dutch town called Arnhem. And I thought how Emil’s name was just a German version of that, and he’d told me he spent a while in Holland.” She shrugged. “It fit.”

  Ceinwen could bring up the clip now, but with Miriam so chatty she wanted to know more. “Emil was a communist.”<
br />
  “Socialist, more like. Jack, my husband. He was a communist.”

  The Mississippi in Ceinwen never could get used to this kind of thing. “Isn’t that something,” she managed.

  “What Emil started, the Depression continued, I guess. I went to meetings for years. Met Jack in ’34. Poor man had been asking me to marry him for at least ten years before I finally did.”

  “Marriage is very bourgeois.” She figured this was the sort of thing you were supposed to say to a communist.

  “That’s exactly what I kept telling Jack,” chuckled Miriam. “And he kept arguing that it was a perfect cover. No one would suspect a respectable couple of being agents of the revolution. Truth was, he was a respectable sort of man. Born to be a husband, really.”

  “What made you change your mind?”

  “Oh, by ’46 or so it became clear it was time to leave Hollywood. Easier to get theater jobs. Although not that much easier.” Miriam pointed toward the entrance. Just past the door, a man was sitting on a fire hydrant and downing a can of something concealed in a paper bag. “Hence our eventual gracing of Avenue C. Anyway, you couldn’t gallivant around the countryside living in sin, not in those days. The hotel clerks wanted a marriage certificate.”

  They both watched the washer for a minute.

  “I’m going to get a copy of the monograph,” said Ceinwen. “I was going to make you one, too.”

  “Good heavens, don’t do that. I won’t read it. My good memories won’t be in there, and the bad ones I’d rather leave alone.”

  She inhaled and said, “I found out something else from the collector guy.”

  “What’s that, another scholarly paper about Emil? They must be hard up for topics these days.”

  “No, he said he’d seen a little piece of the film. There’s an archive here in New York that has it. Place uptown, called the Brody Institute for Cinephilia and Preservation.”

  Miriam put both hands on the side of her chair and pushed herself to her feet. She turned her back and walked away a few paces, then came back with her hand over her mouth. I’m a jerk, thought Ceinwen. I keep forgetting how old she is. I could have given her a stroke. Miriam took her hand away.

  “How long is it?” she asked quietly.

  “He said it runs about two minutes. I haven’t seen it yet. You have to be some kind of student or academic. But I’m sure we can get you in.” Miriam’s hand was back on her mouth. “Great news, yes?” added Ceinwen, hoping Miriam was going to start looking happier.

  She folded her arms tightly. “Which scene?”

  “He said you were getting menaced by someone.”

  She snorted. “That’s the whole movie right there.”

  Ceinwen ventured, “When would you want to go see it?”

  Miriam sat again and crossed her legs. “I don’t.”

  It was Ceinwen’s turn to jump out of her chair. “Are you crazy?” She checked herself and said, “I’m sorry, but that makes no sense to me at all. You told me you’d always wanted to see it again.”

  “I said I wanted to see the movie again. The whole movie. Not some itty-bitty little scrap of it. Like the Oscars. God help us.” Miriam’s voice took on a breathy starlet quality. “‘Ooooh folks, here’s this little clip from the dark ages, before everybody figured out how it was really done. Don’t worry, it’s not too long, we don’t want to bore anybody.’”

  The sudden rush of pure hatred in Miriam’s voice kept Ceinwen from sitting back down. She said, very tentatively, like she was approaching a guard dog, “There’s a lot of people who still love silents. You said you trusted your own judgment, not Gregory’s.”

  “And I do.” Miriam’s voice was no longer venomous, but it still invited no argument. “Who knows, maybe people would appreciate it now. But I can tell you for sure, nobody’s going to see two minutes of Mysteries and suddenly decide to give Emil his due, much as I might wish otherwise. I’ve made my peace with that. Most people labor at things that won’t survive. It’s pure ego to think you should be any different.”

  “But this bit did survive.” Not even a shrug in response. “It’s better than nothing!”

  She waved her hand in Ceinwen’s direction. “You like that dress, don’t you.”

  Oh for god’s sake. Not the fucking dress again. “I wear it a lot, I know. That’s because it’s flattering, Miriam.”

  “It’s lovely on you. Although you do need a bra with it. I’m trying to put this in a way you’ll understand.” She paused. “Let’s say Talmadge took that dress.”

  On top of everything, Miriam had a completely wrong picture of Talmadge. “That isn’t his thing.” The washer had stopped. Ceinwen grabbed a laundry cart and pushed it in front of the door.

  “Not to wear. He just decides one day that it isn’t nice anymore and nobody else is going to want it, so he throws it away. You can’t even fish it out of the garbage. But he keeps a little bit of one ruffle. And when you complain, he hands you the scrap and says, ‘Here you go. It’s better than nothing.’”

  Ceinwen yanked the washer door open, caught a towel as it fell out, and reflected that she was never going to get it right with Miriam. “I’d still want to see it.”

  “That’s your youth talking. Old ladies, we ask for more. After a while we decide all that sweet feminine making-the-best-of-things is for the birds.” She picked up Ceinwen’s hand and gently pulled it away from the basket.

  “You don’t mind if I see it, do you Miriam?”

  “Knock yourself out.” Miriam pushed the basket over to the dryer. “How are you going to get in? You aren’t a student, are you?”

  “No, I’m not. Matthew’s arranging it. He’s a postdoc at NYU.”

  “I see.” Miriam swung open the dryer door with a thump. “You told Matthew.”

  How could good news go this badly? “I told him you’d been in a movie in the twenties. That’s all.”

  She could tell just by the way Miriam was throwing in the clothes that she didn’t believe her. “I suppose I can’t expect you to keep secrets from your sweetie. And those English upper-crust types aren’t a gabby bunch, anyway. But please, no one else. The last thing I want is the NYU film department ringing my bell.”

  “Matthew’s a mathematician.” Miriam slammed the dryer door shut and started feeding in quarters. “He doesn’t know a soul at the film department.”

  “A mathematician? That’s going to sound odd,” said Miriam. She hit the button with one short push of her index finger. “How on earth is he going to use that to see a film?”

  “He’s an academic. They can come up with all sorts of weird ideas at a moment’s notice,” said Ceinwen, with pride.

  Miriam turned and put her hands on her hips. “This should be fun for him, then. ‘How Émigré Jews Brought Trigonometry to Hollywood.’”

  “That’s pretty good. I’ll suggest it.”

  “Go right ahead.” Miriam sat back down. “Well, I know you work today …”

  Ceinwen knew her cues by heart. She said goodbye and grabbed her things. At the door, she turned to look. Miriam was watching the dryer with a face like Garbo at the end of Queen Christina, staring off into eternity.

  2.

  “GOOD,” SAID MATTHEW WHEN SHE TOLD HIM THAT MIRIAM DIDN’T want to see the film. “One less explanation.” He’d managed to Xerox two copies of the monograph and grumbled that it would have been easier asking Angie for a kidney.

  When she returned the book to Andy, finding a reason to leave quickly was helped by the fact that there was no place to sit in his office. She told him the best part of the monograph was the section about ways of seeing silent movies, and she swore she was going to pick up some Andre Bazin the next time she was at the Strand. Andy said she could come over to his place and flip through Cahiers du Cinema, which he had dating to the inaugural issue in 1951. She pointed out that she didn’t speak French and he told her that he’d be happy to read it out loud to her and translate. She told him it might be a goo
d idea, but she needed to wait until her schedule got a little less crowded.

  Matthew called the Brody and said the man he’d spoken to, some sort of curator, was a little distracted-sounding on the phone and didn’t seem to care why they wanted to see it. He just took their names and said to come in next Tuesday morning at 11:00 a.m. and ask for the director at the front desk.

  Ceinwen wore her forties suit with stockings and her best ankle-strap high heels, causing Matthew to point out that the streets were still slushy. “I want to look serious,” she told him.

  When she caught sight of the building, she grabbed his arm. A townhouse, at last, and not just any old townhouse. Red brick, paned windows, ornate white trim and a staircase that curved to the entrance floor. “Five floors. Look at how wide it is. Aren’t you glad I wore heels?”

  They were buzzed into a lobby and she had to restrain herself from spinning around to take it all in. The floor was white marble set with tiny black tiles. Dead center was a round, tufted settee like the ones in thirties-movie hotels. Many feet away, at a carved mahogany desk, sat a young woman with red hair and plenty of freckles sprinkled across flawless skin. Behind her a window soared up two stories to show a bare winter garden. On the right a staircase swooped up toward a huge chandelier, on the left more stairs led to the lower floor. Other than that, the hall was almost bare. The settee was the only place you could sit.

  “Matthew Hill and Ceinwen Reilly. We’re here to see Isabel Chung.” There was a carved frieze running all the way around the ceiling, vines and flowers and people doing things, but it was hard to see what.

  The woman seemed puzzled. “Did you have an appointment?” Where, Ceinwen wondered, did you get two-story-tall velvet drapes?

  “Yes. I spoke to Fred Creighton.”