“Very likely,” I said.
“About fifty-five?” I love the way Canadians say “about.” “Barney something or other. Used to work here. Moved down to Marquette, I heard.”
About a year ago, he thought. I know, I know, you’re wondering about Frederick Manion. Be patient. I was wondering too, wondering how such a man might materialize.
The next day, I drove back into America, along the Superior shore, through all the flat towns, hunched against the wind, and came to Marquette. As I drove in, I saw the lights of the Thunder Bay Inn, and I felt like Barney whatever coming to the place, and being struck by the coincidence.
I went into the inn: large, crowded, a lot of soldiers with noisy women. I sat at the bar and waited for the man to get to me. He had an embroidered name on his vest: “Alphonse, call me Al,” it said.
“Thank you, Al,” I said when the beer came.
He looked at me knowingly, the way barmen are always ready to say they remember you, and he grinned defensively.
“Barney around?” I asked casually.
“Mr. Quill? No, he’s bowling tonight. Mary’s here, though—in back.” He nodded his head. I looked through the doorway at the end of the bar. It was open, and I could see into an office. A woman of maybe twenty-five was sitting there with a ledger and a calculating machine. I knew that face as well as I knew the name. I couldn’t stay there, so moved but content with a beer. I left my drink and walked out into the blast of the night.
I had to work out how to do it. For all I knew, Barney Quill was someone else. I had to make certain. But the young woman … if there was no trace of him here in Marquette, how could I explain the way I felt I knew Mary’s hunted look, the way she seemed to be staring at herself?
I moved into the Twilight motel, with a waterbed and You Only Live Once on the late movie, about a good man (Henry Fonda, no less) who becomes a killer. I enjoyed it again, along with the local ads—the car dealers peering at cue cards, the discount-furniture store with the owner in a Halloween mask (an old ad held over) and here, one for an inn, the Thunder Bay Inn, with its smug boss, Barney Quill, behind the bar, chatting to the camera about his range of beers and bar specials. It was him, Mark McPherson, gray now, but still dark and menacing. If I hadn’t seen him, I would have known the voice and the slick, insolent way he had with the camera. I went to sleep happy at having found the man I wanted in this board game of motels.
The next night I went to the Thunder Bay Inn. It was crowded and I sat in an ill-lit corner. I was sure he wouldn’t recognize me—it had been nearly thirty years, and we had met only once. The bar was full of soldiers again, and there was one man, a lieutenant, who caught my attention. He was in his late thirties, maybe, with very dark hair and sardonic eyes. His table included a younger woman, a flirt, touching all the men except the lieutenant. He watched her and the other men with a fixed, silky smile on his face. The more I studied it, the more I thought that man could be a killer. He was apparently sociable and amiable, but I felt the distance he was keeping between himself and his silly gang. The woman stood up and I heard some remark about the little girls’ room. She walked away so that everyone could get a good look at her bottom. Everyone watched her go except the lieutenant.
Then he stood up and strolled over to a cigarette machine, collecting coins from the pocket of his uniform. I followed him, trembling with excitement and apprehension. Would I actually talk to him? What could I say? I saw his name tab: Lt. F. Manion. He pushed quarters into the machine, got a pack, opened it and put a cigarette in his white ivory holder: it was a sinister affectation. Then he realized I was standing beside him.
“Your turn, Pop,” he said.
“Oh, thank you,” I muttered, and he had gone.
I was mortified by my own feebleness. I had been speechless, helpless, a coward, sure the man would laugh at me or still the din and repeat what I had said, incredulous at my nerve. And what would I say? “I wonder if I can interest you in killing someone.”
Back in the motel, I wept as I watched On Dangerous Ground. I had come so far, and promised this vengeance to myself for so long. Yet now I could not grasp it. I thought of going to a gun store, equipping myself, striding in tomorrow and killing him behind his own bar. But I have always abhorred violence; and always known that I would need an instrument. Yes, I have seen so many killings on film, but it is a fallacy that the viewer becomes more prone to use a gun himself.
One more night, I returned to the inn, resolved that it would be my last. Lieutenant Manion was nowhere to be seen. But Quill, or Quilty—whatever—was there again, applying liquor and bonhomie. The woman from Manion’s party was there too. She was wearing a tight sweater and pants. When she danced with other soldiers near the jukebox, you could see she had no bra on. And you could see the outline of her panties through the sheer, synthetic material of the pants.
Then the woman left, and only a few minutes later Quill went out too, leaving Al to manage the busy bar. I had the impression that Quill followed her.
An hour passed. The crowd was lessening. I was blue and tipsy, sure I had failed, when Quill came back. I was sitting near the door that night, and I was no more than twelve feet away from him. He was an old man too, I could see, and he seemed out of breath. He went back behind the bar, whispered to Al, and I could hear Al’s giggling above the talk and music of the bar.
I finished my last drink and got up. I took a final look at Quill. In stupid bravado, I waved to him. He paused, looked through the smoke and waved back: a tavern owner has to “know” everyone. I moved to open the door, but it was pulled away from me as Lieutenant Manion came in.
“Good evening,” I said, but the man never saw me. There were tears in his eyes, and, I realized, a gun in his hand. He walked up to the bar and he put five bullets in Barney Quill, leaning over the bar and reaching down to make sure the job was done. My delirious laughter was the only sound in the raw silence of shock.
MARK McPHERSON
Dana Andrews in Laura, 1944,
directed by Otto Preminger
I walked out into the starry night jubilant. The breath of my song turned into mist in front of me. I stomped down to the water, thinking to crush the shingle with my amazed liberation. He was dead, and I had not had to lift a hand. Just as my weakness had sent me away, it seemed that the world had felt my desire and responded by sending forth a killer, driven by his own furious reasons—whatever they were—but I had seen tears springing in eyes that had been heartless the night before. Now I, the hopeful killer, found myself in tears that a miracle had lifted away the guilt I had not been brave enough to accept. It was as if a secret author had designed everything and let my despair and its mercy cross on the threshold of the Thunder Bay Inn. There on the narrow shore, I looked out at the steel glaze of Lake Superior in the moonlight and I howled at the moon.
“My dear fellow,” said an elderly voice; I felt a gentle hand on my shoulder. I turned. It was a man of about my age, white-haired; I could smell whiskey, like sauce on the ice-cream night. “What’s the trouble?”
I made an effort to control my laughter and my tears. The tension of the last week had made a wreck of me.
“A man was just killed in the inn,” I explained.
“Good Lord,” he said under his breath, looking at the inn’s bright windows. “Was it murder?”
“A soldier,” I said. “He shot the owner of the place. He seemed to be in a trance.”
“You’re shocked,” he said. “You should take a little brandy. It’s so cold tonight.”
With that, he gripped my arm and I let him guide me to another tavern, quieter and still unaware of the sensation up the street. He sat me down and called for two brandies. He introduced himself as Parnell Emmett McCarthy. I said I was spending the night in town, on my way from Montreal to International Falls. Mr. McCarthy waited for me to calm myself, and then he extracted the whole story from me with a skill that belied my feeling that he was not far short of drunk.
Dearest George,
I have heard he is in Thunder Bay. This news is not fresh. He may have moved on.
The other girl is or was with him. My dear, I do not think she was Mark’s. I let Mark take her because he promised then to leave us alone. I have never forgiven myself, but I think the child was yours. Remember me.
All my love,
Laura.
The trial never knew of him as anything but Barney Quill, the deceased. The corpse has no history; it is enough that its violent coming into being initiates the trial. His whole shady past was covered by the revelation that Mary Palant was his daughter. There were lascivious gasps all over the courtroom: Marquette had thought she was Quill’s mistress. Even now, they couldn’t quite separate the old idea that he had been sleeping with her from the hot flash that he was her father. Suppose I had said she was not his, but mine, those gasps would have started tittering. The credulousness of that kind of audience can only be teased so far. Revelation is always close to the ridiculous.
The woman who had seemed like an army slut was actually a Laura, Laura Manion, the lieutenant’s wife. They had been married a few years, since a time in Georgia when his and her first marriages had been broken apart by their affair. It was the contention of the defense, ably conducted by a Mr. Paul Biegler, backed up by none other than Parnell Emmett McCarthy, that earlier on the fateful night Laura Manion had left the inn. That Quill had pursued her and offered to drive her back to the trailer she lived in with Manion.
But he had driven off the highway into some woods—the place was found and avidly splashed in the local papers. He had hit Mrs. Manion, pulled off her pants, ripped away her panties and raped her. The abused woman had staggered home and told her husband. In his rage, he had gone straight to the inn and, under what Biegler called “an irresistible impulse,” shot the innkeeper.
The state’s case, conducted by a smart lawyer from Lansing, was that Laura Manion had been as willing to go with Barney Quill as she seemed happy to dance with anyone. They said that Manion knew his wife’s looseness, and that it was murder plain and simple. For his part, the lieutenant remembered only a daze. I sat in the court (I could not miss it), tickled to think that a cloud of unknowing had met my need.
The case hinged on the evidence of Mary Palant. For the young woman had found a pair of torn panties upstairs in the inn, and put them aside. She had heard evidence in court and been reminded of them. They came into court, a tattered white flag of nylon, but with a label—the Smart Shop in Phoenix—that confirmed Mrs. Manion’s memory of their purchase.
I looked at the two women, Laura and Mary. It still seemed hard to think of Laura Manion being raped. But if I thought that, why surely I would have to query all rapes—it is an old male humbug that women always want it. Mary Palant’s face was more stricken. She had honestly given evidence that helped save a man for his wife. But it gave credence to the gossip that her father was a wolf. Her father? She had had to admit it in court: how Quill years ago had had an affair with a waitress in Blind River, Ontario, never married, then welcomed Mary when her mother died in a flood. But the constraint in Mary’s face made me think she had lost not only a father, but her good opinion of him.
When the trial was over, I went to call on her. Yet again, I realized I was tongue-tied, weighed down with an awesome question too great to be asked. She was running the inn now, with the help of Al; it was the best way to fill the days.
I introduced myself; she was polite. I told her that I had talked to her father a few times before the shooting; that I had liked him, had been horrified by what happened, and a little curious to know more about him than had emerged in the trial.
“I felt he was a more private person,” I told her.
“Yes,” she said. “I think so.”
The child has to trust what parents say about its origins. Suppose that waitress in Canada had been paid to look after Mary. Suppose Quill sometimes called on them. Suppose the little girl had wondered if he was her father, and claimed as much in her most ardent dreams. Then the mother had died. I grant the flood (I looked that up), but I wondered if Mark had not held the waitress under. She had no other kin; that is how Quill took the child. I checked: he had adopted her.
“Was he really your father?” I asked her, and I could not tell what answer I wanted.
“I thought so once,” she replied, “but later …”
I might have prodded her. But I had reached the point of wanting to leave things alone, and there were tears in her eyes at least as honest as those I had seen on Lieutenant Manion’s face.
“You have a fine inn here,” I said, to change the subject.
“It is,” she said, and I knew as if pierced that she and I had the same fondness for out-of-the-way places.
GEORGE BAILEY
James Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life, 1946,
directed by Frank Capra
I was born in 1910: I will be seventy-five this coming February, and I will make it so that I can go to Marquette again in the summer. I was born in Bedford Falls, Nebraska, and I have lived there all my life. Nor do I have any intention of leaving the place; those hopes and fears have all gone. I was born conservative and local, and such a man can hardly deal with experience, take pleasure or accept tragedy, unless he abides by his nature. I have been away from Bedford Falls a very few times—I mean traveled away. But in my mind I have always ranged farther afield—not just to the West, or back to New York—but into possibilities, stories, other lives that I could not have. All my life, I have loved the movies, and they have a legion of slaves, pale, overweight and shy, but fantastic journeyers, of which I am one. We all of us have to be somewhere every moment: it is our dull duty, whether it’s in Bedford Falls or the Pierre Hotel in New York. But the screen is like a map for our dreams on which we may always travel, without ticket, tiredness or pain. It is our greatest frontier, like a magic mirror.
Perhaps I am absurdly proud of Bedford Falls. I know when I was young I had a tendency to make myself sentimentally cozy about certain things: it was immaturity, I daresay, and I had to get as far as thirty-six before I learned anything different. Some days I see Bedford Falls as a nondescript town, a flat land with flat lives, small and small-minded, cautious, critical and piously inhibited. It may be so. Yet once I regarded it as ideal, like the small towns on Christmas cards, held together by the light of the star, by its own fellowship and by satisfied isolation from all the rest of the world.
Well, today Bedford Falls is nearly a suburb of restless Omaha. There are strategic bombers in our sky, trucks half a mile away, going east and west, carrying goods, and there are cars in every drive. When I was a child, Omaha was a treat, apparently a day away on a bus that went twice a day. If you went, you had to wait by the stop amid cornfields, alone in a mass of silent growth, feeding America. Today our grain goes to Russia, along with the threat of the bombers. In those days, people walked and stopped to talk: the town was content with itself. It seems like a moment of grace—but maybe it was rancid then, and America is just a story of its men and women going from happiness to stoicism.
I had two brothers, Harry and Jeffrey, and there were only five years covering our ages. They made me a father figure, because Pa was so busy, and so weary, from running the Bailey Building & Loan. I saw so much of my life in his, but I was pleased to be led then. It was a childhood of perfection, I still think: modest in means, rich in feeling. But I cannot tell now whether that is true to the time and the place, or just a measure of my young optimism.
There were dangers and disasters, but they were averted. When Harry fell through the ice, I went in and rescued him: it was the natural thing to do, and I never felt bitter that my hearing went in the one ear because of the cold water. And
I saved Mr. Gower from accidentally putting poison in a prescription. Who wouldn’t have done that, if they’d known? The town made me a kind of hero. I should have been all the more confident, but it left me anxious. I never trusted ice or the obvious again. It was the start of my suspiciousness, and when I found myself as a worried, worrying man, depressive, alarmist and fearing the worst, why, I was deaf too to go with it, the perfect physical accompaniment.
It was in 1927 that I first saw Mary Frances Hunt. There was a fair in Omaha that summer, and a gang of us went over for a weekend. There were parties and picnics, and that’s how I met her. She was ten and I was seventeen; it’s a matter of fact that I fell in love first with a child, a girl in a white frock. At that time, I don’t think I was aware of what was happening. A seventeen-year-old does not own up to being smitten by a kid, least of all to himself. But my mind knew. It started to compose itself for the patience I would need; perhaps my fear of going away seized on Mary Frances as a reason for choosing safety. In any event, when Pa died the next year and I was faced with going to Lincoln to the university or running the company, I stayed in Bedford Falls. People said I was swell for letting Harry go two years later, but I was a coward too.
The 1930s were so hard. The Building & Loan went from trouble to trouble during the Depression. I was never home early. I could see people’s pity at the haste with which I was aging. Faster than Mary Frances was growing up. I found reasons to be in Omaha, and I watched the Hunt girls, Mary Frances and Laura, attracting more and more attention. I was nearly a comic figure to the young set at their picnics. If Mary Frances did like me, it was because my image of premature failure interested her dramatic instincts. She was a fine actress. I couldn’t deny it, but I was frightened by all the urging that she go on the stage. Not just because I would lose her then, but because I thought her parts acted on her like an illness. She had the nature of an actress—repressed in life, alive on the stage—but when she went back into life she was inflamed by what she had felt in the play. She was no longer satisfied or calm. With every play she became a little more disturbed as a person. Only I seemed to see this; but I loved her, and that made the difference.
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