The Biograph Girl

by William J. Mann

  She was sitting on the edge of her bed, just staring ahead of her, her hands dangling between her legs.

  “Molly,” I told her. “It will be all right once we get out of here.”

  She just shook her head.

  “Molly, look at me,” I insisted. “It will be all right.”

  “You said it, Flo,” she said, her eyes rising to meet mine. “This is the truth. There’s nothing more than this.”

  “I was wrong, Molly,” I said, grabbing her by the shoulders. “God knows how wrong. I can finally see that. We can be so much more—”

  She made a face, clenching her teeth.

  “The pain is gone, Molly,” I told her. “Look at me. The pain is gone!”

  But it had merely leapfrogged. From me to her.

  Molly took my pain.

  She groaned suddenly, doubling over in front of me.

  “Molly!”

  I stooped down to embrace her. And then I saw it. On a stand beside the bed.

  A glass. With the remnants of some liquid.

  Behind it, two bottles.

  Cough syrup. And the other …

  I picked it up.

  The skull and crossbones made me gasp out loud.

  Ant paste.

  “Dear God,” I breathed. “Dear God, Molly. You mixed them! You—you—poisoned yourself!”

  She stood with some difficulty, made it halfway into the hall, then crumbled in a heap to the floor.

  “Molly!”

  I bent over her. Her eyes were still open. “Dear God,” I kept repeating over and over. “Dear God, dear God!”

  I lunged suddenly for the phone on the kitchen table, but the phone was dead. Of course.

  I ran outside. Now terror—blind, hysterical terror—propelled me. I ran to Marian’s house, banging on her door. “Marian! Marian! Come quickly! Oh, Marian! Dear God, call a doctor! She’s poisoned herself!”

  I saw Marian peer out from behind her curtains, squinting her beady little eyes at me. Her windows were closed tightly. Had she heard? Had she heard correctly?

  I couldn’t wait for her. I ran back to my cottage. Molly had tried to crawl. She lay now on her side, stretched out in the corridor.

  “Flo,” she said weakly.

  “I’ve got to get a doctor, Molly,” I cried.

  “No, Flo, no, please.” She lifted her hand toward me.

  I bent down next to her. “Why did you do it, Molly? We were going to leave.”

  Her eyes found mine. “There was nowhere for me to go, Flo. This was the only home I ever knew.” I took her hand. “With you, Flo.”

  “Molly, let me call a doctor.”

  “Go, Flo. Your pain is gone.”

  “Molly!”

  “Go before it comes back.”

  She closed her eyes.

  I squatted there next to her. She was right. The pain was gone. It was still gone. Just this morning I would never have been able to run about as I had, never been able to stoop down beside her, never been able to encircle her in my arms.

  She began to vomit against my blouse. It didn’t matter. Once, long ago, they had taken her away before I’d ever had the chance to hold her. Now I made sure to hold her close, once, before she was gone.

  The pain would return. I knew that. She knew that. I had no plan then, just instinct. I was still fired by the conviction to leave, and I couldn’t remain there, not even to wait for the ambulance. I set Molly gently back down on the floor. I ran outside, grabbing only my purse. I hid among the rosebushes and cacti and watched as Marian finally emerged from her house and discovered Molly on the floor. Her scream ripped through the quiet neighborhood. Soon others had gathered, others I barely knew, peering in through my door at Molly’s body.

  “Who is it?” the ambulance driver asked when he arrived.

  “Florence Lawrence,” Marian cried, dabbing her pitiful old nearsighted eyes. “She came over and banged on my door, saying she’d poisoned herself. She was in such a state—just the other day she said she could imagine taking a gun to her head—oh, dear!”

  “Get her up on the stretcher,” his partner said. “Is there still a pulse?”

  “Yup, but faint.”

  “Look,” another of the ambulance crew said, coming out of the house. “There’s a note.”

  I watched as they carried Molly down the steps on a stretcher to the waiting ambulance. I had even come out from the bushes, clutching my purse to my chest. I stood just a little apart from the gathered crowd of neighbors. No one knew me. No one recognized me. So it had come to this. I stood there, nearly among them, and they didn’t know me.

  But of course not.

  Florence Lawrence was the woman being carried away.

  I was someone else.

  Of course, it took Lester to make it real.

  “Lester,” I whispered.

  He looked up at me, his face white. “Flo,” he said.

  I had taken a cab to the hospital and walked in without any notice. I found no sense of urgency within those walls; everything proceeded as I imagined it always had. Nurses strode calmly down corridors, clipboards in hand. Over the intercom, doctors were paged with apparent composure. In one room, a woman lay peacefully on a table, smiling up at the ceiling. In another, a man in a wheelchair sat twiddling his thumbs.

  Only at the far end of the unit was there any commotion. A nurse hurried out of the last room, her white smock flapping. A red light over the door blinked on and off. I paused, pulling back, my purse nearly up under my chin.

  Lester was inside the room. I saw him standing over a white-sheeted body on a metal slab, just gazing down at it. He was alone.

  He looked up at me with little surprise, just terrible sadness and a haggard, lost expression in his eyes.

  “I couldn’t save her,” he said.

  I nodded. “They think she’s me,” I said softly, stepping inside.

  Lester put one arm around me and closed the door with the other. “She was asking for you, Flo, at the end,” he said.

  I looked up at him. “What did she say?”

  “She said for you to go,” he told me. “Go where, Flo? She kept repeating, ‘Tell Flo to go.’”

  I nodded, looking down at her body. The sheet had been draped up over her face. A stain of vomit had seeped through the sheet near her mouth.

  “She was right,” I said. “It’s the only way.”

  “The only way for what, Flo?”

  “They think she’s me,” I said again, looking up at Lester.

  He looked up at me peculiarly. “But it isn’t you, Flo. It’s Molly.”

  “Did you tell them that?”

  “I’ve been too busy trying to save her. All I said was that she was a friend.”

  I gripped his hands. “You mustn’t say anything, Lester. You must let them go on believing it was me.”

  He looked at me strangely. “Flo, you’re not making any sense.”

  “Oh, yes, I am. Don’t you see? For the first time in many years, I’m finally making sense. Florence Lawrence needs to die, Lester. It’s the only way.”

  “The only way for what?”

  “For me to get away. I’ve tried everything else. I’ve tried getting married. I’ve tried changing my name. I’ve tried all the medicines you’ve given me. I’ve even tried new careers, but Florence Lawrence kept coming back. She was always there. Ready with the pain, the sadness, the memories—worst of all, Lester, with her incessant need for applause. I can’t let her live again. I’ve got to let her die.”

  “But this is Molly, Flo. Not you.”

  “No one knows who it is. She has no family. We were her family, Lester. We’ll be the only ones to grieve her.”

  “You’re asking me to falsify a death record? To identify Molly as you?”

  I squeezed his hand as tightly as I could. Still no pain.

  “I’m more than asking you, Lester,” I said to him. “I’m begging you. If you ever loved me, ever cared about me, please, please, do thi
s for me.”

  He seemed staggered by my request. “Flo, it’s not ethical.”

  I shook his hands in agitation. “Oh, Lester. It’s what she wanted. She doesn’t deserve to be remembered with such a shabby end. Don’t make her another Peg Entwistle. She can live on in our hearts as she always was, young and lovely and full of hope. Let me take this death from her. Let Florence Lawrence be remembered for eating ant paste—if she’s remembered at all!”

  I had to laugh then. I let go of Lester’s hands and turned around and looked at Molly. I carefully pulled back the sheet to reveal her face. None of the pain that had been there before remained. I touched her cheeks. Still warm.

  “You see, Lester? We’re both without pain now. Don’t let it come back.”

  He seemed to realize for the first time how agile my movements were, how easily I walked around the room. “Flo, how …?” he asked.

  “Let me go, Lester, please,” I said.

  He just kept staring at me, as if mesmerized by this person in front of him. As if he didn’t recognize me.

  “Did you plan this with her? Did she do this for you?”

  “There was no plan, Lester. But yes, she did it for me. I truly believe that. Molly’s given me a chance. A chance to live.”

  He ran his hand through his thinning red hair. “You’d just leave us all?” he asked. “Where would you go?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “When I was a girl, we just blew from place to place. The road’s an old friend of mine, Lester. I’m sure I’ll go someplace.”

  He seemed near tears. “Flo, I can’t,” he said. “The nurse will be back in just a moment with all the forms. I can’t do what you ask.”

  “You must, Lester. Please. I know I’m asking an enormous favor. I know I’m putting you at terrible risk. But I wouldn’t do so unless I truly believed it to be the only way. You’ve tried so hard to cure me now for so many years. And look at me: I have no pain, Lester. None.”

  “Life’s sharpest rapture is surcease of pain,” he said quietly, almost to himself as a way of comprehending me. “Emma Lazarus,” he added.

  I nodded. “Yes. Oh, yes. You have the power at last to cure me, once and for all.” I looked at him as hard as I could. “Please, Lester.”

  His face was white. His eyes looked lost and old, as if there were so many truths behind them, so many hidden stories he’d never revealed. Oh, poor Lester. I know the pain I caused him, the moral dilemma I thrust upon his life.

  But he loved me. He did it because he loved me. He gave his life for me as surely as Molly had.

  “When I was a boy,” he said to me, “the other children would taunt me on the playground. I had no friends as a child—only you, Flo. Only you up there on the glorious screen. I’d come home and read your letters to me. Touch the photographs you had sent. Everything would be all right in the world when I did that.” His voice cracked. “I’ve never loved a woman. Only you, Flo.”

  “Oh, Lester,” I said.

  “You’ve been the only pure love I’ve ever known,” he said.

  “Then do this for me, Lester.”

  His eyes bore into me. “I’ll never see you again,” he said, his voice no longer a doctor’s, or even a man’s—but a boy’s, standing forlorn in the play yard, my photograph in his hands.

  “You wouldn’t want to see me, Lester,” I told him as gently as I could. “Because I’d be dead. Florence Lawrence would have to be truly dead and buried—because you signed that document. You swore it was so.”

  He said nothing.

  I turned and looked down once more at Molly. Lester came up beside me and looked down at her as well. How beautiful she was. So slight, so young, with the same pale skin that I had, the same platinum-streaked hair.

  “Go on,” Lester finally said, his voice thick and somehow very different. “Get out before anyone sees you.”

  That’s when I walked away. I just walked out the hospital doors into a whole new life and—well, you know the rest.

  The Present

  “Then you didn’t kill her?” Ben asks as if surprised.

  Or disappointed.

  Richard glares up at him. They’re back in Flo’s hotel room. They’d whisked her away from the theater in a waiting car and brought her here, where she seemed to revive somewhat.

  And she finally told them what they’d been wanting to know.

  “Poor, poor Molly,” Flo says.

  “I find it incredible that Lester could pull off the deception,” Richard says. “That you could just walk out of there.”

  “But I did,” Flo tells him. “I’m telling you the truth. All of it. I walked right out under the reporters’ noses. Marian had been convinced it was me, and I’d even left a note. So why would there be any suspicion? It was hardly surprising that Florence Lawrence ended her life after so many years of humiliation.”

  “But didn’t anyone notice Molly was gone?” Ben asks.

  “I imagine Bob did. I suspect it was he who eventually reported her missing.” She sighs. “Oh, my poor little Molly. They had to go and dig her up. Because of me.”

  “Flo,” Sister Jean says, “you need to tell this to Detective Lee. It will end his questions, clear your name.”

  “Well, hold on,” Richard interjects. “Not so fast. We should talk with your lawyer. Flo still might not be free and clear.”

  “Why not?” Jean asks.

  Richard bends down next to Flo. He looks up into her eyes. They’re sharp and clever again. “I just don’t want to see an argument made that you somehow encouraged Molly to do it—or made her depressed enough —or ignored the warning signs—and then walked off and left her.”

  “Richard!” Jean stands over him. “That’s absurd.”

  Ben sniffs. “Really, brother. You’re thinking like a pulp-fiction writer instead of a journalist. Besides, it’s ancient history what happened that day.”

  “Not to Myrtle Pickles and the Cherry Sisters.”

  Flo reaches over and takes Richard’s hand. She hasn’t appeared to be listening to anyone other than him. “You promised you’d help me,” she reminds him.

  “And I intend to keep my promise,” he reassures her.

  Jean places her hands on Flo’s shoulders. “This is the end of the road. We’re ending our tour tonight.” She looks down at the old woman in her care. “Shall we go back to St. Mary’s, Flo?”

  Flo doesn’t say anything. She just keeps looking at Richard.

  “Hold on, Jean,” Ben says. “We can’t just leave. What about the campaign with Oprah? We’re still contracted to do a couple more spots.”

  “We’re done,” Jean says definitively. “Aren’t we, Flo?”

  She sighs. “Yes,” she finally admits. “We’re done.”

  Ben starts to speak, then turns away.

  “Ben,” Flo says. “Don’t you see? I can’t do any more. You saw me on the stage tonight. That’s how I was. That’s how she was—Florence Lawrence—just a bundle of nerves moving from spotlight to spotlight. I can’t become that again. Oh, I fell for the lure all over again. I can see that now. The clamor, the attention. The applause. But I walked away from all that, Ben. Molly died and I lived. I know it sounds hokey, and maybe it is. But I can’t go back to being Florence Lawrence. She’s dead and buried—and reburied!”

  She looks back at Richard.

  “Don’t forget,” she says softly so that only he hears her. “You promised you’d help me.”

  He makes a small, tight smile.

  “Come on,” Jean says to Flo. “Let’s get you to bed.”

  “I met Mr. Sam Glick tonight,” Richard tells his brother after Jean and Flo are gone.

  Ben looks over at him. “Oh?”

  “He mistook me for you. Guess it’s your new hair.”

  Ben seems uncomfortable, anxious for Richard to leave.

  “So you’ve written a script,” Richard says.

  “And if I have?”

  “I only care how you treat Flo
in it.”

  Ben laughs. “Like hell that’s all you care about. What you’re in a huff about is that I’ve just squashed any chance for your book to get optioned.”

  “I’m not writing a book,” Richard tells him.

  Ben makes a face. “Of course you are,” he says.

  Richard shakes his head. “Not about Flo. Not about any of this. I think we’ve both exploited her enough as it is.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Believe whatever you want,” Richard tells him. “But I’ve let all of that go. Ben, the Hollywood dream is fucked up. Haven’t you learned anything from listening to Flo?” He lets out a long breath. “Look. If it happens for me, it happens. But what’s important to me is what I’ve already got.”

  “I’m not giving up,” Ben states plainly. His lips are tight with conviction.

  Richard runs a hand across his face. “Even if it means hurting Flo?”

  “I’ve worked too hard, waited too long—” Ben stops. “Flo’s a tough lady,” he says, “no matter how much Jean coddles her.”

  Richard approaches him. He can see Ben tense as he gets closer. It’s the old instinctive response Richard remembers from when they were kids. They approach, draw nearer; then one of them throws the first punch.

  But Richard just stands there. And what he says is the last thing in the world Ben would ever have imagined he’d say.

  “Ben,” Richard tells him, “I’m sorry that I’ve been such a shit for a brother at times.”

  Ben just stares at him.

  “Maybe I have tried to lord it over you. I’m sorry, Ben. I’m sorry we were caught up in whatever shit was going on between Mom and Dad. Mom took me and Dad took you and they left us nothing between us. I’m sorry for that, Ben. There’s a lot about you I admire. Your talent. Your wit. Your convictions. Don’t forget them, Ben.”

  He reaches over and touches his brother’s shoulder.

  “Do right by Flo,” Richard says. Then he turns and leaves.

  What the fuck was that about? Ben can’t take his eyes off the door for several seconds after Richard has left. What the fuck is he up to?

  I’m sorry that I’ve been such a shit for a brother at times.

  There’s a lot about you I admire.