Three by Finney

by Jack Finney

  But he was smiling. “Good,” he called as he walked toward her. “Jesus Christ, it was great! Listen,” he said, voice astonished as he stopped before her, “you’ve got something, you know that? It’s”—he shrugged—“I don’t know; presence, I guess. Can you do it again?” He was suddenly worried that she couldn’t—“Listen, can you do it again? Exactly the same! Don’t change a thing. Except . . .” He smiled, holding up a hand to show it was no rebuke, anxious not to upset her in any least way. “Except no hesitation,” he said gently. “Okay? Essie wouldn’t hesitate. Can you do that?” Marion nodded. “Okay!” he called, but the man with the clipboard was tapping his upper arm for attention. They murmured together for a couple of moments, the director glancing at his watch. “Okay, let it be overtime,” he said. “We got to have this. Okay, places everyone!”

  Again the make-up girl made her rounds, the camera operator did something to his lens, the man with the slate appeared, clapped his boards—and it happened once more. Not quite the same, though. This time—I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but this time it was better. Better because now everyone on the set knew from the first moment that something important was happening today, and the air was alive with the excitement of that. They did it again, and the scene was a marvel. Who was this, the scene said as Marion walked forward to her final position, who was this incredible Essie, and what was she going to do?

  Moving away from the three men, walking to the last position, she reached it, and stood there again, lazily, insolently, serene and proud. Again she moved her body to the music, just a little, but it caught the breath in my throat with the strength of its sensual promise. And without any hesitation this time, her hand moved to the dark-blue cord around her waist and pulled the single knot loose. Stepping forward as she did so, and already dancing with her shoulders, she shrugged loose from her gown, letting it fall to the floor behind her, and stood smiling at the party, completely naked. On the curve of her stomach a heart had been drawn in red lipstick; a blue-inked feathered arrow pierced the heart as though arrow tip and half the shaft had entered at her navel. And the heart and arrow turned her nudity into something salacious.

  She stood smiling at the audience in the instant before her dance began; and then she frowned. She looked down at herself, then up again but staring past her audience now. And then this girl of 1926—wild though she could be but a girl of 1926 all the same—said, “No.” She said it loudly enough but to herself. “Why, no, goddamn it. This isn’t the movies.” She looked around at them, her glance sweeping across their faces. “You bastards,” she said. Then she turned around to look back at the director and, her voice rich with contempt, she said, “You bastard: this isn’t the MOVIES at all!”

  He came to. “Cut! Cut!”—he was striding toward her. “Listen, you! If you want to make this goddamned test, if you ever want to even work again—” He stopped and, like the others, stood watching.

  Marion had stooped and picked up her robe, and—not bothering to put it on, not troubling to hide her nakedness—she flung it contemptuously over one shoulder, and head erect, walked off the set to the dressing room.

  They were suddenly busy, everyone finding something to do, ignoring me as though I were invisible. The director especially was never still: walking angrily about; ordering the set irrevocably struck as fast as it could be got to; releasing his actors; ordering lights off and removed, equipment taken away. And when Marion came out dressed, everyone on and around the set was pointedly unnoticing as she walked down the stairs toward the set and me, her head up, ready to look at anyone. I walked forward to meet her, took her arm under mine, and as we walked across a corner of the set toward the distant exit, I had my head up, too, in challenge, trying to find someone who would meet our eyes. And some did. Some of the actors and some of the technical people met our eyes and—a little mockingly maybe, but still—they smiled in approval. But off in the gloom on the long walk toward the big metal doors and the studio street outside them, Marion cried a little, then she stopped.

  I thought she’d leave. And standing outside the studio on the street flagging a cab parked at the hack stand a dozen yards down, I said, “Jan?”

  “No, it’s Marion, Nickie. I’m a selfish bitch, and I know it. But not all the time, not quite all of it.” The cab stopped before us; she leaned toward the open front window to speak to the driver and said, “1101 Keever Street.”

  She wouldn’t talk in the cab. When I tried, she just reached over to put her hand on mine for a moment, quieting me and letting me know she understood that I’d comfort her if I could; then she turned away to stare out her window.

  We got out at the Standard station a quarter block from the great wrought-iron entrance gates. There was a phone booth at the edge of the lot, and Marion called the number listed beside Bollinghurst, Theo N. “You reach him?” I said when she folded the door back.

  “No, but I sent word—that Marion Marsh was waiting. Outside the gates.”

  Angling across the street toward the wall and high iron fence stretching off into the distance of both directions, she said, “I’ve been here before. When this was new. I saw it from a sight-seeing bus.” We walked along beside the wall, then stopped at the great ornate gates across the driveway, and Marion pointed at the oval plaques in their centers, one bearing a V, the other a B. “They were polished then, and shined like gold.” In the daylight I could see that the plaques weren’t iron like the gates themselves; they were bronze, green with verdigris. Set into the keystone of the arch that curved over the gate tops, a bronze scroll surmounted by a knight’s plumed helmet read GRAUSTARK. But it, too, had turned green, and I saw that paint was flaking from some of the pickets, rusting patches showing through. On the stone wall just to our right The Word had been crudely spray-painted long ago, the paint fading.

  We heard a sound, a rattle, and a man on a bicycle was riding bumpily down the driveway toward us: youngish, bald, and wearing a kind of butler’s uniform, though without a coat—black pants with a narrow white stripe down the sides, black-and-white horizontally striped vest, wing collar, bow tie. Swinging off the ancient loose-fendered bike, he rode the last few yards standing on a pedal. He nodded pleasantly, and with a big brass key unlocked a small gate within one of the large ones, its design blending with the whole so that I hadn’t realized it was there. He gestured us in, we stepped through, and he locked it. Then, walking his bike, he led us back up the long curved drive toward the house.

  “The lawns were marvelous when I saw them,” Marion murmured. “The bus stopped at the gates so we could all look in, the sprinklers were on, and every one made a rainbow, and the grass was just perfect.” It wasn’t now. The lawns had been freshly mowed, but here up close they were disfigured by great islands of cropped-off dandelion tops and crab grass. “The gravel was whitewashed and freshly raked.” But if the thin scatter of stones left on the driveway now had ever known whitewash, it was long gone, and not enough was left to rake. Mostly the driveway was two dirt ruts through a weedy stubble half-covered with browning leaves.

  Yet the grounds weren’t uncared for; the banks and clumps of shrubbery and small trees we were passing needed trimming, clipping back, but they weren’t running wild. The place was looked after but in a slovenly way, as though, I thought, no one any longer checked to see how well it was done.

  The driveway gradually curving, the house growing larger and larger as we walked toward it, expanding in both directions, I saw that it was truly enormous: a great two-story, flat-roofed mansion in, I suppose, a Spanish style, of rough-finished beige-colored stucco. Wide shallow stone steps led from driveway to stone-flagged portico and the massive double entrance doors of carved wood.

  Up the two or three stairs, across the portico, and into the entrance hall, large though not enormous, paved in great black and white stone blocks, checkerboard style. A two-story ceiling, and hanging from it by a velvet-covered chain, the largest crystal chandelier I’ve ever seen in a private hous
e. And there we waited for twenty-five minutes, sitting across from each other in velvet-upholstered straight-backed chairs.

  I sat facing two sliding oak doors closed across a great arched entrance flanked by standing suits of armor each holding a ten-foot lance. To my right, an angled flight of carpeted stairs and the closed arch-top door to what I supposed was a hallway. Marion sat facing me and an eight-foot window just behind my chair, which overlooked a sweep of lawn and a great empty fountain, the bottom of its bowl black with sodden leaves.

  We waited, here in the luxury and grandeur, both impressive and pathetic, of another time and taste, occasionally hearing distant household sounds from behind far-off closed doors. Then the corner of my eye caught a movement, I turned my head, and there—up at an angle of the stairway, slowly rounding it to face us—there he came, wearing what I took to be an old-style tuxedo with a stiff wing collar.

  No mistake, this was an old, old man. And no mistake, this was Ted Bollinghurst. If he was approaching forty in 1926, he was well into his nineties now, and that is what I’d have guessed him to be—wrinkles upon wrinkles and not to be mistaken for the seventies, but into the wispy fragility of the nineties or more. We stood up to face him; he was smiling down at us, but peering, too, not quite certain he saw us, and before we spoke I had time to study him.

  It was the nose that said Ted Bollinghurst: Marion had described it as snubbed, but I wasn’t prepared for a nose so turned up, the nostrils long black holes, that it was very nearly a deformity. He wasn’t bald and he wasn’t not bald; on an unusually high domed skull grew not much hair but so evenly thinned that there were no actual bald spots. It was strangely dark, like a Presidential candidate’s, and he wore it carefully parted in the center as, no doubt, he always had. But now it hung limp and lifeless straight down on each side to the tops of his big crinkled old ears.

  He was closer now, halfway down the stairs, and I saw that of course his hair was dyed, and that there was a faint touch of red just under each prominent cheekbone, and I knew why we’d waited twenty-five minutes. He’d been carefully preparing himself, making up his ancient face a little, and dressing in—not a tuxedo, I saw, but a “smoking jacket” of deep maroon with silk-faced roll lapels. To meet Marion Marsh this old, old man had wanted to look his best.

  Slowly, slowly, advancing always with the right foot, one careful step at a time like a child, hand never leaving the banister, he saw us for sure now, the smile suddenly turned real, and in that instant I liked him, liked even his strange face. “Marion?”

  “Yes. Yes, it is . . . Ted.” She’d slowly stood up, staring, open mouthed. But now as she spoke she smiled at him, beautifully, and walked quickly toward the foot of the stairs. He moved down onto the final step and reached a hand out to her, still smiling but near to crying, too, I thought.

  “Marion, Marion, Marion” he said. He’d once been taller, I supposed, but now, even standing on the bottom step, he was no taller than she. “How good to see you; oh, my dear, how good, how good.” He had released the banister and was holding her hand in both of his, peering into her face; and Marion stood, smiling still but blinking, close to crying, too.

  She replied, genuinely pleased and touched to see him, then she introduced me to him, and the old man welcomed me. His voice was quite firm, surprisingly deep, and if he spoke a little slower than a younger person, it wasn’t much. He seemed ancient but vigorous, seemed still in complete easy possession of his mind and faculties. But I realized it wasn’t true; if not actually senile he was into the kind of uncritical vagueness that precedes it. Because it seemed not to occur to him that the Marion Marsh he had known would be a woman of eighty now. Obviously Marion was simply Marion to him, and that was a young woman, just as in memory she always had been. Yet he remembered this: “You’ve changed the color of your hair, haven’t you?” He shook a finger like a dry stick at her, smiling, and stepped down to begin moving slowly across the big checkerboard toward the sliding doors. “It was blond! And bobbed,” he said, winking at me, shaking his head, as though to say, These women! “But you haven’t changed otherwise. Not a bit; I’d have known that smile anywhere.”

  “And neither have you, really. I recog—”

  “You recognized this nose!” He chuckled phlegmily, then suppressed a cough. “That doesn’t change!”

  “I think it’s cute!”

  “But the rest of me has changed, I’ll tell the world; oh, boy, oh, boy, oh, boy.” He stopped at the big doors, setting his fingertips into the grip plates. “You haven’t been here before, have you?” he said uncertainly. “Were you at any of the parties we used to have?”

  “No.”

  “And you, sir? Nick. Is this your first visit to Graustark?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, good. People thought I was bugs to buy it, but I like to show it off.” He began sliding the door open, I stepped forward to help, then he gestured us past him into a room that quite literally wasn’t much smaller than the high-school gym I’d played intramural basketball in.

  Like the hall, it was two stories high; the drapes drawn, every lamp softly lighted. It was more like a fashionable hotel lobby of the Twenties than a living room; obviously this had been meant for enormous parties. Standing just inside the doorway we were staring off into a room of as many as twelve or fourteen big chesterfields and I just don’t know how many dozens of chairs, all fatly upholstered in a bygone style, and still it was spacious and uncrowded. There were deep-pile rugs, three grand pianos—three—each draped with a fringed Spanish shawl, their tops crowded with framed photographs. And tables, lamps, huge vases, ornaments, statuary, paintings. There were standing lamps five or six feet high, the kind my mother called “bridge lamps,” one entirely of wicker, even the shade, the light shining through it, and most of them were draped with still more fringed, embroidered shawls. Halfway up the wall a railed balcony of closed doors ran around the room on all sides but the one we’d come in at. More Spanish shawls hung draped on these railings, one embroidered with a cactus, the others with roses.

  I saw all this, an impression only, in a slow sweeping glance, then my head stopped and I stood staring at the staircase at the opposite end of this great room, realizing in the moment I saw it that this entire vast space was really a setting for it.

  From the railed balcony, stairs led down along the wall opposite us, beautifully railed and banistered. Then, at no more than a yard above the floor level of the room, they ended in a landing of white marble as large as a small stage. Only three shallow but immensely wide steps from it to the floor, each a little wider than the last, the final step, its ends gracefully rounded, a good eighteen feet long. The landing was a stage, planned for the dramatic entrance from above, and the final pause at the center of attention, before stepping down into and joining the room.

  But then I understood that even this landing was only the setting within a setting for something else. Hung on the wall of the landing, to face the length of the entire room and the great entranceway we stood in, was a full-length—and at the very least, life-sized—portrait of a woman so magnificent that a little physical chill moved up my spine as I stared at it. I knew the face: this was Vilma Banky, standing in a knee-length, loosely hanging evening gown of the Twenties, a Spanish shawl draped over one shoulder. Her head was turned, chin slightly lifted, to show her marvelous profile. In the center of her forehead a curl spiraled round and round to a final point, but if that sounds funny it wasn’t: this was a beautiful, beautiful woman and nothing could make her absurd. Concealed lighting illuminated the painting without shine and from all sides, its gilt frame ten feet high if it was an inch. And it was hung just exactly high enough so that no matter who, short of King Kong, came down the stairs to pause on the stagelike landing before it, she’d be upstaged by Vilma Banky.

  Ted stood waiting till we’d looked our fill, as no doubt he’d always done the first times he took people into this room. Finally we turned to him, murmuring our compli
ments, and he nodded, smiling, and accepted them on her behalf. “Yes. Thank you. This is Vilma’s room. It’s her house still, very nearly as she left it. I had a staff of researchers working full time for something over a year, while the house itself was being renovated. They consulted old newspaper and magazine photographs and accounts. Interviewed or corresponded with people who’d been here often. Of whom there were a great many. And many of whom loaned us photographs they’d taken. They consulted diaries and letters of Vilma’s time here. Read her household accounts. And fortunately we had the auction catalog, illustrated and with full descriptions of virtually everything this house once contained. So we were able to track down many of the things that had been sold. Including the painting. Especially the painting. In most instances we were able to buy them back. Much of the furniture has been rebuilt, restored to just as it was, even to the reweaving of certain materials. Some of the furniture is duplicated. So that now—well, she’d be at home here, if only she could walk back into it. But there are a few things I’ve added.”

  He walked slowly forward to what I’d thought was a delicate, thin-legged, oval-topped table, but as we moved closer I saw first that the top was glass, and then that a small shaded light inside it illuminated the interior of what wasn’t a table but a shallow display case lined with pale-blue watered silk. We stopped before it, looking down into it—and I didn’t understand what I was seeing, lying there in the center of the case just above a printed card.

  It was a shapeless lump about the size of a dime, its surface wrinkled and shriveled, grayish pink in color. It lay squashed down onto the center of a raggedly cut, roughly circular piece of heavily varnished canvas about the size of a man’s hand. Before I could read the card, Ted explained, voice lowering respectfully. “The wad of gum Spencer Tracy stuck on the back of Clark Gable’s plane in Test Pilot.” Marion’s head lifted slightly to look across his bent back at me, frowning, and I read her expression: Who is Spencer Tracy? Who’s Clark Gable?