The Best of Connie Willis

by Connie Willis

  And I’d be willing to bet there were other people who felt the same way I did, who might be seduced by Mencken’s language and the fact that Ariaura was telling them exactly what they wanted to hear.

  “You’re right,” I said. “We need to look into this, but we should send somebody else to the seminar.”

  “How about my publicist? She said she wanted to go again.”

  “No, I don’t want it to be anybody connected with us.”

  “I know just the person,” Kildy said, snatching up her cell phone. “Her name’s Riata Starr. She’s an actress.”

  With a name like that, what else could she be?

  “She’s between jobs right now,” Kildy said, punching in a number, “and if I tell her there’s likely to be a casting director there, she’ll definitely do it for us.”

  “Does she believe in channelers?”

  She looked pityingly at me. “Everyone in Hollywood believes in channelers, but it won’t matter.” She put the phone to her ear. “I’ll put a videocam on her, and a recorder,” she whispered. “And I’ll tell her an undercover job would look great on her acting résumé. Hello?” she said in a normal voice. “I’m trying to reach Riata Starr. Oh. No, no message.”

  She pushed “end.” “She’s at a casting call at Miramax.” She stuck the phone in her bag, fished her keys out of its depths, and slung the bag over her shoulder. “I’m going to go out there and talk to her. I’ll be back,” she said, and went out.

  Definitely too good to be true, I thought, watching her leave, and called up a friend of mine in the police department and asked him what they had on Ariaura.

  He promised he’d call me back, and while I was waiting I looked for and found The Great Monkey Trial. I looked up Mencken in the index and started through the references to see when Mencken had left Dayton. I doubted that he would have left before the trial was over. He’d been having the time of his life, pillorying William Jennings Bryan and the creationists. Maybe the reference was to Mencken’s having left before Bryan’s death.

  Bryan had died five days after the trial ended, presumably from a heart attack, but more likely from the humiliation he’d suffered at the hands of Clarence Darrow, who’d put him on the stand and fired questions at him about the Bible. Darrow had made him—and creationism—look ridiculous, or rather, he’d made himself look ridiculous. The cross-examination had been the high point of the trial, and it had killed him.

  Mencken had written a deadly, unforgiving obituary of Bryan, and he might very well have been sorry he hadn’t been in at the kill, but I couldn’t imagine Ariaura knowing that, even if she had taken the trouble to look up “Boobus Americanus” and “unmitigated bilge” and research Mencken’s gravelly voice and explosive delivery.

  Of course she might have read it. In this very book, even. I read the chapter on Bryan’s death, looking for references to Mencken, but I couldn’t find any. I backtracked, and there it was. And I couldn’t believe it.

  Mencken hadn’t left after the trial. When Darrow’s expert witnesses had all been disallowed, he’d assumed it was all over but assorted legal technicalities and had gone back to Baltimore. He hadn’t seen Darrow’s withering cross-examination. He’d missed Bryan saying man wasn’t a mammal, missed his insisting the sun could stand still without throwing the earth out of orbit. He’d definitely left too soon. And I was willing to bet he’d never forgiven himself for it.

  To me, the scientific point of view is completely satisfying, and it has been so as long as I remember. Not once in this life have I ever been inclined to seek a rock and refuge elsewhere.

  —H. L. MENCKEN

  “But how could Ariaura know that?” Kildy said when she got back from the casting call.

  “The same way I know it. She read it in a book. Did your friend Riata agree to go to the seminar?”

  “Yes, she said she’d go. I gave her the Hasaka, but I’m worried they might confiscate it, so I’ve got an appointment with this props guy at Universal who worked on the last Bond movie to see if he’s got any ideas.”

  “Uh, Kildy … those gadgets James Bond uses aren’t real. It’s a movie.”

  She shot me her Julia-Roberts-plus smile. “I said ideas. Oh, and I got Riata’s ticket. When I called, I asked if they were sold out, and the guy I talked to said, ‘Are you kidding?’ and told me they’d only sold about half what they usually do. Did you find out anything about Ariaura?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m checking out some leads.”

  But my friend at the police department didn’t have any dope on Ariaura, not even a possible alias. “She’s clean,” he said when he finally called back the next morning. “No mail fraud, not even a parking ticket.”

  I couldn’t find anything on her in The Skeptical Mind or on the Scamwatch website. It looked like she made her money the good old American way, by telling her customers a bunch of nonsense and selling them chakra charts.

  I told Kildy as much when she came in, looking gorgeous in a casual shirt and jeans that had probably cost as much as The Jaundiced Eye’s annual budget.

  “Ariaura’s obviously not her real name, but so far I haven’t been able to find out what it is,” I said. “Did you get a James Bond secret videocam from your buddy Q?”

  “Yes,” she said, setting the tote bag down. “And I have an idea for proving Ariaura’s a fraud.” She handed me a sheaf of papers. “Here are the transcripts of everything Mencken said. We check them against Mencken’s writings, and—” She stopped. “What?”

  I was shaking my head. “This is channeling. When I wrote an exposé about Swami Vishnu Jammi’s fifty-thousand-year-old entity, Yogati, using phrases like ‘totally awesome’ and ‘funky’ and talking about cell phones, he said he ‘transliterated’ Yogati’s thoughts into his own words.”

  “Oh.” Kildy bit her lip. “Rob, what about a computer match? You know, one of those things where they compare a manuscript with Shakespeare’s plays to see if they were written by the same person.”

  “Too expensive,” I said. “Besides, they’re done by universities, who I doubt would want to risk their credibility by running a check on a channeler. And even if they did match, all it would prove is that it’s Mencken’s words, not that it’s Mencken.”

  “Oh.” She sat on the corner of my desk swinging her long legs for a minute, and then stood up, walked over to the bookcase, and began pulling down books.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, going over to see what she was doing. She was holding a copy of Mencken’s Heathen Days. “I told you,” I said, “Mencken’s phrases won’t—”

  “I’m not looking up his phrases,” she said, handing me Prejudices and Mencken’s biography. “I’m looking for questions to ask him.”

  “Him? He’s not Mencken, Kildy. He’s a concoction of Ariaura’s.”

  “I know,” she said, handing me The Collectible Mencken. “That’s why we need to question him—I mean Ariaura. We need to ask him—her—questions like, ‘What was your wife’s maiden name?’ and ‘What was the first newspaper you worked for?’ and—are any of these paperbacks on the bottom shelf here by Mencken?”

  “No, they’re mysteries mostly. Chandler and Hammett and James M. Cain.”

  She quit looking at them and straightened to look at the middle shelves. “Questions like, ‘What did your father do for a living?’ ”

  “He made cigars,” I said. “The first newspaper he worked for wasn’t the Baltimore Sun, it was the Morning Herald, and his wife’s maiden name was Sara Haardt. With a d and two a’s. But that doesn’t mean I’m Mencken.”

  “No,” Kildy said, “but if you didn’t know them, it would prove you weren’t.”

  She handed me A Mencken Chrestomathy. “If we ask Ariaura questions Mencken would know the answers to, and she gets them wrong, it proves she’s faking.”

  She had a point. Ariaura had obviously researched Mencken fairly thoroughly to be able to mimic his language and mannerisms, and probably well enough to
answer basic questions about his life, but she would hardly have memorized every detail. There were dozens of books about him, let alone his own work and his diaries. Plus Inherit the Wind and all the other plays and books and treatises that had been written about the Scopes trial. I’d bet there were close to a hundred Mencken things in print, and that didn’t include the stuff he’d written for the Baltimore Sun.

  And if we could catch her not knowing something Mencken would know, it would be a simple way to prove conclusively that she was faking, and we could move on to the much more important question of why. If Ariaura would let herself be questioned.

  “How do you plan to get Ariaura to agree to this?” I said. “My guess is she won’t even let us in to see her.”

  “If she doesn’t, then that’s proof, too,” she said imperturbably.

  “All right,” I said, “but forget about asking what Mencken’s father did. Ask what he drank. Rye, by the way.”

  Kildy grabbed a notebook and started writing.

  “Ask what the name of his first editor at the Sun was,” I said, picking up The Great Monkey Trial. “And ask who Sue Hicks was.”

  “Who was she?” Kildy asked.

  “He. He was one of the defense lawyers at the Scopes trial.”

  “Should we ask him—her what the Scopes trial was about?”

  “No, too easy. Ask him …” I said, trying to think of a good question. “Ask him what he ate while he was there covering the trial, and ask him where he sat in the courtroom.”

  “Where he sat?”

  “It’s a trick question. He stood on a table in the corner. Oh, and ask where he was born.”

  She frowned. “Isn’t that too easy? Everyone knows he’s from Baltimore.”

  “I want to hear him say it.”

  “Oh,” Kildy said, nodding. “Did he have any kids?”

  I shook my head. “He had a sister and two brothers. Gertrude, Charles, and August.”

  “Oh, good, those aren’t names you’d be able to come up with just by guessing. Did he have any hobbies?”

  “He played the piano. Ask about the Saturday Night Club. He and a bunch of friends got together to play music.”

  We worked on the questions the rest of the day and the next morning, writing them down on index cards so they could be asked out of order.

  “What about some of his sayings?” Kildy asked.

  “You mean like, ‘Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy’? No. They’re the easiest thing of all to memorize, and no real person speaks in aphorisms.”

  Kildy nodded and bent her beautiful head over the book again. I looked up Mencken’s medical history—he suffered from ulcers and had had an operation on his throat to remove his uvula—and went out and got us sandwiches for lunch and made copies of Mencken’s “History of the Bathtub” and a fake handbill he’d passed out during the Scopes trial announcing “a public demonstration of healing, casting out devils, and prophesying” by a made-up evangelist. Mencken had crowed that not a single person in Dayton had spotted the fake.

  Kildy looked up from her book. “Did you know Mencken dated Lillian Gish?” she asked, sounding surprised.

  “Yeah. He dated a lot of actresses. He had an affair with Anita Loos and nearly married Aileen Pringle. Why?”

  “I’m impressed he wasn’t intimidated by the fact that they were movie stars, that’s all.”

  I didn’t know if that was directed at me or not.

  “Speaking of actresses,” I said, “what time is Ariaura’s seminar?”

  “Two o’clock,” she said, glancing at her watch. “It’s a quarter till two right now. It should be over around four. Riata said she’d call as soon as the seminar was done.”

  We went back to looking through Mencken’s books and his biographies, looking for details Ariaura was unlikely to have memorized. He’d loved baseball. He had stolen Gideon Bibles from hotel rooms and then given them to his friends, inscribed, “Compliments of the Author.” He’d been friends with lots of writers, including Theodore Dreiser and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who’d gotten so drunk at a dinner with Mencken he’d stood up at the dinner table and pulled his pants down.

  The phone rang. I reached for it, but it was Kildy’s cell phone. “It’s Riata,” she told me, looking at the readout.

  “Riata?” I glanced at my watch. It was only two-thirty. “Why isn’t she in the seminar?”

  Kildy shrugged and put the phone to her ear. “Riata? What’s going on? … You’re kidding! … Did you get it? Great … no, meet me at Spago’s, like we agreed. I’ll be there in half an hour.”

  She hit “end,” stood up, and took out her keys, all in one graceful motion. “Ariaura did it again, only this time as soon as she started, they stopped the seminar, yanked her offstage, and told everybody to leave. Riata got it on tape. I’m going to go pick it up. Will you be here?”

  I nodded absently, trying to think of a way to ask about Mencken’s two-fingered typing, and Kildy waved good-bye and went out.

  If I asked, “How do you write your stories?” I’d get an answer about the process of writing, but if I asked, “Do you touch-type?” Ariaura—

  Kildy reappeared in the doorway, sat down, and picked up her notebook again. “What are you doing?” I asked, “I thought you were going—”

  She put her finger to her lips. “She’s here,” she mouthed, and Ariaura came in.

  She was still wearing her purple robes and her stage makeup, so she must have come here straight from her seminar, but she didn’t roar in angrily the way she had before. She looked frightened.

  “What are you doing to me?” she asked, her voice trembling. “And don’t say you’re not doing anything. I saw the videotape. You’re—that’s what I want to know, too,” the gravelly voice demanded. “What the hell have you been doing? I thought you ran a magazine that worked to put a stop to the kind of bilgewater this high priestess of blather spews out. She was at it again today, calling up spirits and rooking a bunch of mysticism-besotted fools out of their cold cash, and where the hell were you? I didn’t see you there, cracking heads.”

  “We didn’t go because we didn’t want to encourage her if she was—” Kildy hesitated. “We’re not sure what … I mean, who we’re dealing with here …” she faltered.

  “Ariaura,” I said firmly. “You pretend to channel spirits from the astral plane for a living. Why should we believe you’re not pretending to channel H. L. Mencken?”

  “Pretending?” she said, sounding surprised. “You think I’m something that two-bit Jezebel’s confabulating?”

  She sat down heavily in the chair in front of my desk and grinned wryly at me. “You’re absolutely right. I wouldn’t believe it, either. A skeptic after my own heart.”

  “Yes,” I said. “And as a skeptic, I need to have some proof you’re who you say you are.”

  “Fair enough. What kind of proof?”

  “We want to ask you some questions,” Kildy said.

  Ariaura slapped her knees. “Fire away.”

  “All right,” I said. “Since you mentioned fires, when was the Baltimore fire?”

  “Aught-four,” she said promptly. “February. Cold as hell.” She grinned. “Best time I ever had.”

  Kildy glanced at me. “What did your father drink?” she asked.

  “Rye.”

  “What did you drink?” I asked.

  “From 1919 on, whatever I could get.”

  “Where are you from?” Kildy asked.

  “The most beautiful city in the world.”

  “Which is?” I said.

  “Which is?” she roared, outraged. “Bawlmer!”

  Kildy shot me a glance.

  “What’s the Saturday Night Club?” I snapped out.

  “A drinking society,” she said, “with musical accompaniment.”

  “What instrument did you play?”

  “Piano.”

  “What’s the Mann Act?”

  “Why?” sh
e said, winking at Kildy. “You planning on taking her across state lines? Is she underage?”

  I ignored that. “If you’re really Mencken, you hate charlatans, so why have you inhabited Ariaura’s body?”

  “Why do people go to zoos?”

  She was good, I had to give her that. And fast. She spat out answers as fast as I could ask her questions about the Sun and The Smart Set and William Jennings Bryan.

  “Why did you go to Dayton?”

  “To see a three-ring circus. And stir up the animals.”

  “What did you take with you?”

  “A typewriter and four quarts of Scotch. I should have taken a fan. It was hotter than the seventh circle of hell, with the same company.”

  “What did you eat while you were there?” Kildy asked.

  “Fried chicken and tomatoes. At every meal. Even breakfast.”

  I handed him the bogus evangelist handbill Mencken had handed out at the Scopes trial. “What’s this?”

  She looked at it, turned it over, looked at the other side. “It appears to be some sort of circular.”

  And there’s all the proof we need, I thought smugly. Mencken would have recognized that instantly. “Do you know who wrote this handbill?” I started to ask and thought better of it. The question itself might give the answer away. And better not use the word “handbill.”

  “Do you know the event this circular describes?” I asked instead.

  “I’m afraid I can’t answer that,” she said.

  Then you’re not Mencken, I thought. I shot a triumphant glance at Kildy.

  “But I would be glad to,” Ariaura said, “if you would be so good as to read what is written on it to me.”

  She handed the handbill back to me, and I stood there looking at it and then at her and then at it again.

  “What is it, Rob?” Kildy said. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Never mind about the circular. What was your first published news story about?”

  “A stolen horse and buggy,” she said, and proceeded to tell the whole story, but I wasn’t listening.