by John Dunning
“No . . . I’m meeting someone later.”
“That’s good. No one should be alone at Christmas. I could offer you a warm place by the fire. Some hot apple cider with cinnamon.”
“Thank you. But I can’t.”
“Santa’s coming. He really is, he’ll be here any minute.”
Holly looked at her.
“It’s a game we play every year for my kids. They get their presents on Christmas Eve. Some friends get all decked out and play the role.” She beckoned with her fingers. “Come in for a while, warm yourself.”
“Really I can’t. I’ve come too far as it is.”
“Okay, then. Happy Christmas, stranger.”
“Yeah.” Holly watched her go. “You too,” she said after the door had closed.
Stupid, she thought, turning away. Dumb, dumb, stupid idiot. What harm would it have done to let her see your face? To have a cup of steaming cheer? To visit with her children? . . . or tell her who you are?
She saw headlights in the dunes: Santa coming, not in a sleigh but in a Dodge of mid-thirties vintage. Brinker’s car. She knew them all, knew who they were and where they lived, what they drove, where they ate. She knew them even in their disguises. Rue and Becky dressed as elves. Rue’s friend Brinker as a clown. The fat cooking woman, Laura Leaf, bundled up as Mrs. Claus in a Santa suit. And Stoner a splendid Santa, stuffed into his own red outfit with pillows and pads, his bearlike frame topped with white curls and a long flowing beard to match.
First Brinker went in, to dance and delight. Ten minutes later, the elves, carrying stockings with nuts and oranges and small wrapped parcels. Mrs. Claus arrived with cakes, rich devil’s food for the kids, spiked fruitcake for the grown-ups. Stoner stood alone on the porch, timing his own grand entrance, loving the wait as he chuckled at what he was seeing inside. Suddenly he was discovered: a tiny face peered through the glass and screamed for joy. “Hello, sweethearts, hello!” he cried, clumping to the door with bells ringing and his bag brimming with boxes and teddies slung over his shoulder. Livia threw open her house and took his bag and the children leaped into his arms. “Merry Christmas, sweethearts! Merry Christmas!”
The door closed and they were lost in their holiday world.
The shadow woman watched them play. She was drawn to the glow and pushed to the dark. She wanted the light and wanted it badly; it drew her like the pull of the sun. But it was the darkness that claimed her.
She awoke in the darkness of her father’s room with his voice in her head. She sat up in bed.
Nothing out in the vast blackness but the hissing of the radiator. You are going mad, she thought.
I had to get out of there. Go home, if only for a while. Once I had thethought, I couldn’t get out of that town fast enough.
She threw her clothes together in a moment. In the closet her coat caught on the hanger and she ripped it free, tearing the lining and scattering dust everywhere.
Something fell. Some small thing, round and hard.
A roll of film.
She dragged the chair into the closet and got up to look. A bare light hung from a frayed cord and she held it over her head. There, where the molding made a little ridge over the door, in a layer of dust—a dark spot, about the size of a fifty-cent piece.
The roll fit the spot perfectly. It had hung over the lip by almost half, balancing there until she had knocked it down. Might’ve been there two weeks or ten years.
She would get it developed but not here. She trusted no one in this town, not even the nameless people who ran the photo service in the pharmacy. In the worst of times she believed that Harford owned everyone.
She sat on the train, gently rocking her way across Pennsylvania. She was cold, she was never able to get warm enough, and all the way home she kept her hand in her coat pocket, clutching that roll of film.
She felt Harford’s presence. He seemed to be out in the black landscape, flying along beside her.
But she arrived in Sadler on a wave of trumped-up hope. Her father would be here, alive and well, wondering where the hell she had gone. Or the mailbox would be full of postcards, explaining everything.
In her heart she knew better.
She came up the steps and saw stuff in the mailbox. No postcards. She threw it all on the kitchen table and let it wait while she made a fire. Kept her coat on, still cold as she fed wood to the flames; then sat in her father’s chair to look through the mail.
The house payment was seriously overdue. She couldn’t let that lapse, it would be paid off in a few years. A letter from the church, wondering where she’d gone.
At the bottom was a letter from you.
Instantly her eyes filled with tears. Tom was dead.
Of course he’s dead. Of course.
She remembered thinking when he’d joined the navy: Now they’ll kill him.
Now they had.
Wonderful letter, Jack. Jesus Christ, couldn’t you even give me a return address?Where the hell is Arcadia, California?
The first days of 1942 were like a sieve, irrevocably separating her old life from whatever was to come next. One day she realized that she was putting her mind in order, getting ready for something she had decided to do but only now was coming to understand. Another notice arrived from the bank, darker and more threatening. The house didn’t matter, let the goddamn bankers have it. Her father was right, the effing banks were going to own everything in the world anyway. She scribbled a reply—We have made these payments faithfully since 1915 . . . don’t you people have any conscience?— but then she didn’t send it, she burned it in the fireplace. You can’t appeal to people on their lack of conscience when they have no conscience to appeal to.
She burned many papers, including the story about March Flack. It didn’t matter, she knew it by heart.
In January the phone company took out her telephone. Slowly, like a man dying of very old age, her life in Sadler was shutting down. She stood at the window on a snowy afternoon and thought, I will never come back here, but what she would do next was as much a mystery as the disappearance of her father. She sensed an ally in Livia but had never approached her; why, she couldn’t say. The closest she could come was that it didn’t feel right. It just didn’t feel right, digging around in my dad’s affairs that way. And Livia knew nothing. I found that out when I eavesdropped on her and Rue one day in the café. But she wasn’t done with that little town yet, and the town wasn’t done with her.
In her kitchen on that snowy afternoon she looked for the hundredth time at the pictures she had gotten out of that roll of film. There wasn’t much doubt her father had taken them, but what they proved she didn’t know. A series of beach shots, taken at dusk, the Goodfellows group by the light of a bonfire. Becky laughing, Gus looking half amused, Rue and Brinker standing a few feet away, and in the foreground Livia talking with some unknown man. More of the same, focusing on the individuals, Livia still standing close to the camera, talking with the same fellow. Then a series of indoor prints— a radio soundstage, with microphones and lights. Hazel sitting off to one side . . . the Schroeder boys standing at opposite ends. The clock on the wall said 2:03. Another picture, almost the same, at 2:05; another at 2:06. Peter gestured and seemed to be saying something in anger, something important. George listened intently. Hazel looked distracted as if she didn’t hear or care or understand what they were saying. None of them seemed aware that they were being photographed. The pictures had been taken through glass, from the dark production room facing the soundstage.
Holly flipped back to the first shot: Livia and the unknown man on the beach. I wonder who this is. I’ve never seen him with any of the others.
That’s because he was gone by the time you got here. He was with me then,in California.
Her eyes opened wide. It’s Kendall.
January 24. The day Harford came to Pennsylvania.
She got off the bus and turned the corner. Froze in her tracks. The Packard was parked in front of her house
.
A dozen thoughts raced through her mind. She stood there for a while, then slowly she began to walk up the street.
Darkness came early in the dead of winter. The wartime act hadn’t been passed yet and the street was black and deserted. No mistaking that car, though. There were none like it in her town.
She could hear her heartbeat as she passed Emmett’s old house. She walked past the hedge and her own house came into view. A car turned into the street a block away and in its headlights she could see that Harford’s car was empty. He’s out there somewhere, she thought: back in the dark, waiting for me.
Then she saw him. He was sitting on the front porch steps. Wearing those goddamn dark glasses, she saw in the glare from the passing car. Looking like a blind man.
She spoke to him from the sidewalk. “What do you want?”
“I came to tell you something.”
His voice trembled: he was nervous. She didn’t know what to do next, only that she was vulnerable and afraid.
“Okay,” she said. “Come inside.”
Her courage bucked her up and gave her more courage, as courage always did. She walked past him and opened her door, facing the dark house. When she turned on the lights he was standing there with his hat in his hand.
The hat reminded me in a strange way of Daddy. For just that instant in theflash of the light the feeling was so strong that it was like a third party in theroom. Then I looked up at his face, at those glasses, and there was no warmthabout him, no reassurance, and again I was afraid. But I had to hear what he’dcome to tell me. I might never get this chance again.
They sat at the kitchen table. She offered nothing, no coffee, nothing. She waited and at last he said, “I’ve asked everyone about your father. No one knows why he left.”
“And you came all this way to tell me this.”
He spread his hands, a gesture that said, I’m here, aren’t I? He tried to smile but the effort had a chilling effect.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m not very good at this sort of thing. But I wanted you to know that I did try.”
“Uh-huh.” She shook her head slightly, never taking her eyes away from him. “I guess I’m not very good at it either. Right now, for example, I’m having a terrible time believing that you would come here just to tell me this.”
He sat perfectly still for a long moment, then shrugged. “You remind me of someone.”
She said nothing. He was going to have to do better than that.
“You look nothing like . . . this other person. Maybe it’s your voice.”
She found this even more incredible. “Sir, you barely let me get two words out of my mouth. If you remember.”
“Sometimes that’s enough.”
“Please,” she said. “If this is a game you’re playing . . .”
“I assure you it’s not. I did everything in my power to find out what you wanted to know.”
“What should I do, then, say thank you?”
“I didn’t come here for thanks.”
“That’s good. I’m not in a very gracious mood. My father is missing and you seem to have had something to do with that.”
He shook his head. “I didn’t.”
“How can I believe you? You say you never met him but I know that’s not true. I have his word for that against yours. Who would you believe?”
He sighed loudly. “It’s exasperating. All I can tell you is, I never met the man.”
She wanted to scream at him—Liar! But she looked across the room and saw the face of the child peering in through the back-door glass. She gave a small headshake and the child backed away. But a moment later the face appeared over the sill, and in the presence of the child she drew some comfort.
She looked at Harford. “Who told you where I live?”
He said nothing.
“It was that sheriff, wasn’t it? That half-assed bumpkin.”
Harford pushed back his chair. “I’m sorry. I can see I shouldn’t have come.” He got up and crossed the room and she followed him to the door, keeping herself half a room away. At the bottom of the front porch steps he turned to her for the last time.
“I don’t know what it is. Your voice, your spirit maybe.”
Then he was gone.
You know the rest of it. How I came back here. How I became Holly O’Harathat night on a whim at the pier. I won the amateur night, a ten-dollar prize.Not a small thing when you’re struggling to stay alive.
At some point I began wondering about those pictures. You don’t take pictures like that with a box-style Kodak. So where’d he get the camera? Therearen’t many places in town that handle cameras like that. I knew he couldn’tafford to buy it new. So I stopped at the pawnshop on the south beach and thereit was—his gold watch in the glass case. He had hocked his watch for the loan ofthe camera. The guy had even instructed him on how to use it. Surprising, theguy said, that he never came back for the watch or brought the camera back. SoI paid for the watch, and the camera, and then you came to town, and you knowthe rest.
I thought I’d die when I saw you. All I could think of was . . . well, nowthey’d have to kill you too.
( ( ( · ) ) )
SHADOWS
OF AN
OLD WAR
( ( ( 1 ) ) )
THE hush began a minute before air. Maitland mounted the steps to the booth where Stoner sat tense, his hands on the dials. Zylla, who had written an inspiring score with no notice at all, stood with his baton before thirty musicians. Poindexter spread himself on a chair between two turntables and Livia crouched among the gadgets a few feet away. Stallworth cleared his throat and the noise carried to the back of the room over the heads of two hundred people. The audience watched expectantly. Eastman stood ready with his cue cards. At the microphone to his right, Holly looked calm, ready to go. Kidd stood near the door, with the office staff strung out along the wall to his right. Everyone had come, to find standing room only. There was tension even in the faces of the secretaries. How odd that only Jordan Ten Eyck and Holly O’Hara were calm.
Jordan had had his attack of nerves two hours ago in the dress, but it had all gone so perfectly that suddenly he stopped worrying. Holly was going to be sensational. Maitland had coaxed her into just the right pace for those rousing patriotic numbers and she had come through with spectacular fire, so good that the orchestra had given her an ovation at the end of it. Everything was going to be fine.
“We’ve got a strong core here,” Maitland had told him. “Lots of strength at the heart of it. There are people in radio for whom nothing ever goes wrong. Mrs. Harford was one of those, a creature of the air who never took a false step once the red light was on. Zylla’s another, and so is Leland. Rick Gary is nothing short of a commanding presence, and Miss O’Hara is like the rock of Gibraltar. Not to spook you, Jordan, but I think you’re like that.”
He was so confident by airtime that he lingered through that first long medley before going back to check on his cast. Holly fused with the orchestra, a perfect bonding, with Zylla leading her like one of his instruments. In the thunderous ovation Jordan slipped away, down the hall to Studio B, where the cast stood on the small stage, quietly giving their lines a final look. A monitor on the wall told them how well it was going, and it was going fine; he could feel the excitement as he came into the room.
Rick Gary was the first to notice his arrival. He looked up from his script and said, “It’s sounding good out there,” and then everyone raised their eyes, first at Jordan and then at the clock. Pauline and Hazel had been deep in some discussion, which suddenly ceased, and Rue stood alone on the far edge, looking slightly terrified with the moment at hand. Maitland had dismissed her jitters as normal. “She needs that edge to power her performance. I think she’ll always have it; no matter how many big roles she plays, she’ll always stew in her juices just before air. I’ve seen a dozen actresses like her and fear never hurt any of them.”
Gary had helped her enormously in the
dress. He smiled out of his vast network experience and assured her without ever stepping on Maitland’s role as director. He was a consummate professional, a short, muscular bundle of dynamite, slightly graying, in his early forties. Rue hung on his every word and gesture and he was charmed by her wit and good looks. He had arrived late in the afternoon and his sudden appearance had galvanized the cast. He had read the script in New York and already knew it well, coming in with a full load of enthusiasm. “This is going to be great,” he assured. “I don’t care what the networks are carrying in those time slots, we’re going to blow them away.”
The show had cut upstairs, where Barnet was directing a small group of “ordinary citizens” in a poetic appeal for war bonds. At eight twenty-three the orchestra returned with an overture to the regional medley that Holly would sing going into the drama. “Time to go,” Jordan told them. He opened the door and led the cast single-file up the dark hallway. Becky Hart had been stationed at Studio A to make sure everyone got through the doors before she locked them again, and at eight twenty-nine Holly’s number ended and the cast came in during the prolonged applause. The timing was tight: even as Zylla brought up the dark theme music, Gary and Rue were still picking their way across the stage. Eastman watched them warily from the center-stage announcer’s microphone, and it all looked very ragged as they tiptoed across the cables and stood in the cornfield of mikes, waiting.
But it hit the air in perfect harmony, the lines just right and delivered to the half second, the sound effects cued and brought up without a hitch. Zylla’s music flowed over it, potent and inseparable, and in the booth Maitland waved like Toscanini, keeping the mood tense and unbroken with his two-handed direction. The audience sat transfixed, caught by the story even with the trappings so clear. And Jordan had that feeling of life speeding past, of everything going too fast and running out of control. It ended with a question. So what shall it be for Rudy Adams—this door, or that? Livia jerked open the door and Zylla’s musical sting drove the point home . . . the lady, or the tiger? The cast hustled off as Eastman read the epilogue: that never in its history had the United States faced such a threat to its way of life as now; that those fighting boys were depending on the home front to back the attack with war bonds and stamps.