City of Flickering Light

by Juliette Fay

  “This is nice,” she said and let her head loll against the sofa’s back.

  It was awful to see her like that, and Irene just wanted her to stop talking in that airy, wraithlike way and go the hell to sleep. But there was no bed. Irene wondered if Dan curled his sizeable frame into the love seat each night.

  There was a large weaving on the wall with intricate geometric patterns and loops at the top corners that hung from hooks. He released one of the loops and let the weaving hang from the opposite side, revealing the outline of a Murphy bed in the wall, which he pulled down. It was sloppily made with sheets and a thin blue cotton blanket.

  “She needs to sleep,” he said.

  “Okay,” said Millie. She rose and drifted to the bed, lay down with her shoes on, and was unconscious in seconds.

  Irene stared at Millie’s peaceful features for a moment and burst into tears.

  How would this ever work? How could they continue to survive on her thin salary, with Millie likely to wander off and do something foolish any day of the week? Irene couldn’t abandon her. She couldn’t. But she couldn’t keep going like this, either. She pressed her hand over her mouth, embarrassed and overcome, and when Dan approached, she shook her head. He stopped, but he didn’t retreat. “It’s been a long, hard day,” he murmured.

  One of the longest and hardest. Irene had had longer and harder, of course, but not for a while. Not, if she remembered correctly, since she’d met Millie.

  “Why don’t you lie down with her and rest.”

  Irene shook her head again. She thought she might drown in her own wet sorrow if she lay down. And she was mad at Millie. Or just scared. It was all a jumble.

  Her weeping slowed, and Dan passed her a handkerchief, as gray and threadbare as her own. He pulled Millie’s shoes off and slid them under the bed. Then he tugged the top sheet and blanket out from under her and tucked them around her limp form.

  Irene watched him do this, unflustered, as if none of it really surprised him. This was the world, his actions seemed to say, and he was a full-fledged citizen.

  He pulled a chair out from the table for Irene and then went to root around in the icebox. She slumped down into the old wooden chair, scratched up but surprisingly sturdy. He put down two glasses of water and a plate with a hunk of cheese and roughly sliced bread. Holding an apple in his hand, he pared off the bruises and sliced it onto the plate.

  He sat down heavily in the other chair and nodded toward the food. “Go on,” he said.

  “I’m not sure if I’m hungry.”

  “You are.”

  She inhaled a sniffle. Maybe she was. And whether she was or not, it felt good to be fed. The apple slice was cold and sweet on her tongue, and he cut her a wedge of cheese to go with it. “You must have younger brothers and sisters,” she said.

  “I do.”

  “Where are they? Arizona?”

  He cut a piece of cheese for himself and wrapped a slice of bread around it. He looked up at her before he took a bite. “The Navajo Reservation.”

  She knew he was waiting for some sort of reaction, but she was too exhausted to have one. What was it like on a reservation? She had no idea. “You must miss them.”

  He smiled. “I go back when I can, but it’s better if I work here and send money instead.”

  “You grew up there?”

  His smile faded. “There and the Indian School.”

  This made no sense to Irene’s addled brain. “There’s a school to teach you how to be an Indian?”

  He turned his gaze to the window, and his cheekbones were bathed in argent light from the streetlamp. “No. It’s a school to teach you how not to be an Indian.”

  They talked quietly, though with no concern for waking Millie. She seemed ready to give Rip Van Winkle a run for the title. He put the kettle on and brought out a folded piece of muslin to show her its contents: small yellow flowers with long green stems and needlelike leaves folded back and forth and tied in little bundles. “It’s called greenthread. Grows all over the reservation. My mother sends it to me because she worries my life here is too different, and I need something to purify my blood from city life.”

  “And does it?”

  “Purify my blood?” He smiled. “I certainly hope so. Anyway it tastes good and reminds me of home.”

  Irene watched as he set a bundle of greenthread into a ceramic teapot in the tiny kitchen and poured boiling water over it. He put a spoonful of honey in each of two mugs and brought the teapot in one hand and the mugs in the other to the table.

  “And your father?” Irene half expected him to say mind your potatoes. She would have.

  “Died before I was born. He came through with a rodeo show, and she liked him right away. She thought it would be a more exciting life than the reservation, and I can’t blame her there. They got married quick in Winslow, and she went on the road with him. He was thrown and broke his neck just before I was born.”

  “Oh, God,” breathed Irene. “Your poor mother.”

  “He was white. That and the fact that she’d run off without a backward glance made it a bit complicated for her coming back to the reservation. But what could she do?”

  “They took her back?”

  “I’m sure they were pretty angry for a while. But people get over their anger a lot faster than they get over their love.”

  Irene glanced at Millie. Lucky for you, she thought.

  “She remarried?”

  Dan shifted in his seat. “Yes.”

  “You didn’t like him.”

  “He didn’t like me. I was half white and a reminder that he wasn’t her first.”

  “You must have been relieved to go off to school.”

  Dan looked off into middle space, and she saw a flash of some strong emotion cross his features. “Relieved is not the word I would use.”

  The tea had steeped long enough, and he poured it into her mug, stirring up the honey from the bottom with a spoon. “It’s okay if you don’t like it.”

  There was an earthy, almost smoky taste, balanced perfectly by the sweetness of the honey. “It’s nice.”

  He seemed pleased with this. “Maybe you’re half Navajo, too, Irene Van Beck.”

  “I am tonight,” she said with a smile.

  His grin faded to a calm gaze, and she suddenly had the feeling of being absorbed by him. Known and cared for in some uncomplicated, primal way. And she wanted to know him, too; if he talked about himself all night, she would be happy to sit back and listen.

  She took another sip of her tea. “Tell me about the school.”

  The Phoenix Indian School was far away. “More than just miles,” he said. “The physical distance was the least of it.”

  He’d been a prime candidate at the age of seven, with paler skin than most and a “reputable” father. “He was a bronco buster, mind you,” said Dan. “Not exactly a state senator.” But it wasn’t his line of business they’d cared about. It was the color of his skin. It made the fine folks at the Bureau of Indian Affairs feel that his son would have a better chance than most at assimilation because, as they’d said, being American was in his blood. “Their version of American, of course.” His mother had wept when he’d been taken off to the school. His stepfather was all too happy to see him go.

  “The first thing they do is cut off all your hair.” Dan explained that for the Navajo, long hair wasn’t a fashion choice. Brushing the hair with bundled stiff grass and tying it into the traditional bun at the nape of the neck was part of the tribe’s spiritual practice. “You can’t accomplish it yourself. You need another person, your mother or a relative, to do it for you.” It further connected people to one another. At the tender age of seven, a newly shorn Dan was convinced that his mother would not recognize him, and he was now an orphan.

  “But you wear your hair short now,” Irene said.

  “Living here, it’s easier to go out and not have people stare. Also, I can take a non-Indian part if the opportunity arises.
” He’d grown his hair out when he went back to the reservation as a teenager but had it cut and made into a wig when he came to Hollywood.

  “That wig you wear is your real hair!”

  He grinned. “So I can have my cake and be a Navajo, too.”

  He’d allowed her to ask all kinds of personal questions for hours, but he’d never asked any of her, though he’d left spaces for her to be forthcoming if she’d cared to be. She was anxious enough without going into all that. She wanted only to be transported from her current situation to the fascinating life of Dan Russell and dreaded the thought of leaving.

  “I should probably wake her up and get us out of here so you can get some sleep.”

  “It’s past midnight!”

  “Dan, we can’t stay here. You’re a single man, and this is your bedroom. It’s unseemly enough that we came here at all.”

  “We just dragged your friend out of the Harem in a drugged-up haze, and you think coming here is the unseemly part?”

  She must have been beyond tired, because his annoyance—and his logic—made her laugh. Of course he was right. “Yes, but where I come from—”

  “And where is that, exactly?”

  “Van Wert, Ohio.”

  He crossed his arms. “Tell me what the good people of Van Wert would say.”

  She couldn’t stop chuckling. It was suddenly all so ridiculous. “They would be mortified, and I would not be invited to help plan the church suppers or so much as walk my neighbor’s dog for fear of corrupting him.”

  “Irene, have you consulted a map lately? Because this is not Van Wert, Ohio.” He pointed out the window. “This is Hollywood, California, where you’d have to run naked down Sunset on a Sunday for anyone to glance up from the latest Photoplay magazine.”

  She laughed until her eyes watered and she had to dab at them with the handkerchief he’d given her hours ago for a very different sort of tears. She shook her head. “I am so tired.”

  “Go to bed.”

  “Your neighbors won’t be scandalized?”

  It was his turn to laugh. “Trust me, they all know where they live.”

  She took off her shoes and slid under the covers with Millie, watching with half-closed eyes as he undid the wall blanket from its remaining hook, lay down on the braided rug, and covered himself. “I hate that you have to sleep on the floor.”

  “Good night, Irene.”

  “Good night, Dan. And thank you.”

  It could only have been a few hours—the sun hadn’t even risen yet, though the sky was softly lightening—but Irene felt strangely well rested, as if for that brief period she had let every last worry, every care she’d ever had or anticipated for the future, float into the ether.

  With her cheek at the edge of the mattress, she gazed down at Dan Russell lying on his back on a braided rug on his own floor, hands resting across his chest.

  Savage Indian.

  It’s what her aunt would say. She had a particular love of westerns and had taken Irene and Ivy to the local movie house regularly. Irene had seen so many “savage Indians” attack Conestoga wagons and God-fearing farmers it was a wonder she wasn’t terrified to face a real one.

  But she wasn’t. Not remotely. She’d had a good feeling about Dan from the moment she met him, and his “savage-ness” had been fully refuted by his protectiveness of Millie and unflagging kindness to Irene over the course of such a strange and horrible evening. He’d had every reason to pass judgment on them, these burlesque girls, one of whom had taken drugs and danced for pay. But instead he’d welcomed them into his home, offered food and drink, and given up his own bed to sleep on the floor.

  And he’d talked to her, told her the stories of his life, though some were undeniably painful, and he still didn’t seem sure if he’d always made the right decisions. He’d opened his heart to her. As Millie had over and over, and Henry, too, with his endless support and generosity. Somehow they’d oiled the rusty hinges on her own heart.

  Savage Indian, indeed.

  His eyes fluttered and he gazed up at her, a smile slowly warming his face. “Well, that’s a nice way to wake up,” he murmured.

  Without thinking she slid her hand off the mattress and down to him, and he took it and held it against his chest. She could feel the reliable thumping beneath it as they each lay in silence and stillness, at arm’s length. After a few moments he raised her hand to his lips and kissed her palm, never taking his eyes off her.

  The tenderness. Dear God, she’d never felt the likes of it. Filling every inch of her. Cutting all the ballast that had weighed her down for so long.

  She found herself sliding off the edge of the mattress toward him. His arm opened to fold her in, and she curled herself against him, needing as much bodily contact as she could manage while fully clothed and lying on a braided rug, with her best friend snoring in the bed above her.

  “I want to know everything about you,” he whispered.

  “Okay,” she said. “I’ll tell you.”

  29

  I don’t understand it. One minute I’m the guy everybody loves, the next I’m the guy everybody loves to hate.

  Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, actor, writer, director

  ARBUCKLE HELD FOR MURDER

  Tragedy Wipes Smile from Funnyman’s Face

  San Francisco, Sept. 12—Roscoe (“Fatty”) Arbuckle, motion picture comedian, was booked on a charge of murder late Saturday night in connection with Friday’s death of Miss Virginia Rappe, film actress. After a party in Arbuckle’s suite at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco, Miss Rappe was removed in critical condition and subsequently died. Autopsy surgeons said the cause was peritonitis super-induced by an internal injury. Arbuckle was charged under the section of California code providing that life taken in rape is considered murder. No bail is allowable.

  “Can you believe that?” Henry slid the paper over to Gert as they grabbed a quick breakfast before work on Monday. “He seemed like such a happy-go-lucky guy. Always making everyone smile.”

  “That poor girl wasn’t smiling,” Gert scoffed. “He’s making a million a year, and he has to go and kill someone.”

  “Why would anyone do something like that?”

  “You’d know better than I would.”

  Henry gave her a sharp look. “Gert.”

  She put her hands up. “I’m only saying women don’t do it, so don’t ask a woman why.”

  He had to concede the point. A filthy rich movie star could get almost any girl he wanted, and happily. Why would he force himself on one who didn’t? Why would any man?

  Poor Millie. Gert had been her usual blunt self on Friday night when he’d met her for drinks, and they’d proceeded to comb every juice joint, dance hall, and back alley on Sunset, with no sign of her. When they’d circled back to the Studio Club and found the note from Irene, he’d been relieved. But still sickened by the knowledge of what had happened.

  He was glad about Arbuckle. At least poor Miss Rappe might get some justice, although fat lot of good it would do her now.

  “Paramount must be going crazy.” Gert took a sip of her coffee. “Nothing the studios hate more than scandal.”

  Scandal. Henry tapped his fingers on the newspaper and looked out the window. Gert was right. The studios would put up with any amount of outrageous behavior from their stars, as long as the public never found out. In fact, he’d heard there was a whole department called Publicity to deal with such things. Sending actors out of town to dry out or get over affairs or deal with pregnancies. Paying off the newspapers and coming up with sweet, happy stories for them to tell instead about the stars’ marital bliss, cooking skills, and kindness to small animals. A little grease here and there to keep the massive machinery of the movie business pumping out flickers and reaping the profits, without interference from sermonizers and moralists.

  When they arrived at the studio, the faces of crew and actors alike were so mournful, there might as well have been a funeral dirge playing
. Film industry morality had always been in question; that was nothing new. But if someone as successful, rich, and well liked as Fatty could be accused of such a heinous crime, well, it looked like judgment day had finally come.

  The paper had reported on his several nights as a guest of the California penal system, after which he’d been handed over to a grand jury by zealous prosecutor Matthew Brady. There were the articles on the reaction from around the nation. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union, still basking in the glow of having foisted Prohibition on the nation, felt they were up to the task of crushing immoral behavior wherever it raised its bejeweled head.

  Closer to home, at the Methodist Church on Hollywood Boulevard, the pastor railed against the film industry as “a community of jazzers,” whose only interest was in “eating and drinking and wearing clothes and more clothes—and less clothes—and more jewels and trying to drive faster and seeking hungrily for fresh sensations and bizarre things.” They were “moral lepers, lounge lizards, mashing parasites and lip-sticked women.”

  On set, the crew went about the business of preparing to reshoot scenes that hadn’t come out to Edward’s satisfaction. The mood was somber, but he soldiered on with his characteristic good manners and attention to detail. The village of Hollywood might be commencing to drive a silver Bentley straight to hell, but Edward Oberhouser had a picture to make.

  At the lunch break, Henry made his way casually toward Edward, who was scanning an inked-up copy of the continuity script Eva Crown had handed him. No one else was in his immediate vicinity, and Henry told himself no one would bat an eye at an actor—not a star, of course, but someone with a part and lines to say—asking the director a quick question. Nevertheless his heart pounded as if he’d been cornered in an alley by a gang of thugs.

  “Mr. Oberhouser?”