by Jack Finney
Jan said, “I’m delighted, fascinated, that she lived here. Right here in our house. Oh, I’m so glad you told us!” She shoved her chair back, jumping up. “I’ve just got to look at her wall again!” Carrying her coffee, Jan walked to the living room, and my father and I followed with ours.
In the living room we stood sipping our coffee under the hardness of the overhead bulbs, staring again at the huge lipsticked message from across the years. My voice hollow in the empty room, I said, “I’ve never heard her name before. She ever make it in Hollywood?”
“She never got back.” He took a sip of his coffee, then looked at us. “In nearly every book or movie about the Twenties there’s an obligatory scene: a bunch of people tearing down a country road in an open car, bottles waving, singing, yelling, having a fine drunken time. Well, it did happen. I’ve done it myself. And that’s what Marion did the night before she was to go back to Hollywood. I wasn’t along; she was mad at me, and I wasn’t invited. The car turned over, injuring several of them and killing her.” Jan winced, making an involuntary sound of protest in her throat, and I was frowning. “That was over in Marin County. On a back road near Ross. They had to refilm a couple parts of the picture she was working in. With another actress unknown then, but who turned out to be Joan Crawford. Marion never even saw the one complete picture she did appear in. It was released a month after she died.”
After a moment Jan said gently, “But you saw it, didn’t you?”
“Of course. It was called Flaming Flappers.” He smiled at her. “I’m sorry, but that’s what it was called. I saw it more than once, I can promise you, and felt as bad as I’ve ever felt, almost. Because when I saw it I knew Marion had been right. I was certain then that she’d had a career ahead of her, maybe even a great one. She wasn’t especially good-looking, but she had more vitality and . . . sheer animal magnetism, I guess you’d call it, than anyone else I ever knew. When she was in a room, anywhere at all, you knew it. Not just me, everyone felt it. And when she left a room you felt it, too, almost as though the light had dimmed. Well, that came through in the picture. Except for a last little glimpse of her at the very end, so short it didn’t count, she was in only one scene. A party scene: you saw her talking to a group of admiring men. That’s all; it only lasted half a minute, maybe less. But it got her a real part in the next picture, the part Joan Crawford ended up having and which began her career. I’ve often thought that that should have been Marion’s career. Because she had that same direct personal appeal and power over you that only a handful of the really great stars ever have; the ones you never forget, like Garbo; Crawford; Bette Davis. She had a career coming to her, all right.” Taking a sip of his coffee, he looked back at the wall. “ ‘Read it and weep!’ ” he murmured, and nodded. “She was right about everything that day, wasn’t she?”
• •
CHAPTER TWO
• •
A couple weeks later we had the apartment looking pretty good; we’d painted nights and weekends till it was done. We had a housewarming then, and Marion’s wall was the life of the party. There were nineteen guests, a lot of them friends from college days at the University of California at Berkeley, which is where Jan and I met. There were others from my office at the Crown Zellerbach company, on Market Street. And the couple from downstairs, the Platts; Jan had gotten acquainted with Myrtle Platt in meetings at the porch mailboxes. She was a cheerful overweight housewife, and when they arrived and had the wall explained—the first thing every guest had to know, naturally—she went back downstairs and came up again with a big, shiny coffee-table book, an illustrated history of the movies, which I knew about but couldn’t afford. Everyone gathered around it, spread open on the cloth-covered table Jan had arranged against one wall on which liquor and drink-making stuff was spread. And Myrtle turned the pages hunting for a still from Flaming Flappers. But there wasn’t any; the picture wasn’t even mentioned.
Ellis Pascoe said, “There never was such a picture.” He was a former instructor of mine at the University, a thin, bearded man who used to tell me he wished he were a don at Oxford. “Don’t you recognize Nick’s disguised handwriting, Jan? Lord knows I do from all the semiliterate papers of his I had to read. He’s putting you on; he wrote that so he wouldn’t have to peel off the rest of the wallpaper.”
Drinks in hand, staring at Marion’s wall again, the group rang changes on what might appear on further layers of the Cheyneys’ wallpaper: a huge X covering the largest wall, which would be King Kong’s autograph; Walt Disney’s denunciation of Mickey Mouse’s sexual extravagances. But the actuality of the great red scrawl couldn’t be joked away, it retained its mystery, and there wasn’t one of us, including Jan and me, who at some moment of the evening didn’t find himself standing and staring at Marion’s wall. After the party, doing the dishes, letting Al in for a little midnight snack before throwing him out again to his backyard dog-house, we decided there was no question now of removing Marion’s message; it had become the showpiece of the house.
Spring arrived; we had our last skiing weekend of the season at Sugar Bowl in March, and the next weekend a college friend of Jan’s invited us to her parents’ place on Tahoe, and we went water-skiing. There’s a marvelous old-time-jazz nightclub in San Francisco called Earthquake McGoon’s, and a couple times a year they run a film festival in a tiny California town, Volcano. They invite friends and customers, including us, and short of a hundred-and-five fever I wouldn’t miss it: great old films from Dr. James Causey’s collection, of which I wish I owned even the discards. We went to that; and we saw some new movies, read some books, went to an A.C.T. play. We visited friends and were visited by them. Six of us went bike riding in Golden Gate Park one weekend. And on my birthday in May, Jan gave me a full-length feature on 8-millimeter film, Doug Fairbanks’ The Mark of Zorro. That costs $55.98 from Blackhawk Films, a lot more money than she was supposed to spend on my birthday present, but I was glad to have it.
Summer arrived, and we began talking about what to do on my three weeks of vacation in July, but couldn’t really think of anything that would be a hell of a lot of fun while costing practically nothing. We’d gone to Tahoe for ten days of my vacation last summer, and New York the one before that, so we didn’t mind not doing anything much this time. A couple weekends we went sailing on the Bay with friends and talked about buying a boat of our own, knowing we couldn’t. I finished some painting and put a new muffler on the Packard. And in between all this gaiety I went to work nine to five-fifteen, five days a week, Lincoln’s and Washington’s birthdays off.
One night in the middle of June, coming home from work, I got off the bus as usual two blocks from home. The walk from there is nearly all uphill, and it had been fairly warm all day, in the high seventies, a great day, and I took off my suit coat; the temperature was only just now beginning to go down as the first fog slid onto the Bay. As I climbed Buena Vista hill, coat over my shoulder, my view of the city gradually expanded, and looking out over it I was pleased as on nearly every evening with its white-and-pastel look. And with the marvel of the Bay, the hills and mountains around it, and how much of an older San Francisco remained. The money-makers were destroying the city as fast as they could go, blocking off the old views with higher and higher buildings—praised by the Mayor, approved by the Supervisors—and the destruction of the Bay itself with fill and pollution continued. But there was still an awful lot of beauty to destroy before they finally Manhattanized or Milwaukeeized San Francisco, a lot still left that was good to look at meanwhile. As a Midwesterner, a flatlander, I appreciated this place, and had been here long enough to feel a part of it.
On my front porch, winded a little from the climb from street level, I thought as always that I ought to start jogging. And I stopped to look out over the city once more, expecting a renewal of the way I’d been feeling. But, perversely now, without any reason I understood, a stab of depression killed the feeling. It had happened before, and I was used to
it, and to the almost automatic sequence of thoughts that came with it. The very thought of these thoughts bored and depressed me in advance, and I skipped right past the big ones, the big national and international problems that you’re tired of too. Next in line came the thought that it would soon be five years that I’d worked at a job meant only to be a stopgap between college and whatever it was, when I discovered it, that I really wanted to do. But all I’d discovered so far was that I didn’t have anything I really wanted to do. And the unnerving idea had begun occurring to me that this job—which was pleasant enough, and at which I was fairly successful, but which had no relation to anything important in my personality—might be permanent. Someday, incredibly, I might be pensioned, having spent my entire working life at Crown Zellerbach. Next came the nagging feeling that it was time Jan and I had children. We wanted to, genuinely; I like kids, so does Jan, and we’re going to have them, but like a lot of people we’d decided to have a few carefree years first, and I didn’t quite seem to be ready to say I’d already had them. There were other equally dreary commonplace thoughts; the entire sequence had become mechanical, and I was just standing there, my mind barely ticking over, staring off across the city—hundreds of windows were a blank glittering orange from the lowering sun—when I heard a bay window open above the porch roof, rattling in its frame.
“Nick?”
“No, he’s working late. I’m your neighborhood mugger, Rupert the Raper. Open up, lady; you’re next.”
“What are you doing down there?”
“Balancing on one leg. Setting a world’s rec—”
“Well, come up here, Nick! I’ve got something to show you!”
“Okay.” I turned toward the door, getting out my key, but before I could get it unlocked I heard Jan clattering down the inside stairs. She opened the door and stood grinning at me all excited; she was wearing the gray sweater and slacks she’d bought with the I. Magnin gift certificate her mother had given her at Christmas. In her hand was a small magazine, TV Guide, I saw, and her finger was holding a place. She didn’t speak, just opened the magazine and pointed, eyes bright.
Thursday Evening, June 14, I read at the top of the page, and saw that Jan’s lacquered nail was touching the little TV-screen-shaped spot on which a 9 was superimposed in white. This was today’s date; Channel 9 was the Bay Area Public Television station. I took the magazine and, walking upstairs behind Jan, read the listing: 9:30 p.m., THE TOY THAT GREW UP. “Flaming Flappers,” silent film of the Twenties starring Richard Abel and Blanche Purvell: hip flasks, flaming youth, fast cars, and fast parties. Piano accompaniment following original cue sheets by Mabel Ordway.
I was grinning when we hit the top of the stairs and said, “Kiddo, you don’t know it, but you probably just saved my life.” I kissed Jan, genuinely, so that she actually flushed. “Now how in the hell am I going to wait till nine-thirty?”
At nine-twenty-eight I switched on the set in the living room, turned to 9, and stood waiting for sound and picture; across the room Jan sat on the chesterfield watching, and Al lay on the rug before it, more or less knocked out as he generally is after his dinner. The sound came on, music over a man’s voice, the music rising in volume as the voice receded. Then the picture popped on, swelling to fill the screen, rolling slowly; I tuned it to sharpness as the rolling slowed and stopped. Two men in molded-plastic chairs sat facing each other, one listening and slowly nodding, the lips of the other moving soundlessly as the music overrode his voice completely. They began contracting into the distance as the camera drew away, the men continuing to talk, one of them throwing his head back to laugh, as though they were so caught up they were unaware the program was ending.
I sat down on the chesterfield, and we watched the station’s call letters, KQED, appear on the screen. For some time then, maybe twenty seconds or more, the letters remained there silently, the set humming. I said, “Shows class, you see; no commercials.” I slouched down comfortably, extending my legs, and put my feet—I was wearing soft slippers—on Al; he was in exactly the right place. His head lifted to stare at my feet, then at me. You could read his mind; he was wondering which was the least disagreeable course: to actually make the effort of getting up and moving out of range or to lie back and put up with it. He thought about it, then lay back again, sighing. I said, “This is part of the job of ‘being the dog,’ Al. It’s not all carefree barking. You’ve got to earn that daily seventy-nine-cent can of dog food; nothing’s free.” Making a supreme effort, he thumped his tail twice against the floor, and I took my feet off. The call letters disappeared and THE TOY THAT GREW UP appeared superimposed across a still figure of Charlie Chaplin, the sudden background music a thumping nickelodeon piano. A neat young man in suit and bow tie came on, standing before a painted backdrop representing a movie box office. He spoke pleasantly with seeming authority about films of the Twenties, the usual stuff. I said, “See the faintly amused smile? That shows he knows the old films are a little ridiculous. But get the careful voice, the scholarly note; you can’t claim he’s patronizing them.”
“What’s the matter with you tonight?”
“I’m Samuel Johnson, my mind a scalpel; I see through pretense everywhere. The truth is that ridiculous as it sounds, I’m all excited.”
“Me too.”
The screen faded to black, and—Jan’s shoulders actually hunched up in glee at this—the title of the picture appeared in white letters on a black that seemed faded and less than black. “Flaming Flappers” it read incredibly, in a thin graceful italic of the period, “A Paramount Picture” The piano accompaniment, no longer nickelodeon, thank God, receded in volume to become an almost unnoticeable background sound, but it made all the difference; we were in another time long before sound came to the movies. Cast and credits came fast, and not very many of them. The screen went momentarily dark, then lightened rapidly to show an enormous chauffeured car entering a circular white-graveled driveway between high wrought-iron gates, and Jan gripped my forearm. “I can’t believe it. I can’t stand it. We’re actually going to see Marion Marsh!”
The car on the screen slowed, then stopped before the wide shallow stone steps of a great country house. I sat forward, peering, then identified the radiator ornament. “Pierce Arrow.” A subtitle appeared: “A Wealthy Long Island Estate.” The chauffeur opened a back door of the sedan and began helping an elderly woman out; she carried a lorgnette, wore a long dress and a round, straight-sided hat with a slightly curved top. I said, “Looks like she’s wearing a cake.”
The scene cut to a huge room—tapestries and crossed spears on its walls—whose open French doors led out to a stone veranda with a heavy stone balustrade; beyond the veranda an enormous lawn stretched into the distance. I couldn’t tell if it was real or a backdrop. The elderly woman with the lorgnette was entering the room, and walking toward her from the veranda entrance was a young woman, Blanche Purvell, I recognized, the star of the picture. In contrast to the older woman’s dress, hers was knee-length and sleeveless. “Nice legs,” I said, and smiled as Jan glanced at me.
The story developed fast: Blanche Purvell was rich, an heiress, in love with a poor man in the nearby town, even though her mother, the woman with the lorgnette, objected. The young man appeared to deliver groceries, wearing a cloth cap with a long curved peak, a white shirt, tie, and a sweater. With the help of a middle-aged woman in servant’s uniform, he unloaded them from a wicker basket onto a wooden-topped table in a strangely old-fashioned kitchen, and the girl happened in. They smiled lovingly at each other when the servant wasn’t looking, then walked out the back door and across a grassy expanse, passing a pair of tennis courts on which young people were playing. I wondered where it had been filmed, and what stood there now: a freeway on-ramp, I supposed; or a shopping center with a five-acre parking lot. The couple walked on toward a delivery truck, a black Model T Ford with a long, curved roof extending from windshield to tailgate, its sides open. It stood parked on a dirt road.
“Of course. He wears that nutty cap because he’s bald as a bowling ball, and she doesn’t know it.”
“What a surprise when he takes it off on their honeymoon.”
“If he does.”
A roadster with wooden-spoke wheels appeared, top folded back, and braked to a fast skidding stop, its wheels seeming to revolve backward slowly. A cloud of dust enveloped the boy and girl and Jan murmured, “Goody.” A young man in tennis flannels, a white knit sweater tied by its arms to hang down his back, slid over the closed door of the open car, a pair of rackets in one hand. He glanced superciliously at the truck, then imperiously beckoned the girl to follow as he walked on toward the tennis courts. “I adore him!” Jan said.
“You’re a snob.” On the screen the girl turned to follow the young man in flannels, then looked longingly back at the boy left behind at the truck. She spoke and as her lips moved I said, “I love you, Ralph, but Frank smells better.” On the screen a subtitle said, “I’d rather stay with you!”
We lost interest: the story developed too fast and too obviously, and the world, if any, to which it referred was remote to the point of incomprehensibility. The film was a copy of a copy, probably, the faces washed out, very white, and Jan murmured, “They’re all eyes, lips and eyebrows, like old snapshots.”
“Yeah. You know something? This film was made by light reflected into a lens. From the faces of real people. Who were once really there in exactly that scene, doing just what you see. I know that but I don’t believe it: that’s always been an old film, and they’ve never existed outside it.”