39
A
fter a few more years of wandering, I finally found a home and a haven in Gaylordsville, Connecticut. I had recently read a novel someone had left behind in a bus station,
Show Boat
by Edna Ferber, and the gambler, the reckless wooer, Gaylord Ravenal, reminded me of Jim, and maybe I saw a little something of myself in Magnolia, the woman who loved her husband through thick and thin. I could just see Jim’s smile lighting up his eyes and the diamond horseshoe twinkling in his tie again. I took it as a good omen, that I had finally found the place where I belonged.
I met a pair of ladies on the train, a Mrs. Clara Dutton and a Miss Amy Lyon, who were respectively the matron and nurse of a boys’ school. Seeing that I had nothing, they offered to share their hamper of sandwiches and slices of lemon jelly cake with me. They were kind to me, and for the first time in many long years I told them something of my story, making it clear as the finest crystal that I didn’t want notoriety, I longed only for peace.
“You poor soul, it
has
been a long and wearying journey for you; hasn’t it?” Mrs. Dutton said. Then she shared a lengthy look with Miss Lyon, who smiled and nodded. “But I think it’s over now,” she clasped my hand.
They told me about a spot of land near the school that nobody wanted because it was too near a railroad track. “When the trains go by they would make any walls near there shake, and I’m sure they’d shake the thoughts out of anybody’s head too,” Mrs. Dutton said. But the land could be had very cheaply if I didn’t mind the noise and a little discomfort. It turned out I had just enough money saved to buy it and build a little shack to call my home. There wasn’t enough money for electricity or running water, but I had always preferred the kind, gentle glow of candles and lamps and there was a stream just a few steps outside my back door and the trees and blackberry brambles around it provided me enough privacy to bathe. I was no longer a pert-breasted blond beauty, so I couldn’t imagine anybody braving those brambles to spy a glimpse of my nakedness.
To welcome me to my new home, Mrs. Dutton brought me a blanket she had crocheted in orange, pink, and white stripes, in remembrance of how that first conversation had begun when I admired the orange and pink taffy-colored clouds outside the window. Her sister-in-law, Mrs. Roberson, the wife of the school chaplain, sent me a loaf of the fresh-baked banana bread she was famous for. And Miss Lyon gave me several packets of vegetable and flower seeds. Some of the boys from the school—how sweet of them, since they hadn’t even set eyes on me—painted me a little placard that said “Home, Sweet Home” in bright pink letters, with the sun smiling down on my little house and flowers springing up all around it, and Mrs. Dutton said that some of them had even volunteered to come hoe and weed the earth for me.
The “friendless lady” wasn’t friendless anymore. For the rest of my life, I would bear the name I had been born to—Florence Chandler. They respected my wishes and kept my secret. No one ever asked me a single question about my former life or my guilt or innocence; they let those tired old ghosts rest.
I can’t say there were no more dark moments to mar my newfound happiness—no one can say that—but, on the whole, I was content. Sometimes the demons would rear their ugly heads and pull me back into the sticky, sluggish black tar pool of depression, but I fought them back down into the pit of Hell as best I could and just got on with the business of living. From time to time, especially as I got older, the diary would beckon to me from the dark corner where it lay hidden, demanding that its story
must
be told now that there was no one who needed protecting anymore. But, following the philosophy of out of sight, out of mind, I just piled more of the magazines, old newspapers, and discarded books I endlessly collected on top of it, trying to stifle its evil whispers.
Mrs. Dutton, Mrs. Roberson, and Miss Lyon found me little jobs to do around the school, nothing too taxing, as I was getting on in years, but simple, pleasant things like helping in the library, decorating the chapel, and assisting Miss Lyon in the dispensary, helping to minister to and soothe her little patients who were trying so hard to be brave little men in the face of scrapes, burns, and the occasional dislocated shoulder or broken limb. It was just enough to make me feel that I had actually earned my nickels and dimes and the hot lunches I was provided.
Some of my benefactors still remembered me, and tiny bequests came in the mail from time to time, though these trickled off during the years of the Great Depression, when times were lean for almost everyone and many millionaires were feeling the hard pinch of poverty. Some even, I’m told, ended up selling apples on street corners or jumped out of windows when faced with the prospect of living without their fortunes.
Several stray cats found their way to my door, and I took them all in and loved every one of them as though it were my very own child. Tiny tins of fish-flavored food for them and my movie tickets became my greatest expenditure and joy. I had a little door cut into the bottom of my back door so they could come and go as they pleased and would never feel like prisoners of my love. Their warm, wiggly, soft bodies and contented purrs provided me with the comfort and affection I’d been missing all these years. Why hadn’t I thought of that before? I’d finally found the love I’d been waiting for. Of course, it wasn’t the same as holding or being embraced by a man or boy in lust carnal or maternal, but it was enough and in some ways it was better. Those cats certainly made better friends than anyone I ever met in the Currant Jelly Set.
I went to the movies several times a week, sometimes walking or hitching rides into adjoining towns to see different features or to follow a film I especially favored and wasn’t ready to say good-bye to just yet. All the managers and ushers, even the candy counter boys and girls, knew me and were very kind to me; they seemed to understand how much the movies meant to me.
I was mesmerized by
Pandora’s Box.
I watched entranced as the doomed Lulu, who had destroyed everyone who had ever loved her, unwittingly led Jack the Ripper to her room one lonely, foggy Christmas Eve. In my mind’s eye, Louise Brooks’s sleek black-helmet bob grew long and swirled into a mass of gilded curls and her shabby short skirt grew rich and sprouted lace and melted down to her feet and filled out to billow and bounce with a perky bow-bedecked bustle as she became me and her companion became Jim. She turned on the stairs and, smiling, reached out her hand to him as the audience gasped at the knife he was hiding behind his back. “I am she; she is me,” I kept whispering as I watched her until the candle of her life went out. It was such a scandalous picture—
shocking, immoral, wanton, lurid—
everyone said, and Mrs. Dutton and Mrs. Roberson were simply
appalled
that I had seen it. It was quickly withdrawn, but I sat riveted to my seat through every showing. It made me wonder if someone else knew my and Jim’s secret, but no, it could not be. Vivacious, impetuous Lulu’s resemblance to the girl I used to be was merely a coincidence, and Jack the Ripper was only a melodramatic and morally convenient method for her demise; women like her had to be punished.
I was particularly partial to the costume pictures and those sparkling-witted comedies poking fun at the gay and giddy rich with their Pekingeses and protégés and scavenger hunts, with colorful casts of Champagne Charlies and madcap heiresses often falling for ordinary working-class Janes and Joes or even the butler or an absentminded scientist.
I watched the love goddesses of the modern world flit by fleetingly as butterflies. I saw the vamp Theda Bara become a living caricature; thankfully the real-life woman had the sense to gracefully retire when the public would not let her change with the times. I watched the fast-living redheaded “It Girl,” Clara Bow, who replaced her crash and burn. And “the platinum blond” comet who was Jean Harlow, the tart with a heart both men and women took into their own, blaze briefly across the silver screen only to die, suddenly, at twenty-six. Why did no one ever notice that her eyes never smiled? She made sex seem like an alluring dress she could put on or take off at random; you just instinctively
knew
she was still a little girl inside only playing at dress-up in all that slinky white skintight satin, feathers, diamonds, and furs, and the sassy, tough cookie dialogue was all bravado.
I cried like a baby over
Stella Dallas.
When Barbara Stanwyck stood out in the rain watching her daughter’s wedding through a window, I saw myself watching Gladys. And Madame X and Madelon Claudet sacrificing themselves for their sons’ greater good; if only I had been so noble, if only I had stayed away from the Le Roi Gold Mine. And there I was embodied by Kay Francis as the happy, breathless young bride falling in love with the house on 56th Street, wanting to live and love there forever, just like the long-lost Florie the day she first set foot in Battlecrease House.
I lost myself in the musicals, now that the movies not only talked but sang, watching Fred and Ginger fall in love as they danced, tapping their way through all sorts of silly romantic complications to the inevitable happy ending, while Nelson and Jeanette made love in soaring operatic trills, like a pair of bittersweet warbling lovebirds. And I marveled at the Busby Berkeley spectacles, where the master deployed beautiful chorus girls in military-like maneuvers that his camera captured at clever angles. I loved to sing along with the musicals. Sometimes I’d get so carried away that despite my increasingly stiff joints and rheumatism, I’d get up and dance up and down the aisle, brandishing my Eskimo Pie ice-cream bar like an orchestra conductor’s baton, spattering those seated nearest with droplets of melted chocolate and vanilla, as I sang until an usher inevitably came and escorted me back to my seat, explaining the manager was worried I might break a hip if I kept on and then I wouldn’t be able to come watch movies anymore.
I sat and stared in unflinching fascination at the monsters—Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Mummy—and wondered who they were before and if love had been responsible for their sinister transformation, if it had done to them what it did to my husband. I pondered the allure of the sphinx-like Garbo as Mata Hari, Queen Christina, and Camille and sat torn between love and hate for the fast-talking, rum-running, gun-toting gangsters, wept over doomed romances, and quaked with laughter at the comedies.
It was a world where I found
everything
I was looking for, and I
never
wanted to leave it. Sometimes I was there when they opened the doors for the first show and the last to leave when the time came to lock them. Popcorn, candy, soda, and ice cream were like the nectar of the gods to me, and I wanted no other banquet. They fed my body as the flickering images on the silver screen fed my soul.
By lamplight late at night in my shack or sitting out on the steps in the bright light of day, I voraciously devoured all the fan magazines I found, fished out of rubbish bins, or was given or spent my scant coins on. I wondered how all these bright, beautiful young people who now filled my world never quite seemed to figure out that fame and fortune were not the answer. I charted the rise and fall of popularity, the slow fade into oblivion, or the sudden shock and abrupt departure ordained by death, and condoled and wept over their scandals. I’d felt the pinch of those shoes; I knew what it was like to fall.
It was in a movie theater in 1936 that God granted me my moment of grace, the greatest, most sweetest gift I never expected to receive. It was a cold, rainy day, so dreary, awful, and gloomy I’d almost stayed home. But I just couldn’t settle, no book or magazine could hold my attention, and the rain tapping on the tin roof overhead, usually so soothing, only needled my nerves. I felt some compulsion calling me to the movie house, so I pulled on my galoshes and raincoat and went out.
I arrived just in time to see the tail end of the first showing of a costume picture called
Lloyd’s of London,
sort of a frilly valentine about maritime insurance and thwarted love with lots of pretty people in even prettier costumes; I was
sure
I was going to like it. I was busy jostling my popcorn, soda, and candy and wiggling out of my raincoat when I happened to glance up at the screen. In that moment I
froze
. Every hair on the back of my head stood up, and my heart leapt into my throat when I glanced up and saw
that
face. It was a
MIRACLE!
Bobo was dead, but the movies, through the grace of God, had given him back to me, more beautiful than he had ever been in life, if that was possible.
In a dark dressing gown, he leaned weakly within a window, framed by heavy satin drapes trimmed with tassels, streaks of ludicrous, improbable silver painted into his black hair to give the suggestion of suffering and age to a boy barely past twenty. The most
beautiful
face I had ever seen rested its brow against the glass, lips parted, trembling, in grief and anguish, black-coffee-brown eyes shimmering, wet with tears, as he gazed down upon his childhood friend’s funeral cortège solemnly passing. Slowly, the eyes dropped, the head bowed, the camera drawing caressingly closer, until that face fully filled the screen, then the lashes fell, the same magical double row, so long and thick they cast shadows upon his cheeks. His name, the credits soon revealed, was Tyrone Power.
My husband was right, words of wisdom scattered amongst the carnage of his diary like a single diamond-bright star lighting up the blackest night—the Lord sometimes sends the strangest angels to those who least deserve it.
I sat through that picture three times that day. I was back again the next morning, waiting when the theater opened, and every day after that until they changed films. I sat there, spellbound in darkness, leaning forward, feasting my soul, drinking that boy in with my eyes, feeling as though I had been touched by the divine.