Seidel, Kathleen Gilles (28 page)

As they drove south toward Courthouse, Jill and Doug tried to reconstruct the movie's final episodes from memory. They now had two pieces of information—everything with either the horse or the baby was shot in April.

Jill refused to look at the video until she had showered. Doug gave her a towel and a clean T-shirt, which was every bit as long on her as the little denim skirt she had been wearing. It was a bit more transparent, but she knew that Doug would not say anything. If he noticed—and she profoundly hoped that he would—there was a professionalism about him that would set aside those responses as not appropriate to this moment.

When she came out of the bathroom she found him on the floor in front of the television. The dogs were sleeping next to him, and on the screen Booth was leading the weary Blossom home.

"It's pretty clear," he said. "The whole journey must have been shot in April."

"Let me look at it." She pushed aside one of the dogs and sat down. "You'd be surprised what clever editing can do." When Gary Cooper couldn't bat left-handed for
The Pride of the Yankees,
the editor had suggested reversing the number on his uniform, printing all the signs in mirror-image, then having him bat right-handed and run to third base. The editor then flipped the film and made him look like Lou Gehrig.

Doug handed her the remote. "Just don't get near me. You're too clean."

Jill rewound the film to the horse's first appearance. She watched carefully, sometimes using the slow-motion feature. As the daughter of an editor, she knew that Doug was wrong. The journey could have been pieced together from any number of takes. In fact, it almost certainly was. Blossom and Pompey, Booth's black servant, were never in a frame together.

"No." Doug didn't believe her. "That can't be right."

"Look at it again."

And, of course, she was right. Occasionally Pompey was shown on the back of a horse, but almost all you saw of the horse was his reddish-brown mane. In several brief scenes the horse's shadow fell between him and Booth. But when Jill and Doug froze on those frames, both agreed that here were Judy Garland's braids, the thing an editor could do nothing about except pray that no one would notice. This shadow was cast by too healthy a horse, it was not poor Blossom's shadow.

"I'll be damned." Doug shook his head. "I would have sworn you saw all three of them together. That's pretty tricky."

"It's the editing," Jill murmured. Cass's editing.

The phone rang and Doug went into the kitchen to get the phone. Jill rewound the tape again, once again looking at the journey sequence. It really was brilliant editing. It made her wonder why her father hadn't been nominated for an Academy Award on this film. Editing awards were tricky. People had to have some sense of what the original material was like before they could know how creative the editor had been, to know if he had saved the picture or ruined it.

Or just commercialized it.

Doug came back into the living room and Jill twisted around, looking at him.

"That was Gran," he said. "She said she just remembered that there had been film in Bix's camera. None of them had the heart to develop it so Charles had told them to put it in the deep freeze. She hasn't a clue if it's still there, but if we want to go defrost her freezer, it's fine with her."

CHAPTER 12

So the next morning found Jill in Mrs. Ringling's cellar, preparing to defrost her freezer.

At first she had been amazed at the notion that a roll of film would have sat in a freezer for forty years. The studio had lost the movie's April script; it had destroyed all the footage not used in the final version; it had lost track of the production files. Why would one roll of undeveloped film still be around after forty years?

Why not? Doug and Randy, both Virginians to the core, had asked. That wasn't so long ago. Who would have thrown it out?

Once she saw the freezer she grew more hopeful. It was a big chest-type without any interior shelves. In a family that didn't unpack boxes labeled "Unpack Immediately," a small object might drift to the bottom and get lost there for years.

Of course, this was not the freezer into which the Ringlings had put the film in 1948. Mrs. Ringling said she had gotten this one during the fifties. "But I moved everything from the old, and I do seem to remember having seen the film a couple times since then. I never knew what to do with it, so I always tossed it back in, but I haven't seen it in ages."

So they started to unload the hulking appliance. The top layer had some supermarket food—Pepperidge Farm Cherry Turnovers, Swanson Hungry Man turkey pot pies, Minute Maid juice. There was meat from a local processor, stamped and wrapped in white paper. The food beneath that was mostly garden produce—corn, peas, and beans— home-packed in white freezer boxes, surrounded by innumerable plastic containers of applesauce. Jill stacked them on top of the washer and dryer, her hands growing cold as she worked. She took out four bags of pecans, two jars of yeast, two packages of bought English muffins, and four wrapped loaves of homemade cranberry bread. Toward the bottom of the freezer were several pounds of coffee packed in the old-fashioned squat cans, some mason jars of homemade soup, and more applesauce. Every layer had its share of leftovers, packaged in foil, tucked into plastic.

Mrs. Ringling shook her head as they reached the bottom of the freezer. "You must think I'm a pretty poor housekeeper." She showed Jill the label on a foil-wrapped packet, "Meat Loaf Leftovers, 4-26-51."

"I don't think any such thing," Jill assured her.

"Valley people always save stuff; I suppose it comes from the wars. Sheridan and then all those children supposedly starving in Europe. It really made us save things."

Jill was starting to get used to the Civil War and World War II existing side by side on the Valley's psychological time line. "Having such a big freezer, you could save things without causing any trouble."

At least, no trouble until it was time to defrost it. Jill's legs ached from riding the day before, her shoulders were tight from moving boxes, and now her hands were very cold.

The freezer was empty at last. They had found no film, but the walls were thick with frost-encrusted ice. Anything might be buried in those glaciers. "Do you have some cast iron skillets?" Jill asked. "I'll go boil some water."

Doug and Randy had been amazed at how willingly Jill had volunteered for this chore. They couldn't imagine her at such a domestic task. But Jill knew how to clean. Alice had made sure of that. It was part of a lady's education; the mistress of a house cannot supervise her servants unless she can properly perform the tasks herself. This was why Alice had taught the duke's two sisters how to clean.

She had approached Jill's lessons with even more diligence. Alice did not trust American money; she had taught Jill to clean in case she ever had to do it for herself. So while Jill could mend aging damask and care for family silver—neither of which she owned—she also knew about oven cleaner and toilet bowl brushes. The irony, of course, was that while Jill could have hired people to vacuum Interstate 81 if she had wanted, Lady Katherine had a charwoman only one morning a week, and her younger sister, the Countess Ives, didn't even have that.

"Boil water?" Mrs. Ringling frowned. "That's sure an old-fashioned way to go about it. Use a blow dryer, girl. It's much less messy and you don't have to run up and down the stairs."

"You blow dry your hair?" Mrs. Ringling's silver hair, twisted into a hair net, did not look like much technology had been sacrificed in its behalf.

"No, but I also use the thing to dust the chandeliers. Doug gave it to me for Christmas a couple of years back. It's right handy."

Alice had taught Jill to dust with feathers and lamb's wool. A blow dryer sounded like quite an improvement. Jill would have to tell the Countess Ives.

There was an electrical outlet in the overhead light fixture, and following Mrs. Ringling's instructions, Jill plugged together three orange extension cords and hooked them up to the Lady Clairol hairdryer. Lady Clairol did work better than the hot water, but even so, the years of ice required considerable patience, something which Jill had in great abundance. Finally she was able to pry the ice off in slabs, and imbedded deep in one of the slabs was a roll of film.

"I sure hope that's the one you want," Mrs. Ringling said. "What a shame to have you go to all this trouble and find yourself looking at Ward's kids standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial."

Jill set the film aside, and since she was the sort who always cleaned up after herself, she finished the chore, scrubbing out the freezer, carrying away three forty-gallon trash bags of elderly food.

Before coming, she had called a friend who owned a photography lab, and he had assured her that exposed, but undeveloped, film should survive indefinitely in a freezer. "It may be as brittle as can be. You'd better send it to someone good."

"I'm sending it to you," Jill had told him. So when she was finally done with Mrs. Ringling's freezer, she drove to the Federal Express office and shipped the film out to California.

It was just after four as she came to the Courthouse exit, so she turned west off the Interstate, taking the county road to Aunt Carrie's. In the ditches along the side of the road the airy Queen Anne's lace were starting to blossom, and the woodland borders glowed with ferns and vivid masses of the star-like fire pinks. The sunlight was gentle, softening the memory that troops had marched across this ground.

She found the men in the flower garden. A pile of irises lay next to Randy; he was tying them in bunches with kitchen twine while Doug was filling a line of rusty coffee cans with water from the green garden hose. They were working with steady, set expressions, oblivious to the flowers' beauty.

"That's a lot of flowers," she said. "Are you having a party?"

They looked up. "Did you find the film?" Doug asked.

"Did you bring dinner?" Randy asked.

"Yes, to you." She pointed to Doug. "And no, to you," she said to Randy.

Doug cheered and Randy groaned. "It's Thursday, Jill, Thursday. Whoever's out should always get dinner on Thursday; that's our one rule."

"I'll be happy to go get something, but what's so special about Thursdays?"

"Friday's the Farmers' Market," Doug explained. "Randy may look like God's gift to womankind, but on Fridays he's a florist. We spend Thursday evening getting ready."

"Don't laugh," Randy said as he wrapped lengths of string around his forearm. "I didn't have to pay myself last summer, thanks to these flowers and that jam."

Apparently Aunt Carrie's flowers were indeed serious agriculture. From March to October she had sold her flowers at one of the weekly Farmers' Markets in the Washington suburbs. She had made enough to cover her groceries and pay off what was left of her winter heating bill.

"But I only made that much because I sold all her jam," Randy said. "Now it's gone, so I'll be lucky if I can get another year out of these babies. They've survived some intense neglect."

Doug brought out an armful of badly cut tulips, and Randy started to tie them. Jill guessed that they were Cottage or Darwin tulips; they were flamboyantly colorful— scarlet, deep purple, golden yellow, and a lovely pure white—with long stems that tended to droop.

"Do you always bunch them by kind?" Jill asked as she watched Randy wrap the tulips near the heads, trying to make the stems appear straight. "Don't you ever do assortments?"

"We don't know how," Randy answered. "Apparently Aunt Carrie was great at this mix-and-match stuff. She'd get twice as many bouquets because she'd add a lot of weeds."

By weeds, Jill assumed he meant the Queen Anne's lace, the purple violets, the maidenhair ferns and the thistle.

"If you'll let me help," she said. "I can probably do some mix-and-matching." As part of the English-lady's education that she had received from Alice, Jill had, of course, learned to arrange flowers.

Randy instantly dropped his twine and scrambled up. "What a perfect division of labor. You do this and I'll go pick up dinner. I'm much better at picking up dinner than I am at the flowers."

Jill set Doug to work sharpening the knife. Then she hitched a ride down the lane with Randy and, taking a bushel basket from the back of his truck, filled it with ferns and Queen Anne's lace. She carried the bushel basket back up the lane, gathering armloads from the flowering shrubs, perfumed masses of delicate lilacs, clouds of brightly colored azaleas. Then she cut foliage, boxwood and privet, magnolia leaves and euonymus.

Back at the garden Doug had finished picking the tulips. Jill herself liked the droop of their long stems and the interesting, natural shapes made once the flowers were arranged. But she knew other people wanted all stems to be as regimented as daffodils so she set Doug to work rolling the tulips, five at a time, in newspaper. Plunged up to their necks in cool water, the flowers would be straight by tomorrow morning.

She hammered the woody stems of the foliage, the lilacs and the azaleas, stripped off all their lower foliage and blossoms, and put them into warmish water. She recut all the flowers, slicing them at a crisp, sharp angle, and then put them in cool water.

Then she lined up all the coffee cans and began to combine the flowers. She mixed some iris with the white Treasure azaleas and some more with the pale pink Cameos. Sprays of lavender Corsage azaleas went with deep purple tulips. She did all-white arrangements, all-yellow, all-lavender. She blended cool, pale blossoms; she grouped the rich, vividly colored flowers. She combined the quiet and the striking. To some she added touches of greenery; in others the foliage was profuse. Every bouquet was different, and she was as happy as could be. It wasn't quite as good as riding, but it was better than searching through attics and freezers, getting permits for other people's fundraisers, better than raising fish.

"You're very creative," Doug said.

Jill looked up from her work. He had finished eating and was gathering up his trash, stuffing it back into the McDonald's bag. Jill hadn't touched her own food; she had hardly noticed Randy's return.