Marion's Wall

by Jack Finney

  “No, you weren’t.” She brought up a fist slowly and touched the side of his jaw in a pantomimed punch. “You big lug…”

  “Come on!” Ted grabbed up the two film cans. “This is what we want to see! It’s the first third only, just your part of the picture. Your picture, Marion!” Fade-out.

  It was what we wanted to see. Marion did, and out of everything in that astounding vault, so did I. The old man at work bringing the massive old projector to life, I flicked off the vault lights, and let Marion lead the way, down the side aisle to the front row, then across to a low upholstered settee for two.

  There we sat, Marion staring up at the empty screen, waiting like a child. Half-turned in my seat, I watched Ted thread up. He worked surprisingly fast, winding the leader through its gate, onto the sprockets, fastening the end onto the big take-up reel. He slammed the little metal door shut on the film, opened another behind the projection mechanism, adjusted the carbons, slammed the door shut, struck the arc, and ran a few feet of leader, houselights still on. He yanked open a metal door, and peered in at the reeled film, started it again, slammed the door shut, flicked off the houselights, and actually ran across the back of the theater and down the side aisle.

  I didn’t understand the hurry until up on the screen the last of the white leader flicked past and, superimposed on a line drawing of a saxophone, the title appeared: JESSE L. LASKY PRESENTS “DAUGHTERS OF JAZZ,” A HOWARD BERMAN PRODUCTION, FROM THE NOVEL BY WALTER BRADEN. And in just that moment the first chord of Ted’s accompaniment began; he’d reached the organ in time.

  Rapidly, not nearly so many screen credits as now, the titles appeared, and then the cast, in white letters on black. But I never read it as I generally always do, and I don’t think Marion did. Because opposite the very last listing, ADELE, something else appeared instead of the JOAN CRAWFORD that should have been there. It was a badly flickering rectangle of white, and I knew what had happened. On every last frame of that listing, Ted had carefully scraped off a narrow rectangle of emulsion and Joan Crawford’s name along with it. In its place we now read—the letters jiggling and vibrating—the name he had inked in to replace it, MARION MARSH.

  The picture started then, continued, and it was nothing; neither Ted nor anyone else would have preserved it for itself. I’d heard of it once, I recalled now; a film collector I’d met had seen it run off. He was a Crawford fan, collecting her pictures, and had seen this simply because it was her first, the only reason it had been preserved. She’d been good, he said. It was why she’d been noticed, how she’d got her start.

  It was a comedy of sorts. The star was Alicia Conway, who’d made a few pictures in the Twenties. In this she was a show girl out to marry a millionaire. Instead she falls helplessly in love with his handsome young valet, and marries him for pure love. After a lot of nonsense, it turns out that he is the millionaire posing as his own valet because he’s tired of women chasing him for his money.

  We watched for quite a while, the organ unobtrusive, its mood skillfully shifting with the action on the screen. Once I turned to watch him, and Ted sat swaying gently on the organ bench, fingers drifting over the keyboard; happy.

  I felt a nudge and turned. On the screen, a swimming pool, rectangular, old-fashioned, the scene filmed outdoors in a little too much sun. And yes, there among a group standing beside the pool—the girls in dark, short-skirted, knit bathing suits, and rubber caps; the men in dark trunks and white tops—stood the girl I’d seen on my television screen and, that same night, in transparent but vivid and colorful reality. The screen was black-and-white but in the sunlight her blondness was plain, as one by one the girls—show girls at the millionaire’s pool—walked onto the diving board, posed at its end, glancing around at the spectators, then dived.

  I couldn’t make out how it happened. The others were simply actresses miming the part, waggling their hips and shoulders as they walked out on the board, batting their eyes as they posed, diving in. But now again, and as always, Marion Marsh made you lean forward. She walked out onto the board, not waggling, very simply and directly, but I was aware of her figure, her body, her movements, and herself—the person. And, genuinely unconscious, I think, of a change in their actions, so were the men beside the pool. For each of the four girls who’d preceded Marion, they’d grinned, worked their eyebrows up and down, made side-of-mouth comments. But for Marion they just stood and watched, motionless, not remembering to talk, and it made her the only moving figure on the screen. When she stood on the end of the board, ankles together, looking around with the Marion Marsh arrogance I’d come to know, even the girls dog-paddling in the pool stared up at her. Abruptly she dived in, knifing into the water out of sight, the next girl wriggling toward the board, and the scene went lifeless again.

  “What did you do?” I whispered. “What were you thinking; did you actually feel that part?”

  “The part? Hell, no. All I was thinking was that I was damn well going to make them look at me. The camera was what I thought about.”

  On the screen, a street scene, and beside an enormous interurban trolley car, I caught a glimpse of an ancient electric automobile, the tall old kind that ran on batteries and steered with a tiller bar.

  A little later, a chase: a touring car racing along a narrow asphalt road beside a railroad track trying to catch a speeding train. On the observation platform, Alicia Conway, arm outstretched, waited for a man crouched on the car’s running board to get close enough to toss her a weighted envelope containing her marriage license, the car wavering from side to side of the road.

  Cut to a front view facing the car. We see the driver and three or four people in both front and back seats, men and women. They’re excited, the driver hunched over his wheel, twisting it back and forth, eyes wide, demonstrating great speed. The girls shriek, grimace, sway from side to side, and it occurs to me that they don’t trust this medium to actually record on film and, months later, make an audience believe. Except Marion.

  You didn’t even notice her at first. But after the first dozen seconds of that swaying, gesticulating chase, you spotted a girl in the back seat almost hidden by the others. You became aware of her, I realized, because she wasn’t doing anything. She just sat, chin lifted a little, eyes nearly closed, and faintly smiling—but you sensed the rush of air she must be feeling on her face, detected her quiet exhilaration. Just as the bit ended, your eyes on her, she suddenly flung both hands up and outward, half rising in her seat, and you saw the word she spoke as though you’d heard it: Faster…

  The scene was hers, locked up and stolen from everyone else while they weren’t even noticing her, and when I turned to look at Marion in the darkness, she was grinning. Eyes still on the screen, she murmured, “That was my idea, the last bit. I didn’t say anything for fear they’d stop me; just did it. And I’ll bet Crawford stole it.”

  The reel ended, and Ted hurried back, turned on the houselights, pulled the reel out, set it down, and fitted in the second. Again he threaded up fast, checked both reels, slammed the little metal door closed, started the projector, flipped off the houselights. As the leader flickered by, he was hurrying down the aisle, and once again the first soft organ chord and the first frame of the reel came into being together.

  “My last scene,” Marion murmured. “I think it comes early.”

  It did, within a minute or two. A beloved old man, producer of a Broadway musical, had just collapsed backstage. Now the chorus, a dozen girls, had to go on, smiling out at the audience, snapping their jazz-age fingers while inwardly their hearts were anguished.

  Eleven girls did it by baring their teeth in rigid smiles, as though the camera wouldn’t record a smile unless the teeth were exposed, while blinking rapidly to show they were fighting back tears. Marion did it with a strained lips-closed smile, the lower lip just barely trembling now and then, while she stared out and beyond the audience, not seeing it, so that she made you wonder what she was thinking. But you knew what she was thinking—the p
icture had told you—so you believed that you saw her feeling it. The others pantomimed grief but Marion showed it to you—or let you perceive it yourself. Apparently they’d had two cameras going, one for close-ups. Because now cuts began from full-stage views to a close-up of one or the other of the girls’ faces. But more and more these cuts returned to Marion’s face. Beside me, she was murmuring excitedly to herself, “I thought they would, but I wasn’t sure! They’re using my close-ups, mine.”

  Again a cut to a close-up of Marion, her smile remaining, shoulders swaying, lifted fingers snapping, but now actual tears were running down her face. The camera backed off just enough to show her dancing full figure, smiling for the audience, crying in her own inner grief, and I was thrilled, wanting to shout or cry out or do something, and I knew Joan Crawford had not, could not possibly have, been better than what I was staring up at now.

  The room lightened, whitening the screen, dimming the picture, and I felt annoyed the way you do when someone opens a door at a movie, and turned to see who’d done it now. But no door was open, and even in the moment it took my head to turn, the light had subsided. Only a swarm of yellowish-white moths of light, strangely, was fluttering and zigzagging over the surface of the big worktable back there. Very fast they moved, sparking a little, like fuses.

  They were fuses, I understood then, a dozen or so twisting lengths of film burning with frantic speed back toward the cans they’d come out of, and even while I was trying to push up out of the low-slung lounge, I knew what had happened. I knew because I’d glimpsed the achingly brilliant light of the arc inside the projector, and I shouldn’t have been able to see it. That meant the protective metal door Ted had slammed shut in his hurry to reach the organ had simply bounced open again, a little way at least. All it had taken then, presently, was one of the occasional sparks from the glowing carbon sticks to flare out through that narrow door-ajar opening onto a length of film. A moment when a ragged-edged hole had expanded across a single frame—of Greed? The Great Gatsby? A lost Griffith?—then a puff of fire lightening the screen for a moment, and now dozens of fuses were lighted and racing.

  On my feet, running across the front of the little theater toward the side aisle, I saw the first can of film and an instant later all of them flare up into yellowy fire, sudden thick, black, greasy smoke swelling and expanding like a dozen evil genies, merging at their tops, then sucked like a steadily rising black curtain into the ceiling-high air vent across the back of the room. Before I even reached the side aisle the drapes directly beside the burning film at the end of the table went up suddenly—brightly and softly crackling.

  Halfway up the aisle I caught a sickening whiff of the stink and stopped dead. It’s a gas, the smoke produced by burning film, intensely poisonous. It’ll kill you quick, and now I knew what was going to happen. Old film is almost literally dynamite, chemically allied to nitroglycerin, I believe; it was going to explode, and no one was going to be able to go into that gas to stop it.

  Standing halfway up the aisle, staring at the back of the room and the open cans of film, like flat smudge pots of poisonous yellow fire, the black smoke rising like a wall from table to vents, I could already feel a pressure of heat moving down the aisle. Old nitrate film ignites at only 300 degrees. In moments now—not only the drapes but now the varnished wood paneling under them was crackling brightly—the temperature in the bins we’d left open just inside the vault would softly explode into flame, lids flying off. After that, the heat continuing to build, the closed bins would explode.

  I yelled, “Ted!” He sat on the organ bench, stricken, frozen, staring back at the fire. Running back down the aisle for Marion, I shrieked, “Out, Ted, out! Put a handkerchief over your face and get out!” Turning to race across the front of the theater toward Marion, I saw her—incredibly—turn her face from the blaze to look up at the screen again. The projector, on the other side of the room from the blazing drapes and film, was still turning, Marion’s movie flickering steadily up on the screen.

  I gripped her wrist but she yanked it instantly and violently, shaking her head without ever taking her eyes from the screen. “No! You go, Nickie! I’ve got to see my picture!”

  I tried again but she gripped the big upholstered arm and jammed her feet far under the lounge, tugging hard at the wrist I held … and the film rolled steadily on, sixteen frames a second, the fire behind us slowly whitening the screen. But the image was still clear: Marion in her own living body of half a century ago, fingers soundlessly snapping, smiling bravely as she danced, staring ahead almost as though at the fire, the tears sliding down her cheeks. And here, hungry-eyed before that screen sat—not really Marion, this was my wife’s body, and I took the entire rounded back of her head into the grip of my spread left hand, drawing my right fist carefully back to hit her with just precisely the right force if I could do it to knock her unconscious without breaking her jaw. She saw me, eyes flicking momentarily from the screen to my fist. And in the instant before I struck she went limp with a little sigh, eyes closing.

  Partly running, partly staggering, I carried Jan’s unconscious body across to the side aisle and part way up it. There I got ready for the run around the table’s end, through the wall of poisonous smoke toward the vague, smudged red of the exit sign on its other side. My right arm under her limp knees, my left arm supporting her upper body, I worked my left hand up over her face—ready to clamp down across her mouth, thumb and forefinger gripping her nostrils closed while I ran, holding my breath.

  Ted sat watching me from across the theater. Then he turned on the organ seat to look up front, and involuntarily I did, too. Transparent but perfectly clear, Marion sat in the front row, the blondness of her hair apparent in the beam of the projector, face lifted to the screen on which she danced. Ted turned, both old hands dropped to the keyboard, and a mighty chord burst from the organ. He played, then, thrillingly, all stops open, and up front the dancing ghost on the screen like the ghost seated before it steadily lightened and whitened as they both moved toward final disappearance.

  Then Marion turned to stare back at Jan and me. She smiled: mockingly, affectionately. And touching her forehead in a kind of casual Joan Blondell salute, she turned back to the screen.

  I ran then, looking over at Ted once more as, still playing, he looked back over his shoulder at me. And what I saw then, I knew I had seen before. The human mind works strangely, at the strangest times, and even as I ran through the wall of acrid smoke with a hand over Jan’s face, to crash through the doors out into the clear air of the long corridor beyond them—I was trying to remember where I had seen that face before.

  Jan stirred, murmured, and opened her eyes. I set her on her feet, we raced down that long hall, and as we ran I understood what I’d seen when Ted’s high-domed, sparse-haired head had turned to show his eyes, round and staring, and those strange flaring nostril holes, black in the flicker of that growing fire. It was the scene, almost precisely, far down in the cavern below the opera house, in which the Phantom of the Opera turns from the organ to stare—horribly, pathetically—across the room.

  Out on the great dark lawn we stood with the dozen servants and the beginning crowd—growing fast, people pouring in through the great iron gates—staring up at Graustark, hearing the distant approaching hoot of the fire trucks’ sirens. Inside, the electricity had gone off suddenly, and now the great house against the night sky was a silhouette except for three reddening windows; I didn’t know where they were. Then the roof—over the film vault and projection room, the servants said—exploded in a great roaring gush of flame, thick sparks, and black flying objects, the sky turning pink.

  And now the fire was free and we watched it begin its race down the long hall of bedrooms in which once had slept Vilma Banky herself … Nazimova … Tom Mix … Constance Binney … Milton Sills … Lya de Putti! Then the first of the great arched windows lighted—for the last time and more brilliantly than ever before—searingly lighted from within. In Renee Adoree’s outst
retched hand the rose brightened … brightened. And in the furious turbulence of roaring flame she seemed actually to move, straining toward the doughboy in the truck just beyond her reach. Then the great glass picture sagged, broke, and hundreds of bright fragments of The Big Parade fell outward and down, some actually flaming in colors.

  The fire smashed through the hall roof, the light of it widening outward on the lawn, turning the people before us into rosy-edged silhouettes; and now, my arm around Jan’s minutely trembling shoulders, we could feel the heat. Up on the distant fortress of the next great window the tricolor of France glowed impossibly bright. For a moment it shivered, and seemed to flutter. Ronald Colman and his weary column swayed as though about to drop to the desert sand, and then did, sagging into nothingness as the entire center of the window touched melting point.

  Down the long hall the fire raced and roared, then Buddy Rogers’ Allied plane, like the distant plane it had just shot down, took fire, or seemed to, flames licking its wings. Near the wing tip a pane popped out, black smoke instantly pouring through as though trailing from the wing edge. Then, still smiling, the upraised hand peeling off his helmet, touching his forehead as though in final salute, Buddy disappeared behind a bursting-out black-and-red smear of flame.

  A moment later, no longer, Doug Fairbanks’ costume brightened into a beautiful, achingly brilliant emerald-green, and his indomitable white-toothed grin became visible, I’m certain, over half of Hollywood in that last instant before Robin Hood burst outward and was gone. Then Jan and I turned, and in the flickering wash of pink light, the long shadows of Graustark’s great trees wavering before us, we walked toward the gateway as the first fire truck turned through it, gravel and dead leaves spitting under its wheels.