The Best of Connie Willis

by Connie Willis

  He didn’t know what the handbill was about, I thought, because he couldn’t read. Because he’d had an aphasic stroke in 1948 that had left him unable to read and write.

  I had a nice clean place to stay, madam, and I left it to come here.

  —INHERIT THE WIND

  “It doesn’t prove anything,” I told Kildy after Ariaura was gone. She’d come out of her Mencken act abruptly after I’d asked her what street she lived on in Baltimore, looked bewilderedly at me and then Kildy, and bolted without a word. “Ariaura could have found out about Mencken’s stroke the same way I did,” I said, “by reading it in a book.”

  “Then why did you go white like that?” Kildy said. “I thought you were going to pass out. And why wouldn’t she just answer the question? She knew the answers to all the others.”

  “Probably she didn’t know that one and that was her fallback response,” I said. “It caught me off guard, that’s all. I was expecting her to have memorized pat answers, not—”

  “Exactly,” Kildy cut in. “Somebody faking it would have said they had an aphasic stroke if you asked them a direct question about it, but they wouldn’t have … and that wasn’t the only instance. When you asked him about the Baltimore fire, he said it was the best time he’d ever had. Someone faking it would have told you what buildings burned or how horrible it was.”

  And he’d said, not “1904” or “oh-four,” but “aught-four.” Nobody talked like that nowadays, and it wasn’t something that would have been in Mencken’s writings. It was something people said, not wrote, and Ariaura couldn’t possibly—

  “It doesn’t prove he’s Mencken,” I said and realized I was saying “he.” And shouting.

  I lowered my voice. “It’s a very clever trick, that’s all. And just because we don’t know how the trick’s being done doesn’t mean it’s not a trick. She could have been coached in the part, including telling her how to pretend she can’t read if she’s confronted with anything written. Or she could be hooked up to somebody with a computer.”

  “I looked. She wasn’t wearing an earpiece, and if somebody was looking up the answers and feeding them to her, she’d be slower answering them, wouldn’t she?”

  “Not necessarily. She might have a photographic memory.”

  “But then wouldn’t she be doing a mind-reading act instead of channeling?”

  “Maybe she did. We don’t know what she was doing before Salem,” I said, but Kildy was right. Someone with a photographic memory could make a killing as a fortune-teller or a medium, and there were no signs of a photographic memory in Ariaura’s channeling act—she spoke only in generalities.

  “Or she might be coming up with the answers some other way,” I said.

  “What if she isn’t, Rob? What if she’s really channeling the spirit of Mencken?”

  “Kildy, channels are fakes. There are no spirits, no sympathetic vibrations, there’s no astral plane.”

  “I know,” she said, “but his answers were so—” She shook her head. “And there’s something about him, his voice and the way he moves—”

  “It’s called acting.”

  “But Ariaura’s a terrible actress. You saw her do Isus.”

  “All right,” I said. “Let’s suppose for a minute it is Mencken, and that instead of being in the family plot in Loudon Park Cemetery, his spirit’s floating in the ether somewhere, why would he come back at this particular moment? Why didn’t he come back when Uri Geller was bending spoons all over the place, or when Shirley MacLaine was on every talk show in the universe? Why didn’t he come back in the fifties when Virginia Tighe was claiming to be Bridey Murphy?”

  “I don’t know,” Kildy admitted.

  “And why would he choose to make his appearance through the ‘channel’ of a third-rate mountebank like Ariaura? He hated charlatans like her.”

  “Maybe that’s why he came back, because people like her are still around and he hadn’t finished what he set out to do. You heard him—he said he left too early.”

  “He was talking about the Scopes trial.”

  “Maybe not. You heard him, he said, ‘You let the quacks and the crooks take over.’ Or maybe—” she stopped.

  “Maybe what?”

  “Maybe he came back to help you, Rob. That time you were so frustrated over Charles Fred, I heard you say, ‘Where the hell is H. L. Mencken when we need him?’ Maybe he heard you.”

  “And decided to come all the way back from an astral plane that doesn’t exist to help a skeptic nobody’s ever heard of.”

  “It’s not that inconceivable that someone would be interested in you,” Kildy said. “I … I mean, the work you’re doing is really important, and Mencken—”

  “Kildy,” I said, “I don’t believe this.”

  “I don’t, either—I just … you have to admit, it’s a very convincing illusion.”

  “Yes, so was the Fox sisters’ table-rapping and Virginia Tighe’s past life as an Irish washerwoman in 1880s Dublin, but there was a logical explanation for both of them, and it may not even be that complicated. The details Bridey Murphy knew all turned out to have come from Virginia Tighe’s Irish nanny. The Fox sisters were cracking their toes, for God’s sake.”

  “You’re right,” Kildy said, but she didn’t sound completely convinced, and that worried me. If Ariaura’s Mencken imitation could fool Kildy, it could fool anybody, and “I’m sure it’s a trick. I just don’t know how she’s doing it” wasn’t going to cut it when the networks called me for a statement. I had to figure this out fast.

  “Ariaura has to be getting her information about Mencken from someplace,” I said. “We need to find out where. We need to check with bookstores and the library. And the Internet,” I said, hoping that wasn’t what she was using. It would take forever to find out what sites she’d visited.

  “What do you want me to do?” Kildy asked.

  “I want you to go through the transcripts like you suggested and find out where the quotes came from so we’ll know the particular works we’re dealing with,” I told her. “And I want you to talk to your publicist and anybody else who’s been to the seminars and find out if any of them had a private enlightenment audience with Ariaura. I want to know what goes on in them. Is she using Mencken for some purpose we don’t know about? See if you can find out.”

  “I could ask Riata to get an audience,” she suggested.

  “That’s a good idea,” I said.

  “What about questions? Do you want me to try to come up with some harder ones than the ones we asked him—I mean, her?”

  I shook my head. “Asking harder questions won’t help. If she’s got a photographic memory, she’ll know anything we throw at her, and if she doesn’t, and we ask her some obscure question about one of the reporters Mencken worked with at the Morning Herald, or one of his Smart Set essays, she can say she doesn’t remember, and it won’t prove anything. If you asked me what was in articles I wrote for The Jaundiced Eye five years ago, I couldn’t remember, either.”

  “I’m not talking about facts and figures, Rob,” Kildy said. “I’m talking about the kinds of things people don’t forget, like the first time Mencken met Sara.”

  I thought of the first time I met Kildy, looking up from my desk to see her standing there, with her honey-blond hair and that movie-star smile. “Unforgettable” was the word, all right.

  “Or how his mother died,” Kildy was saying, “or how he found out about the Baltimore fire. The paper called him and woke him out of a sound sleep. There’s no way you could forget that, or the name of a dog you had as a kid, or the nickname the other kids called you in grade school.”

  Nickname. That triggered something. Something Ariaura wouldn’t know. About a baby. Had Mencken had a nickname when he was a baby? No, that wasn’t it—

  “Or what he got for Christmas when he was ten,” Kildy said. “We need to find a question Mencken would absolutely know the answer to, and if he doesn’t, it proves it’s Ariaura.”<
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  “And if he does, it still doesn’t prove it’s Mencken. Right?”

  “I’ll go talk to Riata about getting a private audience,” she said, stuffed the transcripts in her tote, and put on her sunglasses. “And I’ll pick up the videotape. I’ll see you tomorrow morning.”

  “Right, Kildy?” I insisted.

  “Right,” she said, her hand on the door. “I guess.”

  In the highest confidence there is always a flavor of doubt—a feeling, half instinctive and half logical, that, after all, the scoundrel may have something up his sleeve.

  —H. L. MENCKEN

  After Kildy left, I called up a computer-hacker friend of mine and put him to work on the problem and then phoned a guy I knew in the English department at UCLA.

  “Inquiries about Mencken?” he said. “Not that I know of, Rob. You might try the journalism department.”

  The guy at the journalism department said, “Who?” and, when I explained, suggested I call Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.

  And what had I been thinking? Kildy said Ariaura had started doing Mencken in Seattle. I needed to be checking there, or in Salem or—where had she gone after that? Sedona. I spent the rest of the day (and evening) calling bookstores and reference librarians in all three places. Five of them responded “Who?” and all of them asked me how to spell “Mencken,” which might or might not mean they hadn’t heard the name lately, and only seven of the thirty bookstores stocked any books on him. Half of those were the latest Mencken biography, which for an excited moment I thought might have answered the question, “Why Mencken?”—the title of it was Skeptic and Prophet—but it had only been out two weeks. None of the bookstores could give me any information on orders or recent purchases, and the public libraries couldn’t give me any information at all.

  I tried their electronic card catalogues, but they only showed currently checked-out books. I called up the L.A. Public Library’s catalogue. It showed four Mencken titles checked out, all from the Beverly Hills branch.

  “Which looks promising,” I told Kildy when she came in the next morning.

  “No, it doesn’t,” she said. “I’m the one who checked them out, to compare the transcripts against.” She pulled a sheaf of papers out of her designer tote. “I need to talk to you about the transcripts. I found something interesting. I know,” she said, anticipating my objection, “you said all it proved was that Ariaura—”

  “Or whoever’s feeding this stuff to her.”

  She acknowledged that with a nod. “—all it proved was that whoever was doing it was reading Mencken, and I agree, but you’d expect her to quote him back verbatim, wouldn’t you?”

  “Yes,” I said, thinking of Randall Mars’s Lincoln and his “Four score and seven …”

  “But she doesn’t. Look, here’s what she said when we asked him about William Jennings Bryan: ‘Bryan! I don’t even want to hear that mangy old mountebank’s name mentioned. That scoundrel had a malignant hatred of science and sense.’ ”

  “And he didn’t say that?”

  “Yes and no. Mencken called him a ‘walking malignancy’ and said he was ‘mangy and flea-bitten’ and had ‘an almost pathological hatred of all learning.’ And the rest of the answers, and the things she said at the seminars, are like that, too.”

  “So she mixed and matched his phrases,” I said, but what she’d found was disturbing. Someone trying to pull off an impersonation would stick to the script, since any deviations from Mencken’s actual words could be used as proof it wasn’t him.

  And the annotated list Kildy handed me was troubling in another way. The phrases hadn’t been taken from one or two sources. They were from all over the map—“complete hooey” from Minority Report, “buncombe” from The New Republic, “as truthful as Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound” from an article on pedagogy in the Sun.

  “Could they all have been in a Mencken biography?”

  She shook her head. “I checked. I found a couple of sources that had several of them, but no one source that had them all.”

  “That doesn’t mean there isn’t one,” I said, and changed the subject. “Was your friend able to get a private audience with Ariaura?”

  “Yes,” she said, glancing at her watch. “I have to go meet her in a few minutes. She also got tickets to the seminar Saturday. They didn’t cancel it like I thought they would, but they did cancel a local radio interview she was supposed to do last night and the weeklong spiritual immersion she had scheduled for next week.”

  “Did Riata give you the recording of Ariaura’s last seminar?”

  “No, she’d left it at home. She said she’d bring it when we meet before her private audience. She said she got some really good footage of the emcee. She swears from the way he looked that he’s not in on the scam. And there’s something else. I called Judy Helzberg, who goes to every psychic event there is. Remember? I interviewed her when we did the piece on shamanic astrologers. And she said Ariaura called her and asked her for Wilson Amboy’s number.”

  “Wilson Amboy?”

  “Beverly Hills psychiatrist.”

  “It’s all part of the illusion,” I said, but even I sounded a little doubtful. It was an awfully good deception for a third-rate channeler like Ariaura.

  There’s somebody else in on it, I thought, and not just somebody feeding her answers. A partner. A mastermind.

  After Kildy left I called Marty Rumboldt and asked him if Ariaura had had a partner in Salem. “Not that I know of,” he said. “Prentiss just did a study on witchcraft in Salem. She might know somebody who would know. Hang on. Hey, Prentiss!” I could hear him call. “Jamie!”

  Jamie, I thought. That had been James M. Cain’s nickname, and Mencken had been good friends with him. Where had I read that?

  “She said to call Madame Orima,” Marty said, getting back on the phone, and gave me the number.

  I started to dial it and then stopped and looked up “Cain, James M.” in Mencken’s biography. It said he and Mencken had worked on the Baltimore Sun together, that they had been good friends, that Mencken had helped him get his first story collection published: The Baby in the Icebox.

  I went over to the bookcase, squatted down, and started through the row of paperbacks on the bottom shelf … Chandler, Hammett … It had a red cover, with a picture of a baby in a high chair and a … Chandler, Cain …

  But no red. I scanned the titles—Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice … Here it was, stuck behind Mildred Pierce and not red at all. The Baby in the Icebox. It was a lurid orange and yellow, and had pictures of a baby in its mother’s arms and a cigarette-smoking lug in front of a gas station. I hoped I remembered the inside better than the outside.

  I did. The introduction was by Roy Hoopes, and it was not only a Penguin edition, but one that had been out of print for at least twenty years. Even if Ariaura’s researcher had bothered to check out Cain, it would hardly be this edition.

  And the introduction was full of stuff about Cain that was perfect—the fact that everyone who knew him called him Jamie, the fact that he’d spent a summer in a tuberculosis sanitarium and that he hated Baltimore, Mencken’s favorite place.

  Some of the information was in the Mencken books—Mencken’s introducing him to Alfred A. Knopf, who’d published that first collection, the Sun connection, their rivalry over movie star Aileen Pringle.

  But most of the facts in the introduction weren’t, and they were exactly the kind of thing a friend would know. And Ariaura wouldn’t, because they were details about Cain’s life, not Mencken’s. Even a mastermind wouldn’t have memorized every detail of Cain’s life or those of Mencken’s other famous friends. If there wasn’t anything here I could use, there might be something in Dreiser’s biography, or F. Scott Fitzgerald’s. Or Lillian Gish’s.

  But there was plenty here, like the fact that James M. Cain’s brother Boydie had died in a tragic accident after the Armistice, and his statement that all his writing was modeled on A
lice in Wonderland. That was something no one would ever guess from reading Cain’s books, which were all full of crimes and murderers and beautiful, calculating women who seduced the hero into helping her with a scam and then turned out to be working a scam of her own.

  Not exactly the kind of thing Ariaura would read, and definitely the kind of thing Mencken would have. He’d bought The Baby in the Icebox for The American Mercury and told Cain it was one of the best things he’d ever written. Which meant it would make a perfect source for a question, and I knew just what to ask. To anyone who hadn’t heard of the story, the question wouldn’t even make sense. Only somebody who’d read the story would know the answer. Like Mencken.

  And if Ariaura knew it, I’d—what? Believe she was actually channeling Mencken?

  Right. And Charles Fred was really talking to the dead and Uri Geller was really bending spoons. It was a trick, that was all. She had a photographic memory, or somebody was feeding her the answers.

  Feeding her the answers.

  I thought suddenly of Kildy saying, “Who was Sue Hicks?”—of her insisting I go with her to see Ariaura—of her saying, “But why would Ariaura channel a spirit who yells at her audiences?”

  I looked down at the orange and yellow paperback in my hand. “A beautiful, calculating woman who seduces the hero into helping her with a scam,” I murmured, and thought about Ariaura’s movie-star-handsome ushers and about scantily clad Victorian spirits and about Sir William Crookes.

  Sex. Get the chump emotionally involved and he won’t see the wires. It was the oldest trick in the book.

  I’d said Ariaura wasn’t smart enough to pull off such a complicated scam, and she wasn’t. But Kildy was. So you get her on the inside where she can see the shelf full of Mencken books, where she can hear the chump mutter, “Where the hell is Mencken when we need him?” You get the chump to trust her, and if he falls in love with her, so much the better. It’ll keep him off balance and he won’t get suspicious.

  And it all fit. It was Kildy who’d set up the contact—I never did channelers, and Kildy knew that. It was Kildy who’d said we couldn’t go incognito, Kildy who’d said to bring the Sony, knowing it would be confiscated, Kildy who’d taken a taxi to the seminar instead of coming in her Jaguar so she’d be at the office when Ariaura came roaring in.