The Biograph Girl

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The Biograph Girl Page 56

by William J. Mann


  He had, of course, and they’d made love right there on the bare hardwood floor, afterward consuming a jug of cheap red wine and eating cold pizza and staying up until four A.M., unpacking boxes and laughing over the stupidest things.

  He wasn’t sure he could stand going back inside and seeing Anita’s closet empty, her slippers gone from under the bed, just one toothbrush left in the holder.

  On the radio, Crystal Gayle’s singing about making brown eyes blue. Ben snaps off the radio in a hurry.

  “I did love you, Anita,” he says out loud as Route 1 snakes around a sharp bend, going down into a valley before rising up again along the edge of the cliff.

  He did love her—that was undeniable—but his own inertia had eventually taken the edge off that love. He saw what it was doing to her. Once a bright-eyed kid filled with dreams, she’d exchanged ambition for security, chance for refuge. The known, despite its dreary complacency, became preferable to unexplored opportunity. He had observed for some time how his lack of faith in himself had translated into the same for her. Their fears fed off each other’s. They were mired in the quicksand—and so long as they kept holding each other’s hands, they could never climb out.

  Jean had been different. She had believed in him right from the start. The first one ever to fully and truly believe. Anita had been swept up by the glamour of dating a “filmmaker”—at just the time she was losing her father. Jean, however, had come to Ben grounded in her own place in the world, her own mission, firmly set in her own convictions.

  And she had believed in him.

  I believed you to be a man of honor. A man of compassion. An artist, Ben. I believed you to be an artist.

  “Oh, God,” Ben says out loud, the pain a physical thing in his gut.

  But it wasn’t just that.

  It was even more, Ben.

  “For me, too, Jean,” he says softly. “Goddamn it. For me, too, it was even more.”

  But he could never tell her. Not now. Not at the moment Julia Roberts’s people were reading his script. Not at the moment he had everything within his reach.

  And what chance did he and Jean have anyway? She was a goddamn nun!

  I’ll resign whatever I have to.

  You see, Benny, he hears his mother saying, Jean won’t live a life that’s not true to herself. You could learn a lesson.

  “Ma, please,” he says, shutting her up.

  The road moves away from the coast, heading back through the thick, murky woods of Marin. Redwoods tower over the winding road. There’s a morning mist rising from the earth, thickly carpeted with needles and moss.

  “You’ll see, Ma,” he says suddenly. “Your Benny’s gonna turn out to be something. One way or another.”

  What’s important to me is what I’ve already got.

  Richard’s voice. God, they’re ganging up on him. Richard and Mom, as always.

  But there’s more.…

  Just do your best.

  It’s Dad’s voice. Jesus. Dad, too.

  Just do your best. That’s the only way.

  “Shit,” Ben says.

  Up ahead, the traffic on 101 slows down on the approach to the Golden Gate Bridge. Ben doesn’t understand what could be causing the backup. Rush hour isn’t for another several hours. But even before he can spot the golden spires, he’s forced to a total stop. “Aw, come on,” he gripes.

  He flicks the radio back on and turns the knob in hopes of finding a traffic report. A snatch of Billy Idol. A squeal of the Bee Gees. A puff of hot air from Rush Limbaugh. “Eeew,” Ben says. “Get off of my radio.”

  “—backed up at least into Sausalito at this hour.…”

  Here it is.

  “Any confirmation yet on whether it was really her?” a female announcer is asking the traffic reporter.

  “Not yet. But people are stopping their cars as the word spreads and gathering on the city side of the bridge. That’s what’s causing the back-up.”

  Directly in front of Ben is a bright yellow school bus. Two little fat boys stick their heads out the back window and pull open their mouths with their fingers.

  Ben makes a face back, scrunching up his eyes and sticking out his tongue. One of the boys laughs and flashes him the thumbs-up sign.

  “Let me repeat,” the radio announcer is saying. “We have an unconfirmed report that Florence Lawrence has jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge.”

  “What?” Ben asks.

  “Police are arriving on the scene now.”

  “Jesus!” Ben slams the car into neutral. “No way! No fucking way!”

  “Apparently, forty minutes ago, Miss Lawrence either jumped or fell from the bridge. Eyewitnesses say it seemed a deliberate act ….”

  “No!” Ben cries. “No way!”

  “As we get more details, we’ll—”

  He turns off the ignition and jumps out of the car. He looks ahead of him at the line of traffic leading up to the bridge. He finds that he can’t get a breath, that he’s gulping air—almost as if he’d been punched in the stomach.

  “Goddamn it,” he manages to say and starts to run.

  “Hey, buddy,” shouts a truck driver. “You can’t just leave your car in the middle of the road!”

  But he barely hears him. He just keeps running, darting in and out between cars, running with no thoughts in his head, just the blue sky in his eyes and the wind in his ears—until he rounds the bend and sees the gold of the bridge glinting in the sun.

  They’ve closed all but one of the lanes going into San Francisco and traffic is inching along again. There’s no traffic at all coming from the opposite direction. They must have closed all the lanes on the other side of the bridge.

  At the entrance, big digital caution signs flash. Up on the bridge itself, near the apex, Ben can see several police cars and a crowd of people all gathered at the side. He hops over a line of orange cones and begins running up the ramp.

  This is crazy, he keeps repeating to himself. This is crazy. Crazy.

  He reaches the crowd. A black woman is crying hysterically. Beside her, two young white guys are eating licorice and giggling. Ben pushes through them. He sees a line of cops. And a phalanx of photographers.

  But of course.

  Then he sees Anita. She’s standing in the glare of the camera, and a TV reporter has thrust a microphone in front of her face. She’s crying, her face bright red with the blotches of blue he remembers so well from her father’s funeral, the big heaving sobs that seem to threaten to snap her fragile little rib cage. Her mascara runs in heavy black streaks down her face.

  No, Ben thinks. This can’t be happening.

  “She—she was here,” Anita’s telling the reporter. “And then—I—I—turned around—and she was—”

  The reporter finishes for her. “She had jumped?”

  Anita covers her face with her hands. “Please, no more!” she screams.

  Ben moves up to her, pulls her away from the camera. She doesn’t even seem to register him.

  The reporter continues speaking into the camera. “That was an eyewitness to the tragedy, a friend of Miss Lawrence’s.” She moves over to thrust the microphone into the face of the black woman Ben saw crying. “You, too, ma’am. You saw her jump?”

  “I did,” the woman says, bawling again. “Little old lady. I saw her fall all the way down there.” She points over the side of the bridge.

  The reporter moves her microphone to a white man in shirtsleeves and tie standing to her other side. His eyes grow wide as he recounts his tale. “I was walking my dog like I do every day across the bridge and I saw something fall,” he says, staring into the camera. “My God, I realized. That was a woman!”

  “Thank you, sir,” the reporter says. “And will you spell your name for me?”

  He does, eagerly. “Will this be on the six o’clock news? I’ve got to call my wife and tell her to watch.”

  Ben grips Anita by the shoulders. She still doesn’t seem to grasp the fact that it’s
him. “Anita,” he says, shaking her a little.

  He moves her long hair away from her eyes. She looks up at him, a frail, flickering gaze. “Ben,” she says, as if even now not fully comprehending.

  “Why? How?” he asks.

  “Oh, Ben,” Anita cries. She reaches up and embraces him, her arms encircling his neck. He holds her, pulling her close to him. “Oh, Ben. We were supposed to leave tonight. We were all set to go. She said she wanted to see the city one more time. She wanted to see it from out here, on the bridge. You know how she loved San Francisco. She just said she wanted—to—see it.”

  Sobs rack her body again. “Easy, babe, easy,” Ben says.

  She pulls back and looks up at him. “Richard and I brought her up in her wheelchair, and then she wanted to stand, to look out—and before I knew it.…”

  “Could she have fallen?”

  “No, Ben! Oh, dear God, she jumped!”

  A policeman has approached them. “Miss Murawski, we’re going to have to ask you to come down to the station and make a statement,” he says.

  She nods.

  “We need to get traffic moving again,” he says loudly to the gathered crowd. “We need to clear this area.”

  Ben doesn’t want to let Anita go. He clings to her arms, but she gently extricates herself from his grip and moves away with the officer. He stands there mute, watching her leave.

  And that’s it, he thinks. Just a few months ago we would have clung to each other, but now …. He watches Anita walk away from him alone, her head down.

  Ben looks over toward the spot where Flo jumped. Her wheelchair sits at an odd angle. Richard’s standing there, just looking over the side of the bridge as if in shock.

  Ben walks over to his brother. He says nothing, just stands next to him and looks over the side.

  “This can’t be real,” he finally manages to say.

  Richard doesn’t reply. He just keeps staring down. The water is a deep dark blue below them. It moves fast under the bridge. Every once in a while it curls into a frothy ribbon of white.

  Flo’s down there—in there—

  “This can’t be,” Ben says again, louder now. “This isn’t the way it was supposed to end!”

  “What did you expect?” his brother says to him—but it’s sixteen years earlier, and it’s Thanksgiving morning. Richard had just gotten up, rubbing his eyes. Mom was still in bed. Ben was sitting at the kitchen table. He looked up at his brother and told him their father had died an hour earlier.

  Richard didn’t respond then, just as he isn’t responding now. They had remained there in the kitchen, in a kind of mystical silence for several seconds. Finally Ben spoke again. “This isn’t the way it’s supposed to be,” he said, the hot tears streaming down his cheeks.

  Still Richard had said nothing. His face twisted in an emotion Ben couldn’t identify. Grief, surely, but more than that. Anger, perhaps, that he hadn’t been there. Resentment, very likely, because Ben had. He stood there in the kitchen, unable to speak, and when he finally found his voice, he said simply, in a cold, hard tone Ben would never forget, “What did you expect? That you could keep him alive forever?”

  Ben looks at his brother now leaning on the rail of the bridge. “Please, Richard,” he says. “Please say something.”

  “She said she had to go,” he tells Ben simply, not taking his eyes away from the water. “She said—just last night—that she never should have brought Florence Lawrence back. ‘I’ve got to let her go,’ she said.”

  Ben feels a sudden flood of anger—more welcome, more familiar, than the grief. “That should have been a clue!” he shouts at his brother. “You should have known that’s what she meant to do!” He shakes Flo’s wheelchair. Her black cloche hat is lying in the seat. “How did it happen, Richard? How?”

  “We were all just looking over at the city,” Richard says numbly. “The sunlight was sparkling off the buildings. Flo said she wanted to see the hill where she and Linda had first met, where they picked daisies and daffodils together. She wanted to stand, so I helped her out of her chair.”

  “You helped her stand,” Ben snaps.

  “Yes. And I moved off to the side and Flo stood there, the wind in her hair. She was quite beautiful. I remember thinking how beautiful she looked in the sun and the wind—and then I followed her gaze off toward the city.” He closes his eyes. “When I looked back, she was gone. For a second, I thought she had just walked up a ways. But then Anita was screaming. A man ran up to us, said he saw her jump.”

  “You said you would protect her!” Ben charges.

  Richard looks over at Ben. He doesn’t respond. For once, he doesn’t mirror his brother. He doesn’t copy his rage.

  “You don’t understand, Ben,” he says. “This is what she wanted.” His words are calm but forceful. “This was the only way.”

  “So you accept this? You accept that this was destined to happen?”

  “I accept Flo’s choice.”

  “You should have known what that choice was,” Ben says bitterly. He looks over at his brother, a thought taking root in his mind. “Maybe you did. Maybe you did know.”

  Richard says nothing further. He just keeps staring down at the water.

  Ben feels the anger dissipate as quickly as it arrived. “Jesus Christ,” he says, and the tears come—as hot as they were sixteen years ago. “Jesus Christ, Richard. This isn’t the way it should have ended.”

  Richard places his arm around his brother’s shoulder. “Maybe it is,” he says. “Maybe it is, Ben.”

  “Maybe she’s still alive,” Ben says desperately, his head turning to Richard, his eyes wide. “Has anyone gone down?”

  “Ben. We have several eyewitnesses who saw her hit the water. There’s no way she could have survived that.” He smiles weakly. “She’s a hundred and seven years old, remember.” He pauses. “Or somewhere around there.”

  “This can’t be real,” Ben says. “This can’t be happening.” Something suddenly strikes him. “Where’s Jean?” he asks.

  “Oh, dear God,” Richard says as if the thought had just hit him too. “Jean. She and Rex left this morning on a flight back to New York. We were going to follow later tonight—oh, good God—I’ve got to call her before she hears it on the news.”

  “Mr. Sheehan?” It’s the same police officer who’d spoken with Anita. “We need your statement. Including what Miss Lawrence told you last night.”

  “Of course, of course.” He turns, looks at his brother. “I’ve got to go, Ben.”

  “Richard, I—”

  Richard looks at him.

  But Ben doesn’t know what he was planning to say. He just stops, stands there with his mouth open.

  “Good-bye, Ben,” Richard says and moves off with the policeman.

  Behind them, an old man is saying, “I seen her go.” Ben turns in the direction of his voice. He has wild white hair and unruly eyebrows that seem to have a life of their own. The reporter is thrusting the microphone in front of the old man’s face.

  “I was drivin’ my van over there,” he rasps, “and I seen her get ready to do it. I pulled over and yelled, ‘Hey!’ But it was too late. There she went, her dress flyin’, her arms flailing all the way down. You know, the city keeps votin’ down guardrails. It’s lunacy. It’s the third suicide this month!”

  “Come on, Grandpa,” a cop is saying. “Move along.”

  “Ahh,” the old codger snarls at him. “You ever hear of freedom of assembly?”

  “You, too,” the officer tells the news crew.

  “How about freedom of the press?” the old man shouts. The reporter smiles at him, thanking him again for his story.

  Ben just stands there, at the spot where Flo jumped, and watches the old man limp his way back to his van.

  The news is full of it. Ben sits in his hotel room with all the lights off, watching it over and over.

  “A tragedy today in San Francisco,” says Dan Rather. “Florence Lawrence—the
world’s first movie star, rediscovered earlier this year and the center of a mystery nearly sixty years old—ended her life by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge ….”

  “Police tonight are calling the death of Florence Lawrence a suicide,” Peter Jennings reports. “Eyewitness accounts are numerous, and no criminal negligence charges will be brought against her companions, Richard Sheehan and Anita Murawski. Police are calling this simply an unfortunate incident ….”

  “Sadly,” says Dr. Joyce Brothers, speaking on Entertainment Tonight, “no one apparently seemed to realize just how depressed Miss Lawrence was. Not even those closest to her. But it was quite apparent in her appearance at the Castro Theater. The stress of the publicity, the accusations surrounding Margaret Butz’s death—these things seem to have weighed heavily on her.”

  “Of course, the irony of it all,” says Deborah Norville, in an exclusive interview with Jameson Collins on Inside Edition, “is that this time she really did take her life when in 1938 it had, in fact, been someone else ….”

  “Actually, Deborah, this is the third reported death for Florence Lawrence,” Collins tells her. “Remember, in 1910, she was reported killed in a streetcar accident in St. Louis. Of course, both then and in 1938, she eventually turned up alive.”

  Deborah shudders. “Well, I can’t imagine she’d survive that plunge into the frigid bay,” she says. “Divers tonight are still searching for her body, but suicides are often never recovered after jumping from the Golden Gate.”

  The phone keeps ringing. Ben doesn’t answer, just lets all the messages pile up in his voice mail. Xerxes. Glick. Mom.

  He had tried to call Jean earlier, but Sister Augustine at St. Mary’s told him she had departed without leaving them any clues to where she was going. “She came in and gave her resignation this morning,” she confided to him. “We were all stunned. She seemed so—so filled with life. So excited. She was going to go back to doing the work she wanted to do—you know, with the poor. Then came the news about Flo. She didn’t say anything. Her face just got very stoic, and she took Flo’s keys and before any of us knew what she was doing, she was gunning out the driveway in Flo’s old Bel-Air. No one knows where she is ….”

 

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