Wilde Stories 2018

by Steve Berman

  Last night, however, one cat escaped the bag. Owen Covington, son of late theater owner Richard Covington, prevented an unknown woman from leaping to her death from the theater’s roof. As it so happens, not only is young Mr. Covington a hero, he is the author of Raymond Barrow’s mysterious new play.

  Although he declined to comment upon his heroic actions, I was able to unearth one piece of information at least. Owen Covington’s play, scheduled to open at the Victory later this year, is titled The Secret of Flight.

  As for the young woman whose life Mr. Covington saved, could she be a member of the cast? Has Raymond Barrow unearthed the next darling of the theater scene? Or is she merely some poor seamstress working behind the scenes? More scandalously, could she be Raymond Barrow’s lover? The only clue Mr. Covington provided during my repeated requests for comment was an unwitting one. He said, and I quote: Clara is none of your business.

  Who is Clara? Rest assured, dear readers, I intend to find out!

  Personal Correspondence—Raymond Barrow

  December 20, 2012

  Dear Will,

  Here I am, at it again. The old fool with his pen and paper. Did you know they reopened the Victory Theater earlier this month? Not the Victory Theater, of course, a new one with the same name where the old one burned. They wanted me to be on their godforsaken Board of Trustees or some bullshit. I almost wish I’d taken the meeting in person just to see the look on their bootlicking, obsequious little faces when I said no.

  God, I’m an ass, Will. I was an ass back in the day, and I’m an ass now, just a donkey of a different color, as they say.

  Maybe it’s the new theater that has me dredging up all these memories. It’s like poking an old wound, though there were some good times mixed in with the bad. There was Clara. And of course, there was you. If you could have seen… Well, it doesn’t matter. I cocked it all up in the end.

  I was so excited when Owen Covington brought me the script of his new play. He was a virtual unknown, this snot-nosed kid who couldn’t hold his liquor, but God help me, I thought he would save my career. Old money and all that. I didn’t know his family had fallen into ruin. His father murdered, his uncle a suicide. All their lovely money pissed away. I should have done my research, but live and learn.

  The whole thing was a disaster from beginning to end. Even before Clara, before… The press was at my throat from the get-go, desperate to see me fail. Then goddamn Owen Covington goes and tries to kill himself. Like nephew like uncle, I suppose.

  Clara saved his life. She stopped him from jumping off the Victory’s roof, though the newspapers reported it the other way around. Made Covington out to be a hero. What was that horrid woman’s name? Betty? Betsy Trimblesomething? She was the one who gave you that absolutely scathing review as my leading man in Onward to Victory! God, I hated her.

  But there I go, rambling. I was telling you about Owen and Clara. After she saved him, Clara told me how much she wanted to let Owen jump. She showed me her palms. They were all cut up where she dug her nails in trying to stop herself from grabbing him. But she couldn’t. She told me she couldn’t help saving Owen, no matter how much she hated his family.

  That was the closest she ever came to telling me anything about herself. Of course, I knew bits and pieces from Owen, not that I believed half of it. But then here was Clara, someone I trusted, saying the same thing. She said she’d known Owen as a child, that she’d been his nanny, and he was the only good thing to come out of the Covington family.

  I asked her what the hell she was talking about, she and Owen looked exactly the same age. I thought maybe she’d finally open up all the way, maybe I’d finally get the truth out of her. Hell, I’d have settled for knowing her real name because I’m sure as shit it wasn’t Clara Hill.

  Instead of answering, Clara pointed out a flock of starlings. We were up on the roof of the theater, smoking, the way you and I used to do after rehearsals. That was the first place you kissed me. Do you remember? I was certain my mouth would taste like ash and whatever rotgut we were drinking and you’d be disgusted, but you weren’t.

  Are you angry that I spent time with Clara up there? There wasn’t anything between us. We were friends. Actually, we became friends because of the roof. We’d both been going up there separately to smoke, and then we banged into each other one day and started taking our cigarette breaks together. It’s a lucky thing we never burned the goddamn theater down.

  I suppose that’s how she found Owen, snuck up for a quick drag on her own and ended up saving his life.

  Anyway, the birds. The sun was just starting to rise, and the birds were winging back and forth across the sky like one giant creature instead of hundreds of little ones. Clara watched them for a while; then she said, “Can you imagine what it’s like, Raymond? Being part of something larger than yourself, knowing exactly where you fit in the world, then having it all ripped away from you, and finding yourself utterly and completely alone?”

  God, Will, it’s been years, and I can still hear her asking it. Even when she asked it, it had been two years since you’d been gone. When you died, Will… Well, I knew exactly what Clara was talking about. You were everything, and I couldn’t even be with you at the end. I couldn’t tell anyone how my heart had been ripped out, or cry at your grave.

  Things are different now, but there’s no one I want to cry for the way I wanted to for you.

  Maybe that’s why Clara and I got along so well. We were alike in our loneliness. We both had things we couldn’t tell anyone about ourselves. Not all ghosts are about guilt. That’s something else Clara told me once, and I understand her now. Some ghosts are about sorrow, and loss. But God, Will, of all the ghosts to have haunt me, why did it have to be hers, and not yours?

  Ray

  Incomplete Draft of Murmuration by Arthur Covington—typed manuscript with handwritten notes

  (EDWARD and CLAIRE face each other in EDWARD’s office, the same setting as their earlier confrontation. Light flickers through a screen painted to look like a window, suggesting a storm. CLAIRE holds a gun pointed at EDWARD.)

  EDWARD: Give me the gun, Claire. We both know you won’t shoot me.

  CLAIRE: You don’t know the first thing about me. You have no idea what I’ll do.

  EDWARD: Elizabeth is upstairs. She’ll hear the shot and call the police. There’s nowhere for you to go. You’ll be caught, and you’ll hang.

  CLAIRE (laughing bitterly): It doesn’t matter. They can’t kill me. It doesn’t matter what you took from me, I still can’t die. But you can.

  (CLAIRE steadies the gun. EDWARD finally shows a hint of fear.)

  EDWARD: Claire, be reasonable. I can—

  CLAIRE: No, you can’t. You can’t do anything. You tried to steal from me, but my life can’t be stolen, not that way. When you couldn’t steal it, you broke it, and now I can’t fly away either. I can’t leave this place, not while you’re alive.

  (EDWARD reaches for CLAIRE. OWEN enters STAGE RIGHT, dressed for bed. He looks between CLAIRE and EDWARD, confused, and takes a step toward CLAIRE.)

  OWEN: Will you tell my bedtime story?

  (CLAIRE fires. EDWARD falls, and OWEN puts his hands over his ears and screams. CLAIRE stands still for a moment, then drops to her knees. Running footsteps can be heard from offstage.)

  CLAIRE (barely audible): It didn’t work. I’m still here. Oh, God, it didn’t work.

  This is still shit. That’s how it happened, but no one will believe it. The truth is too strange.

  Clara shot Richard while Owen watched, and she didn’t run away. She let them arrest her. She confessed, but there was never a trial. She vanished out of the cell where they were holding her. The police were mystified.

  Shit. I could write my play closer to the truth. No one would know the difference except Elizabeth. Then she’d start asking questions. What’s the point? I can never produce this goddamn play, for her sake and for Owen’s.

  Clara shot Richard with Owen
standing right there watching. He doesn’t remember, at least not consciously. His young mind couldn’t cope, so he shuttered the information away, but something like that doesn’t go away completely. It changes a person. It leaves a stain.

  I took Owen to see a hypnotist. Elizabeth doesn’t know. Dr. Samson put Owen into a trance, and Owen recounted word for word the whole exchange between Clara and Richard. In real life, Owen didn’t walk into the room the way I wrote it in the play. He was hiding under Richard’s desk, playing a game. He wanted to jump out and scare Clara. He saw the whole thing.

  That’s not the worst of it though. After describing his father’s murder, Owen started laughing. Dr. Samson thought it might be some sort of defense mechanism, his mind, even hypnotized, trying to protect him. He asked Owen about it, and Owen said he was laughing because the bird-lady was making pictures in the sky. She was telling the starlings which way to fly, like she used to on the boat from England.

  God help me, he was talking about Clara. I’m more sure now than ever—she isn’t human.

  TRAGEDY STRIKES THE VICTORY THEATER!

  Herald Star—October 10, 1955

  Betsy Trimingham, Arts & Culture

  Owen Covington’s life was cut tragically short yesterday when he was struck by a subway train. As regular readers of this column know, Mr. Covington was both a playwright, and a hero. I spoke with a police officer who was “unable to comment on an ongoing investigation.” He declined to say whether foul play was suspected, but I do wonder how a young man in the prime of his life could simply slip from the subway platform in front of an oncoming train.

  Keep your eyes on this column, dear readers. The truth will out eventually, and I will report on it.

  Personal Correspondence—Raymond Barrow

  December 22, 2012

  Dearest Will,

  Here I am again with my pen and paper. I’ve been thinking a lot about paper lately, the pages Owen had from his uncle when he first pitched me the idea of his play. He wouldn’t let me read them for myself, he just sort of waved them around in front of me and said he was going to use them as the basis for his script. He only had fragments, Arthur Covington killed himself without ever finishing the play.

  Of course I read those fragments eventually. It wasn’t snooping, just protecting my investment. Besides, it was Owen’s fault for passing out drunk on my couch with the damn pages still in his jacket pocket.

  It was all there—Owen’s father, Richard, his uncle, Arthur, and Clara. Of course in the play they were Edward, Andrew, and Claire, but it’s obvious who they were supposed to be. Except it was fiction. Fantasy. Or maybe I was too stubborn to see what was right in front of my face.

  This is what I think now: Owen’s father did something terrible to Clara a long time ago. Clara murdered him, and Owen witnessed the whole thing. Of course, Owen didn’t remember it happening, not consciously. Trauma and all that. But on some primal level he did remember. He was in love with Clara, or he thought he was. It was all tangled up in guilt and her killing his father, like some goddamned soap opera, but real.

  Clara loved Owen too, in her own way. Not the way he wanted her to, but like a mother bird that hatches an egg and realizes a cuckoo has snuck its own egg into her nest. Her baby is gone and she’s accidentally raised the cuckoo’s child, but she defends it and she cares for it because that’s her nature, and it’s not the baby’s fault after all.

  It’s why Owen tried to kill himself. He thought it would set her free. And it’s why Clara couldn’t let him.

  At first I didn’t believe it, any of it, but the more time I spent around them, the more time I spent with Clara… God, Will. You were gone, and I didn’t have anyone else. I thought I could help Clara, do one good thing in my life and save her. I started thinking maybe Owen was right. Maybe if no one in his family was left alive, she could finally leave. I didn’t…I just bumped him, really. He lost his balance. He was so utterly piss drunk, he probably didn’t even feel it when the train hit him.

  I never told Clara, but I think she knew. She was the one who insisted the play go on, in Owen’s memory. I tried to convince her to leave. I’d just killed a man. I couldn’t think straight. I was raving, shouting at her. I think I almost hit her. But Clara just looked at me with this incredible pity in her eyes. She put her hand on my arm, and said, “Grief can change the nature of a person, Ray, when nothing else can. Enough loss, and it weighs you down, you forget how to fly.”

  She told me everything I needed to know, Will, but I didn’t know how to listen.

  I didn’t know how to listen when you told me you needed help all those years ago. The empty bottles, the needles; I refused to see it because I didn’t want it to be true. I should have listened. I miss you, Will.

  Yours, always,

  Ray

  Personal Correspondence—Raymond Barrow

  October 20, 1955

  Dear Ray,

  This is it, our big night. The Secret of Flight opens, and I don’t know what will happen after that. There’s something I’m going to try, Ray, and if it doesn’t work, I might not see you again. So I wanted to say thank you for everything you’ve done for me, and everything you tried to do. You’re a good friend. I don’t have many of those, so believe me when I say our time together meant a lot to me even though I couldn’t tell you everything about me. Instead, I’m giving you this story. It’s the best I can do, Ray. I hope you’ll understand.

  Love,

  Clara

  The Starling and the Fox

  Once upon a time, there was a fox, and there was a starling. They weren’t really a fox and a starling, they only looked that way from the outside, but for the purposes of this story, those names will do. This happened far away, in another country, many years ago.

  The starling was flying, minding her own business, when she spotted a tree with lovely branches. She landed on one and discovered a fox lying across the tree’s roots, crying piteously.

  “Oh, they have killed me,” the fox said. “I shall die if you don’t aid me.”

  The starling couldn’t see anything wrong with the fox, but she didn’t see the harm in helping him either.

  “What is it you need, sir fox?” she asked him.

  “Only a feather from your beautiful wing, and I will be well again,” the fox said.

  The starling was doubtful. She looked again and she couldn’t see any blood on the fox’s fine fur, but he continued moaning as she looked him over, and it certainly sounded as if he might die.

  The starling chose one of the small feathers near the top of her wing. She didn’t think it would hurt to pull it out, and she didn’t think she would miss it either. As she took hold of it in her beak, the fox cried out again.

  “Not that feather! Only the long feather at the tip of your wing will do. The straight and glossy one that shines like a still pool at midnight, even when you think there is no light at all.”

  The starling thought the fox sounded a little foolish with his poetic language and the way he carried on, but the fox rolled on his back, weeping, and put a paw over his eyes. His tongue lolled from his mouth, and surely he would die at any moment if she did not help him.

  The starling took hold of her longest and straightest feather with her beak, and pulled. It hurt, worse than anything she had ever felt, like the stars and the moon and the sun going out all at once.

  “Good. Now bring it down to me, quickly!” the fox said, jumping to all fours, even though he had been at death’s door a moment ago.

  Dazed with pain, the starling hopped down to him, half tumbling as she went. She presented the feather to the fox.

  “Are you saved now?” she asked him.

  “Very much so,” the fox replied, and his eyes were bright.

  “Then I will take my leave,” the starling said.

  She spread her wings, but when she tried to take flight, she found she could not. Without her longest, straightest feather, she couldn’t fly. She leapt toward the sky ag
ain and again, but crashed back to the ground every time.

  The fox watched her impassively through all her attempts.

  “Help me, sir fox,” she said when she had finally exhausted herself.

  “Surely I shall,” he said, and stepped forward, snapped her up in his jaws, and swallowed her whole.

  This is the moral of the story: You should never trust a wild animal. A fox cannot change its nature no matter how it dresses itself up, or what fine words it uses. It will always hunger. If you let your guard down, even for a moment, it will devour you whole.

  iPhone Audio and Video Recording—Raymond Barrow

  December 26, 2012

  [The image swings, showing the floor, a man’s feet, and a desk cluttered with papers. A starling perches on a corner of the desk, briefly visible before the camera turns to show the face of Raymond Barrow.]

  BARROW: There, you see, Will? I’ve been dragged kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century after all. My great niece, Sarah’s daughter, gave me one of those infernal iPhone things. They were all over for Christmas yesterday, and spent most of the day showing me how to use it. Sarah suggested I might like to record some of my personal recollections of the good old days, something to preserve for generations to come. Ha! If the future is interested in a washed up old has-been who failed at every important thing he ever turned his hand to, then I pity them. But there is something I want to show you, so maybe this thing will be good for something after all.

  [The camera turns to face outward again, the image bouncing while Barrow holds the phone in front of him as he walks. The camera catches glimpses of an ornate entryway, a crystal chandelier, a sweeping staircase. Carvings, hangings, sketches, and paintings on the walls depict birds of all kinds. The camera approaches a massive grandfather clock standing next to a door set beneath the curving staircase. The wooden case is chased with mother of pearl, showing a heron standing placidly among a cluster of reeds.]