The Electric Hotel

by Dominic Smith

  * * *

  Filmed from behind a narrow glass aquarium tank, the frames tinted green-blue and slow-motioned, the widow descended toward the bottom of the river, her arms languishing above her head, her singed gown billowing around her like the luminous skirts of a jellyfish. In fact, Claude remembered three men lowering Chip Spalding from a winch in a harness while a fan blew up his skirts. An eel—elegant as a sine curve—swam by in the glass tank that acted as a second lens wrapped in front of the camera. The murky bottom of the river was three feet on the other side of the glass tank, nothing more than a mountain of heaped silt and improvised wreckage and flotsam in a darkened corner of the production stage. The widow lay in the mud, her eyes open and fixed on the fathomless world above.

  * * *

  A slick of daylight on the surface of the river. Then we are rising again, this time above the Palisades and back toward New Jersey, above a burning mansion surrounded by a mob with torches. We watch the conflagration for a moment but the camera still floats, passing over the gardens. The last thing we see, as we float by, is the yew maze and the two children standing at the center of its geometric heart, craning up and looking back at us as we pull away.

  * * *

  The orchestra let the final images unfold without accompaniment, their bows and horns at rest, and when the houselights came up the silence continued for a very long time. People continued to stare up at the blank screen, unsure of what they’d witnessed. Eventually, men tightened cufflinks and watchbands, women adjusted shawls, and then a few people stood up from the close-in seats. Everyone then followed their lead, as if emerging from a long and stupefying eulogy, drifting into the aisle in a daze, their eyes down on the carpet. Claude watched them shuffle for the exits and out toward Broadway, listened for their reactions down in the auditorium, but it was eerily quiet.

  * * *

  When the filmmakers descended the stairs into the lobby, no one was waiting for autographs or milling around to catch a glimpse of the widow in the flesh. But there happened to be a few people still collecting their coats from the cloakroom attendant, two affluent couples waiting for their furs and camelhair coats. They turned around just in time to see Sabine stepping tenderly down the stairs in her red cochineal dress, her eyes dark and shining and tender with what she’d just endured. You didn’t just kill off the beautiful monster, she would tell Claude in bed that night, you burned her at the stake. One woman over at the cloakroom window, a socialite ablaze in diamond earrings, a mink stole around her shoulders, lifted her eyes to Sabine and tapped her husband on the sleeve. And then the four of them stood for a moment, transfixed by the vision of a wrecked Sabine descending the stairs. One of the husbands guided his wife toward the glass doors along Broadway and in a low, grave voice he said, Well, look at that, it’s the vampiric whore back from the dead.

  19

  Edison’s Attack

  In the two weeks before the letter arrived from Edison and his lawyers, more than one hundred thousand people saw The Electric Hotel in New York and New Jersey. In hotel bars and lounges all over the city, there was an uptick in women ordering absinthe frappés and the department stores couldn’t stock enough black evening gowns and lavender powder and kohl. Despite the film’s moral hazards, it received enthusiastic notices and reviews in the dailies and film journals. A critic writing in The Moving Picture World called it a harrowing work of genius, a moving picture coup of macabre storytelling. The Ciné-Journal described it as a moral plague that will nonetheless leave audiences rapt and gasping.

  * * *

  Within a few days of the premiere, bags of mail began to show up at the studio, some of them addressed to The Moviemakers, but most of them addressed to Sabine Montrose, or That Woman, The Widow, The Consumptive, The Vamp, The Harlot, The Whore Montrose. Pavel oversaw the handling of the letters, the careful sorting and parceling out to Sabine. She had always made a habit of reading and occasionally responding to her fan mail, but this onslaught was different. The mailbags piled up in Hal’s office, most of the letters unread.

  * * *

  The Edison demand letter arrived on a Friday afternoon, hand delivered by a law clerk who’d traveled from Edison’s complex in West Orange, New Jersey, some twenty-five miles west. Hal and Claude were in the film lab, overseeing the packing of celluloid prints for national distribution. The lab crew worked in shifts to hand tint, dry, and pack the reels for shipping. Every theater would get a wooden crate with the labeled canisters, the musical score, and a set of publicity stills, including a signed photograph of the actors on Lester Summers’s yacht.

  * * *

  They took the letter to Hal’s office but neither of them could bring themselves to open it. Eventually, Hal sat at his desk, reached for a letter opener, and sliced the envelope open with a tiny sword. Between the tiger head on the wall behind his desk, with its glassy eyes and formaldehyde vapors, and the rheumatic image of a younger Edison on the back of his door, the portrait from the Brooklyn parlor, he read the letter several times before handing it to Claude. For years he’d burnished his contempt for Edison, rubbed it like bronze and kept the portrait as proof of how far they’d come. The Wizard of Menlo Park had tried to patent or otherwise copyright various forms of motion and light, would patent human breath itself if he could find the legal precedent, and here he was firing a litigious canon directly at the Palisades.

  * * *

  The letter itemized the violation of a filmstrip patent (US772647) held by the Motion Picture Patents Company, several camera mechanism infringements, and a customs law violation that had occurred by illegally importing foreign celluloid without paying stamp duty. It also mentioned the New Jersey fire codes that were routinely ignored in the manufacture and storage of flammable celluloid, with said filmstrips further used for hazardous fire stunts that jeopardize the New Jersey public safety and contradict the state civil code for navigation of waterways.

  * * *

  The final paragraph read: Unless the film is pulled from distribution immediately, the General Film Company and its agents will be forced to remove all theaters currently exhibiting The Electric Hotel from its distribution agreements, effective at midnight tonight. Carbon copies of this letter have been sent to affected theaters, the New Jersey Fire Warden, and the state waterways commissioner.

  * * *

  After Claude read the letter he slumped into an easy chair, unable to speak, and then something on Hal’s desk came alive and the world was split in two by a ringing telephone. Hal knew it would be a theater calling to say they would have to cease exhibiting the film to stay in business, but for a brief moment he was convinced it was his father calling from the afterlife with a dispatch. He could see Chester Bender roused from a nap in the apartment living room, fresh from a three-day stupor of booze and poker losses, scratching at his paunch and brimming with saloon philosophy: A dog that chases carriage wheels will eventually come to harm …

  * * *

  To the theater owner on the other end of the line, Hal said he understood, that he would arrange for the pickup of the reels, and then he quietly replaced the Bakelite receiver onto its cradle. A few minutes later, the phone rang again and Hal unplugged the transmission cord from the wall. He reached into a desk drawer to retrieve a bottle of whiskey and poured them both a few fingers of single malt into two tumblers. They sat quietly, the afternoon light scaling up off the river, sipping whiskey, each man lost to his personalized version of ruin.

  * * *

  Hal looked at the box of his father’s unredeemed pawnshop pledges sitting on a metal filing cabinet. He didn’t have the heart to send the shoes, hairbrush, and personal effects to Flossy in the Catskills, and studying the box now, with Alroy Healy’s block-case BENDER on the side, he realized that the end in his mind had always been a small caliber bullet from the muzzle of a gun. He saw himself sitting there in his office with its telephone and wall safe and tiger head, sitting in his bespoke suit and Italian loafers, an ashcan tycoon from F
latbush Avenue and Myrtle and Fulton who couldn’t outrun his own fate. He was a gambler’s son, a curbstone hustler, had always been a dog chasing after a churning carriage wheel.

  * * *

  For Claude, the picture of ruin was a room without windows. It was a scene unframed by a viewfinder. For two decades he’d lived an extraordinary life, traveled the globe assembling footage, a diplomat of the moving image, cheered on in taverns and theatrical palaces. He’d slept with and married a famous actress. The idea of his celluloid masterpiece languishing in a metal cabinet while Edison dragged them through the courts was unthinkable. He had created something new in cinema, he was sure of it, five thousand feet of spectacle and revelation, consumptive visions in china blue and rubidine red, a story of our darkest selves. He imagined himself living out his days as a traveling projectionist, forever turning a crank between vaudeville acts or auditorium travel lectures. He saw himself on a Paris street corner in a sackcloth suit, mistaken for a mortician.

  * * *

  As if summoned by their desolate moods, Chip Spalding appeared in the office, one arm in a sling, his eyebrows growing back in tiny clumps, a slight limp when he walked. During the high burning fall he’d torn some cartilage in his left knee, broken his wrist, and singed off his eyebrows and what little remained of his body hair. The long black wig had protected his head of wiry, cedar-colored hair.

  —Who died? he said, limping in.

  Hal handed him the letter and he stood by the window to read it.

  —Even with the ticket sales so far, Hal said, we’re way behind on the debt. If the film gets pulled now, we’ll end up owing about forty thousand.

  Hal’s face was unreadable, his eyes on the wall.

  —Do you know any lawyers? Claude asked Hal.

  Hal sipped his whiskey, shook his head.

  —The Benders have never been big on jurisprudence.

  * * *

  The room fell silent. Chip looked up at the mounted head of the tiger and thought about the moment he’d put two bullets into the side of the animal’s neck. There was a split second when the bullet was roaring through an artery, when the tiger’s eyes were walled back but still blinking, when somehow the animal knew it was both still alive and already dead. Death throbs in the veins of the living, he thought. Maybe he should return to Australia, take up an honest day’s work, and live in a caravan back behind some far-flung beach. You could do worse than wake every morning to the unfurled cobalt of the Pacific.

  * * *

  The thing was, he’d never liked bullies, had always stood up for the short or gimp or poofy kids at school, the convent boys who came over to the public side of education when their family farms turned to cinders and dust in the great drought. He’d always been a scrapper, a playground pugilist, and he wasn’t about to let his fire stunt go unobserved because of some lording inventor and magnate.

  —Why don’t we go talk to Edison directly? Chip asked.

  Hal brought his attention back from the wall.

  —What, we just motor over there and show up unannounced? Go have a chat with Mr. Edison?

  Chip set the letter back on the desktop, facedown.

  —The one thing my father taught me was that when your opponent has a height and weight advantage, you ambush the bastard.

  Claude sat nodding with his hands clenched in his lap.

  * * *

  When they arrived at the gates to the laboratory complex in West Orange, a security guard checked them in and a telephone call was made to Mr. Edison’s office. Deliberations ensued and they were told that Mr. Meadowcroft, Edison’s secretary, would come down to meet them. Meadowcroft arrived in a charcoal suit and bow tie, a British accent clipping his vowels and throwing up the intonation at the end of his sentences. He shook hands with each of them, introduced himself as new to the post of secretary, but said he was a former partner in a law firm that had worked with Mr. Edison since the beginning.

  * * *

  He led them on an impromptu tour, took them past the various buildings, machine shops and laboratories, the employee restaurant and the department of decorative and miniature lamps. There was no mention of film or motion pictures; those had long been decamped to the Manhattan and Bronx operations. Claude wondered where they were hiding the Black Maria, Edison’s first studio—a black box the size of a house that featured hinged roof panels that opened up to the sunlight.

  * * *

  Meadowcroft made a point of stopping by the punch clock in the entrance to the main building to show them that Edison himself punched in every morning before eight, that he was just another workingman. Then they were led into a big open room with tall windows and hanging light shades. The silver-haired inventor sat at a rolltop desk, leaning back in a wooden swivel chair, surrounded by a cortege of assistants in dark suits and bow ties, each of them taking turns to lean into his good ear to give an update from the realms of commerce and invention.

  * * *

  Hal saw that his nemesis was a man in his sixties in a crumpled white linen suit, despite the fact that it was November, a man, perhaps, who had no use for seasonal attire or social customs, who found such things a baffling bit of noise. There was a straw boater on the desk, a half-eaten cheese sandwich, a pile of engineering books, and a scatter of phonograph records in their paper sleeves. He had a kind, avuncular face, and each time he cupped his right ear to listen to the bent-over messenger the attendant got so close that he almost kissed the side of Edison’s poised head.

  * * *

  Meadowcroft told them to take a seat at a long table that was spread with blueprints and he went over to deliver his own dispatch, to kiss the halo of white hair beside Edison’s right ear. The inventor looked over and delivered a raffish grin, as if Meadowcroft had just told his employer that a dozen naked girls were on their way in to dance for him. Hal clasped his hands on the tabletop and wondered what had just been whispered. The hustlers from the Palisades have come to hand you their testicles like a pair of iron Baoding balls. He pictured Edison rotating the Chinese meditation balls in one hand as he peered into a microscope or stood behind a lectern. Edison took a bite of his cheese sandwich, waved his assistants off with a loose, distracted hand, then rolled himself over to the table, his backside never leaving the wooden swivel chair.

  * * *

  Meadowcroft sat at one end of the table, beside Edison’s good ear, and proceeded to take minutes.

  —Let it be known that I am recording the minutes of this meeting, at four-fifteen p.m. on this Friday, November eleventh, 1910, held between Mr. Thomas Edison and Misters Bender, Ballard, and Spalding. Gentlemen, you may proceed with your business.

  Hal didn’t know how to begin, so he just passed the letter across the table. Edison picked it up, put on a pair of wire-frame spectacles, read it while chewing with concentration.

  —Apart from some capitalization misfires, I’d say this is a handsomely worded letter. The intention is very clear and robust.

  It dawned on Hal that Edison had perhaps signed but never read the letter, that its summarized contents had been whispered into his right ear along with something about a delayed shipment of tungsten wires. Then, judging by the pleased look on Meadowcroft’s face, he wondered whether the secretary had written the letter himself. There was something smugly Anglo-Saxon in its construction.

  —Which one is the lawyer? Edison asked Meadowcroft loudly.

  Claude noticed that there was a miniature rubble field of cheese crumbs on Edison’s lapels. He thought back to his first meeting with the Lumière brothers, the way they’d dressed like aldermen. They had seemed like men on the verge of history; Edison seemed on the verge of a nap. Meadowcroft leaned in and told Edison that there was no lawyer currently representing the visitors.

  —Sir, said Hal, we’d like to come to some agreement about the distribution of our new film. Theaters all over New York and New Jersey are pulling it as we speak because of this letter.

  Meadowcroft relayed the mes
sage.

  —Yes, Edison said. I expect they are.

  —But we’ve never knowingly violated any of your patents or copyrights.

  This was a lie and they all knew it. Meadowcroft spoke mockingly:

  —He says they didn’t knowingly violate any of your patents.

  Edison looked out over the table, above their heads.

  —Have you gentlemen heard of Hertzian waves?

  —What now? asked Hal.

  —In this very room, there might be fifty wireless messages being transmitted and we would never know. Completely invisible to us. And yet this hub of space is alive with meaning. The unknown, gentlemen, is something for which I am always preparing. Now, I am going to ask you a question …

  Hal, Claude, and Chip all looked at one another. Was he a madman or a New Jersey Confucius?

  —What are you here for? Edison asked.

  —As I just mentioned, we want to discuss the alleged patent infringements and the distribution of our new film, said Hal.

  —No, no, said Edison, annoyed, wetting his lips, not here in this room, here on earth. What are you each here for?

  It seemed like a trap, so Hal said nothing.

  —I was put here to make pictures, said Claude.