“I thought I’d telegrammed. You know I didn’t want to disturb you.”
“I received the telegram yesterday but was hoping I could stay up,” she says in a voice better suited for a nurse than a wife. “Was the trip a success?”
“We managed to persuade Izzy to return with us, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“We?”
“Yes,” Micah says, remembering that a good liar always uses the truth. “Me and our guide, Mtabi.”
“And what of your other friend?”
Micah strides across the length of the room and kisses her atop the forehead. “You’ll have to be more specific, dear. Incredible as it may sound, I have lots of friends in Africa these days.” He loosens the knot of his tie and rubs the back of his neck in a single sweeping motion, decides to skip the midnight meal altogether and heads straight for the bar cabinet.
“You know exactly who I mean.” Sitting on the love seat, waves of hair fanning out over her shoulders, Margaret appears as regal and full of threat as an empress. “I’ve always been a good wife to you, and I’ve always turned away and allowed you to have your adventures so long as you’ve returned to me and the boys. But this latest involvement cannot continue.”
Micah steadies himself with his scotch. He’s believed that the true secret of alcohol rests not in its bringing on a sense of abandonment but the opposite: the application of a ruthless precision of focus. He’s held that drink didn’t slow down one’s perceptions but sped them on, serving as an electrical current for the filtering out of the inconsequential, nonsense meaning, and social miscues. He wishes he were drunk now and does his best to hasten that process along.
A full-length mirror hangs in the sitting room across from where he’s situated. In it he sees a fattish man, the middle button of his vest straining beneath his suit jacket, the space between his chin and neck alarmingly pink and shapeless, a foppish red handkerchief leering from his pocket, a boyish man with a boy’s smooth face careering toward middle age, a balding lothario, chaser of easy marks, maker of contrivances. The pitiable, fatuous fellow nodding back at him in the mirror attempts a stern, resolute expression, the false face of an adolescent making a show of manliness. He reaches a hand out to confirm that, yes, the comic figure waving back is himself.
And in a rush this shadowy creature is planted curbside at a parade of regret, a carnival of missed opportunities and fates never made. They stream by: thoughts of the women he’d never love and the good work he’d never do and the children he’d never raise and the understanding he’d never attain and the qualities he’d never foster and the challenges he’d never dare and the greatness he’d never will himself into achieving, a future of self-recriminations stacking up like newspapers in the hall. These are the people you’ve loved. These are the people you’ve been given and chosen to love in your one spin around. These are the people you’ve failed. You envisioned yourself a romantic hero, but you can’t even best your wife in a lousy late-night conversation. You told yourself you’d walk through fire for her, drink vinegar, eat a crocodile, but, no, you really wouldn’t. You’re not willing to give up anything for her. He hates himself, but he doesn’t hate her. He’d sooner end it than renounce her.
“I won’t insult you by suggesting I don’t know who you’re talking about,” he says, using a tone that’s unfamiliar in their marriage and taking a seat on the couch across from her.
“Good.”
“Or that I believe you’ve been unaware of some of my other affiliations.”
“I’m not asking for a confession, Micah.”
“Thank you for that.”
“But I am asking for it to stop.”
“I want you to know, Margaret,” he says, too pleased with this formulation, “I never meant to embarrass you.”
“Oh, Micah,” she sighs. “Let me be very clear about this. It’s not my embarrassment we’re talking about. This isn’t about the humiliation I feel or that the boys will feel. I’m talking about how others see you. Have no illusions about this, dear. I’m not the one preventing you from continuing this association. Running around with colored girls—really? It’s just not the way things are done.”
A bauble on the coffee table draws his attention. He picks it up. A paperweight, a snow globe, slippery in his hand. Embedded deep in its base, beyond the blizzarding clouds of confetti, an imperfection, a tiny bubble, no larger than one that might be found resting on a baby’s lip. In it Micah is certain he can catch the reflection of Rose’s room eighty blocks uptown, the amber dream of happiness, his phantom limb hidden four miles away. In the object the fireplace crackles in miniature, drawing him in. Reaching to place it back on the table, he falls off the couch and ends up on the floor. More comfortable there than in a hard-backed chair or on the overly formal sitting-room furniture she’s chosen, he stays put.
“This is difficult to say”—holding the paperweight, not looking at his wife—“but I don’t know if I’m a good man. What I mean to say is, I don’t know if I haven’t spent my life dedicated to entirely the wrong things. Does that make sense? Do you understand what it is I’m trying to say? I don’t know if I’ve ever tried to be a good man. If I’m equipped for it.”
“That has little to do with how you’re meant to handle things,” she says, radiating energy, red hair and white robe like fire on snow.
From the floor Micah looks up at his wife. “What would you have me do?”
“I want to hear you say it. I want you to say you’ll end it.”
“Okay, I’ll end it.”
“And I want you to tell me you never cared for that colored whore of yours.”
“I don’t know what I was doing, Margaret.”
“And?”
“It didn’t mean anything to me.”
“Tell me her name. Say everything again—only call her by name so I believe it—and then you can sleep in your bed.”
“Rose. Her name is Rose. Rose Letty.” He places the paperweight back on the table, in scalloped shadow revealed to be a cheap trinket. “No, that’s not right.… She’s married now. So I suppose her name is Rose Dobie. And she never meant anything to me.”
“Oh, what am I to do with you?” she answers as she might an exasperating toddler. “You’ve acted like a child, Micah. Now it’s time to put away childish things.”
“I will,” he says, crawling across the floor to her. “I will,” he pledges again and again and again, reaching her slippered feet and beginning to stroke her bare ankles in an ecstasy of supplication and instruction until her white arms reach down, take him up, and fold him into her like a snowdrift.
THREE
The brothers had come home to New York City to the welcome news that Bumpy Johnson was in prison awaiting trial on bootlegging and racketeering charges, his seventh arrest in twenty-four years. Upon a return visit to her Harlem town house, Micah found Stephanie St. Clair to be keenly interested in the outcome of his second African adventure. Relaxing into the couch cushions while Troy looked on, Micah regaled the great lady with tales from the most recent trip, drinking deep from a perspiring glass of lemonade. And he did not flinch when it came time to inform her how Mtabi had destroyed the film in which the queen held so valuable a stake.
“Certainly, Mr. Grand,” St. Clair said, passing a plate of gingerbread cookies to Micah with spidery hands festooned with gemstones that were visibly old, beautiful, and deep of the earth, “a businessperson as sophisticated as yourself wouldn’t have thought to see me without first having considered some other arrangement.”
Well, there was ninety minutes of movie to make, Micah explained, and he had the muscle to fill it. Appealing to the hardworking woman’s sense of commerce, Micah presented the brothers’ plan. They would abandon the unlikely historical project and offer St. Clair instead a greater percentage of the new Henry Till picture.
“You’re proposing to exchange a tragic story for a comedic one?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“That isn’t the picture we agreed to make.”
“No, it’s not.”
“It sounds like this other picture promises to be just more mockery and monkey business.”
“That’s correct. The Grand brothers are back in the blackface-and-custard-pie business. Well, Madam Queen, what’s your ruling?”
Micah didn’t flinch when the great lady leaned back in her love seat, weighed her deliberation, and offered a response that might provide for the filmmaker a worthy tombstone inscription. “When audiences laugh,” St. Clair said, “it’s never wrong.”
They shot fast and cheap in the Brooklyn Armory and the Biograph Studio in the Bronx in ways that would have made their mentor proud. This would be the last film to wave the Imperial Pictures banner. Marblestone’s burial had uncovered entire mountain ranges of debt, and with it the yard work of dismantling the company, divvying up the assets and the swatch of studio lot among disgruntled producers, California real-estate investors, European backers, and a gang of nickname-wielding disreputables (Sammy the Schvitz, Paulie Knuckles, Jimmy the Spritz). The butter-and-egg business of measuring, assessing, parsing, and dividing that Micah hoped would have Marblestone cackling through eternity.
Once they completed a rough cut of the picture—the brothers’ worst, crassest effort, they all cheerfully agreed—Micah journeyed back to Los Angeles to work on poster treatments, discuss print and advertising budgets, and help clean out the Augean stable of Marblestone’s studio. It was September 1929, and despite some rumblings—rising unemployment, farm failures across the South and West—the country’s dream of itself shone undimmed.
Wandering around the Imperial Pictures lot as burly movers pick apart the remaining pieces of the soundstage, Micah comes across a freestanding staircase, blazoned with glitter and flags, a prop from the recently wrapped backstage musical The Brooms of Broadway. Laid on its side like a wounded horse, the stairwell is being wheeled on a flatbed toward a moving truck, its top and bottom steps connecting nothing to nothing, floating freely under California’s marmalade sky. It is an image full of portent and mystery. Were he a writer, Micah thinks, he might attempt a poem around it.
“When can we see the trailer?” Micah asks Sherman Penderson, the northwestern furniture magnate and efficiency expert who’d been brought in to reallocate the company’s resources. It grieved Micah to think of Marblestone’s life work reduced to some papers and balance sheets carried around in a red briefcase by this officious prick, someone with no sense of stories, no feel for faces as food for the soul.
“I assure you, Mr. Grand,” Mr. Penderson tells Micah in the neutral tones of a tax auditor, “we’ve got some top cutters working on it.”
“I’m sure you do, but Izzy and I had a verbal agreement with Arthur—we always cut our own trailers.”
“Audiences are changing, Mr. Grand.” Mr. Penderson’s eyes lift from the ledger and rise over the rims of his glasses like a pole vaulter just clearing the bar. “As I said, we’ve got top men working on the footage.”
“Who?”
“Top men.”
Tradition dictated that on premiere days in New York, Micah would trek out to Coney Island to walk along the boardwalk, eat a hot dog, play some Skee-Ball, and be reminded once again that his fledgling industrial art was born from cotton-candy amusements. Micah also liked treating himself to a shoeshine, even if these weren’t the shoes he’d be wearing with his tuxedo later that evening.
New York was experiencing an Indian summer in mid-October, and walking through Luna Park on this unusually crowded fall day, Micah was reminded of the last time he’d been here, filming Quicktime with Babe Ruth on that glorious June day the summer before. Through the weave of happy cries and wave sounds, Micah makes out a familiar jingle:
Just twenty cents a shine,
Come rain or come shine,
Not a quarter, nickel, or dime,
Just twenty cents a shine!
Recognizing the shoeshine boy from the previous summer, Micah notes that the kid has shot up several inches since the filmmaker saw him last. The youth’s face is now stripped of baby fat, round-cheeked insouciance beginning to be replaced with the hardening clay of adolescent features. Micah has marked the stirrings of similar transformations in the faces of his boys, a development that fills him with wistfulness and pride.
The boy unties the laces of Micah’s shoes, spreads wide the uppers, lifts the tongue up and out, and begins working dark wax polish into the leather with a worn piece of ladies’ hose. “Nice shoes.”
“Thanks.”
“Take good care of your shoes, they’ll take good care of you.”
“Sound advice.”
“Y’see much of Babe these days?” the boy nonchalants, clockwising the polish into the leather.
“No, just that one time,” Micah says, delighted that the kid remembers the production company’s triumph.
“Wanna hear something?” Working the rag now with real vigor.
“Sure.”
“I work here in Coney couple days a week but downtown the others,” the boy says, conspiratorially swathing the financial district in italics.
“Well, you seem to be an industrious young man.”
“And the fellas down there—talking ’mongst themselves—they chattering ’bout how they taking it out, taking all that money out and putting it under a mattress for safekeeping. How Wall Street’s the one place in the world where something goes on sale and no one wants to buy it.”
“The market’s been up all summer, kid,” Micah says, searching the boy’s face, looking intently into eyes that signal the impression of having already seen too much. “Still, I’m inclined to take your advice. Besides, what goes up must come down, right?” Micah says, pointing to a coaster across the way that cradles in its last carriage a pretty girl who improbably holds a small parasol. “That’s not just the nature of things, it’s entertainment.”
“That’s how I’m thinking, too, mister.” He spits a gob onto the filmmaker’s shoe and begins attacking it with a horsehair brush as, in the distance, the Cyclone veers up again, roaring like a mechanical dragon in search of its next meal.
“Well,” says Micah, tossing the boy a quarter in exchange for saving his wife’s family fortune, “thanks for the tip, kid.”
FOUR
It promised to be a good night. Till was in town with Emily for the premiere, as was Lili Damita, the new heart-shape-faced French starlet who had taken New York by storm and whom Micah was eager to meet. Johnny Beaujolais promised to cover the event for both Moving Picture World and his weekly radio broadcast, and advance word on the picture was good, suggesting that Till might be one of the select group of comic actors whom audiences might still accept in silent films.
It was no accident that they had planned the premiere for the day the spike was finally affixed to the top of the Chrysler Building, making the approximately thousand-foot tower the tallest building in the world. The crowds could see the skyscraper from the Rivoli Theatre across town, its terraced Art Deco crown resembling a religious headdress.
Premieres felt different in Times Square than in Los Angeles. It was the essential contradiction of New York: Since the place was forever grabbing you by the lapels to impress upon you that it was the epicenter of the whole whirligigging world, here you could relax in the certitude that you were never the biggest show in town. Even so, the blinking marquees, klieg lights, and rows of dark, square-backed cars, shiny as stoves, always gave Micah a thrill, even if premieres made just small-kilowatt contributions to busy Broadway boulevards already bustling with offerings from the Rialto and the Criterion and the Paramount and a hundred other theaters.
“Entertainment is a big industry but a small business,” Micah assured Stephanie St. Clair the afternoon they signed a formal contract giving her a 20 percent stake in Pot of Trouble, and he is reminded of those words as he steps from the limousine. Sleek and shiny as a hood ornament, freshly shaved and peppermint scen
ted, all brightness and gloss, Micah dives into a pool awash in exposed female limbs and watery illuminated streaks, blinking across waves of familiar faces that cling to red-carpet stanchions like buoys.
Camera bulbs pop, and here comes everybody. There are the gag writers Shecky Sugarman, Wendell Wilkins, and Amsterdam McSweeney. There is Benny Castor and Trudy, whom Micah is scheduled to entertain with Margaret while the couple is in town. There is Izzy’s friend Howard Mansfield, looking bald and dapper and, for the first time Micah can recall, near to happiness. Wisping along strobiscopically, he is certain of it, he sees Rose, three or four persons deep in the crowd, wearing a bonnet and a plain brown dress, her beautiful frowning face viewed in a flash as welcome to him as water to a man lost in a desert. It is not until he feels a prick of dampness, and looks down at the spot asterisking on his white tuxedo shirt, that he realizes she’s shot him with a water pistol. He looks up again, hoping to spot her, fingers clutching the incriminating novelty item’s trigger, but she is nowhere. Absorbed by the crowd.
“And we’re here with the picture’s director, Mr. Micah Grand,” says Johnny Beaujolais, corralling the filmmaker and pressing an ice-cream-cone-shaped microphone into his face. In his hand Beaujolais holds an index card listing several capitalized items (“AFRICA,” “HENRY TILL,” “SILENT PICTURE”) committed in a child’s penmanship that Micah finds oddly poignant. In the photograph that accompanies Beaujolais’s syndicated newspaper column, the reporter is always shot in rakish profile, and speaking with the man up close, Micah understands why. Of the facial disfigurement earned as a war correspondent at the Battle of the Marne, the radio announcer displays no signs of embarrassment, leading the interview with an aggressive chin and enjoyably rat-a-tat-tat delivery.
“Mr. Grand, lions, tigers, Pygmies—Pot of Trouble promises to be Henry Till’s greatest adventure yet, does it not?”
“Indeed.”
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