* * *
He started taking them along on his trips into the city, where he visited a specialty camera and optical supply store. Once a week or so, they took the ferry over to Midtown and walked the dozen blocks to Appleton’s to choose a new colored lens or a bottle of rubidine-red for tinting the film stock. Claude could have easily sent Nash Sully on these errands, but he loved to mill around in the store with its bromide smells and high, tiered shelving, the clerks adjusting cameras on swaths of velvet laid out on the countertops, hundreds of apertures staring out from behind glass-fronted display cases. They sold telescopes and trick cameras, rolls of film, photographic papers, refurbished projectors. Cora liked to study the novelty items—the Photoret pocket watch camera favored by private detectives, or the palm-sized, auto-spooling Minigraph, or the optical illusion sketches. Leo, meanwhile, headed straight for the telescopes and binoculars every time.
* * *
On their walks back to the ferry wharf, Leo stayed close, occasionally tugging Claude’s sleeve when something caught his eye, while Cora strode out in front, carrying their purchases in a paper bag, singing in her high, pretty voice as if to clear the way. For the river crossing, Claude handed them strips of taffy and told them stories about his childhood, about collecting mushrooms with his father and the eerie alpine nights they slept up under the dormers of mountain inns. He also told them about a childhood spent watching—anthills below magnifying glasses, his garrulous Austrian grandfather behind a windowpane when he came to visit and smoked like a factory chimney outside, his older sister through a keyhole when she kidnapped the family Alsatian, Bernard, and kept him prisoner in her room. You were a collector and a spy, Cora said with her offhanded prescience. Leo added: Our parents never let us stare because it’s considered obnoxious. Claude told them that the trick to ogling was to know when to look away.
* * *
After several of these trips, Claude couldn’t resist buying them each a gift—Cora a book of optical illusions, Leo a pair of birding binoculars—and soon they were bringing their treasures along to the glassed-in production stage each night for wardrobe, hair, and makeup. Sabine told Claude not to spoil them, which was rich, he said, because she let them leave the table with food on their plates or braid her hair with dogwood flowers or climb on her back when they went swimming.
* * *
On set, between scenes, Leo and Cora were free to roam. Leo often sat perched on a stool beside Nash Sully, who had been promoted to assistant director and took care of mounting the cameras and warming the arc lamps and prepping the set before Claude’s arrival. And Chip Spalding became an honorary uncle, entertaining them while Sabine and Claude worked into the night. He sometimes brought along the wallaby and let Leo and Cora feed it with grass while he told them stories about his daredevil days in Tamarama.
* * *
When Leo asked about Chip’s scars—the cryptic puzzle of a daredevil’s life—Chip talked about farm escapades, about droving and fencing and breaking horses, about the escape to the big city and setting himself on fire.
—Your dad …
He looked nervously at Cora, then modified it:
— … the new one, he was the first to film the blazer stunt. Has he shown it to you yet? The one where I’m on fire and jumping into the ocean?
They both looked at him.
—Stop telling fibs, said Cora, wagging her finger.
—I’ll ask him to show you, said Chip.
Leo was running a hand over the disc-shaped scar on Chip’s left forearm. Whenever someone touched it, Chip swore he tasted lead and smelled smoke.
* * *
The children were never coached for their scenes. All they had to do was stare out the window, walk down the hallway, or play in their room. They never asked what the film was about, and neither Claude nor Sabine ever told them that their mother was the inspiration for the role of the widow. But Claude noticed the way that Sabine subtly prepared them for the camera. Right before they came onto the set the gramophone music in the cottage turned a little brooding and Germanic, just like the raking symphonies Dorothy had played from her sanitarium bedside. Or Sabine mentioned her own mother, in passing over dinner, as if to evoke the unnamable ache that all orphans reach for in the night.
* * *
They were not yet orphans, though. That didn’t happen until July, when Claude received a telephone call in the main house from Dr. Callow.
—Dot slipped away on a wave of laudanum and morphine, the doctor said, with barely a murmur, a boat slipping quietly into a deep lake.
The doctor paused, coughed away from the telephone. Claude asked about funeral arrangements and Callow said that Dorothy’s final will and testament, of which he was the executor, was very clear.
—She insisted that there be no ceremony of any kind. We have a plot for her in our own cemetery, out by the lake. Which brings me to this: your first payment, from the trust, will arrive next month. It must be deposited into an account with your name and your wife’s name on it, per Dot’s wishes. Oh, and will you let the children know of their mother’s passing?
The doctor made telling the children about their mother’s death sound like a formality, a matter of tucking a note under their pillows.
* * *
When Claude returned to the cottage, he told Sabine the news in the privacy of their bedroom. He’d envisioned she might have some wise and maternal way of handling such matters, but she began to weep unabashedly and—still with tears running down her cheeks—called the children into the bedroom from one end of the hallway. After explaining that their mother had been loosed from her body, she said, She loved you both so very much and always will. Staring down at his untied shoes, Leo said, I don’t like to cry. Cora put her arm around his shoulder.
—Father didn’t like it if we made a fuss of things. Is there a grave?
—Out by a lake, said Claude.
—She couldn’t swim, said Leo, sniffling.
* * *
Sabine met these words with a fresh round of her own sobbing. She knelt on the floor and pulled the dumbfounded children into her embrace. From above, Claude watched their blinking, startled faces amid the net of Sabine’s shining hair, then he patted the top of Sabine’s head. Alors, you’re scaring them. Sabine released them and Claude took them back to their bedroom. When he returned, he found her sprawled across the bed with her face in a pillow.
—Out of respect, there will be no filming tonight. It’s only proper, she said.
Claude drew the curtains against the afternoon sun.
—You’re grieving as if it was your mother who died all over again.
—Will you stroke my hair for just a minute? Then I will go and sleep in the children’s room. They need my comfort.
—Or perhaps you need theirs.
* * *
There was nothing in the bedroom Claude shared with Sabine that suggested a man might dwell within. The draperies and eiderdown were laced and brocaded, the armoire smelled of jasmine and milled hand soap. His tailored clothes hung neatly, his English shoes polished and arranged on a shelf, but in truth he felt like a lodger. It didn’t dissipate the relish he felt each night when he came to bed after midnight, the reels developed and drying in the lab, Sabine lying naked under the sheets.
* * *
True to her word, she fulfilled all of her wifely duties, though this was done between the hours of 6:00 and 7:00 a.m., twice a week before the children were up, on the days of her choosing. The exception was the week after Dorothy’s death, when she made a habit of waking him five mornings in a row. He awoke to find her kissing his shoulder or stroking his leg, or sometimes she would dispense with the preliminaries and slide a hand down into his cotton drawers. The lovemaking was unhurried and experimental. Once she had lowered the drawbridge he was free to add some stage directions of his own. Sometimes, afterward, with a bite mark on his arm or a cramp in his leg, he would watch her fall back asleep and think: I’ve married a te
rrifying Greek goddess. I should be terrified but I’m not.
* * *
The film, meanwhile, continued to kill Sabine off one frame at a time. Although he no longer wanted to banish her to some cinematic afterlife, the celluloid seemed to have a mind of its own. Every angle, scene, and plot device pointed to an inevitable and tragic conclusion. To change the ending now—he briefly entertained her and the children floating across the Hudson in the dirigible—was to deny an audience its most basic impulse. Moviegoers favored endings that mimicked medieval morality plays, the restoration of balance. They wanted to see her burn alive.
* * *
With a month left to shoot, Claude began to think about an epic musical score to accompany his melodrama. The reels normally went out with a cue sheet from the studio, a listing of major scenes with suggested musical accompaniment, and this was a big improvement over the days of free-rein accompaniment, a house organist or violinist making it up as he went along. But because Claude wanted to control every aspect of the mood during the hour-long showing, he planned to commission a composer and a score. He convinced Hal that they needed an arrangement for a forty-piece orchestra and a sound effects man in the wings. The big symphonic sound would include pieces by Schubert, Dvořák, Schumann, Mozart, Grieg, Mahler, and Wagner. The smaller theaters, he knew, would bastardize the score, scale it down to a few musicians and an actor in the wings who could shatter glass or scream when the story called for it. The bigger movie houses—like the 1,100-seat Art Nouveau palace they were building on West Forty-second Street—would mount the film like an Italian opera.
* * *
Someone had built an exact replica of Sabine’s life. There was a plaintive husband, two sensitive, intelligent children, a house full of games and puzzles and impromptu recitals. She immersed herself in the stage business of the household, the cutting of sandwiches and the bandaging of knees. It occurred to her that she had always been at her best onstage with a prop in her hand, with some small enterprise before her—the lighting of a match, say—and so it was in life. Years of listless contemplation had left her feeling untethered and now she felt firm and brimming, eager to wake each morning and put the kettle on. Bustling had never been so enjoyable.
* * *
They traipsed into the woods beside the studio property at dusk, inventing games and picking wildflowers. Leo and Cora never tired of hide-and-seek, of being pursued into the flowering dogwoods that spangled through the river light. While she counted, Sabine liked to lie under the canopy of fragrant trees and close her eyes, giving Claude and the children enough time to burrow into ditches or cover themselves with leaves in a shallow gulley. Sometimes, as she moved through the darkening trees, she called, ’Tis now the very witching time of night, when churchyards yawn, come out, come out, before I find you all.
* * *
This often got a squeal of terrified delight from one of the children as they reassessed their fortresses and made for a deeper, darker place. She heard them scurry, whisper, plot. Leo, in particular, possessed a talent for camouflage and confinement. He insisted on hiding alone inside moss-barked, hollowed-out logs, flattened against stone ledges, or in the crook of two tree limbs, and each time Sabine found him, there was a moment of denial. He would stare out, disbelieving, while she peered into his violated sanctuary, then he would tear out of the spot and come bursting into her arms, knocking the wind out of her. Claude would admonish Leo for his roughness, but Sabine loved the raggedness of it, the last vestiges of untrammeled childhood as she lay back, leaves in her hair, and let him tickle her half to death.
* * *
It occurred to her sometime that summer that she was no longer afraid of the white days stretching at the end of her life. It wasn’t happiness she’d found—she doubted she had the disposition or capacity for that abstraction—but joyous distraction, the wild good cheer of being alive and entertained by others. She had never felt so necessary, so amusing. Children were easy to make laugh—you imitated them, pouted when you didn’t get your own way, sang at importune moments, played with accents, and belched when they least expected it. She gave herself completely to them, treated them as her confidants and co-conspirators.
* * *
She also felt herself swell and harden with a kind of fierce protectiveness. She had often wondered whether she was a moral coward, or too sensitive and easily intimidated, and now she knew in every muscle and nerve that she’d fight off Siberian wolves, jump in front of hurtling locomotives, or kill a man with her bare hands if the children were threatened. She carried this formidable knowledge everywhere she went, in the pit of her stomach, scanning a room or situation for reasons she might be tested. Bravery, she thought, was so much more interesting than beauty.
16
The Old Neighborhood
Money troubles are like women, Chester Bender used to say—they’re fickle and want your undying attention. Hal could remember such loose talk in the kitchen after dinner, or once his father had settled in the living room with a teacup full of whiskey in his favorite chair. It all came back to him that summer, in early August, when he realized the studio was about to run out of money.
* * *
If the final eight-minute sequence hadn’t called for a mob and a burning dirigible, or if the score wasn’t a musical Taj Mahal, they might have been all right. As it stood, the budget had almost doubled, they were short close to $15,000, and the banks and creditors wouldn’t budge. Without another infusion of cash he couldn’t pay for extras or a composer, not to mention distribution and advertising. He persuaded a few individual investors to up their commitment, a few thousand here and there, but he found himself back in Brooklyn one Saturday afternoon in August, going to see Alroy Healy. He hated himself for it, tasted gunmetal at the thought of it, but in all the boroughs, it was Healy who could galvanize cash at short notice, who could have old John make an entry in the logbook and just like that you were on your way with a leather satchel in hand and a noose around your neck.
* * *
But no one seemed to know where Alroy was, so Hal moved from one tawdry Brooklyn business to another, from the saloon to the mattress emporium to the poolroom. He finally found him at a pawnshop on Myrtle Avenue, a storefront with a large display window, a teeming showroom, and a cavernous warehouse set behind it. Arranged in the front window were the forfeited effects of other people’s lives—a green bicycle, a collection of bone china, a divan, two violins, a guitar, a pair of polished oxfords, a set of Madras pajamas, a child’s miniature train set.
* * *
Hal could remember coming here with his father twenty years earlier, always using the side entrance for discretion, to pawn or redeem daguerreotype equipment or a pair of cufflinks or the family’s heirloom clock. Flossy either didn’t know, or pretended not to know, and it always seemed to happen on a Saturday afternoon, Chester’s pockets empty and his mind shuddering with the thought of having nothing to put in the collection plate the following morning. God, just like Alroy Healy, kept tabs on outstanding bets, and Chester had made it his habit to always make an offering in church to hedge against his own terrible luck.
* * *
Inside, the shopmen bustled behind the long wooden counter in their shirtsleeves, a line three deep of workingmen and their wives, holding umbrellas, bundles of clothes, billiard cues, fire irons. Hal asked one of the clerks where Alroy could be found and he was directed out through the warehouse to the manager’s office. The space behind the storefront was filled with unredeemed stock, most of it on metal shelves, pawn tickets attached, and arranged by category: rows of ornaments, tools, clothing, furniture, paintings, sporting goods. Beside the loading dock was the windowed manager’s office, where Alroy sat at a desk with a black Labrador at his side. Hal knocked on the door and was waved in after several seconds of scrutiny through the window.
* * *
Alroy puckered up a wolf whistle as Hal walked into the office. Here we go, it’s the fucking Prince of the P
alisades. Fancy suit, Hal Bender, what is that, poplin? In recent years, despite the studio’s uneven balance sheet, Hal had taken to buying his shoes and suits from a Midtown clothier. In all his dealings with investors and distribution consortiums, he’d found it necessary to look the part of producer and impresario—imported brogues and tweeds and silk ties. Alroy gestured for him to sit, but continued to rub the dog’s black muzzle and head.
* * *
Above the desk was a sign that read Uncle Is In. Uncle was an old Victorian moniker for pawnbroker, and people along the avenue, from the saloon to the pawnshop to the poolroom, all called him that, Uncle Alroy, because it was a sign of respect for the man who could bring cash between paydays or the angel of death upon your household. If there was anything avuncular about Alroy, Hal thought, it was in the worst possible way—the husband’s brother who shows up to Christmas already drunk and proceeds to flirt with the host’s wife and daughters.
* * *
Hal sat down in an overstuffed lounge chair and took in the office. Everything had the look of a lapsed pledge—a grandfather clock, a brooding old painting of a ship being tossed in a storm, a snuffbox with a masonic star set into the lid, a walking cane with somebody’s initials engraved on the handle. The desk was piled high with ledgers and carbon-copy receipts.
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