The Biograph Girl

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by William J. Mann


  That’s when someone yelled, “Fire!” The bonfire had gotten loose, igniting a series of small grass fires. I dismounted, thanked my horse, and allowed him to be led away from the flames, which were spooking him even more now. I took a seat on a log at some distance watching the men hoot and holler as they stamped out the flames.

  From my coat, I withdrew a tablet of paper, borrowed pen and ink from Mr. McCutcheon, and wrote:

  Dear Linda,

  I am making a moving picture today. What a curious experience it has been. The sun has gone behind a cloud and a fire has broken out. We may need to begin again tomorrow.

  I looked up. Above me stood a man from the Wild West Show. He was playing an Indian in the film; his face was painted with black smudges. He offered me a cigarette. “Might as well warm your lungs,” he said.

  I smiled up at him. He lit the cigarette for me and handed it down. I took in a long, delicious drag.

  “Some trick riding there,” he said, smiling a crooked grin.

  I raised my eyes. He was handsome, with dyed black hair and steel gray eyes. Older than I was. Maybe thirty. “Thanks,” I said, taking his comment as a compliment.

  He sat down next to me on the log. “You’re mighty purty, Miz Boone,” he whispered in my ear.

  He smelled of gin. My first instinct was to pull away, but I didn’t. He seemed to be friendly with Mr. McCutcheon and the others; it wouldn’t do to offend them. In the old days, of course, when Mother was the boss, none of our actors would have dared sit so close to me. Mother would’ve had them tossed out—but first I’d have landed my own fist on their jaw. I’d always taken care of myself. In Buffalo, I’d rassled it up with Norman many a time when his teasing got too severe. I may have been just a girl, but I got my licks in.

  Now, however, I felt my face flush as the actor nuzzled my hair with his nose. I stiffened. “Just keepin’ warm,” he said with his lopsided grin. When he asked me if I wanted another cigarette, I declined.

  He was handsome—I couldn’t deny that. His proximity made me uncomfortable, but I admit there was a tangle of feelings wrapped up in that discomfort. There was something warm and thrilling to his nearness, too—warm and a little heady. I could smell gin and tobacco but also sweat and … something else. Mother and her actors had all treated me like a child. When this man kissed my ear, I wasn’t sure how I felt. I finally just stood and headed off into the trees.

  It was too late to do any more filming. It was getting dark, and I was cold and damp. In my head, I was composing the rest of my letter to Linda. I planned to tell her:

  It is a queer thing, making movies. Nothing at all like acting on the stage. Strange men, calamity after calamity—and no applause.

  That’s when I bumped into the body dangling from the tree.

  A man. Dead. Hanging.

  I screamed.

  My Indian-painted friend rushed up behind me. “Miz Boone,” he ordered, “cover your eyes.”

  But I couldn’t. I just stood there and screamed. The dead man’s eyes were open and black. His neck was broken at a horrible angle. He wore a waistcoat and vest. A pocket watch had come loose and now swayed lifelessly at his side. His black eyes faced me, but his body was turned toward the woods.

  He’d killed himself.

  Like my father.

  Mr. Porter and the others were gathering around. Mother was suddenly behind me. “Florence, come away with me,” she said.

  But I broke free of her. I turned to my new friend. “May I have another cigarette please?” I asked. Mother watched me warily.

  He lit it for me. I thanked him, inhaling the smoke, holding my gaze with his. He took off his coat, draped it around my shoulders. “There,” he said. “Don’t you fret over no hanged man.”

  Mother turned and walked away.

  My friend and I moved off, too, just as I heard them cut the dead man down.

  We went to a tavern in the Village. There were dozens of them in those days—seedy little places with bartenders who wore eye patches and patrons who spat on the floor. My friend was staying at the boardinghouse above. I drank several whiskeys and smoked perhaps a dozen cigarettes. At one point, a little drunk and very tired, I turned to my friend and said, “Do you know that suicides burn even longer in hell than murderers?”

  He put his arm around me and kissed me with his hot, smoky breath. “Don’t you let that trouble your dreams, Miz Boone,” he said, his tongue traveling from my mouth down my neck and forcing its way under my high-buttoned collar.

  I don’t remember agreeing to go upstairs with him. But I’m sure I must have. I went up willingly—I’m quite certain of that—and smoked some more cigarettes and drank some more whiskey. When he reached over with his big hand—I remember how dirty it was with grime caked into his pores, oil defining his fingernails—I didn’t protest. I let him touch my throat, cup my breasts, slip his fingers through the laces of my bodice.

  But I did say no, finally, when he began to unbutton my blouse.

  “Stop,” I told him. I tried to push his hands away. “No, please. No more.”

  But I was too weak, too drunk. And after all, he had bought me all those whiskeys and given me all those cigarettes. He had comforted me when I found the dead man.

  “You’re so purty, Miz Boone,” he kept saying over and over, and finally I just turned my face from his and allowed his weight to collapse upon me.

  I hated it. Later, when I thought about it, I felt shame, revulsion. But while it happened, I simply hated the feel of it, the roughness of his hands and his sandpapery face, the hot pain that sliced up through me. I cried all during it, and afterward I bled all over the sheets.

  He laughed at me, called me a child. He told me to get up, get dressed, get out of his room. I was bleeding quite a bit. I felt queasy and confused from the whiskey and cigarettes. There was a burning sensation inside me that wouldn’t go away. I pulled on my shoes and stumbled down the stairs.

  Outside, with a tickle of fresh snowfall on my face, I tried to take hold of myself. I thought of Linda. Soon she would be in New York. Soon she would be with me, and we could become famous actresses together.

  I got lost finding my way home. I wandered through the Village, not sure which way was uptown. It began to snow furiously. I could barely see through the near solid blanket of blowing white that seemed to drop down from the sky. I huddled in a doorway for a time, drunk and disoriented, trying to remember my name.

  “I’m Florence Lawrence now,” I kept saying over and over again. “I’m Florence Lawrence.”

  Florence Bridgewood could have found her way home. I’m sure of that. Even if Bridgewood was no kind of name, Florence Bridgewood still could have found her way home.

  But Florence Lawrence—she just fell down, drunk and bleeding in the snow. She just lay there shivering—almost until daybreak—until a policeman happened upon her and took pity and then took her home.

  The Present

  “Flo, you know Mr. Sheehan is coming back today,” Sister Jean says.

  Flo sits opposite a mirror in her room. A nurse’s aide is behind her, tying her long, wispy white hair with a bright red bow. Over Flo’s bed—a hospital bed that stands in sharp contrast to the maplewood bureau and soft upholstered sitting chairs also in the room—hangs a poster of a little girl, a woman, and a man with a walrus mustache. The poster reads:

  BABY FLO, THE CHILD WONDER WHISTLER

  WITH CHARLOTTE LAWRENCE AND HENRY

  DUXWORTHY

  The man is playing a harmonica. The golden-haired little girl stands with her arms outstretched, as if to embrace the audience.

  “Flo, did you hear me?”

  She turns and smiles. “Yes, Jeannie, I know Mr. Sheehan is coming today,” she says.

  Jean watches her intently. Has for the last couple of days. She’s read the material Richard left with her. So many similarities between the two women. But it was impossible. There was no way Flo could be this Florence Lawrence person. No way in
the world.

  “No way in the world,” Jean could hear Anne Drew telling her, many times, about so many things, “doesn’t mean there’s no way in heaven.”

  Anne had believed in miracles. She never accepted the literal truth. “Don’t look to numbers or facts for the truth,” she’d taught Jean. “Look to the heart.” Which was why it was so hard for Jean when Anne failed, at the very end, to look into her own heart.

  “We take care of our own,” old Sister William had told her the day Jean learned she was being reassigned from St. Vincent’s to St. Mary’s. “Believe me, Jean. This will be the best thing for you.”

  Jean grinned ironically. “Delivering me from temptation, Sister?”

  Sister William was from the old school. Still in a black veil and high black lace shoes. But Jean had always found her to be warm and understanding. “It’s Anne’s recommendation,” Sister William admitted. “St. Mary’s needs someone like you.”

  “St. Vincent’s needs me,” Jean pleaded. “Don’t send me away.”

  “You’ve been devoted to the community of St. Vincent’s, Jean. I can’t deny that.” Sister William took in a long breath. “But in light of what’s happened …”

  Devoted to the community of St. Vincent’s. Of course she was devoted to them. They were her family, those crack addicts and homeless wanderers, those streetwalkers with AIDS, those motherless children. They were why I became a nun.

  She’s been devoted to the residents of St. Mary’s, too, as best as she’s been able. But it’s been different. Many of these folks had been wealthy Catholic fund-raisers and organizers in their day; dear as many of them are, Jean’s never felt they needed her—not in the way the people at St. Vincent’s needed her.

  Only with Flo has there been a connection beyond the superficial. With Flo she felt a sense of kinship. Neither really fit in at St. Mary’s. Neither truly belonged. Flo would never have come to a place like this if she hadn’t, finally, been forced by physical limitations to do so—and even then, she’d lived on her own a lot longer than most folks her age. Both she and Jean had unconventional tastes, unorthodox senses of humor. Sister Michael, Jean’s predecessor, would never have encouraged Flo’s theatrical redecoration of the place. She and Flo had fought tooth and nail over Flo’s smoking. Jean—although a strict nonsmoker herself—is far more indulgent.

  There’s a spiritual connection, too. Flo was only a nominal Catholic—“There’s some Irish in me” is all she’s told Jean—but they share some very similar views on God. “Oh, He’s not some crucifix on a wall,” Flo has said to Jean, who wholeheartedly agreed. Flo summed up Jean’s beliefs in her usual straightforward way: “God’s in the eyes of people I love and who have loved me. God’s in the soft caress of a young man in the Temple of Dionysus.”

  That last part hadn’t made complete sense to Jean—one more of the mysteries surrounding Flo Bridgewood—but she understood the old woman’s gist. “God’s our family,” Jean said to her.

  “And family,” Flo reiterated, “isn’t counted by blood.”

  They were all gone, her family, Flo told Jean the first day they met. “I saw them all go,” she said, her eyes faraway, “and I’m still here.”

  It was the same for Jean. Her parents were dead. Anne was dead. And Victor, too. There was no one. Even the other Sisters felt distant. After what had happened, they saw her through different eyes, and their treatment of her was still painful. The family they’d shared seemed part of an irretrievable past.

  But with Flo, Jean had found home again. They shared thoughts of God and love and loss late into the night. Flo made her laugh as no one else ever had, teaching her the peculiar brand of folk wisdom that seemed Flo’s own. She’d learned a lot with all those years under her belt. “If at first you don’t succeed, Jeannie, sure—try, try again,” she said. “Then quit. No use being a damn fool about it.” Their laughter would echo through the quiet corridors at two A.M.

  Flo was her family now—and part of her feared she had failed to protect her. What had Richard Sheehan discovered? We take care of our own. Yes, yes—that’s what she has to do. She needs to take care of her own.

  She sits down next to Flo. The nurse’s aide combs the old woman’s hair back. “She sure is a pretty one, isn’t she, Sister Jean?” the aide asks.

  “She sure is,” Jean answers. “You think you’re pretty, Flo?”

  Flo just smiles at herself in the mirror.

  She’s somewhere else today, Jean thinks. In her own world, her own space, among her own secrets and truths.

  What truths did Flo keep? We all have them, Jean thinks. Surprising, startling little truths that observers would never suspect. In smaller minds, such truths might diminish respect for a person; in others, they simply enlarge the canvas of the person’s life. When they’d cleaned out Stanley Soboleski’s trunks in the storage area, they’d found dozens of frayed women’s brassieres and panties, vintage 1940—and faded yellow photographs of Mr. Soboleski wearing them. His poor daughter—Anita had called her Aunt Trinka, Jean thought—had nearly collapsed on the floor in embarrassment. Jean suspected that she had known her father’s secret truth all these years, but never thought it would rise up and grab her as it did. And in front of a roomful of nuns.

  Jean respected people’s truths. Their secrets. She’d learned that little piece of wisdom on her own. Anne taught her many things, but not that particular bit. Anne could never find it in her heart to see Jean’s truth, and that sorrow would forever stay with Jean, the memory of that rejection. But what had happened with Victor would always—always—feel right in her heart. So that’s where Jean kept it. Always there. Her truth.

  She studies Flo now as she faces the mirror. In the material Richard had left, there was an old photograph of Florence Lawrence. A pretty girl in profile, with a prominent nose and strong jaw. Was there a resemblance? Possibly—and yet …

  “Mr. Sheehan hopes to be finished today so he can write his article,” Jean tells Flo gently. She smiles. “You like him well enough, don’t you?”

  “Oh, yes.” Flo taps the aide’s hand resting on her shoulder. “Very nice, Cassie. That’ll be all.”

  “Beautiful as ever, Miss Flo,” the aide says, winking as she leaves.

  Flo turns in her seat. She cocks her head at Jean. “Do you like him?”

  “I do.” Jean does like Richard Sheehan. She has almost from the start—but she’s worried now. Worried about what he may have opened up. “I just noticed that you seemed—well—a little cagey the other day, Flo.”

  The two women hold each other’s gaze. Flo finally turns away, smirking. “Why, Jeannie, whatever do you mean?”

  “Flo, you know I’ve never pried.”

  “No, you never have.”

  “I haven’t thought it my business.” She hesitates. “But you’re my family, Flo. I want to do what’s right for you.”

  Flo stands with some difficulty. Then she straightens up, walking confidently to her bureau. She unscrews her lipstick and carries it back to the mirror, then sits down and shakily applies the bright red color to her lips, going above the line to create her own 1920s look.

  “What do you mean, cagey?” she asks, looking at Jean through the mirror. “Did you think I wasn’t being fair to the poor man?”

  “Flo, you tell him just what you want. Nothing more. And if you don’t want to see him again, that’ll be the end of it.”

  Flo appraises herself, pursing her lips. She seems to be considering something. “No, I’ll see him.” She looks at Jean through the mirror again. “I want to see him.”

  “All right then, Flo.”

  She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath. “Jeannie, do you remember that woman? What was her name again? Her mother was here, died a few years back—”

  “You mean Clare Blake?”

  “Yes.” Flo smoothes out her silk flower-patterned dress neatly across her lap. “Clare Blake. Remember how she was doing that oral-history project? She’d gone back to
school, to the community college over in Buffalo, and she was interviewing all us old-timers like we were aliens crash-landed from outer space.”

  “I remember.” Clare Blake had had none of Richard Sheehan’s charm and had shown none of his respect. Jean remembers Clare shouting at the folks gathered in the day room, “I’ll talk really loud so you all can hear me.” Old Mr. Soboleski—bless his soul—kept turning down his hearing aid so that eventually he silenced the patronizing woman altogether. “Tell me your stories,” Clare Blake had yelled at them. “Tell me everything you remember.”

  Flo twinkles. “Would you say I was cagey with Clare Blake?”

  “I’d say you were brilliant with her.” Jean grins. Flo had begun telling a story—whether it was true or not, Jean didn’t know—about seeing President William McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition just moments before he was assassinated. Clare Blake’s eyes had widened and she’d begun squealing, “Oh, this is good. This is perfect. I’ll get an A!” But then suddenly Flo had stopped, staring blank eyed at the woman. “Go on!” Clare Blake had insisted. “Go on! You were waiting in line and then—”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Flo had said dreamily. “Who are you?”

  Poor Clare Blake had gone away with about twenty minutes of unfinished stories.

  “You were brilliant,” Jean says again.

  “I have my reasons for everything I do,” Flo says, patting Jean’s leg.

  “Flo,” Jean asks, reaching over and taking Flo’s old spotted hands in her own, “I need to ask you. Did you tell Richard the whole truth? Did you answer him—honestly—each time?”

  Flo studies her. She reaches up and gently caresses Jean’s face. “Of course, Jeannie,” she says. “Have you ever known me to lie?”

  No, Jean thinks. But she fooled Clare Blake. She could be quite clever working around the truth when she wanted to.

  “You tell Richard to come see me in my room this time,” Flo says. “I want to show him my posters here. Tell him—tell him I’m ready for anything he wants to ask me.”

 

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