I Don't Know How the Story Ends (19 page)

That sucked the air out of the room. I felt a little breathless myself, and Mother blanched as pale as porcelain. Father turned to stare at her, and since the good side of his face was toward me, I raised my eyes. From that angle he looked like my father again, reluctantly confronting his wife on the rare occasions when she was in the wrong. “Flirting?”

“It wasn't flirting—that's ridiculous. He tried to charm me into appearing in one of his pictures, some heartwarming drama where a desperate mother abandons her baby on the Little Tramp's doorstep and he goes on to raise the boy—a
mother
, not a romantic…” She trailed off, looking agitated.

“Strolling?” Father asked in the same inquisitive tone.

“Yes. We met one time, and that's when I turned him down flat.” Mother took a deep breath. “I won't pretend it wasn't flattering.”

“And the yellow roses… I expect those were very flattering too.”

“That was just a thoughtful gesture. Though perhaps a little flashy.”

“From what I hear of him,” Father said drily, “‘thoughtful' is not the word that first comes to mind. ‘Pushy' may be more like it.”

She did not reply. After a pause, Father awkwardly folded his napkin with one hand and placed it carefully beside the untouched slab of toast. “Is it time we returned to Seattle?”

“Almost. At the end of the month—”

“The end of the
month
?” His tone sharpened. “That's over two weeks. Why wait?”

“It's as long as the girls and I originally planned to stay. We'll be back in time for school, and I'll have a few weeks of sunshine up there before the rain and gloom set in.”

“It's your home, Matilda. Rain and gloom and all. Or perhaps it isn't really. Perhaps
I
should go back in a few days, and let you decide when you're ready. If ever.”

This was certainly over my depth. “May I be excused?”

Mother practically glared. “You may be excused to your room. And stay there for the afternoon. You might want to ponder the trouble you've caused.”

Sulkily I pushed back my chair and left the table. Was I the cause? Or just the pointer-outer? I stomped down the hall and slammed my bedroom door, and the moment I was alone, my mind began sprouting the seeds of a plan.

Love's Wait Rewarded

One thing I was grateful to Ranger for: a knowledge of the greater Los Angeles streetcar schedules. That was how I knew they began at five-thirty in the morning so I could be at the corner of Fifth and Vine at that time on Saturday. Behind me, in our room at the hacienda, were a soundly sleeping Sylvie and a roll of blankets meant to represent my soundly sleeping self. Under my arm was a carpetbag with the few necessities for a twenty-hour train ride—and, as a last-minute thought, Father's picture from the nightstand.

Scraping together money for the ticket was not easy. I confess to “borrowing” some of it from Aunt Buzzy's pocketbook, with a promissory note to pay it back as soon as I could. Perhaps I could do extra chores for my grandparents, once they'd heard my story and agreed to let me live with them. I would make it up some way, but one thing was certain—I could not stay another day in that sprawling house so stuffed with pretense and passion. I had to get home
now
.

Stepping off the streetcar at the railway station, I squared my shoulders and marched to the ticket booth feeling like Joan of Arc—and when I heard that the Daybreak Limited had been delayed for half an hour because of a rock slide on the track, I felt like a popped balloon.

Also, the agent seemed disinclined to sell a ticket to a lone underage girl, in spite of my best efforts at grown-upness. “I'm going to join my father, the wounded veteran,” was the lie that finally worked, especially when I described my father. The agent remembered him from the week before. From now on, I realized, anyone would.

Resigned to waiting, I found a seat in an alcove off the concourse, opposite a thin gentleman in a gray suit and Stetson hat who was reading a newspaper. The hat and the newspaper were all I saw of him for several minutes—that and a curl of cigarette smoke hanging sulfurously above. My carpetbag held two books, the ubiquitous
Jane Eyre
and a copy of
Red Rover
I was sure Aunt Buzzy would not mind me borrowing. But I was saving those for the train, and regretting my lack of reading matter, when the gentleman abruptly lowered his paper.

“Are you traveling alone, young lady?”

Startled, I could only nod.

“Why so distraught, if I may ask?”

That startled me even more, because I couldn't see how he'd noticed anything from behind that newspaper.

“Oh! I'm not—that is, well…”

He had a long, horsy face with very keen eyes. It might have been the eyes that soon pried the story out of me—or maybe after days of me holding in, it was ready to spill. All of it: my father at the station, the shock of his appearance, the dreadful silence that had swaddled our household until yesterday, and the rift between my parents that threatened to grow wider. Even the scene I'd made hurling the roses, and the hateful words I had hurled after them.

The stranger nodded as I spoke and murmured, “Yes, I see.” What did he see? More than I could, probably, being a grown-up and part of their club.

“I don't know if it's right or wrong,” I concluded. “But if my family's splitting apart, I can't stay and watch it happen.”

“Yes,” he said again. “It's a story to wring the heart. There are many such out of this war. I should probably advise you to go back to your parents and give them time to work it out. But you look so brave and determined, sitting there all alone. Yet so vulnerable. I wish I had a picture.”

This was not a typical grown-up response, and I was emboldened to go on. “Could I ask you a question, sir?”

“Certainly.”

“Do you think… If you were my father, how would you be feeling about me right now?”

The man put on a rueful expression. “Sad…and guilty.”

“Guilty?” My mouth gaped in an unlovely manner. “But
I
was the one who was nasty to him.” There it was—my own guilt.

“Nevertheless. If I were your father, I would feel I had forced you to take on too great a burden at a tender age. I would curse the fates that brought us to it.”

That sounded rather grand, as much as sad, and I saw it in a three-quarter shot, followed by a close-up of Father's melancholy countenance, followed by his hands on my face, and a title card reading—

Stop that!
I told myself.

My companion folded his newspaper and laid it beside him on the bench. “Framing is everything, you see. How you look at a situation, the angle you take.” He held up his hands, flat and parallel to each other, then shifted their position: forward and back, upright and sideways—like a camera lens, I abruptly realized. He reminded me of Ranger on the day we met. “You, there in the station, waiting for a train: are you running toward your future or running away?”

I frowned. “Should I go back then?”

“Back where? Back to Hollywood or Seattle?” While I hesitated, thinking this over, he added, “Go home, child. Wherever that may be.”

“Sir.” A young man was standing by my companion, holding a ticket. “Everyone else is aboard the eastbound. You said to wait 'til the last minute to call you, and this seems to be it.”

“Thank you, Grayson.” The gentleman stood, draped a summer overcoat over his arm, and picked up a leather bag. “I'll be right along.” Then, to me: “By the way, young lady, I work in the pictures. I can't help noticing you have a rare quality of strength and pathos, combined with right expressive eyes.” I blinked at the word “pathos,” which I'd heard only one other person use in actual conversation.

The man had reached inside his jacket. “In a few years, if you are at loose ends, consider looking me up. I may be moving operations soon, but I daresay you'll be able to find me.” So saying, he handed me a card.

“Thank you, sir.” I accepted the card. “Especially forlistening.”

“An honor and a privilege.” He nodded and touched his broad-brimmed hat in salute, then strode down the aisle between seats with a country man's gait—an easy lope that reminded me, for the third time in our brief acquaintance, of Ranger. Belatedly I turned the card over and saw it contained no address or telephone exchange, just a name. And the name was:

David Wark Griffith

I might have decided on my own not to board the train after all. The vision conjured by the master, of guilt and sorrow and cursing the fates, seemed too rich for my digestion just then, and that was surely what awaited me in Hollywood. But where it “home”?

I only wanted things to be as they were, and perhaps that was the real reason for my ticket to Seattle. Even though “things as they were” was a vain hope. And striking out alone in brave-but-vulnerable mode might not be the best way to nudge our family back together. Anyway, the decision was taken out of my hands only a few minutes later when Mother suddenly appeared in front of me.

First she slipped the ticket from my unprotesting fingers. Then she sat down, in the space Mr. Griffith had vacated, and gazed at me from under a black straw hat with a veil that obscured her eyes. “Your father suggested you might be here.”

“You're the one who should have been here first.”

She sighed. “When we go back to Seattle, we must all go back together.”

“To stay?”

“Of course to stay. What else?”

“Some of us might want to follow a film career.” I half expected her to look about for a willow switch. Instead she bit her lip, and the mark on it blazed palely.

“You were thinking about it!” I accused her. “Really thinking! Mr. Chaplin was egging you on, and you liked it! I've seen how people notice you here, especially the men, and you
like
it. Even that scar—it gives you an air of mystery, and it makes them wonder—”

I stopped because she had pushed back the veil. Her dark eyes were red-rimmed and smudgy and far from mysterious. “Would you like to know how I got this scar?”

I'd always thought I would. But now, oddly, I didn't.

“Your father gave it to me.”

My hand went to my mouth. “Mother? Please don't…”

“An accident, of course. It happened during our honeymoon, as we took the ferry to Victoria Island. We were standing on the quarterdeck on a beautiful, sparkling day in September, and—in an excess of high spirits—he seized a davit hook and pretended he was going to swing out over the water on it, only it slipped out of his hands and slammed into my face. The point of the hook went right through my lip.

“It could have been much worse, but at first we couldn't tell how bad it was going to be because my face was swollen like a tomato for the rest of our trip. He felt terrible about it. But then, so did I. It was not one of the more blissful honeymoons in the annals of history, I'm afraid. But the swelling went down, and the bruises and cuts faded—” She touched her upper lip. “All but one.”

“I'm sorry, Mother. I didn't mean—” But I didn't know what I meant.

“He's a good man, a loving husband, a fine father… But Isobel, he left us first, and he didn't have to. It's all very well to hear the call of duty and serve one's country, but that wasn't the reason. His own father goaded him into it: Major Robert F. Ransom
Senior
of the First U.S. Medical Corps, battling camp fever in the Philippines. Dr. Ransom Senior set a standard your father felt he could never measure up to. So he went. In my opinion he far surpassed that standard. But at a cost.”

All this was much more than I wanted to know, and it struck me dumb. After a moment, she stood up and crossed the aisle between us, took my hands and pulled me to my feet. She pushed my hair back, and then her arms encircled me tightly. “We all have our scars, Isobel. Usually they don't show. But knowing that they're there, we can be kinder to each other, can't we?”

I didn't answer because I was crying so hard. I clutched her in return. While we were standing thus, my train was called, but of course I made no move to get on it. After a while my mother wiped her eyes. “And now, dear, we should take no more of Masaji's time—he's waiting at the curb. I'll exchange this ticket of yours for next Tuesday and buy three more.”

“Tuesday?”

“Yes. Your father and I had a very long and frank discussion last night. After that scene at breakfast yesterday, it was that or nothing. We've worked out a way forward, and it does not include a film career.”

I sniffed into her shoulder. “I'm sorry about the yelling…and stomping and door-slamming.”

“I forgive you.” Briskly, she tucked a wayward lock of hair behind my ear. “Your father has an apology due, I believe.” I bit my lip and nodded. “You must learn to see him differently, Isobel. As we all must.”

She picked up my bag and led the way out to the concourse. That's what Mr. Griffith had said, I suddenly realized.
It's all in the framing
. But that was Ranger's specialty, not mine.

“I forgot to tell you,” Mother remarked over her shoulder. “Ranger has reserved our time tonight. He insists on it, and you know how determined the boy is. He and your sister have been thick as thieves, and now your aunt is in on the scheme too. Do you have any idea what it's about?”

Oh yes, I had an idea. But then I remembered: Mr. Griffith, for whose benefit this whole scheme had been devised, was at this moment headed in the opposite direction.

• • •

“I know,” Ranger said when I told him. “I've known since yesterday. Pa says he's decided to move his studio back east.”

For a youth whose dream had just been shattered, he seemed awfully composed. “Then who is the picture for?”

“You,” he replied without hesitation. “And me, and Sam and Sylvie. And for itself. Just wait.”

That was all the time he could spare. Even my conversation with his hero seemed to rouse no interest: “No time now. Tell me tomorrow.”

For most of the afternoon he was down at Vitagraph with Sam and—to my astonishment—Aunt Buzzy, who left for the studio immediately after lunch and returned two hours later with a preoccupied expression and a large book of piano scores entitled
Motion Picture
Moods
.

“I'm sworn to secrecy,” she told her sister and husband. “I can't tell you what it is, but I will say that it's rather remarkable. Titus, I suggest you get Ranger what he asks for tonight.”

Ranger's chief need was a projector and a screen, which his father could summon with a single telephone call to one of his business associates. It arrived around five o'clock, and Ranger shortly afterward. With Sylvie's help and Aunt Buzzy's permission, he unrolled the screen and tacked it to the east end of the great room—the side where the piano was. Then they set up the projector on a serving cart and arranged eight chairs in three rows.

And where was Father all this time? I had made up my mind to apologize, even though I still dreaded having to look at him and felt all the more guilty for that. But he made himself scarce all day. Whenever I asked, I was told he was taking a walk or taking a nap, and when I finally caught sight of him late in the afternoon, he was chatting it up with Ranger like a regular old pal. I knew what would happen if I approached them—Father's easy manner would drop like a loose shingle, and we'd be back to stiff words and awkward pauses. It made me feel jealous of Ranger and angry all over again.

After a subdued supper in the courtyard, while shadows lengthened into twilight, Sam arrived. Under his arm was a single reel of film in a round metal case.

He had dressed up for the occasion, in a jacket and a starched collar and tie, but his hair could have used a dab of brilliantine to keep it out of his face. I would have expected him to be somewhat ill at ease, having been flushed out in public, so to speak. But he was dignifiedly grave as he shook Titus Bell's hand and my mother's, and suffered Aunt Buzzy to put an arm around his shoulders and smooth back his hair. To my surprise, he seemed to know my father already. They nodded to each other with an attitude of mutual respect.