A Graveyard for Lunatics (31 page)

“A blind man.”

“Blind!” Fritz made fists again. I wondered if all these years he had driven his actors like numbed beasts with those fists. “A blind man!?” The Hindenburg sank in him with a final terrible fire. After that… ashes.

“A blind man—” Fritz wandered slowly around the room, ignoring us both, sipping his brandy. “Tell.”

I told everything I had so far told Crumley.

When I finished, Fritz picked up the phone and, holding it two inches from his eyes, squinting, dialed a number.

“Hello, Grace? Fritz Wong. Get me flights to New York, Paris, Berlin.
When
? Tonight! I’ll wait on the line!”

He turned to look out the window, across the miles toward Hollywood.

“Christ, I felt the earthquake all week and thought it was Jesus dying from a lousy script. Now it’s all dead. We’ll never go back. They’ll recycle our film into celluloid collars for Irish priests. Tell Constance to run. Then buy yourself a ticket.”

“To where?” I asked.

“You must have somewhere to go!” bellowed Fritz.

In the middle of this great bomb burst, a valve somewhere in Fritz popped. Not hot but cold air rushed out of his body. His bad eye developed a tic that grew outsize.

“Grace,” he cried into the telephone, “don’t listen to that idiot who just called. Cancel New York. Get me Laguna! What? Down the coast, dimwit. A house facing the Pacific so I can wade in like Norman Maine at sunset, should Doom itself knock down the door. What? To hide. What good is Paris; the maniacs here would know. But they’d never expect a stupid Unterseeboot Kapitan who hates sunlight to wind up in Sol City, South Laguna, with all those mindless naked bums. Get a limo here now! I expect you to have a house waiting when I reach Victor Hugo’s restaurant at nine. Go!” Fritz slammed down the phone to glare at Maggie. “You coming?”

Maggie Botwin was a nice dish of nonmelting vanilla ice cream. “Dear Fritz,” she said. “I was born in Glendale in 1900. I could go back there and die of boredom or I could hide in Laguna, but all those ‘bums,’ as you call them, make my girdle creep. Anyway, Fritz, and you, my dear young man, I was here every night at three A.M. that year, pedaling my Singer sewing machine, sewing up nightmares to make them look like halfway not so disreputable dreams, wiping the smirk off dirty little girls’ mouths and dropping it in the trash bins behind the badly dented cots in the men’s gym. I have never liked parties, either Sunday-afternoon cocktails or Saturday-night sumo wrestling. Whatever happened that Halloween night, I was waiting for someone, anyone, to deliver me film. It never came. If a car crash happened beyond the wall I never heard. If there was one or a thousand funerals the next week I refused all invitations and cut the stale flowers, here. I didn’t go downstairs to see Arbuthnot when he lived, why should I go see him dead? He used to climb up and stand outside the screen door. I’d look out at him, tall in the sunlight, and say, You need a little editing! And he’d laugh and never come in, just tell the dressmaker tailor lady how he wanted so-and-so’s face, near or far, in or out, and leave. How did I get away with being alone at the studio? It was a new business and there was only one tailor in town, me. The rest were pants pressers, job seekers, gypsies, fortunetelling screenwriters who couldn’t read tea leaves. One Christmas Arby sent up to me a spinning wheel with a sharp spindle and a brass plate on the treadle: “
GUARD THIS SO SLEEPING BEAUTY PRICKS NO FINGERS AND GETS NO SLEEP
,” it said. I wish I had known him, but he was just another shadow outside my screen door and I already had a sufficiency of shadows
in
. I saw only the mobs at his memorial trip out of here and around the block to cold comfort farm. Like everything else in life, including this sermon, it needed cutting.” She looked down at her bosom, to hold some invisible beads, hung there for her restless fingers.

After a long silence, Fritz said, “Maggie Botwin will be quiet now for a year!”

“No.” Maggie Botwin fixed me with her gaze. “You got any last notes on the rushes we’ve seen the last few days? You never know, tomorrow we may all be rehired at one-third the salary.”

“No,” I said lamely.

“To hell with that,” said Fritz. “I’m packing!”

My taxi still waited, ticking off astronomical sums. Fritz stared at it with contempt. “Why don’t you learn to drive, idiot?”

“And massacre people in the streets, Fritz Wong style? Is this goodbye, Rommel?”

“Only till the Allies take Normandy.”

I got into the cab, then probed my coat pocket. “What about this monocle?”

“Flash it at the next Academy Awards. It’ll get you a seat in the balcony. What’re you waiting for, a hug? There!” He wrestled me, angrily. “
Outen zee ass
!”

As I drove away, Fritz yelled: “I keep forgetting to tell you how much I hate you!”

“Liar,” I called.

“Yes,” Fritz nodded and lifted his hand in a slow, tired salute, “—I lie.”

“I’ve been thinking about Hollyhock House,” said Crumley, “and your friend Emily Sloane.”

“Not my friend, but go on.”

“Insane people give me hope.”

“What!!!!” I almost dropped my beer.

“The insane have decided to stay on,” Crumley said. “They love life so much that, rather than destroy it, they go behind a self-made wall to hide. Pretend not to hear, but they
do
hear. Pretend not to see, but see. Insanity says: I hate living but love life. Hate the rules but
do
like
me
. So, rather than drop in graves, I hide out. Not in liquor, nor in bed under sheets, nor in a needle’s prick or snuffs of white powder, but in madness. On my own shelf, in my own rafters, under my own silent roof. So, yeah, insane people give me hope. Courage to go on being sane and alive, always with the cure at hand, should I ever tire and need it: madness.”

“
Give
me that beer!” I grabbed it. “How many of these you had?”

“Only eight.”

“Christ.” I shoved it back at him. “Is all this going to be part of your novel when it comes out?”

“Could be.” Crumley gave a nice, easy, self-satisfied burp and went on. “If you got to choose between a billion years of darkness, no sun ever again, wouldn’t you choose catatonia? You could still enjoy green grass and air that smells like cut watermelons. Still touch your knee, when no one was looking. And all the while you pretend not to care. But you care so much you build a crystal coffin and seal it on yourself.”

“My God! Go on!”

“I ask, why choose madness? So as not to die, I say. Love is the answer. All of our senses are loves. We love life but fear what it does to us. So? Why not give madness a try?”

After a long silence, I said: “Where the hell is all this talk leading us?”

“To the madhouse,” Crumley said.

“To talk to a catatonic?”

“It worked once, didn’t it, a couple years ago, when I hypnotized you, so you finally almost recalled a killer?”

“Yeah, but I wasn’t nuts!”

“Who says?”

I shut my mouth, Crumley opened his.

“Well,” he said, “what if we took Emily Sloane to church?”

“Hell!”

“Don’t ‘hell’ me. We all heard about her charities every year for Our Lady’s on Sunset. How she gave away two hundred silver crucifixes two Easters running. Once a Catholic, always a Catholic.”

“Even if she’s mad?”

“But
she’d
be aware. Inside, behind her wall, she’d sense she was at mass and—talk.”

“Rant, rave, maybe…”

“Maybe. But she knows everything. That’s why she went mad, so she couldn’t think or talk about it. She’s the only one left, the others are dead, or hidden right in front of us, with their mouths shut for pay.”

“And you think she’d feel enough, sense enough, know and remember? What if we drive her even more mad?”

“God, I don’t know. It’s the last lead we have. No one else will own up. You get half a story from Constance, another fourth from Fritz, and then there’s the priest. A jigsaw, and Emily Sloane’s the frame. Light the candles and incense. Sound the altar bell. Maybe she’ll wake after seven thousand days and talk.”

Crumley sat for a full minute, drinking slowly and heavily. Then he leaned forward and said:

“Now, do we get her
out
?”

We did not take Emily Sloane to church.

We brought the church to Emily Sloane.

Constance arranged it all.

Crumley and I brought candles, incense, and a brass bell made in India. We placed and lighted the candles in a shadowed room of the Hollyhock House Elysian Fields Sanitarium. I pinned some cotton cloths about my knees.

“What the hell’s
that
for?” griped Crumley.

“Sound effects. It rustles. Like the priest’s skirt.”

“Jesus!” said Crumley.

“Well, yeah.”

Then, with the candles lit, and Crumley and me standing well out of the way in an alcove, we fanned the incense and tested the bell. It made a fine, clear sound.

Crumley called quietly. “Constance?
Now
.”

And Emily Sloane arrived.

She did not move of her own volition, she did not walk, nor did her head turn or her eyes flex or motion in the carved marble face. The profile came first out of darkness above a rigid body and hands folded in gravestone serenity upon a lap made virgin by time. She was pushed, from behind, in her wheelchair, by an almost invisible stage manager, Constance Rattigan, dressed in black as for the rehearsal of an old funeral. As Emily Sloane’s white face and terribly quiet body emerged from the hall, there was a motion as of birds taking off; we fanned the incense smokes and tapped the bell.

I cleared my throat.

“Shh, she’s
listening
!” whispered Crumley.

And it was true.

As Emily Sloane came into the soft light, there was the faintest motion, the tiniest twitch of her eyes under the lids, as the imperceptible beat of the candle flames beckoned silence and leaned shadows.

I fanned the air.

I chimed the bell.

At this, Emily Sloane’s body itself—wafted. Like a weightless kite, borne in an unseen wind, she shifted as if her flesh had melted away.

The bell rang again, and the smoke of the incense made her nostrils quiver.

Constance backed away into shadows.

Emily Sloane’s head turned into the light.

“Ohmigod,” I whispered.

It’s her, I thought.

The blind woman who had come into the Brown Derby and left with the Beast on that night, it seemed a thousand nights ago.

And she was not blind.

Only catatonic.

But no ordinary catatonic.

Out of the grave and across the room in the smell and the smoke of incense and the sounding of the bell.

Emily Sloane.

Emily sat for ten minutes saying nothing. We counted our heartbeats. We watched the flames burn down the candles as the incense smoke sifted off.

And then at last the beautiful moment when her head tilted and her eyes dilated.

She must have sat another ten minutes, drinking in things remembered from long before the collision that had left her wrecked along the California coast.

I saw her mouth stir as her tongue moved behind her lips.

She wrote things on the inside of her eyelids, then gave them translation:

“No one…” she murmured, “under… stands…”

And then…

“No one… ever did.”

Silence.

“He was…” she said at last, and stopped.

The incense smoked. The bell gave a small sound.

“… the… studio… he… loved…”

I bit the back of my hand, waiting.

“… place… to… play. Sets…”

Quietness. Her eyes twitched, remembering.

“Sets… toys… electric… trains. Boys, yes. Ten…” She took a breath. “Eleven… years… old.”

The candle flames flickered.

“… he… always said… Christmas… always… never away. He’d… die… if… it’s not Christmas… silly man. But… twelve… he made… parents take back… socks… ties… sweaters. Christmas day. Buy toys. Or he wouldn’t talk.”

Her voice trailed off.

I glanced at Crumley. His eyes bulged from wanting to hear more, more. The incense blew. I chimed the bell.

“And… ?” he whispered for the first time. “
And
… ?”

“And…” she echoed. She read her lines off the inside of her eyelids. “That’s… how he… ran… studio.”

The bones had reappeared in her body. She was being structured up in her chair as if her remembrance pulled strings, and the old strengths and the lost life and substance of herself were eased in place. Even the bones in her face seemed to restructure her cheeks and chin. She talked faster now. And, finally, let it all come.

“Played. Yes. No work… played. The studio. When his father… died.”

And as she talked, the words came now in threes and fours and finally in bursts and at long last in runs and thrusts and trills. Color touched her cheeks, and fire her eyes. She began to ascend. Like an elevator coming up a dark shaft into the light, her soul arose, and herself with it, rising to her feet.

It reminded me of those nights in 1925, 1926, when music or voices in far places played or sang in static and you tried to twist and fix seven or eight dials on your super-heterodyne radio to hear way-off Schenectady where some damn fools played music you didn’t want to hear but you kept tuning until one by one you locked the dials and the static melted and the voices shot out of the big disc-shaped speaker and you laughed with triumph even though all you wanted was the sound, not the sense. So it was this night, the place, with the incense and the bell and candle fires summoning Emily Sloane up and up into the light. And she was all remembrance and no flesh, so listen, listen, the bell, the bell, and the voice, the voice, and Constance behind the white statue ready to catch it if it fell, and the statue said:

“The studio. Was brand new, Christmas. Every day. He was always. Here at seven. Morning. Eager. Impatient. If he saw people. With shut mouths. He said open! Laugh. Never understood. Anyone depressed, when there was one life. To live. Much not done…”

She drifted again, lost, as if this one long burst had tired her to exhaustion. She circulated her blood a dozen heartbeats, filled her lungs, and ran on, like one pursued: “I… same year, with him. Twenty-five, just arrived from Illinois. Crazy for films. He saw I was crazy. Kept me… near.”