Marion's Wall

Dear Son:

Just a quick note to say that if you and Jan feel sure you want an old Victorian, so called, I think you could do a lot worse: they've got a charm today's penny-pinching architecture completely lacks. I lived in one during my own San Francisco days, and I write mostly to say that if in the course of your house-hunting you should find yourselves near a place called Buena Vista Hill, I wish you'd see if it's still there, and let me know. It was in the last block at the southernmost end of Divisadero Street, Number 114, and was a fine old two-story frame building—I had the bottom apartment—with a gable roof, bay window, and a view of the city and Bay that would knock your eye out. I have fond memories of the place, and if you found one like it am sure you and Jan would be happy in it—happiness is often just a matter of making up your mind to be. Nuff sed!

Not much news from here. Usual lousy Chicago February, though not too cold lately. Last Saturday...

"Eleven-ten." She was wearing blue denims and a black turtleneck sweater. Jan has long dark hair—today it was tied back with a ribbon—she's pale-skinned, and now without any make-up, in the hard daylight from the tall unshaded windows of the empty living room, she looked pale.

"Eleven-ten, and we started at eight-thirty; nearly three hours so far. Goody. Hot dog. Son of a bitch. We'll be at this all day right up till time to drive to the airport. All next weekend, too, probably."

"I thought it would just peel off with that thing." She nodded at the wallpaper "remover" lying on top of my ladder, a shallow foot-square metal thing with a handle, a fog of wet-looking steam rising from its perforated faceplate. It was connected by a thin plastic hose to a chromed tank on the floor plugged to an electric outlet.

"If you thought that, your vision of life has been corrupted. Outside of television commercials things never just peel right off." I picked up the steamer, pressed it to the wall just under the ceiling, and began sliding it back and forth as though I were ironing the wallpaper. It was kind of fun, watching the paper darken from the moisture, but hard on the arms. I could feel flecks of wallpaper drying on my face and knew there were more lying on my hair, which is combed straight back but kind of springy, worn a little long like everyone else's. My name is Nick Cheyney, incidentally, and I'm thirty; Jan's twenty-seven. I'm fairly tall, skinny, my face has been described as "amiable," and I wear metal-rimmed glasses. Today I was accoutered in dirty tan wash pants, a worn-out striped shirt frayed at the collar and torn at one shoulder, and sneakers of really record-breaking filth and raggedness over bare feet.

Jan stood up and walked out to the kitchen with the filled carton on one hip. She came back with the empty carton and two mugs of coffee held by their handles in one hand. Of necessity she left the hall door open and our dog, Al, a tri-colored basset—which means brown-white-and-black, not red-white-and-blue—walked in. As Jan crossed the room toward the window seat, eyes on the coffee mugs, Al sat down on some wet curls of wallpaper to watch the activity, and I didn't betray him. I winked, and he opened his mouth to smile, tongue lolling. I was working with the scraper now, wet paper wrinkling into pennant-shaped strips to hang limply or drop to the floor. Jan sat down on the bay window seat, setting the mugs on the sill, turned and saw Al, who smiled in friendly fashion. "Out!" Jan pointed. "You know better than that! You'll have wallpaper all over the house!" He looked at her closely, wondering if she meant for sure. "Out! In the kitchen! Or go on out and play; it's a nice day."

Al stood up, looking to me for help. "He says you're violating his civil rights."

"He hasn't got any today. Go on now!"

Al left reluctantly, Jan following to close the door. "Take it up with ACLU, Al!" I called. "I'll testify." Using both hands now, I worked the scraper up and down rapidly till the entire dampened area was clear. "There you are. First preview of layer number three." The newly exposed paper was a pattern of brown latticework entwined with dark-green ivy. I climbed down, walked to the window seat, and picked up my mug. "Well? Where do you place it? Early Horrible? Late Atro­cious?"

We stood tasting our coffee, staring up at the wall. "I don't know exactly: the Thirties?"

"Oh God. Is that all? If we have to work our way layer by layer back to 1882 or whenever, this place'll be a foot larger all the way around, time we're finished. And we'll be in our sunset years."

"I know, but it's interesting. To see what other people lived with. Most of them long dead, I suppose. You know something? Now, don't bother teasing me about it, because I know it's obvious, but—"

"If these wallpapers could only talk?"

"Yes."

"Probably bore the hell out of us. Mumbling away about the good old days. If I know these walls, and believe me I do, they'd never shut up."

"With you around they wouldn't get a word in. Oh, I wish I knew who'd lived here, Nick! What woman picked out that ivy pattern? It's not bad, you know. What did she look like, and who lay on a couch in this room staring up at the paper, counting how often the design was repeated. I wish there were some way to know." She sipped her coffee.

"There is, for a certain sensitive few of us." I closed my eyes. "It was a big fat lady. With mean piglike eyes. Stark naked, her obscene tattoos writhing in the gaslight, she killed her husband in this very room."

"She may have started a tradition. Let's see what the next layer looks like."

"No, that's cheating. You have to take one layer off completely, all around the room, before you can look at the next. Same principle—honored by all men, ignored by all women—as a box of candy. You have to finish the top layer before—"

"Oh, come on; say yes to life." She set her mug on the sill.

"Okay." I had a couple more gulps of coffee, then climbed the ladder and began soaking the new ivy-patterned strip I'd just uncovered, slowly sliding the metal steam box back and forth till the white portions of the pattern were nearly indistinguishable from the green of the leaves. A corner of the paper dropped loose and peeled down an inch of its own soggy weight. I set the steamer down, took the corner, and with a steady gentle pull drew it down, slowly exposing a pink-and-green pattern of roses and leaves on a white background. "Okay, what's this? Colonial? Elizabethan? Chaucerian?"

"I don't know, Nick, I'm really no expert. I've only read about it a little. Maybe it's from the Twenties. I'd say the Twent—"

She stopped because, still carefully drawing the dampened paper downward, I'd suddenly exposed three small arcs several inches apart. Each was an inch or so high, and of a red much brighter than anything in the pattern itself. I peeled on down to the bottom of the dampened area, the paper tore off in my hands, and I dropped it to the floor, then rubbed my thumb across the tops of the small red arcs. The red smudged, and I looked at my thumb, then at Jan. "Lipstick."

"Well, peel off some more, see what it is!"

Directly below the layer I'd just exposed, I soaked through another foot-high strip, the height of the steamer plate. Here the ivy-patterned paper was still covered by the layer before it, but I worked till I'd soaked both layers through. I began tugging them loose, carefully working with the scraper blade between wall and wet paper, and was able to loosen and peel both together. "Two layers at once; the gods are sleeping." Jan didn't answer; she stood motionless, watching as there was gradually exposed a foot-high letter M scrawled gracefully across the rose-patterned wallpaper in bright lipstick. "M for murder? Mopery? Merde?"

"Nick, keep going!"

Leaning out to the right from the side of the ladder, supporting the weight of the steamer with both hands, I soaked a double layer of paper beside the big M as far as I could reach. Again with help from the scraper blade both layers peeled, and the red M was the initial letter of a yard-long Marion lipsticked across the wall under the high old ceiling.

Neither of us spoke now. As I scrambled down the ladder we glanced at each other, grinning with excitement. Jan helping, I dragged the ladder to the right, its legs shuddering across the bare wood floor, and trotted up again. And when I'd peeled down the next few feet of the adjoining wallpaper, Jan and I read Marion Marsh in a six-foot length of slanted red foot-high script. Just beyond the h of Marsh the fireplace chimney jutted from the wall, the paper ending at the bricks, and I climbed down to pull the ladder back to the left. "It's a will! Written on the wall! And we're the heirs. The first people to discover it. She's left a million—"

"Nick, shut up and hurry up. Or I'll die."

Working fast, peeling the wallpaper down in yard-long, foot-high strips, I exposed a second line of script centered under the first: lived here, it said. The line below that was near the middle of the wall, within Jan's reach, and as I moved the steamer she worked the scraper, eyes snapping with excitement. June, it said, followed by 14, and as my steamer grated against the projecting brick of the chimney Jan was working off the wet paper to reveal a 1, then a 9, then the entire date, 1926. The line below that, Jan's hands following my steamer so closely its mist curled over her fingers, said, Read it. And the final line, just above the baseboard—we knelt side by side, fingers flying to uncover it—said, and weep!

Sitting back on our heels, we stared up. From ceiling to floor the immense red script covered half a wall nearly eleven feet high and some twelve feet horizontally, and now Jan read it aloud in entirety: "Marion Marsh lived here, June 14, 1926. Read it and weep!" She clutched my arm. "I will weep if we don't find out who she was! Nick, I have to know, I absolutely have got to know."

"Yeah." I nodded, and stood, still staring at that enormous scrawl of writing. "I'd give something to know, all right. Maybe Dad knows; we'll ask him tonight. Look at that. Must have taken a couple tubes of lipstick."

"At least." Jan stood. "It's a very distinctive handwriting. You get the feeling of an interesting person."

"I'll bet she was that, all right. Well, what do we do about it before I peel it off? Take a picture, maybe? I've got film in the camera."

"Oh, no, let's leave it! For the housewarming, at least. It'll make a marvelous conversation piece."

" 'Conversation piece.' " I began dragging the ladder around the fireplace. "Sometimes I wonder what the conversation is really like when folks gather 'round the conversation pieces. 'Hey, is that ice bucket really your mother-in-law's skull?' 'Yep, made it myself. Just before she passed on.' 'Well, I'll be damned.' End of conversation. 'Don't tell me that life-size panorama of Lincoln's War Cabinet is entirely made out of feath­ers?' 'Sure as hell is. Took three nuthatches for Stanton's eyebrows alone.' 'You don't say!' End of conversation. And there'll be even less talk about this, Kiddo. What's there to say? The odds are that no one in the world knows who Marion Marsh was any more; that writing is probably all that's left of her. And we'll never find out any more than this."
 

But we did. For the rest of the day except for a fifteen-minute sandwich lunch in the kitchen—Al, tidy soul that he is, kindly disposing of my crusts—we peeled wallpaper, watching for more writing to appear. None did, and by four-thirty the room was stripped to the rose-patterned paper on all four walls and in the window-seat bay. Once more, then, we stood looking at the wall to the left of the fireplace: Marion Marsh lived here, June 74, 7926. Read it and weep! we read again. Then I changed clothes to drive to the airport.

This was early March but it had been a warm sun-filled day after nearly a week of rain, and all I wore over an open-necked sport shirt was a light sleeveless sweater. The car was parked at the curb down in front of the house, wheels toed in; we're on a hill. The car is the best thing I own: a forty-six-year-old Packard roadster I'd bought half restored before I was married, finishing the job myself; gray body and wheels with navy-blue striping. It ran beautifully, and we used it regularly, our only car.

Today the black canvas top was down, the finish dirt-slashed after the rains, and I stepped up on the running board, slid over the door top, higher than the roofs of some of today's so-called cars, and dropped onto the black-leather seat, glancing up at our windows.

Jan was at the window seat, and she lifted an arm to wave, a little limply, shoulders drooping. She was tired, of course, and had the living room to sweep, dinner to get, and—biggest job of all—get dressed for company. Jan is a shy girl, not so good at meetings with anyone but old and trusted friends. And while she'd met and liked my dad, it had been nearly four years. It helped her poise when she managed to feel she looked her best, so I knew she'd fuss and worry about what to wear.

Driving down the Divisadero hill I felt pretty good: still excited about the writing on the wall; pleased with the day's work; looking forward to seeing my dad. Things were looking up in general, I thought. Jan and I had been married six years, and while we were happy, we had our problems sometimes; what couple doesn't after a while? But we had our new apartment now, the best we'd ever had. There was plenty of work to be done on it yet, including installing some new bathroom fixtures, which the landlord would pay for if I'd put them in. But I liked doing things like that, even removing wallpaper, and so did Jan. We felt busy and full of plans these days, a good feeling. Sometimes I think most everyone needs a new start every once in a while.

The airport is always crowded but it wasn't bad this time of day and year, and the plane was on time. We were home by six-thirty, talking all the way back to the city catching up on the news. There wasn't much: we keep in fairly close touch with a letter every couple of weeks or so and an evening phone call once in a while. We get along pretty well, my dad and I; my mother is dead.

When we turned into our block it was dusk at ground level but still plenty of daylight in the sky. We could see the white-and-pastel city spread out below our hill, every building sharp in the rain-washed air. A beginning fog was moving onto the Bay and the orange lights of the Bay Bridge were on. It was a nice time to arrive. My dad got out, hatless, his tie still over one shoulder from the top-down drive, and stood in the street staring up at the house, as I got his bag from the trunk. Our living-room windows were dark but I thought I could see the blur of Jan's face. It always interested her how much alike my father and I were, and she'd be comparing us again: same height, and he just as skinny as I am. He's bald, and his face is thirty-odd years older than mine, but it's the same face, and I'm Nick junior. He's intelligent, and has the look in the eye of a humorous man. When I glanced at him now, closing the car trunk, picking up his bag, he nodded at the house. "Good to see it again." Then he shook his head. "And strange."

The house, like all the others on that side of the street, sits high on a ridge with a long flight of concrete stairs before you even reach the wooden stairs to the porch. Halfway up them, our middle window rattled, Jan leaned out to call down to us, and Dad grinned and waved. On the porch I was glad to set his bag down for a moment, and we stood looking out over the city at the Bay, fogging over very fast now. "Last time I stood here," my dad said, "you could still see a few sailing ships anchored out there." He turned to look at the lower-apartment windows beside us, but they were curtained, people living there, and he couldn't peek in at his old apartment.

Looking good in an orange dress, Jan stood waiting at the top of the inside stairs with Al, who began barking as soon as the lower door opened. I shushed him, threatening to hand him over to the vivisectionists, and he looked down at me alertly, ears coming up, wondering whether "vivisection" was something to eat. Dad spoke to him, and Al recognized a friend, and said so with his tail; all he'd wanted was to show whose house this was in case the arriving stranger had any doubts. When we were halfway up, Jan came hurrying impulsively down to meet Dad, feeling shy—I saw her face flush—but her eyes were excited. Dad puts people at ease; I've seen it all my life. He slid an arm around Jan's waist, kissing her, greeted her, and walked her on up the stairs; I reached up and pinched her. He likes Jan, genuinely, and I was sure she felt fine, now. "I simply can't wait to ask you!" I heard her saying. "Do you know—" She turned on the landing to see me waggling a hand—Don't say it!—and cut herself short.

"Know what?" He stood smiling at her, then reached down to pat Al.

"Whether the building looks the same. How does it seem to be back in it?"

"Looks as though I'd just left it last month. It may seem foolish to fly out here for only one evening just to see it again. But it's worth it, believe me. Especially with you two in it now. Amazing that you should be here."

I'd set my father's bag down under the hall hatrack, and now I sidled past them and into the living room. Jan was saying, "Well, we looked it up and fell in love with it on sight. And when we learned the top apartment was empty..." She shrugged, smiling.

"Come on in here," I called. "Get the view before I turn on the lights." They came in and walked to the bay windows. The street lamps had come on, faintly illuminating the room, and we could see the city, lighted too now, spread out before us from the uneven mountaintop horizon far ahead down to the shores of the Bay. Nick senior and Jan stood at the windows; I was just behind them. "Furniture's stored in the basement till we finish the room," I said conversationally, and Jan flicked a glance at me, detecting the false casualness of a planned-in-advance remark. "We're still peeling the old wallpaper off; hell of a job." Staring out at the enormous view, comparing it, I suppose, with the way it had been once, my dad didn't answer, and I walked back to the wall switch beside the hall doorway. For a moment I hesitated, looking at his back, wondering if I should do this. Then I flipped on the overhead chandelier, and Dad and Jan turned, squinting in the new glare. "And look what we uncovered this morning," I said casually, and his head turned to follow my gesture.

"Oh, my God," he said softly, staring at the enormous red script on the wall.

When I spoke my voice was suddenly tight; for an instant I was a boy again, afraid he'd gone too far with his father. "Did you know her, Dad?"

A second or so passed, then he turned abruptly to the window, standing with his back to us. "Did I know her," he repeated flatly. "Did I know Marion Marsh. Oh, yes. Oh, yes, indeed." He turned back into the room to stare at the writing on the wall again. Then he walked toward it, his hand coming up as though he were going to touch it, but he didn't. He stopped before it, stood for a moment, then without turning to look at us he said, "When she wrote that I was here in the room with her." His head shook wonderingly. "I was twenty years old." For a moment longer he stood staring. "You know how she reached the top lines?" He turned to look at us, smiling now. "Walking along the back of the davenport. In high heels. She knew I was afraid she'd fall. I stood ready to catch her if she did, and she all but turned somersaults up there. Three-quarters drunk probably, though maybe not; it was never easy to tell. You'd think she was, and she wasn't. Then you'd think she was sober, and she'd be blind." He turned to look at the wall again, his head slowly shaking in awe and astonishment. "And it's still there. Still there! I can't believe it."

Jan said, "I have to go out to the kitchen; there are things cooking. Come on along, will you? Both of you. I don't want to miss a word."

The kitchen was large enough to hold a big round wooden table, covered now with a linen cloth checked in a pastel-blue-and-white pattern, and set for three with the good china and blue tumblers. Around it stood four old-style wooden chairs, each of which Jan had enameled in a different color, the four slats in the back being all four colors. There was an old black gas stove with a white-enamel oven door labeled WEDGEWOOD in blue letters. The sink was old, with a splintering wooden drainboard; I'd have to do something about that. The refrigerator was new, and so were two Formica-covered work counters with cupboards underneath, and there was a big walk-in pantry. Jan stood at the stove, a large wooden spoon in one hand, an old-fashioned in the other, her apron longer than her skirt—she has good, good legs, which still interest me enormously. I'd put Al out in the back yard with his dinner, and Dad and I were at the table lounging back in our tipped-up chairs, sipping our drinks.

"Why did she write it?" he was saying to Jan. "I don't know; impulse. The way she did everything. She'd suddenly decided to move to Hollywood; she'd been in two, three pictures down there. The first as part of a crowd scene that didn't even survive the cutting room. But after the second and third she thought she had a career in pictures." He shrugged. "As she damn well may have; she was an actress. This was a good theater town then, and I saw her a number of times. At the old Alcazar." He nodded once or twice. "She was good all right." He took a swallow of his drink.

"Maybe I shouldn't ask this," Jan said, and stopped, her face flushing.

He smiled. "And maybe I shouldn't answer it." He lifted his glass to the light. "But what with two stiff drinks, the pleasure of being here, and the shock of seeing Marion's writing still on that wall—I will. The answer is that I thought I was. In love with her. That's what you meant, isn't it?" Jan nodded, her face flushing a little more, and she pushed her hair nervously back off one shoulder. "Well, I thought I was, and she thought she was. We'd been talking about getting married, in fact." He turned to grin at me. "If we had, you wouldn't be here, would you? Serve you right, too, for springing that stunt in the living room."

"Oh, I'd still be here," I said. "You couldn't have kept me out. But I suppose I'd look a little more like Jean Harlow than I do now; that's how I picture Marion Marsh, anyway." Like a lot of people, I'm interested in old movies; I collect films, in a small way. So this fascinated me.

"No, she wasn't even particularly good-looking. Pretty enough, I suppose; I don't know really. You just didn't think about that when she was around. She was a year older than I was, you know." Jan had begun to spoon things into serving dishes, and he and I got up to help her bring them to the table.

We began dinner. Jan told me to plug in the coffee maker, which stood at one edge of the table, and I did. Then I poured wine; Dad sipped it and smiled at me, nodding appreciatively, then tasted his food and complimented Jan on her cooking. And when these things had been done, Jan leaned across the table edge toward him and with the bluntness of a shy person who's momentarily overcome it, said, "Why? Why didn't you? Marry her, I mean."

"I wouldn't just throw up everything, pack, and move down to Hollywood with her." His face flushed suddenly, the old quarrel momen­tarily alive again. "What would I have done there? The movies weren't after me, and I didn't expect them to be! It made no sense. Then or now." He was frowning, and he glanced uneasily at me, picked up his wine-glass, and drank. "And of course I'm glad. Very glad," he said to me sternly, as though I might be thinking of denying it, "or I'd never have met your mother." He began cutting his meat, eyes on his plate. "We argued about it. I could see her point, though I didn't want her to go. She had a small part in her second picture that brought her some attention. Before the picture was even released, it got her a pretty good part in still a third. She'd kept working up here, see; it's where the money was, and her real career. She'd go to Hollywood for a couple days' work, maybe, then home again. But this was a bigger, longer part, she had to stay down there, and she suddenly decided that pictures was her career, and came up one weekend to get me. But I wouldn't go. After a while she cried. Then she began cursing me, and you can believe she knew how to do that. Then she jumped up suddenly, ran to the front windows"—he looked up, grinning—"and yanked the middle one up. I was supposed to be scared she was going to jump out. But I knew better. She was the last person in the world to do that. I just sat there, grinning at her. So she knelt on the window seat, leaned out, and looked over the city as though that's what she'd meant to do all the time. It was a fine, cool, sunny San Francisco day, I remember; the kind we ought to import to Chicago. And she said she loved the view. Loved San Francisco. Loved this apartment. And loved me. But she was blankety-blank well going to Hollywood! I didn't say anything, and she pulled her head in, turned around, and looked at me for a minute. 'Some day you'll brag that you knew me, you bastard,' she said. And she was right about that, wasn't she? Then she yelled, 'And this'll be known as the house I lived in!'—all excited in a fraction of a second, the way she could be. She jumped up off the window seat, ran across the room, and climbed right up on the back of the davenport. Still trying to punish me by threatening herself, you see. And demonstrating to herself, I suppose, that I still cared for her. Well, I did. And this time I jumped up and ran over to the davenport, because she could easily have fallen. Then she walked along the back, writing on the wall with her lipstick. Wearing a short skirt, knowing I was standing there watching her." Dad was smiling, looking past us off across the kitchen, fork motionless in his hand. " 'Marion Marsh lived here,' she wrote, and looked back over her shoulder at me. Then—she was a crazy girl, all right—she said, just murmuring it, really, 'Catch, Nick,' and without any other warning she let herself fall straight back."

He looked at Jan, then at me, still smiling. "Well, I caught her. Damn near broke my back, but you can be sure I caught her. I'm sixty-seven years old now, and this may sound strange to your young ears, but I can still remember exactly and precisely how that nutty girl felt, there in my arms. Meaning no disrespect whatever, son, to the memory of your mother. She smiled at me, all sweetness and light, lifted her head to kiss me, then hopped down to the floor, saying, 'Pull that blanking davenport out from the wall, you blank,' only she didn't say 'blank' and she didn't say 'blanking.' Then she wrote the rest of what you saw in there."

I was staring across the table at him wonderingly. This was a new look at a father ten years younger than I was now. "If she'd stayed in San Francisco," I said, "you'd have married her, wouldn't you." It was hardly a question.

"I don't know. How can I say. I hadn't met your mother then. I don't want to discuss it." He was silent for a moment, then he added, "But I will say that most women would have had mighty tough competition against Marion Marsh."

Jan said, "I'm delighted, fascinated, that she lived here. Right here in our house. Oh, I'm so glad you told us!" She shoved her chair back, jumping up. "I've just got to look at her wall again!" Carrying her coffee, Jan walked to the living room, and my father and I followed with ours.

In the living room we stood sipping our coffee under the hardness of the overhead bulbs, staring again at the huge lipsticked message from across the years. My voice hollow in the empty room, I said, "I've never heard her name before. She ever make it in Hollywood?"

"She never got back." He took a sip of his coffee, then looked at us. "In nearly every book or movie about the Twenties there's an obligatory scene: a bunch of people tearing down a country road in an open car, bottles waving, singing, yelling, having a fine drunken time. Well, it did happen. I've done it myself. And that's what Marion did the night before she was to go back to Hollywood. I wasn't along; she was mad at me, and I wasn't invited. The car turned over, injuring several of them and killing her." Jan winced, making an involuntary sound of protest in her throat, and I was frowning. "That was over in Marin County. On a back road near Ross. They had to refilm a couple parts of the picture she was working in. With another actress unknown then, but who turned out to be Joan Crawford. Marion never even saw the one complete picture she did appear in. It was released a month after she died."

After a moment Jan said gently, "But you saw it, didn't you?"

"Of course. It was called Flaming Flappers." He smiled at her. "I'm sorry, but that's what it was called. I saw it more than once, I can promise you, and felt as bad as I've ever felt, almost. Because when I saw it I knew Marion had been right. I was certain then that she'd had a career ahead of her, maybe even a great one. She wasn't especially good-looking, but she had more vitality and ... sheer animal magnetism, I guess you'd call it, than anyone else I ever knew. When she was in a room, anywhere at all, you knew it. Not just me, everyone felt it. And when she left a room you felt it, too, almost as though the light had dimmed. Well, that came through in the picture. Except for a last little glimpse of her at the very end, so short it didn't count, she was in only one scene. A party scene: you saw her talking to a group of admiring men. That's all; it only lasted half a minute, maybe less. But it got her a real part in the next picture, the part Joan Crawford ended up having and which began her career. I've often thought that that should have been Marion's career. Because she had that same direct personal appeal and power over you that only a handful of the really great stars ever have; the ones you never forget, like Garbo; Crawford; Bette Davis. She had a career coming to her, all right." Taking a sip of his coffee, he looked back at the wall. " 'Read it and weep!' " he murmured, and nodded. "She was right about everything that day, wasn't she?"
 

A couple weeks later we had the apartment looking pretty good; we'd painted nights and weekends till it was done. We had a housewarming then, and Marion's wall was the life of the party. There were nineteen guests, a lot of them friends from college days at the University of California at Berkeley, which is where Jan and I met. There were others from my office at the Crown Zellerbach company, on Market Street. And the couple from downstairs, the Platts; Jan had gotten acquainted with Myrtle Platt in meetings at the porch mailboxes. She was a cheerful overweight housewife, and when they arrived and had the wall explained—the first thing every guest had to know, naturally—she went back downstairs and came up again with a big, shiny coffee-table book, an illustrated history of the movies, which I knew about but couldn't afford. Everyone gathered around it, spread open on the cloth-covered table Jan had arranged against one wall on which liquor and drink-making stuff was spread. And Myrtle turned the pages hunting for a still from Flaming Flappers. But there wasn't any; the picture wasn't even men­tioned.

Ellis Pascoe said, "There never was such a picture." He was a former instructor of mine at the University, a thin, bearded man who used to tell me he wished he were a don at Oxford. "Don't you recognize Nick's disguised handwriting, Jan? Lord knows I do from all the semiliterate papers of his I had to read. He's putting you on; he wrote that so he wouldn't have to peel off the rest of the wallpaper."

Drinks in hand, staring at Marion's wall again, the group rang changes on what might appear on further layers of the Cheyneys' wallpaper: a huge X covering the largest wall, which would be King Kong's auto­graph; Walt Disney's denunciation of Mickey Mouse's sexual extrava­gances. But the actuality of the great red scrawl couldn't be joked away, it retained its mystery, and there wasn't one of us, including Jan and me, who at some moment of the evening didn't find himself standing and staring at Marion's wall. After the party, doing the dishes, letting Al in for a little midnight snack before throwing him out again to his back­yard dog-house, we decided there was no question now of removing Marion's message; it had become the showpiece of the house.

Spring arrived; we had our last skiing weekend of the season at Sugar Bowl in March, and the next weekend a college friend of Jan's invited us to her parents' place on Tahoe, and we went water-skiing. There's a marvelous old-time-jazz nightclub in San Francisco called Earthquake McGoon's, and a couple times a year they run a film festival in a tiny California town, Volcano. They invite friends and customers, including us, and short of a hundred-and-five fever I wouldn't miss it: great old films from Dr. James Causey's collection, of which I wish I owned even the discards. We went to that; and we saw some new movies, read some books, went to an A.C.T. play. We visited friends and were visited by them. Six of us went bike riding in Golden Gate Park one weekend. And on my birthday in May, Jan gave me a full-length feature on 8-millimeter film, Doug Fairbanks' The Mark of Zorro. That costs $55.98 from Blackhawk Films, a lot more money than she was supposed to spend on my birthday present, but I was glad to have it.

Summer arrived, and we began talking about what to do on my three weeks of vacation in July, but couldn't really think of anything that would be a hell of a lot of fun while costing practically nothing. We'd gone to Tahoe for ten days of my vacation last summer, and New York the one before that, so we didn't mind not doing anything much this time. A couple weekends we went sailing on the Bay with friends and talked about buying a boat of our own, knowing we couldn't. I finished some painting and put a new muffler on the Packard. And in between all this gaiety I went to work nine to five-fifteen, five days a week, Lincoln's and Washington's birthdays off.

One night in the middle of June, coming home from work, I got off the bus as usual two blocks from home. The walk from there is nearly all uphill, and it had been fairly warm all day, in the high seventies, a great day, and I took off my suit coat; the temperature was only just now beginning to go down as the first fog slid onto the Bay. As I climbed Buena Vista hill, coat over my shoulder, my view of the city gradually expanded, and looking out over it I was pleased as on nearly every evening with its white-and-pastel look. And with the marvel of the Bay, the hills and mountains around it, and how much of an older San Francisco remained. The money-makers were destroying the city as fast as they could go, blocking off the old views with higher and higher buildings—praised by the Mayor, approved by the Supervisors—and the destruction of the Bay itself with fill and pollution continued. But there was still an awful lot of beauty to destroy before they finally Manhattanized or Milwaukeeized San Francisco, a lot still left that was good to look at meanwhile. As a Midwesterner, a flatlander, I appreciated this place, and had been here long enough to feel a part of it.

On my front porch, winded a little from the climb from street level, I thought as always that I ought to start jogging. And I stopped to look out over the city once more, expecting a renewal of the way I'd been feeling. But, perversely now, without any reason I understood, a stab of depression killed the feeling. It had happened before, and I was used to it, and to the almost automatic sequence of thoughts that came with it. The very thought of these thoughts bored and depressed me in advance, and I skipped right past the big ones, the big national and international problems that you're tired of too. Next in line came the thought that it would soon be five years that I'd worked at a job meant only to be a stopgap between college and whatever it was, when I discovered it, that I really wanted to do. But all I'd discovered so far was that I didn't have anything I really wanted to do. And the unnerving idea had begun occurring to me that this job—which was pleasant enough, and at which I was fairly successful, but which had no relation to anything important in my personality—might be perma­nent. Someday, incredibly, I might be pensioned, having spent my entire working life at Crown Zellerbach. Next came the nagging feeling that it was time Jan and I had children. We wanted to, genuinely; I like kids, so does Jan, and we're going to have them, but like a lot of people we'd decided to have a few carefree years first, and I didn't quite seem to be ready to say I'd already had them. There were other equally dreary commonplace thoughts; the entire sequence had become mechan­ical, and I was just standing there, my mind barely ticking over, staring off across the city—hundreds of windows were a blank glittering orange from the lowering sun—when I heard a bay window open above the porch roof, rattling in its frame.

"Nick?"

"No, he's working late. I'm your neighborhood mugger, Rupert the Raper. Open up, lady; you're next."

"What are you doing down there?"

"Balancing on one leg. Setting a world's rec—"

"Well, come up here, Nick! I've got something to show you!"

"Okay." I turned toward the door, getting out my key, but before I could get it unlocked I heard Jan clattering down the inside stairs. She opened the door and stood grinning at me all excited; she was wearing the gray sweater and slacks she'd bought with the I. Magnin gift certificate her mother had given her at Christmas. In her hand was a small magazine, TV Guide, I saw, and her finger was holding a place. She didn't speak, just opened the magazine and pointed, eyes bright.

Thursday Evening, June 14, I read at the top of the page, and saw that Jan's lacquered nail was touching the little TV-screen-shaped spot on which a 9 was superimposed in white. This was today's date; Channel 9 was the Bay Area Public Television station. I took the magazine and, walking upstairs behind Jan, read the listing: 9:30 p.m., THE TOY THAT GREW UP. "Flaming Flappers," silent film of the Twenties starring Richard Abel and Blanche Purvell: hip flasks, flaming youth, fast cars, and fast parties. Piano accompaniment following original cue sheets by Mabel Ordway.

I was grinning when we hit the top of the stairs and said, "Kiddo, you don't know it, but you probably just saved my life." I kissed Jan, genuinely, so that she actually flushed. "Now how in the hell am I going to wait till nine-thirty?"

At nine-twenty-eight I switched on the set in the living room, turned to 9, and stood waiting for sound and picture; across the room Jan sat on the chesterfield watching, and Al lay on the rug before it, more or less knocked out as he generally is after his dinner. The sound came on, music over a man's voice, the music rising in volume as the voice receded. Then the picture popped on, swelling to fill the screen, rolling slowly; I tuned it to sharpness as the rolling slowed and stopped. Two men in molded-plastic chairs sat facing each other, one listening and slowly nodding, the lips of the other moving soundlessly as the music overrode his voice completely. They began contracting into the distance as the camera drew away, the men continuing to talk, one of them throwing his head back to laugh, as though they were so caught up they were unaware the program was ending.

I sat down on the chesterfield, and we watched the station's call letters, KQED, appear on the screen. For some time then, maybe twenty seconds or more, the letters remained there silently, the set humming. I said, "Shows class, you see; no commercials." I slouched down comfort­ably, extending my legs, and put my feet—I was wearing soft slippers—on Al; he was in exactly the right place. His head lifted to stare at my feet, then at me. You could read his mind; he was wondering which was the least disagreeable course: to actually make the effort of getting up and moving out of range or to lie back and put up with it. He thought about it, then lay back again, sighing. I said, "This is part of the job of 'being the dog,' Al. It's not all carefree barking. You've got to earn that daily seventy-nine-cent can of dog food; nothing's free." Making a supreme effort, he thumped his tail twice against the floor, and I took my feet off. The call letters disappeared and the toy that grew up appeared superimposed across a still figure of Charlie Chaplin, the sudden background music a thumping nickelodeon piano. A neat young man in suit and bow tie came on, standing before a painted backdrop representing a movie box office. He spoke pleasantly with seeming authority about films of the Twenties, the usual stuff. I said, "See the faintly amused smile? That shows he knows the old films are a little ridiculous. But get the careful voice, the scholarly note; you can't claim he's patronizing them."

"What's the matter with you tonight?"

"I'm Samuel Johnson, my mind a scalpel; I see through pretense everywhere. The truth is that ridiculous as it sounds, I'm all excited."

"Me too."

The screen faded to black, and—Jan's shoulders actually hunched up in glee at this—the title of the picture appeared in white letters on a black that seemed faded and less than black. "Flaming Flappers," it read incredibly, in a thin graceful italic of the period, "A Paramount Picture." The piano accompaniment, no longer nickelodeon, thank God, receded in volume to become an almost unnoticeable background sound, but it made all the difference; we were in another time long before sound came to the movies. Cast and credits came fast, and not very many of them. The screen went momentarily dark, then lightened rapidly to show an enormous chauffeured car entering a circular white-graveled driveway between high wrought-iron gates, and Jan gripped my forearm. "I can't believe it. I can't stand it. We're actually going to see Marion Marsh!"

The car on the screen slowed, then stopped before the wide shallow stone steps of a great country house. I sat forward, peering, then identified the radiator ornament. "Pierce Arrow." A subtitle appeared: "A Wealthy Long Island Estate." The chauffeur opened a back door of the sedan and began helping an elderly woman out; she carried a lorgnette, wore a long dress and a round, straight-sided hat with a slightly curved top. I said, "Looks like she's wearing a cake."

The scene cut to a huge room—tapestries and crossed spears on its walls—whose open French doors led out to a stone veranda with a heavy stone balustrade; beyond the veranda an enormous lawn stretched into the distance. I couldn't tell if it was real or a backdrop. The elderly woman with the lorgnette was entering the room, and walking toward her from the veranda entrance was a young woman, Blanche Purvell, I recognized, the star of the picture. In contrast to the older woman's dress, hers was knee-length and sleeveless. "Nice legs," I said, and smiled as Jan glanced at me.

The story developed fast: Blanche Purvell was rich, an heiress, in love with a poor man in the nearby town, even though her mother, the woman with the lorgnette, objected. The young man appeared to deliver groceries, wearing a cloth cap with a long curved peak, a white shirt, tie, and a sweater. With the help of a middle-aged woman in servant's uniform, he unloaded them from a wicker basket onto a wooden-topped table in a strangely old-fashioned kitchen, and the girl happened in. They smiled lovingly at each other when the servant wasn't looking, then walked out the back door and across a grassy expanse, passing a pair of tennis courts on which young people were playing. I wondered where it had been filmed, and what stood there now: a freeway on-ramp, I supposed; or a shopping center with a five-acre parking lot. The couple walked on toward a delivery truck, a black Model T Ford with a long, curved roof extending from windshield to tailgate, its sides open. It stood parked on a dirt road.

As they crossed the grass toward it the girl looked around her, glanced at the house, then she and the boy held hands for the rest of the walk to the truck. "He's after her money," Jan said.

"Of course. He wears that nutty cap because he's bald as a bowling ball, and she doesn't know it."

"What a surprise when he takes it off on their honeymoon."

"If he does."

A roadster with wooden-spoke wheels appeared, top folded back, and braked to a fast skidding stop, its wheels seeming to revolve backward slowly. A cloud of dust enveloped the boy and girl and Jan murmured, "Goody." A young man in tennis flannels, a white knit sweater tied by its arms to hang down his back, slid over the closed door of the open car, a pair of rackets in one hand. He glanced superciliously at the truck, then imperiously beckoned the girl to follow as he walked on toward the tennis courts. "I adore him!" Jan said.

"You're a snob." On the screen the girl turned to follow the young man in flannels, then looked longingly back at the boy left behind at the truck. She spoke and as her lips moved I said, "I love you, Ralph, but Frank smells better." On the screen a subtitle said, "I'd rather stay with you!"

We lost interest: the story developed too fast and too obviously, and the world, if any, to which it referred was remote to the point of incomprehensibility. The film was a copy of a copy, probably, the faces washed out, very white, and Jan murmured, "They're all eyes, lips and eyebrows, like old snapshots."

"Yeah. You know something? This film was made by light reflected into a lens. From the faces of real people. Who were once really there in exactly that scene, doing just what you see. I know that but I don't believe it: that's always been an old film, and they've never existed outside it."

The tink-tinkle of the piano never stopped, the blacks, grays and whites continuing to shift on the little screen, and we watched apathet­ically. Occasionally, one of us on guard, the other left to get something to eat, something to drink, to go to the bathroom, to wander the house. We'd watched for over forty minutes, and I was in the kitchen sitting at the table reading the green sport section of the morning Chronicle, eating potato chips. The sound and smell of these had miraculously brought Al out of his coma, and he was sitting on the floor looking up at me like a clumsy basset imitation of the terrier in front of the phonograph in the old ads, head cocked, ears up, as high as he could get them at least, and I tossed him the occasional potato chip. I've tried to teach him to catch, but his hound eyes don't see well enough, and each chip simply landed on his nose, bounced off, and he'd have to hunt for it. Then he'd gobble it down and sit and yearn up at me for more.

I like old Al, as I guess I've made clear, and his eyes fascinate me. They're so huge and brown, so human and innocent. It's as though a completely trusting four-year-old was staring up into your eyes out of a furry brown-and-white dog face. He sat doing this now, and I leaned down from the table to stare back into his eyes and ask him an old and familiar question in this situation. "Listen, who are you in there? Really? You're not fooling me, you know, with that crazy dog suit." I flipped up one of his incredibly long brown ears. "No dog has ridiculous ears like that; there's where you made your big mistake!" I suddenly dropped to my knees beside him, grabbing him under the arms, and lowered him swiftly to his back. Holding him on the floor with one hand, I began rummaging rapidly through his white chest fur. "Where's the zipper! I'm going to pull off this nutty dog suit right now! Exposing you for the impostor you are!" It was an old game, the kind of roughhouse he loves, and he struggled and fought with his hind legs and careful teeth. After a minute I let him up, quieting him down with a little ear-scratching. "Okay, you've won again." I gave him a potato chip. "You're clever, all right; we know that. But that zipper's in there and someday I'll find it."

"Nick, here it is, I think!" Jan called, and I slid the last chips out of the bowl onto the floor for Al and hurried back.

The scene was a party in the big room of the picture's beginning, now filled with people. Playing a grand piano, his shoulders bouncing rapidly to the rhythm, sat a young man with a hairline mustache and straight black hair slicked glossily back from his forehead. Beside him on the piano bench a short-skirted girl sat holding a drink from which she took frequent rapid sips, her free hand waggling at shoulder height, apparently in time to the piano. Another girl lay sprawled across the top of the piano, chin propped on elbow, and holding a cocktail glass. Rugs were rolled back and couples were dancing rapidly. On a great curved staircase people sat kissing; several others lay on a large chesterfield pantomiming drunkenness. Nearly everyone held a cocktail glass, drink­ing frequently, heads tossing far back.

It was entirely unreal; there had never been such people nor such a party. These ancient photographs silently cavorting to the music of a steadily tinkling piano were absurd. Slowly the camera's eye moved around the edges of the party to reveal: a couple sitting under a table exaggeratedly drunk; an expressionless butler entering the room with a tray of filled glasses and an opened bottle that someone immediately snatched; a fast-moving dice game on the floor, everyone in it on his or her knees, fingers snapping; a little cluster of men, including the arrogant tennis player, now wearing a tuxedo, surrounding a girl, nearly hiding her.

Then two of the men moved casually apart, revealing the girl, and we sat staring: this, we knew from what my father had told us, was Marion Marsh. In short flapper dress like all the other women, her hair bobbed like theirs, a strand of hair lying on each cheek curved into a J, her face equally white, she stood listening to one of the men. Then she smiled and replied, and I could feel my attention gripped, I can't quite say why. In a way past defining, with the simple magic of an occasional rare personality, this girl seemed real while the others did not. She was a small grainy figure in a corner of the glass screen but somehow she was truly speaking; I actually caught myself inching forward on the chester­field as though I might hear her if I got closer, and I wanted to hear. Her hand came up, her forefinger shook in playful rebuke to one of the men, then she smiled, and Jan and I smiled with her. Now, in burlesqued entreaty, one of the men put his palms prayerfully together, then took her elbow, trying to lead her away from the others; and at the gentle sympathetic shake of her head and the rueful twist of her lips in refusal I felt a yearning for her as a woman. For no reason I really understood then or now, and unlike every other figure in the absurd scene, this one tiny gray-and-white figure was alive.

She glanced away from the men around her to look across the room. And the flick of boredom that touched her face in that moment and was instantly gone as she turned back to them was genuine. Watching as she resumed her banter with the group, it seemed to me I understood the real feelings of the woman she was playing; afterward I remembered the whole scene as though I had heard her voice. And right now it even seemed believable that the caricatures around her, almost hopping in the exaggerated emphasis of their attention to her, felt what they were pantomiming. The camera was moving on, her image diminishing in size as the scene receded into the background, and I sat straining to see the last of her. And when the edge of the screen cut her from view, I sat, still in the spell of her presence, feeling that she was still smiling and speaking somewhere just out of view.

For a long moment, the never-ending piano and the moving photo­graphs continuing without any more meaning for me, that feeling lasted. Then I came out of it and turned to Jan. "Oh, boy," I said softly. "She had it. She really did."

"Yes—oh, I could cry! Nick, she'd have been a star! We'd have known her name like—"

"I know; Norma Talmadge or Clara Bow. There really isn't any doubt about it."

"Well, it's a shame! Think how your father must have felt, watching that."

"He's gotten over it long since, I'm sure."

We sat watching the picture for a few moments longer, then Jan said, "I don't think I can take another half hour of this, Nick; it's nearly ten-thirty, and I'm tired. But I'm so glad I saw it." She turned to look up at the writing on Marion's wall behind us.

"She comes on again, you know; right at the end."

"Only for a second or so your father said, and I'm too tired; I cleaned the house today. You watch, if you want. I'm going to bed and just lie there thinking about it till I fall asleep."

"Okay. Cookie the old man out first, will you?" I don't remember how this got started but instead of just pulling rank and ordering Al out at the end of an evening, we'd rub a cookie across his nose. His tongue would come out automatically and swipe across his nose, he'd taste the cookie crumbs, his eyes would pop open, and he'd leap to his feet and actually trot out to the kitchen and the hinged dog-door I'd put into the bottom of the back door. He'd hop out, the cookie would be handed to him, and his door latched for the night. Quick, simple, no arguments, and everyone happy, at least till the cookie was gone.

Jan kissed my cheek, cookied Al out, and I stayed for the end of the picture, about another thirty minutes, slumped on the chesterfield, staring at the screen, half awake. In the last moments of Flaming Flappers a bride, Blanche Purvell, tossed her bouquet to a cluster of bridesmaids at the foot of the staircase, and there was a final glimpse of Marion Marsh. Her actions were identical with those of the other bridesmaids, actually, and you saw her for no more than four seconds before her face was hidden by an upflung arm. But she had me; she'd made a fan. And I told myself, nodding my head, that even in that tiny scene she stood out from the rest. "The End" said the screen subtitle abruptly, the piano accompaniment rising to conclusion as I got to my feet and walked over to switch off the set before the guy in the bow tie could come back and tell us what we'd seen. "Well, Marion," I said, murmuring into the new silence, "you were great. Absolutely great."

"Yes."

The light in the picture tube shrinking to a diamond point, I stood motionless, feeling the blood withdraw from the surface of my skin. I made my mind work, trying to consider alternatives. But there weren't any. The unmistakable difference between what you imagine and what is real couldn't be denied; I knew I'd really heard the word quietly spoken, with normal clarity, in a pleasantly husky feminine voice that was not Jan's. I didn't quite like to move, but I did, turning my head to search the entire room in the faint illumination from the front windows. A roof beam cracked, contracting after the warmth of the day, but I knew what it was, I was used to it, and I continued searching the room with my eyes.

It wasn't dark enough for anyone to be hiding, and there was no one to be seen. I'd known there wouldn't be—I knew more than I'd let myself admit—and the hair on my neck and forearms was erect and prickling.

"Nick, it's me."

"Who?"

"Marion," the voice said impatiently.

"Marion"—it was hard to make myself say it—"Marsh?"

"Of course! I just had to see my picture. Oh, God, wasn't I good!"

I nodded, then it occurred to me that maybe I couldn't be seen, and I said, "Yes," but my voice croaked. I cleared my throat, tried again, and it came out too loud: "Yes, you were!" I said. "Are you a"—and again it was hard to say the word, it sounded so ridiculous—"ghost?"

There was a long silence, and I thought I wasn't going to hear any more. Then, startled and faintly amused, the voice said wonderingly, as though this were a new thought, "I suppose I am." She laughed. "Imagine! But yes, I expect that's what a ghost must be. We can come back to where we once lived, you know, though not many ever do. It takes so much ... what would you call it?"

"Psychic energy?" I was so fascinated I'd forgotten to be afraid. I was wildly elated, in fact, my mind racing ahead to picture myself telling Jan about this, telling people at work, at parties.

"Yes, something like that, I suppose; you really have to want to return. Which I did, believe you me! My own picture, and I never saw it before! Finally shown right here in my own house! What is that thing?"

"A television set."

"For showing movies?"

"Mostly."

"It's not very good, is it? So tiny. But what's the diff, I've seen my picture at last! I was cut off—remember?—at only twenty."

"Twenty-one, wasn't it?" I hadn't moved; it didn't occur to me.

"Oh, who cares? Why is that so important! You always did like to rub it in that you were a teeny bit younger than me."

I couldn't see any point in correcting her. I said, "Tell me, what's it like? On the"—I hate phrases like this but couldn't think of a substi­tute—"other side?"

"Oh..." The voice paused. "Something like being drunk: you feel pretty good, and don't think very much. What's it like being alive? I've actually sort of forgotten."

"Just about the opposite. Marion, listen, could you possibly appear? As you really were? Are. Were."

"Oh, Nickie, it's fantastically hard. Even for just a second or so. It must be why ghosts disappear so quickly, don't you think? The only way you can stay around for any time at all is by possession."

"What's that?"

"Inhabiting someone; you'd only do it for some terribly important reason."

"But you can appear for a few seconds. Would you? Please?" It occurred to me finally that I could sit down, and I did, on the edge of the chesterfield.

The voice was soft. "You want to see me once again, don't you, Nickie? You're sweet. If only we hadn't quarreled! How different things might have been. All right; watch in that corner by the hall, away from the windows."

I sat staring, watching a gathering up, an assembling, of light from the rest of the room. At the edges of my vision I saw the corners and the overhead whiteness of the ceiling perceptibly dim; then they faded into complete darkness. The light drained to the floor. Then it moved rapidly along the baseboards in a foglike flow, gathered and began rising in the dark corner across the room—mist-gray at first, then shimmering a little, iridescent. Suddenly it sparkled with deepening color, the colors shifting, separating, rapidly coalescing, steadying into definiteness and shape. And then she stood there, smiling.

The figure was transparent. The wall was clearly visible behind her. But she nevertheless stood sharp and clear in a green-and-blue dress, its hemline at the knees of—I was stunned at myself for realizing—a pair of marvelous legs. Her complexion was a lovely pink and white, and surprisingly, because it hadn't shown blond in the movie, her hair was yellow. She stood regarding me, her blue eyes occasionally blinking; not beautiful, though pretty, and with the astonishing feeling of vitality she'd shown in the picture. Her voice very much fainter now, she said, "You haven't changed, Nick; not really. A little older; you're older than me now! And you're married, aren't you? That was your wife. Both of you here in my old apartment."

My mouth was opening to reply, to tell her who I really was. But her last words had faded very nearly to inaudibility, and the colors and the vision itself were losing strength fast. She was suddenly very nearly gone, just barely within vision, when I saw her head lift slightly. For the first time she seemed to have noticed the writing covering the wall behind the chesterfield, and the fading away stopped. Form and color seemed to strengthen slightly, then they held firm as though by an act of will. I saw her hand move to her chest, saw her eyes widen and her face twist. Very faintly I heard her cry, "To have been alive!" The vestiges of color and form dwindled to nothing, and once again I could see the room corners, and the dim whiteness of the ceiling returned. I whispered, "Marion?" But I didn't expect an answer and didn't get one.

At the front windows, I stood looking out at the city and the long string of orange lights that was all I could see of the Bay Bridge. I'd thought I'd stand here thinking about what had just happened, but my mind was empty, refusing to think; it was too much just now. After a few moments, glancing at Marion's wall as I passed through the room again, I went down the hall to bed.

In bed Jan was facing me, and I touched her lips in a habitual good­night kiss, lightly so as not to awaken her. But she was awake or partly so; she moved closer, and I put my arms around her, letting my eyes close, feeling exhausted, glad for sleep. But Jan's arms tightened, drawing me closer, and I smiled, surprised; once asleep Jan was ordinarily as unlikely as a child to awaken again before daylight. I'd thought I was exhausted but Jan astonished me, and I discovered I wasn't exhausted at all. But when we lay side by side again, my arm snugly around Jan's waist, I could feel myself sliding into sleep like rushing down a toboggan slide, and was glad: what had happened in the living room needed a lot more thought than I was ready to begin tonight. I felt happy, too, more than in a long time. Things hadn't been going as well as they ought to between Jan and me for a while, I really didn't know why. It was nothing serious but we couldn't seem to stop it, and of course that sort of problem moves into bed with you. But tonight it had been gone, that's all; really gone. I felt happy and, sleepy though I was, almost exuberant. It had been one hell of an evening, I thought, grinning in the dark, then wham—I was asleep.
 

My office is just an office, not tiny but a long way from big. I have a carpet in a nice shade of forest-green, a decent-looking desk and chair, another chair for visitors, a table to put things on. And I have a couple of my own pictures on the wall. One is a Brueghel print called The Tower of Babel, which I like to look at because it's crammed with little people doing all sorts of things to build an enormous tower that is shown actually reaching the clouds. It reminds me of covers on Boys' Life magazine when I was a kid—filled with boys swimming, hiking, playing ball, climbing trees, a thousand things. You could study one of those covers time and again, thinking at last you'd seen everything in it, but usually you'd find something you'd missed before. Well, I think the Brueghel is every bit as good as the old Boys' Life covers, and when I got bored I'd get up and stand in front of it hunting for something new. The other picture was a still of Fay Wray in jungle costume that I liked a lot.

The day after I'd seen Marion's ghost I was sitting in my office, pencil in hand, the sharp end pointed down, apparently looking at the papers spread out on my desk. I work in Sales Promotion: dealing with my counterparts in the advertising agency; getting to go to a few West Coast conventions and sales meetings now and then, a dubious benefit, but at least a change; and I do a fair variety of things connected with selling our stuff, which is paper products of more different kinds than a sane man could imagine. A lot of the stuff we make is actually useful, and none of it is downright harmful, so at least I'm not ashamed of what I do.

But I wasn't doing it now; I had more on my mind than Zee paper towels. All morning, beginning as soon as my eyes opened, I'd done my best to think sensibly about whatever it was that had happened last night. At noon I grabbed a quick lunch alone so that I'd have time to walk—first to the Ferry Building at the head of Market Street, then along past the covered docks and the glimpses of Bay between them—and think some more, trying to reach some conclusion.

But there didn't seem to be much of any to reach. Mostly all I did was live over the experience in my mind again and again. I experimented with trying to persuade myself that I'd only imagined or vividly dreamed what had happened, but everyone knows the difference between dreaming or imagining and reality: this had happened. Sitting at my desk now, the only conclusion I could reach was that on rare occasions ghosts actually did in truth appear.

I hadn't told anyone, of course, and except for Jan no longer intended to. The moment I stepped out of the elevator into the fluorescent-lighted, electric-typewriter, air-conditioned busyness of Crown Zellerbach I knew I wasn't going to try to convince anyone of what had happened last night in the dark of our old house. And at breakfast I didn't tell Jan; it would take repeating, take talking over, and there wasn't time. I'd tell her tonight, and—it was a hell of a story—I smiled at the thought, looking forward to it. And looking forward, it occurred to me, to seeing Jan. Remembering last night after the movie, I felt very warm and tender about Jan today, appreciating her good qualities, feeling fond of the bad ones.

My phone rang, and because I'd been thinking about her it was Jan; things work that way, and everyone knows it. After the hellos, she said, "Don't forget the party with the Hursts tonight."

"I know, I remembered. I'm sort of looking forward to it."

"Me, too. It's been a while since we've gone out and had some fun."

I smiled and pulled out a lower drawer to put my feet on. "I don't think it's in to look forward to a cocktail party."

"I know; especially a no-host fund raiser. Nickie, I called because I. Magnin's is advertising a dress sale. It's a real sale, and I do need a new party dress. Something simple. Plain black, I expect, that I'll use forever, but—"

"Get it, then."

"Well, I wasn't sure we could really afford—"

"We can't really afford food. So get the dress. I want to experience that glow of pride a man feels when his wife's ass is pinched by every man at the party."

"Fine, you can have first pinch. See you tonight."

Walking home from the bus after work, looking out over the city as I climbed Buena Vista hill, I was fond of the world and of this moment, in which a boy of four or five squatting on a single roller skate came wobbling toward me unseeingly, concentrating on balance. I stepped aside, pleased with the boy and the evening ahead; I like parties of any kind, at least in anticipation.

On the porch I stopped for breath as usual, but only for a moment or so, and I climbed the inside stairs two at a time; I had to change clothes, then we had to drive across Golden Gate Bridge and on up into Marin County. At the top of the stairs I yelled, "I'm here!"

"Well, I'm in here!" Jan's voice answered from the bathroom. She paused, then said, "I'm afraid to come out."

"What's that mean?" I said to the bathroom door as I passed it; I turned into our bedroom, loosening my tie.

"You'll kill me."

"Well, come on out and get it over with then. I'll give you a choice of methods." Unbuttoning my shirt, I stood watching the bathroom door just across the hall. It was slowly opening, into the bathroom, Jan out of sight behind jr. It opened nearly all the way and she suddenly stepped around it and out into the hall to stand both smiling and frowning appealingly as I stared at her. I was astonished; her new dress was wild, the pattern a really dizzying whirl of color, the material dyed to look as though paint in primary colors had been flung onto it in handfuls, and it was shorter by inches than any she'd ever before owned. Actually, I realized, staring at it, the dress was cleverly done, the blobs of color artfully arranged and proportioned. But it was an eyeful, and I said, "What the hell?" I didn't want her to think I disapproved of the party dress that, after all, she'd have to wear tonight, and I quickly added, "It looks great." And it did, I realized then. "It really does," I said, and she smiled at the sincerity in my voice. "I like it fine; legs like yours ought to be shown off." For an incredible fraction of a second I caught myself comparing her legs with Marion Marsh's, and pushed the idiotic thought away. "You really look marvelous; I may have to rescue you from sexual attack all evening long. Incidentally, if we had time—"

"We don't."

"Too bad. What happened to the plain black dress?"

"I don't know," she said in a mock wail, and walked on into the bedroom and stood looking down at her dress. "That's what I went in to get, then I saw this, tried it on just for fun, and"—she looked up to smile and shrug—"I don't know what got into me but I bought it. Do you really like it? You don't at all."

"Yeah, really." I was pulling on a clean shirt. "But every other woman there will be invisible; they'll lynch you. You feed Al?"

"Yes; he insisted."

On the drive through the city toward the bridge, the top down, I told Jan what had happened last night, factually but including every detail, really trying to convey it. She listened, then we talked about it; she had questions, and I answered them. And she said she wished she'd been there. She believed me, I saw, in that she knew I wasn't lying; that I thought what I'd told her was true. But whether it really had happened, whether it wasn't an illusion ... how can anyone else ever tell?

The town of Ross is old, by California standards, and it's rich. It has enough people with enough money to give them enough power to keep it old. There are still streets too narrow for modern traffic, some of them only dirt lanes unchanged since horses drew buggies along them, and they are kept so. There are very few parking meters, not many street signs or even street lamps, a considerable absence of house numbers, and in the very heart of the town are acres of tree-covered land owned by the local Art and Garden Club that could very profitably be filled with apartment buildings and are not. Along some of the dirt lanes are enormous sprawling houses fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty, or more years old. They're well preserved and kept painted; they're spaced far apart and set well back from the roads behind high hedges or rows of trees on shrubbery- and tree-filled acreage; they and their surroundings look as they always have for decades past. I'd live in one of those houses if I could, and the party was in one of them, I was pleased to see.

It was covered with beautifully weather-grayed wood shingles, was two stories high but so large it seemed low, and lay far back from the road at the end of a long dirt driveway lined by trees. Cars were parked on both sides of the drive, and I added the Packard to one of the lines, and we walked on up the driveway toward the house. I could hear music from the house, very faint, and felt excited. I said, "What's this party in aid of? As our British cousins have probably quit saying."

"Some sort of day-care center. For preschool kids of working mothers. Interracial; Hazel's on the committee."

"Fine; means the drunker you get, the more you're improving race relations. Which frees up the conscience considerably. Anything short of a roaring hangover and you're a goddamned bigot."

Approaching the wide wooden steps of a screen-enclosed old-fashioned porch that ran clear across the front of the house and around both sides, I could hear the music clearly now, piano cocktail music. We climbed the steps and walked around to one of the side porches—we could see a pair of big double doors standing open there—and began to hear the sustained conversational hum of a lot of people. Then we walked into an entrance hall paved with brick-red clay tiles and stood for a moment looking into the room into which the hall led, and I understood why the party was here.

It was an immense room, fifty or more feet in each horizontal direction, the ceiling two stories high and with skylights that could be opened by cog-and-chain apparatuses fastened to the walls. The room must have been built as a ballroom because a permanent raised platform stood directly across from the entrance we stood in. It was large enough to hold a small orchestra, though there was only a piano up there now, a grand piano in full view of the entire room played by a plump gray-haired man in a tuxedo jacket of gray cloth with a silver pattern. Eyes half closed, he sat swaying to his own slow, rippling music, holding a professional smile; just now he was tinkling out "The Way You Look Tonight." There were a hundred or more people in the room, standing in chattering smiling groups or moving slowly through the crowd or sitting along the walls on countless chairs and large old-fashioned chesterfields upholstered in faded blue or maroon velvet. Then we saw the Hursts, Hazel and Frank, making their way toward us, smiling, and we walked out into the big room to meet them.

We were introduced to a group of the Hursts' friends and stood with them in a circle for a few minutes, and I watched the women storing complete details of Jan's dress in the memory banks. One of the women told us about the day-care center till my eyes began glazing. Then two more couples, apparently knowing most of the others, joined the circle, and in the rush of greetings and jokes I touched Jan's arm. "Let's go hit the sauce for the working mothers."

I'd seen the bar at one end of the room, several cloth-covered trestle tables pushed together end to end. Behind them, against the wall, a duplicate set of tables was the back bar. When we got there, three red-jacketed bartenders were serving six or eight people, and at one end of the bar a smiling, distinguished-looking gray-haired woman sat on a wooden folding chair, a roll of tickets and a black metal cashbox on the cloth before her. I paid for two tickets, each good, the lady told me in a cultured voice, "for any sort of drink from white wine to martini," and I thanked her, hearing my own voice trying to sound cultured, too, then I turned to Jan to ask what she wanted.

I was puzzled by her expression: she stood staring at the back bar, her mouth hanging open slightly. The back tables were covered with bottles, a really lot of them, both opened and full. There was whiskey of every type and many brands; dozens of bottles of gin and vodka; there was wine and sherry; rows of Cokes, 7-Up, ginger ale, soda, and the like; on the floor under the tables stood stacked-up cases of still more liquor and mixes. It was an impressive display, but still—Once in a while out of excitement and exuberance Jan took it into her head, as shy people sometimes do, to clown at what I usually thought was an inappropriate moment. I thought this was one of them, and started to nudge her to cut it out, but it was too late. A bartender stood waiting, brows raised inquiringly, and Jan smiled brightly and said, "Wow! Would you look at all that hooch! Is it good stuff?"

"Come on now, Jan," I muttered, "what do you want?"

"Well, just to start things rolling I'll have a Bronx cocktail."

The bartender frowned; a man down the bar was staring at us.

I muttered again. "I don't think they serve fancy cocktails at a thing like this. Takes too much time."

"Okay, we aim to please. I'll have a gin buck." Jan stared at the bartender, then shook her head in amazement. "You don't know what that is? Where have you been! It's just gin, ginger ale, and lime juice. Put in plenty of gin, and you can forget the lime; it's the booze that counts!"

"Oh, for God's sake," I said through my teeth, and turned to stare down the people near us. The bartender brought Jan's drink, face almost expressionless, though he let me see a little sneer way back in his eyes. I said, "Bourbon and soda," and put down my two tickets. I stood watching the bartender, who mixed my drink fast enough, and I took it, glad to turn away. Jan was halfway down the floor, making her way back to the Hursts. Then I saw her stop in the midst of a crowd and, throwing her head way back, toss down her drink like a thirsty longshoreman. She turned and walked back to me.

"Do it again, Big Boy," she said, handing me her empty glass. "That's real stuff; right off the boat!"

"Baby, you're a laff-riot, believe me," I said. "I know we haven't been out much lately, but let's try to get it out of our system, eh? Before we rejoin the Hursts and their friends? I'll meet you there, and bring back your drink." I made myself smile at her and turned back to the bar; goddamn, I'd looked forward to tonight!

There was a bar at each end of the room, I discovered. Walking back toward the Hursts once again, I saw Jan and Frank Hurst turn from the circle toward the other end of the room, then I saw the other bar. When I'd worked my way through the crowd, carefully carrying Jan's full glass and my own drink, she and Frank were on their way back, Jan sipping from her new drink as she walked. She rejoined the circle, eyes sparkling, face flushed, finishing her drink, then handed me her empty glass, took the new one I'd brought, and drank off half of it. A couple of women were watching her, still eying her dress, and Jan looked at them insolently till they glanced away. She suddenly flicked a hip sideways and began snapping the fingers of her free hand. "This party's dead on its feet," she said. "Let's get things moving!" She tossed off her drink and, without looking at me, held out her glass. I had to take it—I was holding three glasses now—and Jan turned from the group again.

I was as mad at Jan as I've ever been, I guess, and I made myself hang onto my smile and stand there, the two empty glasses down at my side inconspicuously, or so I hoped. I stood listening attentively to what one of the women was saying about the day-care center's need for more room and equipment, refusing to turn and see where Jan was going; I knew she didn't have any money.

The woman finished, someone replied, and I took a swallow or two from my glass, casually shifting my position a little as I did so to sneak a look after Jan. I was absolutely astounded: she was standing at the bar smiling and accepting a drink from a man, a complete stranger to her, I knew. He was bowing slightly, waggling a hand in response to her thanks. Jan raised her glass in toast to him, drank off a third of it, then turned into the crowd—not back toward our group as I'd thought for a moment, but angling off toward the other side of the room. For a few steps I could follow her dress, then it was lost in the crowd.

I didn't know what to do. I just didn't know. I couldn't bring myself to embarrass either of us by obviously going into the crowd looking for her, though I wanted to. I made myself stand there, and finished my drink. Then I smiled at Hazel Hurst beside me and, gesturing with my own empty glass, said, "Can I bring you one, Hazel?" She drank very little, I knew, and when she said no, I smiled again, turned and walked toward the bar, slowly and casually, looking brightly around me, trying to suggest a man enjoying himself. I thought if I took my time about this, I might catch Jan returning to the bar and somehow get her the hell out of here.

Halfway to the bar I heard the piano abruptly stop in mid-tune during a medley of songs from musicals, heard a slight rise in the level of conversational hum, saw heads turning toward the platform. I turned, too, not knowing what I'd see, but the instant I did, it seemed to me that I'd known all my life. Up on the raised platform the pianist sat smiling politely, head bowed over the keys, listening to a woman whose head was ducked level with his as she spoke into his ear. The bulk of the piano stood between her and me, and her head was partly concealed by the pianist's. I couldn't actually see her, but I knew. Then, smiling broadly, Jan stood erect up there on the platform, her dress the most vivid object in the room, and as the pianist began what I knew must have been her request, she hopped up onto the piano top, legs swinging, and began to sing along with him, "Bye Bye Blackbird," singing the words when she knew them, and "da-da, DA-da" when she didn't.

She carried the tune well enough, her voice true though thin. And as I worked through the crowd toward her, the song—the pianist cutting it a little short—ended, and people immediately around the platform applauded, but the hands came together limply, lazily, the applause sardonic; someone mockingly called "Yay!" Jan had slid from piano to floor, her head ducking down beside the pianist's again. He nodded, his smile rigid, and began playing "Sweet Sue" with a pronounced rapid beat.

Incredibly, Jan began to dance: knees together, feet and elbows flying, her dress a blaze of flying color. And she was good; she did it beautifully, feet flashing in perfect easy rhythm, fingers snapping, face lifted to ceiling, eyes half closed in ecstasy. It was her shoulders and arms that moved, and her legs, but from the knees down mostly. Except for the sway of her hips, her body moved very little, and she stayed in one spot. You could hear her feet shuffling, leather on wood, and it was a wild exciting dance, primitive and with a kind of innocent sexuality, and when I'd pushed my way to the edge of the platform, all I could do was stand and stare up at Jan—angry, really furious, and at the same time with a ridiculous feeling of pride in this astonishing accomplishment.

With a flutter of notes and a chord, the pianist finished, and now most of the room applauded, this time genuinely, a dozen or more voices calling out "More!" and meaning it. Jan was bowing almost profession­ally; left, then right, slowly revolving to face all her audience. Turning, she saw me staring up at her, and she walked to the platform's edge, directly before me. "Catch, Nick!" she said, revolving as she spoke to let herself fall backward off the platform into my arms, my three empty glasses exploding on the floor.

I wouldn't let myself even think about the meaning of this, not now. My smile fixed, forever it seemed, I set Jan on her feet, slid an arm around her waist, and gripped her left wrist with my left hand. I took her right wrist in my other hand, and, keeping our hands low and out of sight, I led her—forced her, really—through the grinning still-applauding people around the platform, who stepped aside reluctantly to let us through. I'd seen a glass-paned door beside the bar at this end of the room that led onto one of the side porches and a short flight of steps to a lawn, and we moved toward it fast. We'd nearly reached it, walking along beside the bar toward it, when Jan stopped so suddenly her left wrist was yanked loose. I turned to face her, still holding the other arm, and she stuck her hand out at me, palm up. "Give me twenty dollars."

"Outside," I said softly, nodding eagerly, placating her. "Come on outside and I'll—"

"No." She waggled her hand impatiently. "Here. And right now. Or I don't move a step."

People watching, I yanked out my wallet, found a twenty, and pushed it at her. Jan took it and—I had had to let go of her—she walked around the end of the bar past the staring gray-haired woman to the back bar. She picked up an unopened bottle of Gordon's gin, turned and slapped the twenty down on the cloth before the woman, and—me following—walked on toward the exit smiling and blowing farewell kisses to the grinning, murmuring, incredulous room.

In the Packard I was so confused I had trouble getting the key in the ignition, and when I got the car started and backed out onto the driveway, I almost nicked a fender of the car behind us. I swung out onto the dirt road then and drove half a block leaning toward the windshield trying to see by moonlight before I remembered to turn on the headlights. I was driving away from the freeway toward open country and a place to pull over and talk; just now I couldn't speak.

But the top was down, a smooth flow of air cooling my cheeks, and pretty soon I felt I'd be able to make my voice speak calmly. I said, "Jan," but she ignored me, frowning and picking at the seal of clear plastic around the neck of the bottle in her lap. Impatiently, she began to twist the cap off without removing the seal. My control was thin, and I yelled, "Jan! Goddamn it!" We'd reached more or less open country, nothing behind us, and I swung onto the narrow shoulder and stopped, braking hard. "Jan, answer me, or so help me I'll—"

She smiled pleasantly. "Call me by name, and I will."

I sat looking at her, but once again I knew, and had known, it seemed to me, for a long time. I knew who, this afternoon, had bought the screaming dress with a hem eight inches above her knees, who knew most of the words to "Bye Bye, Blackbird," and who could dance the Charleston as though she'd invented it. "Marion?"

"I'll tell the cockeyed world. Open this goddamn bottle, Nickie; you need a little drinkie!"

She was right. I grabbed the bottle and began peeling the plastic seal loose, the driver of a passing Volkswagen turning to stare back at us. And three drinks and four miles farther on down the winding dirt road—we were beyond the town limits and the last of the houses, out into open farm country—I needed another. I took it, steering with one hand, straight gin gurgling out of the bottle mouth down my throat.

"Pass it here." I did, she swigged, then grinned "That's no bathtub gin, Baby; that's real prewar stuff!"

"We have got to talk." A short driveway just ahead led to the gate of a field, and I slowed to pull off.

"Sure, but not now; this is fun! Drive!" She put her foot onto mine and jammed the accelerator flat. The car bucked, leaped forward, and I yanked the wheel away from the driveway and the ditch just beyond it. "Step on it! Let's take a spin!" she yelled and turned to climb up on the leather seat and sit on the folded canvas top. "Whoopee!" she screamed, and some fragment of my mind was able to note that I was grinning and that my foot on the acclerator stayed flat on the floor.

This was dangerous, the curves unbanked, the rear end of the big car fishtailing around them. But without slackening speed I leaned forward and with one hand loosened the big nickel-plated wing nuts of the windshield and lowered it to lie flat on the hood.

The rush of night air, cool and fragrant with country smells, whipped my hair, pressed my glasses to my brows and cheekbones, and narrowed my eyes. We took another curve, sliding sideways for a yard this time before the wheels bit in again, my heart soared in my chest from excitement, and I yelled, "Whoopeeeeee!" Upon the folded top, Marion sat waving the bottle of gin in the air, a look in her eyes, half closed against the rush of air, of utter pleasure in the moment, her lips molded in a little smile of pure, unthinking, animal joy.

"To hell with the speed cops!" she yelled, and took a long swig of gin, her taut throat white in the moonlight, then shoved the bottle down at me. I snatched it and drained the last of the gin without lifting my foot from the accelerator. A tree was rushing toward us, and I half stood behind the big wheel and with all my might threw the bottle at it. It hit squarely, smashing magnificently, splinters of glass flying like ice, and we both howled with delight, wild and free, more than I'd been since I was a child, more than I'd remembered it was possible to be.

But a quarter mile farther on I slowed, pumping the brakes, then jounced off onto a two-rut dirt road leading toward a farmhouse whose lights showed in the distance. There were horses in a field, and trees extending over the shoulder of the road. I pulled off under them, set the hand brake, and turned off the ignition and lights; we had to talk.

Marion was sliding down onto the seat beside me, her skirt pushing back, turning toward me, lifting her arms. "Oh, Nickie, Nickie," she said, "it's so good to be back."

"Hold it." I put a hand up. "Listen, do you think I'm my father?"

"Of course not. I did last night. When we saw my movie. I was still confused then: you lose track of time. Because it doesn't matter."

"These aren't the Twenties, either, you know."

"Ain't it the truth! Some party. Everybody standing around talking about nursery schools! What the hell kind of party was that? Nobody getting any kicks. What was that big red bridge we came over?"

"Golden Gate Bridge."

"What happened to the ferries?"

"They got rid of them."

"Good night! How stupid! They were fun."

"Well, we kept the cable cars. A few of them."

"That's nice. Oh, listen! Did Dempsey beat Tunney?"

"No. Tunney won. Twice. They had a rematch."

"Darn. Dempsey's so attractive, much cuter than the Prince of Wales. What year is this?"

"Nineteen eighty-five."

"What? Why, that's ... fifty-seven years."

"Fifty-nine."

"I hate arithmetic. That means I'm..."

"Eighty."

Her mouth dropped open, then she smiled. "No, I'm not. And you know it."

Something stirred in the back of my mind. It had been there for some time, now it moved forward, demanding recognition. "Marion. ... Last night. After the movie. Was that ... you?"

She leaned back against her door to face me, her shoulders trembling with silent laughter. Then she nodded.

I swung away, staring across my door top at the tree beside us. I heard Marion slide across the seat toward me, then she poked me in the ribs. "Hey," she said softly, "what's so interesting over there? Hey, Nickie, look at me!" I shook my head. "Why not?"

"No, goddamm it!" I swung around to stare at her, then shook my head in disbelief. "Lord, I'm sitting here looking at my wife's face and body, talking to you about how I was unfaithful to her! It's like incest! Only worse!" I set my elbows on the lower rim of the big wooden steering wheel and put my face in my hands. "Jesus! I must be the only man in fifty thousand years to discover a new kind of sin."

"And wasn't it nice?" I didn't answer or move. "Come on," she said softly, coaxingly, "it won't hurt you to say it was nice. Because it was. And you know it."

"The hell it was."

"Oh, yes, it was. A lot better than what's-her-name, Dishwater Janice, knows anything about." She was quiet for a moment. "Look at me, damn it! I don't really look like your wife at all!"

I turned, then narrowed my eyes. This was Jan's face, her dark hair, her arms, hands and body, but ... there was a recklessness in the eyes, a fullness to the smiling lips, a tension and excitement in every line of that familiar body, that I'd never seen before. There was a resemblance to Jan but, incredibly, nothing more. This was another woman, this was Marion Marsh and no one else, leaning toward me now, moist lips smiling, offering herself. "Kiss me, Nickie."

I shook my head and turned away fast.

"Why not?"

"For an absolutely ridiculous reason: I don't want to be unfaithful to my wife!" I was staring almost blindly at the trees beside me fighting back a temptation—oh, Lord, I wished I hadn't drunk that gin—so intense it caught my breath, wanting so much I couldn't believe it. I squeezed my eyes shut and began taking slow deep breaths, thinking cool thoughts, knowing that this girl was right beside me waiting, offering ... and I won. Opening my eyes, finally, I felt actually weak.

I took a few more slow calming breaths, then turned to Marion to make her understand that she had to get out of our lives. Still turned toward me, smiling, she didn't move, and said nothing, just waited as I hunted for words. She looked—but how could she, how was this possible?—voluptuous, the most sensual absolute female I've ever seen. It shone from her eyes, exuded from that familiar, utterly strange body, filled the air. "Nickie," she said softly, "do you realize that under these clothes there's a naked girl?" and the intensity of the sudden disappoint­ment I felt, the cold shock of knowing I had won and was going to successfully resist, was more than I could stand, and I grabbed her. I grabbed her, she grabbed me, and there, staring horses and all, parked on a country road like a high-school kid, my wife's body in my arms, I was wildly unfaithful to her all over again; oh, Jesus.

We passed the house where, incredibly, the party was still going on and reached the highway before I felt I could talk. I heard myself then, voice solemn and actually trembling a little with the seriousness of what I had to say. "Marion. Listen to me. You can't ever, ever do this again." But she didn't answer, and in the greenish light of a highway lamp I saw that she was asleep.

All the way across the Bridge and San Francisco she slept, but at the sound of the ratchet as I set the hand brake, she opened her eyes, glanced up at the house, then at me. "Hi," she said.

Blinking against the gin I'd had, forcing my vision, I studied her face; we were almost directly under the street light before the house. "Hi, Jan."

"Hi." Her hand came up to her mouth, ladylike, to stifle a belch. Then she pressed the back of her hand to her forehead. "Nickie ... I don't feel so good."
 

A little before noon I stood in the kitchen in pajamas and slippers waiting for the toast to pop up, trying not to listen to the loud plopping pulselike gurgle of the percolator. I had a full-blown hangover, and it helped to stand absolutely still while I waited, arms hanging at my sides, eyes closed; when the toaster popped it made me wince. I had to make my way to the other side of the kitchen then, but by walking without lifting the soles of my slippers from the linoleum I managed. Getting the plates out wasn't too bad, but the trays are propped in the narrow space between stove and refrigerator, resting on the floor on their edges, and I had to stoop. I made it by bending very slowly, at the knees only, eyes straight ahead, locating a tray by feel.

Al scratched at the back door; it was past time for him to be let in, and he knew it. I called to him, eyes closed; I told him we'd decided to get rid of him and had bought a plant instead. Maybe he believed me, because as I walked to the refrigerator I heard him pattering back down the stairs.

I was looking for, praying for, tomato juice, pushing milk cartons aside; vodka and tomato juice, I'd remembered, was supposed to be the remedy for this kind of pain. There wasn't any, though; we seldom drank it. But there was a big chilled bottle of California champagne Jan had bought at a local liquor-store sale and was saving for our anniversary. This was an emergency, and I got it out, peeled off the imitation lead foil, and worked out the plastic cork, careful about noise.

The tray vibrated in my hands all the way down the hall, the liquids slopping over. Jan's face, as I turned into the bedroom, was bone-white above her pink nightgown and the dark knitted shawl over her shoulders; she'd had more gin than I'd had. She was sitting up against her pillow, and she said, "Oh, thank God. I couldn't possibly have gotten up myself, I'd have starved right here. Thanks, Nickie, darling," she added so nicely, so lovingly, that my conscience began to ache more than my head.

"I made it entirely by touch; didn't dare open my eyes." I set the tray at the center of the bed and climbed back in again. Then, slowly, slowly, chewing by an act of will, swallowing carefully, we got the dry toast down with careful sips of ice-cold, incredibly delicious champagne; washed down aspirin; swallowed coffee. When we sat holding our second cups, I said, "How you feeling?"

Jan considered, cup cradled in both hands. "Better," she said, voice a little surprised. "My headache's not too bad now; I guess the aspirin's taking hold. And I feel a bit less horrible in general; the coffee and toast, I suppose."

"With a big assist from the champagne. You aren't supposed to do this, you know, or you're on the road to alcoholism."

"Well, it helps." She sipped a little more champagne, a little more coffee, then sighed, put down the cup, and sat back, closing her eyes, and dozed.

I sat looking at her, pale and vulnerable: this was Jan, this was my wife. Last night and the night before that I had ... It didn't matter that it was her body; it was another woman, absolutely no question about that. Once in a while I'd daydreamed a little about other women, but still the answer to whatever problems we had was never actually someone else; I wanted to work things out with Jan. I sat looking at her—there was a little color returning to her cheeks—remembering times before we were married, remembering our honeymoon, that kind of thing, feeling very tender toward her and almost fiercely protective. Then I slipped off into sleep, too.

"Nick?"

"Yeah?" I opened my eyes and ran a quick check over my system. I was definitely healing.

"What happened last night? I can't remem..." Her voice trailed off, and she sat frowning at the foot of the bed. Then she focused her eyes on me again. "Nick! Last night. Did I—dance? I did, didn't I?"

"Well. Yeah. A little."

"By myself?"

I nodded, watching her.

"It's funny, I can barely remember. It's like catching a little glimpse of myself for a moment, then it's gone." Her eyes widened. "I sang, too, didn't I? Up there on the platform!"

I nodded again.

"Oh, Nick, how awful!" She covered her face with her hands. "Why didn't you stop me! What'll I ever say to the Hursts!" She lowered her hands and sat staring at me wonderingly. "And afterward ... I'm not sure I really remember this; it's like a dream you can barely recall. But ... didn't we drive around? Speeding? Skidding on the curves? And didn't you—you did, Nick! You threw a bottle at a tree!"

I nodded again.

"I don't understand it. We're not people who get drunk!" She sat staring at me.

I didn't know what to tell her or whether to say anything. I shrugged and said, "Well. It happens sometimes. Sneaks up on you." There was beginning color in her cheeks but dark smudges under her eyes. She looked delicate, fragile, and a wave of guilty tenderness moved through me. "I'm glad you're feeling better."

She smiled at the truth in my voice. "I know you are. You're better, too, aren't you?" I nodded. "I'm glad."

I leaned toward her and kissed her lightly. Then I leaned far across the tray, took her shoulders in my hands, and kissed her again, much longer and harder. I wanted to make things up to her, and it seemed to me this was how. "Well!" Jan pretended to catch her breath. "What's this all about? And with a hangover at that."

I grinned. "Especially with a hangover. That's how it works with me, I don't know why; always has."

"Always? Does that mean—"

"Never mind the ancient history. This is what matters." I leaned across the tray again, reaching for her.

"Well, maybe we should get rid of this, for heaven sakes." She lifted the tray and set it on the floor. Then she turned back to me as I moved closer, and we kissed, long but gently. Presently we slid down to lie heads comfortable on her pillow. We both smiled, appreciating each other, appreciating in anticipation the leisurely, almost languorous, hangovers-still-persisting quality of the domestic lovemaking just ahead.

Again we kissed, snuggling closer, making ourselves comfortable. Jan searched for and found the handkerchief she keeps under her pillow and wiped at her nose. I pulled the blanket up over our shoulders and punched up my pillow; a pulse had begun at the base of my neck, a headache deciding whether to come back or not. But I didn't care. I had a burden of guilt to make up to Jan, and the nice thing was that I was enjoying doing it. I was kissing her now with a slow passion, she was responding, I felt the beginning blur of my senses, and grinned with relief because I was enjoying this every bit as much as, even more than, last night. Jan's hands met behind my neck, clasped, and she drew me tightly toward her, kissing me harder and again and again very rapidly, and my arms tightened around her till she gasped. "Jan?"

"Yes?..."

I was overwhelmingly tempted to kid myself into thinking I'd been fooled. I wanted to. Lord, how I wanted to. But I knew this was the moment of truth, the test I must not fail, and I shoved her away so violently her clasped hands were torn apart and she cried out. But I kept on shoving, brutally, frantically, using both hands. "No, goddamn it, no!" I was yelling. "It's you, and I know it!"

"Oh, what's the diff!" Marion said angrily.

"All the difference in the world!" I'd thrust my leg straight out, holding her off, the sole of my foot flat against her stomach.

"Yes, there is, isn't there? All the difference in the world." She lay smiling at me, Jan's face but Marion's hot and mischievous eyes.

I'm a silent-movie buff, a term I don't much like but I haven't a better one. And I've watched many an old Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, Chaplin, Mack Sennett. So I know that the best of the old slapstick routines are far from slapdash. Granted the beginning premise, some of those fine old sequences—like Keaton and the mortar on the flatcar in The General—are marvelously logical, each event deriving inevitably from the one preceding. In a weird way they're true to life; they could have happened. So it doesn't surprise me that what occurred now, right in my own bedroom, turned into something the Keystone Kops would have understood.

She tried to move toward me, but my foot was still pressed to her stomach, holding her off, and she said, "Nickie, you want to and you know it!"

I knew it. "No, I don't. Now, cut it out."

She ran her hand suddenly up the back of my leg under my pajama pants, her fingers scrabbling, and my leg yanked away reflexively. Instantly she was scrambling toward me, and I backed right off my edge of the bed onto one foot, and stood up stumbling. She flung herself toward me, shrieking with laughter, and a hand shot out to grab an end of my pajama cord. It yanked, dissolving the knot, and my pants instantaneously dropped to the floor in a white puddle of ankle-deep cloth. I stooped quickly, reaching for them with both hands, but she was at the edge of the bed grabbing for me, and I swung away, one foot coming loose from the pants, which trailed after me from the other ankle as I ran. Marion was rolling off the bed in a whirl of pink cloth and flying legs, and—feeling naked and exposed, tugging the front of my pajama coat down—I ran across the room, yanking my other leg free from the trailing pants. There's a big closet running clear across the end of the room, the door nearest me open, and I stepped in. It's a sliding door, and I rolled it closed.

Instantly it was rolled open again, and Marion stood there grinning with excitement. She stepped toward me, and I whirled away, shoving at the clothes hanging beside me. "Marion, for god sakes! This is absurd!"

"But fun! Fun in a closet, hey, Nick! I'll say!"

I was at Jan's end of the long closet, moving off into it, frantically sliding armloads of her clothes back along the rod toward Marion, who was struggling after me, flinging the hangered clothes behind her almost as fast: it was as though we were swimming through clothes. "Nickie," she called happily, her voice muffled, "isn't this exciting!"

Weirdly, it was. If she so much as laid a finger on me I knew what would instantly happen, right here, and using both arms together in a kind of side stroke, I began shoving still greater swaths of hanging clothes back past me as I fought toward the other end of the closet.

I stopped suddenly and stood motionless: light had just appeared ahead, the door at that end of the closet soundlessly rolled open. I stood silent, listening, hearing nothing, breathing as shallowly as I could. The silence continued, and I knew she was standing somewhere outside the closet, gleeful, waiting to hear me commit myself to one direction or the other. I stood halfway between the two open doors in an empty little no man's land between my end of the long closet just ahead and Jan's behind me. Reaching silently out toward my end, my fingertips brushed nylon and I recognized my ski jacket. Very slowly I reached under the jacket, touched softer material, and closed my hand on it.

Then I heard her, empty hangers suddenly jangling, shoving her way toward me through Jan's clothes, probably hoping to catch me coming toward her. Under my own hanging shirts, suits and folded pants was an empty space a yard high. I squatted quickly, then waddled rapidly along under my clothes, and walked silently out into the empty bedroom like a duck, my sky-blue ski pants in my hand. I stood and, balancing on one leg, quickly thrust the other into a pant leg. But I'd moved too quickly, lost my balance, and had to hop, my bare foot thumping the floor like a hammer.

Instantly I heard her switch directions inside the closet, and she appeared in the doorway at Jan's end. She stood looking at me, then slowly raised both hands to shoulder height, her fingers curving into claws, and distorted her face into an idiot parody of lecherousness, her hunched-over shoulders shaking with silent laughter. She began walking slowly toward me.

There's a kind of mindless panic in being chased, and without thought I simply dropped to the floor of the bedroom onto my hands and stomach, shoving hard with both legs against the closet wall, and slid right across the polished floor and under the foot of the bed.

Revolving frantically on my stomach, I turned to face the room, then lay there under the bed watching her bare feet and pink hem as she staggered around the room gasping through peal after peal of helpless laughter. I had one leg in the ski pants, and in the foot-high space under the bed I tried to slide the other leg into them but couldn't find the opening, couldn't maneuver or see behind me; I was sweating horribly. Then my toes found the opening, and—enraged—I shoved my leg violently down the pants by sheer force.

She was stooped over, watching me, her hair hanging almost straight down, her excited upside-down eyes looking into mine. For a moment, both motionless, we stared at each other. Then a hand appeared beside her inverted face, the hooked forefinger slowly and lasciviously beckon­ing, and I began to curse.

She stood, then the bed was rolling swiftly forward on its casters, about to expose me. I reacted before thought and, like an infantryman crawling under fire, began scrambling to keep up with the bed. Then at last my mind worked. I'd banged my head hard on the underside of the bedsprings; I'd hurt my wrists in the fall to the floor; I was hot, dusty, angry; right now I could resist any woman in the world. I stopped moving and let the bed roll forward till it cleared me.

With difficulty I pulled myself up by the headboard, the bed out in the middle of the room now, and stood erect, looking something like a merman, I suppose, both legs bound tight together by the stretch cloth of one leg of my ski pants. Marion couldn't talk; her outstretched arm pointing at my sky-blue-wrapped legs looking like one thick, strangely contorted leg with two feet emerging from a single stretched cuff, she whooped with laughter, eyes enormous with astonished delight. I was damned if I'd hop, I told myself, and just stood there, holding onto the bedpost, then I had to grin, too. Marion collapsed helplessly onto the bed, rolling and shouting with laughter, and I watched her, grinning sheepishly, until I had to laugh, too.

She stopped presently and lay there, tears running down her cheeks, gasping for air, shaking her head in disbelief. I looked at her lying there, and fought. Fought harder. Fought furiously. And lost. I couldn't walk, so I simply leaped—dived through the air, a streak of white tapering off into sky-blue—landed beside her, and grabbed her on the first bounce. When presently I sat up, it was very slowly. I reached for the blanket, dragged it up, and wrapped it around my shoulders, a corner of it lying on top of my head, and sat there, knees drawn up, huddled. "Oh, damn," I said. "Oh, goddamn, damn, damn."

"You get my goat!" Marion was punching up a pillow, then she lay back, drawing the sheet up over her. "That was some pajama party! And you know it!" She smiled. "Oh, it's so good to be back! To love again."

"Then possess someone else, goddamn it!"

"It can't be just anyone! This is my house, it's where I belong, so it has to be Jean, Jane, June, whatever the hell her name is. You don't suppose I like it?" She held a strand of hair out before her eyes. "Look at this scraggly hair. What a punk color." She let the hair drop. "And thick eyebrows! Skinny arms!" She brought one leg out from under the sheet, and lifted it high, extending it gracefully. "Not bad legs, I must say. Though mine were better." Smiling wantonly, she held the pose till I looked away, then brought the leg swinging closer to me, toes straight­ening to show off the graceful arch.

"Cut it out."

She drew the leg back under the sheet and began making smacking sounds. "The inside of her mouth feels funny. Not quite big enough, or something. But fine for kissing, eh, Nickie?" Suddenly she flung her arms out, arching her body under the sheet till it was supported only at the shoulders and heels. "Oh, it's so wonderful, Nick! Everything is! It's wonderful just to stretch! I'd forgotten!" Lying back, she saw the tray on the floor beside her. "Hey! Been a long time since I tasted champagne!" She leaned over the side of the bed, filled two glasses and sat up again, handing one over to me. I sipped mine gloomily, she tasted hers, then drank it down. "Oh, boy! This is swell! Where'd you get hooch like this?"

"Liquor store near Haight Street."

"The bootlegger has a store?"

"No. Prohibition's over, Marion. Since long before I was born."

"Well, that saves a lot of trouble." She picked up the bottle, filled her glass, held the bottle impatiently till I'd finished mine, then filled it, too.

"Marion. You've got to go. And leave us alone. Got to."

"While there's still some champagne left? You don't know Marion Marsh."

"I'm beginning to."

We finished the bottle; there was less than half a glass left for each of us. Marion emptied her glass, head tilted far back, draining the last drops, then set it down on the table beside her, smacking her lips. "We need some more of this good, good booze, Nickie."

"Not a chance. You've got to go, damn it!"

She threw back the sheet, and stood up, naked and beautiful, walked to Jan's end of the closet, standing open, and pushed one foot and then the other into Jan's oldest and only pair of high-heeled shoes. She took Jan's purse from the dresser, turned toward the bedroom door, and as she walked out, her arm reached into the closet to drag Jan's street coat from its hanger.

In record time I got pants and shirt on right over my pajama top, and a pair of loafers on my bare feet, shoving in shirttails as I ran down the stairs. But when I hit the sidewalk she was far down the street, almost at the corner. I slid into the Packard over the door top, then rolled down the hill after her, accelerating as much as I dared. Before I reached the corner she turned it to the right.

I swung around after her, directly into a parking space at the end of the block. Marion was fifty yards ahead of me, just passing the delica­tessen and the beauty parlor and wig salon heading toward the liquor store whose sign hung out over the walk at the end of the block. Almost directly under the sign a stout woman stood facing the direction Marion was walking from. Her mouth was moving, and when I turned off the ignition I realized that she was feebly calling "Help." She repeated it, not so much yelling as just saying it: "Help"; then, "Police." She was staring not at Marion but at the back of a man who was walking away from her. He wasn't old, as I'd thought at first glance, but shabby, wearing an excessively long dirty overcoat to the tops of his broken unlaced shoes and a knitted cap pulled down over his ears and forehead. He was eying Marion walking toward him, I realized suddenly, and in that instant—not ten yards from Marion now, and walking slowly toward her—the man suddenly opened his coat wide. I cursed and began scrambling out of the car. Because except for his shoes, the man was completely naked under the coat, an exhibitionist, the sides of his coat held stiffly out before him, his eyes riveted to Marion's.

Marion didn't screech, look away, break stride, or even hesitate. Instantly, she flung her own coat open wide, and for another step or so the two of them, naked as eggs under their coats, walked steadily toward each other, the sides of their coats held straight out before them.

The man's jaw dropped in shock. He stopped, stared, horrified, then flung both arms tight around himself, wrapping himself in his coat, hugging it to him, turned and ran.

The stout woman he was now suddenly running back toward, screeched, turned, and began to run, too. Both of them then—the woman lumbering in panic, the man shuffling to avoid losing his shoes—ran down the street in weird slow motion while Marion, coat snugly around her again, swept grandly into the liquor store.

I was laughing too hard, silently, shoulders trembling, to even protest when I followed her into the store, and she bought three quarts and a pint of champagne, spending all but nineteen cents of the money in Jan's purse.

I remember some of what happened then with a shining clarity, and the rest not at all. I remember Marion and me running down the steps from my apartment, bottles in hand, Marion in Jan's red-velvet gold-trimmed robe and matching slippers. On the front porch we pounded on the Platts' door with our fists, choking with laughter. And I remember their faces when they came running to the door, yanked it open, and saw us standing there; they'd been having lunch. I remember inviting them up for champagne, though I don't remember them coming up.

And I remember Marion and me in the kitchen opening a champagne bottle; I held it while she twisted the cork. Al scratched at his little door, and I unlatched it with my foot, he nosed it open, walked in, and stopped dead. Motionless, frozen in the moment of taking a step, he stared at Marion. Obviously he saw nothing of Jan; this was a stranger, and he studied her warily. Then Marion got her cork out, bent down, snapped her fingers gently, and Al came cautiously over. A little neck-scratching and they were friends.

The Platts must have come up because they were there: Frank on the window seat, glass in hand, grinning at everything that happened or was said; Myrtle rushing downstairs, then back up again with a stack of old phonograph records that she set on the coffee table. Marion shuffled through them, said, "Hot diggety dog, Eddie Cantor!" and handed me three or four of them. I got them onto the spindle of the record player after a stab or two, turned the thing on, and the sound came out at Donald Duck speed, and we all howled, Marion delighted since it was the first time she'd heard it. I set the dial at 78 then and restarted it.

I clearly remember lying on the chesterfield, scratching Al's ears, Myrtle and Frank side by side on the window seat grinning, as Marion sang the words to "Ida! Sweet As Apple Cider!," fingers snapping, along with the round lush voice of Eddie Cantor. And I remember Marion teaching us "how Eddie Cantor dances." Each of us standing separately, she had us spread the fingers of both hands, then bring our hands rapidly together and apart in a soundless clapping motion, only the fingertips touching. When we mastered that with the help of more champagne, she coached us in holding our eyes exaggeratedly wide while rolling them frequently. Then, eyes rolling, fingertips clapping, knees rising high, we pranced around the room, Al barking, to "Makin' Whoopee!"

If this was how Eddie Cantor danced, we liked it, and we all seemed to more or less know the words to "Makin' Whoopee!"—including Al, who howled them, head aimed at the ceiling. Together with Eddie Cantor's own voice, the volume turned on full, we screamed and howled out the song as we pranced around the house through every room the way Eddie Cantor dances, floors and window glass vibrating, till a picture fell off the living-room wall.

But it never seemed to me that I was drunk; or if I was, it was a different, lighter kind of thing with champagne; we just seemed to float through the afternoon. Marion asked what time it was, over and again it seemed to me, though it never annoyed me. I'd just smile and say, "Quarter to five" ... "Six-fifteen" ... "A little after seven" ... I don't remember us beginning to dance, but I remember us dancing dreamily, cheek to cheek, hardly moving, to "The Sheik of Araby," sung by Rudy Vallee, Myrtle sitting on the chesterfield beaming at us, Frank asleep in a chair. I remember with a hard, sharp embarrassment how foolishly flattered I felt that Marion should think I was worth all this trouble, and murmuring something to her about it. She said, "You think you're the only reason I'm back? Don't kid yourself, Sheik. There's a lot more reason than that, I'll say! What time is it?" We danced past Myrtle and she said how wonderful it was to see how Jan and I still felt about each other, and my conscience screamed at me. What else can I do, I said silently; sit in a corner and sulk till she leaves?

I remember slamming the door of the Packard and letting my head drop back onto the leather seat back, hearing the other door slam, hearing the whir of the starter motor.

Marion was driving when I woke, but while there was champagne left in my veins and mind, I still didn't seem drunk. My head on the leather seat back as I opened my eyes, I saw the low skyline of a building sliding along beside us and knew I'd seen it before. We were slowing at the curb: that's what had awakened me. And yes; I knew these tiled roof surfaces, beige stucco walls, the arched doorways of this vaguely mission-style building. What was it?

I sat up, staring at it as we stopped, Marion pulling up the hand brake, turning off engine and lights; it was a handsome building still, but old now, feebly lighted by too few bulbs, not another car at this long empty stretch of red-painted curbing before it. "Nick, hurry! Get rid of the car somewhere, park it in a garage, we'll be late!" I turned; in Jan's street coat Marion was sliding out on her side, then she slammed the door, ran around the front of the car and across the sidewalk, and in through one of the long row of double doors stretching across the building's front.

I didn't know what she was talking about, but I knew where we were now; this was the SP depot. After a moment or so, I got out, walked inside, then stopped. Across the tiled floor Marion stood at a ticket window, her back to me. Except for the man behind the window there was only one other person in all of the waiting room, an old man waiting on one of the long, varnished wood benches, a brown-paper shopping bag, its entire surface wrinkled and creased many times over, between his feet.

Marion turned from the ticket window, walked to the center of the empty floor, and stopped. I walked toward her but she didn't see me immediately; she was looking slowly around at the old depot, even glancing up at the ceiling. Her eyes, I saw, walking toward her, were bewildered. She heard my steps then and turned. "Nick, he says there isn't a Lark any more!" She turned to glance back at the man behind the one open window; a boy, actually, of no more than nineteen, a Mexican, with a wisp of mustache, sitting in shirt sleeves, elbows on the counter, cheekbones on fists, reading a magazine lying open on the counter before him. "He says there's no night train to Los Angeles at all!" Her words were a wail; I was afraid she might cry.

"I know." I reached out to take her elbow. Gently I said, "Marion, people don't ride trains any more. There are hardly any left."

She didn't answer or move. She looked slowly around at the worn empty benches; at the long row of ticket windows nearly all permanently boarded over with raw plywood; at the dusty-windowed restaurant in a corner of the waiting room, the big handles of its entrance doors chained together and padlocked; at the great overhead blackboard labeled arrivals—departures, its green-ruled spaces empty; at the dismantled lunch counter, its row of metal stool supports still bolted to the floor, the stool tops gone. She said, "I came down here one night. I was in a play at the Alcazar. I was in the first and third acts but not in the second, and there was time to rush down here and back before my last entrance. Doug Fairbanks and Mary Pickford were leaving for Hollywood.

"They were going home to Pickfair; they'd been here for three days. They saw the play the second night, from the fifth row; I spotted them. And they were going back to Hollywood. On the Lark, of course. I got here in time to see them get out of a big dark-green touring car with a tan canvas top folded back; it was a nice night. It was right out there." She nodded toward the street and began walking toward the open door. I walked along, still holding her elbow. "Doug was waving and grinning, you know that wonderful, wonderful grin, as he helped Mary out of the car. And she was smiling that beautiful smile." We stopped on the walk, Marion staring out at the dark empty street. "She was carrying a tremendous armful of yellow roses. And their car was stopped just where yours is; they'd held the space open for it. I couldn't get anywhere near it, though. There must have been a thousand people here on the walk and out in the street calling 'Doug! Mary!,' the people nearest trying to touch them. Doug was still grinning, and he had an arm around Mary, working their way across the walk. Right here, right where we're standing! People who were arriving to take the Lark—there were hundreds every night, Nick!—had to get out of their cabs and cars in the middle of the street at the edge of the crowd. And people were standing on running boards, and jumping up in the air, trying to see Doug and Mary over the heads of the crowd. Then everyone followed them into the station, every doorway jammed, and we all went on through to see them off. When the Lark pulled out, right on time, Doug and Mary were on the observation platform standing just above the big, round lighted circle that said 'Lark.' Doug was waving back at the crowd, and Mary stood throwing her roses out to the people one at a time; some men ran along the platform beside the train for the last of them. Doug stood waving and Mary blew kisses for as long as we could see them down the track, and we waved back till there were only two red lights and the big round lighted Lark sign." Marion turned to look up at the faded station front, then turned abruptly away, and we crossed the empty walk to the car.

I drove, watching Marion. She'd look out at the city moving past us, look away to stare down at the floor of the car, out at the city again, then back to the floor. Presently, eyes on the floor, she said, "Drive to O'Farrell Street, will you, Nick? Between Mason and Powell," and I nodded.

We crossed Market Street, drove to O'Farrell, waited for a light at Mason, then drove slowly on toward Powell; near the middle of the block I slowed. "Here?"

"A little farther, I think ... No, we're too far now. Or are we? Wait."

I pulled to the curb. The top was still down, and Marion looked back over the rear of the car, then turned to lean forward, staring through the windshield. She studied a building just ahead, on the other side. "Moatle? What's that mean?" She was pointing at an enormous sign of yellow-red-and-white plastic hanging out from the front of the building.

"Motel," I said. "It's a ... well, it's something like a hotel. But without any lobby or anything. Just rooms and a place to park your car..." My voice trailed off; she was shaking her head to shut out my words, eyes squeezing closed as she turned from the motel.

Then they popped open, and she stared up at it again. "Look at that thing!" she said angrily. "Jesus, it's ugly! Get us out of here, Nick. That's where the Alcazar once stood."

A block farther on I said, "Anything else?"

"Nothing."

"Then maybe you ought to tell me what this is all about."

Listlessly she said, "We were going to Hollywood."

"To Hollywood." I nodded. "What for?"

"What for? You saw Flaming Flappers! I was great," she said simply. "I was already at work on another picture. And in that one I was greater still. We were going to Hollywood, Nickie—the way we should have once before! So that I could resume my career."

I nodded several times, then said very gently, "Well, now you know. It's a different world, Marion. The Alcazar's gone. So is the Lark. So will the SP station before long. And the world is filling up with motels. Flaming Flappers was long, long ago. And I'm not my father."

She nodded, then dropped her head to the back of the seat, and I glanced at her. Her eyes were closed; tears were sliding down her cheeks. "Goddamn it. I had a career coming to me!"

In front of the house I set the hand brake, and Marion opened her eyes and lifted her head to look up at the house. For some seconds she sat staring up at it, then she turned to me. "Good-bye, Nickie." She shook her head slowly. "I'm tired, so tired." Then she smiled and reached out to put a hand on my arm. "But it was nice, wasn't it." I didn't answer; to say yes seemed disloyal to Jan, and I felt guilty enough as it was. "Come on, Nickie," she said reproachfully, disappointed in me, "say it was nice. That won't hurt you!"

I sat looking at her for a moment or so. "You're really going? Forever?"

She nodded, and swallowed. "Yes."

"All right," I said. "Why not, then? I'll admit it was nice because it was; I can't help that." I thought about it, then smiled at her. "So, yeah; it was very nice, Marion. In fact, it was wonderful, and I'll never forget it."

"I'll say." She smiled and laid her head back.

I was feeling enormously better just being able to say these things out loud, to speak the truth. "You're a terrific girl, Marion. Different than any other I ever knew. In more ways than one."

"You tell 'em," she murmured, eyes closed, "I stutter."

"Don't ask me to make comparisons between you and Jan, because I won't do that." I sat staring through the windshield at the deserted street. "But hell, yes, I'll admit it was nice. It was wonderful, Marion. Abso­lutely marvelous."

"What in the world are you talking about?" She sat up.

"Jan...?"

"Jan? Well of course it's Jan." She glanced around her, then said, "Oh, my God," and put her hand to her forehead, squeezing her eyes shut. "Nickie ... I don't feel so good. Again!" she added, and her eyes popped open. "Nickie, we've been drinking again, haven't we? I have those same ... fragmentary memories. Little glimpses now and then. What's happening to us! Drinking this way two nights in a row like ... a throwback to the Twenties or something!"

"Champagne for a hangover; that was our big mistake." I reached over and opened her door, trying to end this conversation, and she slid out.

But upstairs every light in the house was on, the living-room furniture was shoved out of place, there were spilled potato chips all over the rug, an empty champagne bottle lying on a chair, and—final triumph of anarchy—Al lay asleep on the chesterfield. Jan looked, then just shook her head, and we walked on down the hall toward the bedroom. In the doorway she stopped short. "What in the world is the bed doing clear out there in the middle of the room?"

"Well. You. Said. You. Wanted to rearrange the furniture."

She wasn't listening. Walking on into the room she pointed at the floor. "And what are your pajama pants doing over there?"

"Well." I tried to grin lewdly. "You threw them."

"I don't remember doing that." She frowned. "Why would I throw your pajama pants. In fact, I don't even remember when we ... Or do I? I remember starting..." It seemed to me that the thing to do was get us to bed and the lights out, and I began unbuttoning my shirt. But Jan was pointing upward now, to the top of the open closet door, her mouth open in astonishment. "What are your ski pants doing up there!"

"Well. You. Wanted to mend them. That was to remind you. One of the cuffs is torn. See?"

"Mend them? Your ski pants? Why should I be worrying about them at a time like..." She had turned, unbuttoning her street coat, and stared at me. "You've got your pajama tops on!"

"Oh, Christ." I had run out of things to answer, but Jan didn't notice. She stood thinking, then walked slowly to her closet, taking off her coat, hung it up, turned, then noticed the dress she was wearing, very short, its pattern looking as though it had been designed by throwing globs of thick paint in primary colors. "I said I'd never wear this again ... I hate this dress!"

She walked to the bed and sat down, staring thoughtfully across the room. I walked slowly and unobtrusively over to my pajama pants, making as little sound as possible, hooked them up with my foot, slipped out of my slacks, and got them on. I was hanging up the slacks when I heard Jan murmur, "Now I remember us," and I turned quickly to look at her. But she was smiling, nodding slowly. "Sort of," she added. "It was wild; my God..." She looked over at me, suddenly happy. "And you said it was wonderful. You said it was absolutely marvelous. Oh, Nickie, it's been a long time since you've said anything like that." I tried to smile, holding my breath. Her hands folded in her lap, Jan's face went thoughtful. "But it's as though ... it wasn't me. It was, of course, but..." She shook her head. "But it wasn't. I don't even know what I mean by that, but..." She shook her head again. "I remember us. Sort of. In little bits." She sat staring, then repeated firmly, stubbornly, "But it wasn't me." I just stood there across the room in my pajamas, waiting. Jan suddenly swung around to look at me, her eyes widening. "And it wasn't me last night! Dancing! Singing! Up there on the platform making a fool of myself! I'd never do that!" I thought about yelling, slumping to the floor, hopping around on one leg as though the other had a cramp, but I just stood hypnotized. Jan turned to face the wall again. Very slowly she said, "It wasn't me the night before that, either. Here. In bed. After Marion's movie." Moving as though in a trance, Jan stood up. Barely breathing the word, she whispered, "Marion . . . What you said downstairs in the car was, 'It was absolutely marvelous ... Marion.' " She yelled it. "You said 'MARION'! My God..." Abruptly she sat down. "She's been ... taking me over. Hasn't she! And you knew it. You knew it! Oh, Nickie," she wailed, "I never dreamed you'd be unfaithful to me!"

I lied. I ran to the bed, sat down beside her, an arm around her shaking shoulders, and listening to myself I sounded convincing because I began with the truth. "I didn't know, Jan! I came to bed after Marion's movie. You woke up, and ... I thought it was you! My God, why wouldn't I!" Under my arm the trembling stopped, she looked up, and I saw in her face the realization that that had to be true. Then the lie began. "Same thing the next night. After the party with the Hursts. I thought it was y—"

"Out in the open!? Parked in a car!? You thought that was me!?"

"Well, it sure as hell looked like you! And don't forget—we were drunk."

She thought, then shook her head, shrugging her shoulders out from under my arm. "But this morning you knew. Because downstairs in the car tonight you said, 'It was wonderful, Marion'! You're having an affair with her!"

"Oh, for cr—"

"Do you want a divorce?"

"Jan, for crysake! What for? To marry Marion?" Soothingly I said, "Baby, Baby, listen to me. Today I knew; yeah. But I didn't find out until ... during."

"Well!?"

"Well, what?"

"When you knew it wasn't me, why didn't you stop!"

"STOP!? My God ... what an inspiration. That idea is typical, absolutely typical of a hell of a lot that's wrong around here!"

She jumped to her feet, gripped the hem of Marion's dress with both fists, yanked, ripped it straight up the front, slipped it off, and—bursting into tears—began ripping it to shreds, and the lurking headache I'd had since morning roared up like a skyrocket.
 

Sunday morning when I came out to the kitchen, breakfast was cooking, and I smiled and said, "Morning," to Jan. But she only nodded, and didn't speak, didn't smile. During breakfast I let Al in to liven things up a bit, tossing him the occasional toast crust. As always with anything thrown to him, they fell to the floor or bounced off his nose, and he had to track them down, sniffing the floor like a bloodhound. Jan sat absolutely engrossed in the front page of the Sunday paper, and I began talking to her through Al: "Would you tell Jan to pass the sugar, Al? Thank you ... Ask Jan if she'd like some more of this absolutely delicious coffee; and help yourself, too, of course."

Pretty soon she smiled a little, and said to Al, "Tell him he can just help me clean the house today; it needs it!"

We got through the day then, with great politeness toward each other, a thorough reading of every last section of the Sunday paper, and in the afternoon, after the house was cleaned, Jan took a nap while I took a walk with Al.

But Monday night when I got home, she had drinks and a bowl of potato chips waiting on the living-room coffee table, and we sat down to them, on the chesterfield, our backs to Marion's wall. Jan said she'd been thinking things over, she understood that I'd been tricked, and that it wasn't fair to blame me. That's what she said, but her eyes didn't; not quite; not yet.

But at least we'd made up, officially, anyway, and Jan sat back with her drink, and in a parody voice and smile to match said, "Well, dear? And how was your day at the office?"

"Break a leg," I said amiably, then Al came wandering in to greet me and accept a few potato chips. "And how was your day, Al?" I said.

Jan said, "Busy; both the garbage man and gas man to bark at, all in one full rich day."

"Well, that's his job. Isn't it?" I said to Al. "Goes with the position of 'Dog.' He takes care of all the barking. Singlehanded. No one else ever helps or even offers, but he never complains." I'd leaned forward toward him, and though I'm pretty skilled at ducking, this time he got me right on the cheek with his tongue. Wiping my face with one of the little paper napkins Jan had set out, I said, "I hesitate to mention this, but where did you dogs ever get the idea that it's some kind of treat to be swiped over the face by a wet dog tongue? Five thousand years of domestication and you still haven't learned that it's no big deal. You don't see the cats doing that." His ears went up at "cats." "They're smart." I picked up a chip, and he sat staring at it. I gave it to him and said, "You know what I'm going to do with you, Buddy-boy? I'm shipping you to Denmark." He wiped his mouth daintily with his tongue and sat watching the potato-chip bowl. "They have an operation that will turn you into a cat." The ears rose, head cocking. "Yep. They'll trim those big, long, dingly-dangly, dopey-looking ears into the kind of nice, pointy, beautiful little ears that cats have." I tossed him another chip. "Teach you to walk fences—they use training wheels, at first, then it's up to you. And there's a crash course in meowing. Oh, you'll love being a cat!" I took one of his ears and slapped him softly in the face with it. "A duel, m'sieu?" and he exposed his teeth in a lazy token threat, tail going. I picked up a last potato chip and pointed to some crumbs he'd left on the floor. "Any more of that and I'm putting out a contract on you for a hit; understand?" I tossed the chip, it bounced off his nose, and he walked around sniffing, tracking it down—it was about a yard away—and Jan and I smiled at each other.

We talked. My vacation began next week, and for lack of anything special to do we'd decided to stay home; visit the museums, see a play that was supposed to be pretty good, try a couple restaurants we'd been told about. And there was still the spare bedroom to be painted. We had another drink, and Jan told me what Myrtle Platt had had to say that morning when they met at the mailboxes on the porch.

All in all we were pretty relaxed, yet at the same time we were tense and on guard, and we stayed that way all evening. Was Marion really gone? It looked like it, but still—in bed we didn't make up in the way that counts. Jan was afraid, she said, and I couldn't blame her. Talking in the darkness, we decided that on my vacation I'd also peel off Marion's wall.

Tuesday I got home a little late—some solemn foolishness at the office that could just as well have waited till morning or 2001. Jan was in the kitchen fixing dinner; I heard the sounds and walked straight back. First thing I said, passing through the doorway, was "Well?" and she knew what I meant. She shook her head, smiling, and held up a hand, fingers crossed: Marion hadn't returned. I kissed her hello, hugging her, working a free hand up under her skirt till I found something elastic to snap. Then I changed clothes, fixed drinks on the wooden drainboard, and we had them, Jan at the stove mostly, me leaning back against the sink.

I said, "Jan, how did you feel? About being ... taken over?" I thought we could talk about it now.

"Horrible." She had the oven door open and was poking with a fork at something that sizzled. "It was terrible, Nick," she said, still poking, then closed the door and stood up. "I was appalled." I nodded. Jan stood absently sipping her drink, staring down at Al, who sat fascinated by her stoveside activities. Then she shook her head and set her glass on the work counter next to the stove. "No," she said. "That isn't how I feel. It's how it seems to me I ought to feel, but I don't. It was sort of frightening." She stood thinking. "Sort of ... ghostly." She smiled at the word. "I only had glimpses of what she was doing, you know. Very dim, mostly. Like looking through a dozen layers of glass. And for only a moment now and then—when she got tired, I think, and had to let go for an instant."

"What were they like? Those occasional moments."

She thought about it, then smiled in surprise at her answer. "Interesting. Life can be a little dull at times, of course; anyone's can. And I have to admit, it was interesting to be—what would you say?— spliced right into someone else's mind and feelings. Someone all excited and pleased with practically everything she saw. It's fascinating to know, really know, Nick, how things seem through someone else's mind." She stood sipping from her glass, and looking—was I right about this? I wasn't sure—a little sad, and I had the sudden odd feeling that maybe something had gone out of her life. Absently sipping her drink, she stood staring at nothing, then her eyes focused on me, glaring angrily. "And she thought you were the bee's knees!" She swung away, stooping to yank open the oven door and jab at whatever was in there.

After a little of that she stood up, said she was sorry, and I smiled, said that was okay, and—well, we got through Tuesday.

Every other Wednesday Jan played bridge downstairs with Myrtle Platt and a couple of Myrtle's friends, and Al and I always helped with the dishes so she could get away early: Al by getting rid of scraps I tossed him while scraping plates for Jan to wash. She changed clothes then, went on downstairs, and I wandered the house a little, looking for something to read. A Blackhawk film catalog had come that day, and I sat down on the window seat—there was still some daylight—and marked a couple things I'd like sometime; for Christmas, maybe: the 1920 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, with Nita Naldi, my second-favorite-sounding silent-movie name—Lya de Putti being first—and maybe The Social Secretary, with Norma Talmadge and Erich von Stroheim.

I put the catalog down and for a few moments sat looking at Marion's wall. Marion Marsh lived here, I read once more, June 14, 1926, the back of the chesterfield cutting off the rest. Then I stood up, walked out to the kitchen and the phone, and dialed my dad's area code and number; it was about eight o'clock here, ten in Chicago. He answered right away, and we talked; every once in a while one or the other of us phoned, particularly when a letter was a bit overdue. He'd run into an old friend of mine in the Loop, Eddie Krueger, who'd been at our house a lot when I was in high school and when I'd come home during vacations from college, my mother still alive. "And," he said, "the weather's been lousy, but that's to be expected."

"Yeah. Something I wanted to ask you, Dad. Just idle curiosity, but I've been wondering about it."

"Shoot."

"Well. The Twenties. I've been wondering—"

"The what?"

"The Twenties; the Nineteen-Twenties."

"Oh, yeah; what about them?"

"Were they really as great as we're always reading? Were they actually all that different from now? Were the people different?"

There was a long pause. I was opening my mouth to speak again, not sure we were still connected, when my father answered. "Well, I've given that some thought myself. You have to make allowances for the fact that at least part of the Twenties were my twenties, too. I was young, carefree, and you tend to look back at your own youth through rose-colored glasses. And in general, we tend to remember what was good in the past and forget what was bad. We're propagandized about the Twenties, too; they've been glamorized. Allowing for all that, Nick, really considering those things and allowing for them—the answer is hell, yes. Ah, Nick, they were great. Such a different time, everything was different then. It was just a grand and glorious time to be alive and young in."

"Well, why? How?"

Again there was a pause. "I won't really be able to tell you that; things were so damn different. The times, the look of things, the country itself; hell, in the very way drugstores used to smell. And my God, yes, the people were different. We were dumber. Not nearly as smart as you. It never entered my head at twenty-one years of age to question the way things were. Any more than you'd question whether the sun should rise, or whether it ought to snow in winter. But it seems to me we were nicer. More tolerant; I don't remember the hatred there is now. We were more easygoing, more interested in things—we were livelier, damn it! We knew how to have fun! I think we knew what life was for. I can't really explain it, Nick. It was just a better time. I feel I was lucky to have been young in the Twenties. And I feel sorry for young people today. It's all so goddamn grim."

We talked a little more; I wondered what he'd say if I told him about Marion, but of course I didn't. When Jan came upstairs I was asleep; they'd played an extra rubber, she said at breakfast, and it turned out to be a long one.

Around ten o'clock Thursday evening, I put down a magazine and looked over at Jan, who was knitting something that was eventually supposed to turn into a sweater for me. I sat watching her, knowing factually that what she was doing would, in fact, result in a sweater. But emotionally it's always impossible for me to believe that twitching a pair of pointed sticks at a ball of continuous yarn will somehow turn it into a usable garment; what holds it together?

Jan knew I was looking at her, and pretended she didn't. She was wearing a plain white blouse and a black skirt, rather severe but she looked nice, very pretty. I said, "Jan," and she looked up, smiling brightly, needles poised. "If you'll excuse the saying, 'We can't go on like this.' "

"I know"—she looked quickly down at her knitting.

"Well, then, if I may offer a suggestion to a lady, why don't we skip merrily down to the bedroom, hand in hand, and fuck?"

She blushed freight-car red.

Jan and I must be the tag ends of the very last generation brought up as kids really believing there were "bad words." A lot of our friends are only a little younger, just a couple of years or so, but it seems to have been the dividing line, and they're able to say these words with ease. And while they're polite, well-bred people who wouldn't have men­tioned it if we'd never said them, still it would have been noticed. I've managed all right; I was in the Army, and as a child I was a boy. But Jan had a hell of a time. I learned—she confessed this—that she'd practiced at home. Washing the breakfast dishes, for example, alone in the house, she'd stand there, hands in the soapy water, working up her nerve, then take a deep breath and say, "Fuck!" She could tell it sounded all wrong at first, tense and strained, just not good enough for polite society. But she persevered, working it and the several other de rigueur words into casual sentences, practicing the way you would to perfect a French accent, until at last she could drop them into sentences with butter-smooth casualness, no hint of either emphasis or de-emphasis. Finally she tried it in what my father would call "mixed company" and it came out beautifully. She sounded to the manner born, the only trouble being that she turned brick-red and stayed that way for thirty minutes.

She was blushing now, but she nodded gamely. "Let me just finish this row."

When she came into the bedroom I was buttoning my pajama coat, scratching Al's ribs with my toes; he was lying on our furry bedside rug in his after-dinner coma. "Better cookie him out," Jan said.

I squatted beside him and tapped him on the shoulder. A brown eye opened slightly, and I made the umpire's out gesture, thumb jerking over shoulder, and the eye closed. "He says he doesn't care to go out."

"Well, he has to. Nickie ... I'm scared."

"Yeah. Me, too." I tapped Al's shoulder again; this time he didn't open an eye. "He claims he has as much right in here as anyone else. Says he's a human being, too."

"Well, tell him that people with hair on their eyelids aren't people at all. Are you really scared?"

"Yeah; I don't want her back either. But still—"

"I know. I know."

"You're not a human being at all. You're a dog! You think we can't tell?" I picked up Al's limp tail—"What about this?" I flipped up a long basset ear—"How do you explain that!" I tapped his black-rubber nose. "And this!" I picked up a paw. "And this: there are all kinds of clues; you can't fool us!" I looked up at Jan, who was unzipping the side of her skirt. "But if you'd really rather not."

"Oh, no! No. We can't. Just go on. Forever. Without."

Al was feebly wagging his tail, and I pointed. "That movement is final conclusive proof: you're a dog. Come on, get your cookie." He stood, yawning, stretching, smiled up at Jan, and followed me out and down the hall. When I came back Jan was in bed, sitting up, wearing the rigid smile of a determinedly happy corpse.

These weren't really ideal conditions for love-making, but we went at it—slowly; tentatively; bravely. It began to go a little better, then quite a lot better, then I gave Jan an extra-special kiss, and she returned a real post-office, special-delivery, registered-letter-with-return-receipt, and things were going fine. I said, "You're a filthy nasty girl, and I'm going to tell your mother."

"Go ahead; she'll never believe you."

I kissed her long and hard, Jan returning it. Then I rose up on one elbow and snapped on the light. Jan lay staring up at me, astonished. "Jan?"

"Yes, for heaven sakes!"

I snapped off the light, then snapped it right back on again. "Where were you born?"

"What?"

"Where were you—"

"Kankakee, Illinois! My God!"

I reached for the light, then paused. "What was your mother's name?"

"Sellers!"

I snapped off the light, Jan reaching for me in the darkness. My lips at her ear, I murmured, "What's your social-security number?"

Softly she said, "481-03-2660."

"Darling," I said, and Jan and I finally made up for real.
 

Friday at the office came and finally went, three long weeks of vacation stretching ahead. We weren't doing anything much with it, but it was still a vacation, and I came home ready to celebrate: we were going out to dinner with Fritz and Anita Kahler.

I got home, and Anita had phoned that afternoon: she was coming down with flu; we'd have to postpone going out. I didn't want to accept it, I didn't want to stay in for another evening, I wanted to do something to celebrate, I didn't know what. And finally we went to a movie.

There was nothing worth seeing; I read through every movie listing in the pink section, the entertainment section of the Sunday Chronicle, which we save to see what's doing in the week ahead, and not a movie in the entire city or suburbs was worth looking at, but we went anyway. To a Western I'd never heard of, which is rare for me, at the Metro on Union Street, and it was an enormous mistake.

I bought popcorn, really celebrating, but Jan didn't want any, and we sat watching the damn thing, a big wide-screen Technicolor job. I tried to interest myself in the scenery, at least, which was pretty spectacular. The accompanying music soared to frequent crescendos and sank to dramatic silences. Wind whistled through canyons, shots barked and pinged in dusty streets, hoofs pounded, wagon wheels creaked, and people of the Eighteen-Seventies, cleverly anticipating the idiom of today, said such things as, "Would you believe two hundred Indians?"

I sat recalling the names of minor actors and in what other pictures I'd seen them; no movie is entirely a waste of time for me. But when I glanced at Jan in the middle of the thing she was actually asleep, dozing chin on chest. I knew I shouldn't have dragged her to this, and if she'd been awake I'd have suggested leaving. But I now had a feeble interest in how the picture turned out, and she was sleeping peacefully, so we stayed. Later when I saw she was awake, I turned to ask if she wanted to go, but she seemed to be enjoying it now, smiling faintly, mouth slightly open to listen, so we stayed till the end.

The lights came up then, the sparse, scattered audience rising, and she turned to me. "How wonderful!" she said, and I smiled at the sarcasm.

"Yeah, great." I sat waiting for her to stand but she was staring at the empty white screen.

"That scenery!" she said, and I realized there was a note of excite­ment in her voice; the people moving slowly up the aisle beside us turned to stare. "The costumes!" she said, still looking at the screen. "And the color!" She swung to look at me. "Nickie, you bastard, why didn't you tell me movies were in color! And that the screen was so big!" She leaned toward me, eyes enormous, people in the aisles openly smiling, and her voice dropped to an awed whisper. "And that they talked. Oh, Nickie, I came back for one last look at the world, and it's lucky I did." Her voice rose again, excited and exuberant. "Imagine! You can actually hear what they say! Oh, boy. Oh, boy, oh, boy, oh, BOY!"

She blinked and glanced up at the empty screen. "Oh! Is the picture over?" She stood quickly, turning for her coat. "I'm sorry; I was asleep, I guess." Pushing an arm into her coat sleeve as we side-stepped toward the aisle, Jan said quietly, "Terrible, wasn't it? But you know some­thing?" She took my arm as we turned toward the exit. "I have that same kind of glow you get sometimes when you've just seen a marvelous movie."
 

It was doubly a sleep-late morning—not only Saturday, but the first day of vacation besides—and I did my best. Eyes still closed, I lay telling myself I was drowsy and would go right back to sleep, but behind the eyeballs, I was wide awake. Because I knew.

There was no sound in the bedroom, I realized then; no movement, no presence beside me, and my eyes snapped open, head turning to look at Jan's empty side of the bed, the covers tossed back. Then I sat up fast, looking beyond the bed at the floor. Everywhere I looked fragments of cloth lay on the floor, their edges fuzzed with unraveled thread: Jan's good black dress torn into dozens of fragments.

Dressing as fast as I could go, I said, "Damn. Goddamn!" but I heard the false vehemence in my voice, and for a moment stood motionless. Then I nodded, finally admitting it to myself: I'd missed Marion. I'd missed her all week long; it wasn't anything I could control.

I'll say this for myself. Grabbing the first shirt I could find, a white one, buttoning only every other button; snatching a pair of tan wash pants; stepping barefoot into a pair of moccasin loafers—I had the grace not to try and blame Jan. It just took someone else, apparently, someone as wild and exuberant as Marion, to bring out what was undoubtedly not the real me at all but someone else who had a hell of a lot better time. I didn't like it, didn't like the implication, didn't want to think about it; it made me sad; that was how I wanted to feel about Jan.

The house was silent in the way a house never is if anyone else is in it. But as I stood buckling my belt, I heard the lower door open, heard her footsteps coming up, and I walked out into the hall to the head of the stairs.

A blond Valkyrie was coming up them, wearing Jan's black slacks and turtle-neck sweater. She looked up at me, smiled, and patted her hair. "Fake. And cheap. But at least it's not mouse color. Bought it at the salon on Haight Street; Jan has a charge. Hope you don't mind." She stepped up beside me. "Welcome me back, Nickie." She kissed me on the forehead, brushed past, and walked on into the living room.

"You weren't coming back!" I followed her. "You said you weren't coming back!"

She swung around, her face going hard. "Can that! All bets are off. They're in color now! On a big wide screen. And they t—" She cut herself off, then grinned. "Hey, they aren't movies, any more, are they? They don't just move, they ... Hey, Nick! They're talkies!" She turned to look at the wall over the chesterfield, then walked toward it, reading aloud. " 'Marion Marsh lived here, June 14,1926.' " She looked over her shoulder at me to nod. "That's the day I should have gone to Hollywood. With Nick Cheyney." She looked back at the wall, blond head nodding in agreement with what she was saying. "I'd have had a career. A great one. As big as Joan Crawford's." Absorbed in her own vision, she turned away. "That's how it was meant to be," she said vehemently, nodding again. Then more quietly, "And that's how it's going to be." She looked up at me. "I'm going to have my career." Suddenly she grinned. "In color and sound."

I walked toward the window seat, pointing at the chesterfield, and after a moment she sat down. On the window seat I leaned forward, forearms on knees, and clasped my hands. "Listen. All your life you acted on impulse, and what happened? It finally got you killed. Well, nothing's changed. Your old picture shows up on television over half a century later, you come back to see it, and on pure impulse make a grab for me just because I look like your old flame. But all that does is cause trouble, and you find out that everything's changed since your day anyway. You see that it has! You know it's no use! But you get a glimpse of a lousy movie in sound and bad color, and whammo—you're back once more to pick up your old career, not a thought in your head about how. Do you ever think, goddamn it!"

I'd reached her; I could see it. She didn't have an answer, and for a moment or two, face sullen, she was silent. Then all she could think of was "Sez you."

"Tell me how then."

Again she had to hunt for a reply; then defiantly she said, "I had friends in Hollywood."

"In 1926, Marion! They're gone now. Dead."

"Baloney! The people I knew weren't stars, they were kids! Like me." She thought for a moment. "Like the prop boy on Flaming Flappers, Hugo Dahl! He was only seventeen, third assistant prop boy or some­thing." She jumped up and walked quickly toward the bookshelves. I keep a few out-of-town directories I've stolen from hotels on the living-room shelves: a two-year-old Manhattan directory, one from Portland, Oregon, the three main Los Angeles books, another from Reno. Marion took down the one with BEVERLY HILLS on the spine, and standing at the shelves she hunted through the D's, pages flying. Her finger moved down a column, backtracked, stopped, then she looked up at me triumphantly. "And he's still there. He'll help me," she said compla­cently, clapping the book shut, putting it back. "He had a crush on me."

"Jesus, Marion, he's not seventeen now, he's in his seventies!" I said pleadingly. "Probably retired, and long since out of pictures."

"Maybe. And maybe not."

"Okay, it doesn't matter, because look: the longest you've ever pos­sessed Jan is a few hours. It takes something, doesn't it? Psychic energy or whatever you want to call it." She didn't answer, just looked sullen again. "And you run out of it, don't you. Then you've got to let go, and Jan is back: right?"

"Maybe."

"Maybe, hell. You wouldn't even get to Hollywood before Jan would take over again and come right back home. And if you did get there, she could do ten thousand things to wreck any comeback before it ever got started."

For a good dozen seconds she sat glowering at the floor, then looked up. "She ought to let me go!" she burst out.

"Let you? Just hand over a ... chunk of her life? To you? Why the hell would she!"

Marion muttered something, refusing to look at me.

"What?"

"I said I didn't mean forever!"

"Oh? Just how long did you have in mind?"

"I don't know. Exactly." She looked at me, head cocking shrewdly, like someone testing out an offer. "A few years maybe?"

I laughed, and she blew up.

"All right, one year, for crysake!" She jumped up from the chester­field, arms folding tensely across her stomach, hands clasping elbows as though she were cold. And in her blond wig, artificial though it looked, in the black slacks and sweater Jan hardly ever wore, and in the fierce expression of her face as she began walking up and down the living room, she didn't look like Jan at all. "I don't know how long it'll take!" she said. "What the hell does it matter anyway! What does she do with her punk little life? Nothing! Good night; she even plays bridge!"

I just shook my head. "Jesus ... You're completely ruthless, aren't you? Completely."

"You don't know your onions!" She flicked me a contemptuous glance. "I'm no more ruthless than anyone else would be. Who felt the way I do." She walked over to stand facing me, leaning belligerently forward. "That's what you don't understand: the way I feel. You've thought about Jan. Thought about yourself. Think about me!" She stared at me for a moment longer, then turned away again, walking the room. "I lost everything," she murmured, to herself as much as to me, "The most anyone could lose. Most of a life that would have been wonderful." She turned to me again, pleading now. "I'm asking for a gift. Of just a little of it back. Make her do it, Nickie!"

After a moment—what else could I do?—I just shook my head helplessly, and she turned abruptly away. I sat watching her walk slowly around the room: absently touching a lampshade, feeling the material between thumb and forefinger; picking up an ashtray, glancing at the inscription on the bottom, setting it down; stopping to look at a picture; walking on. "Punk taste," she muttered once. "Everything dull. Afraid of colors."

She walked out to the hall and back. To the front windows, where she looked past me down at the street, then turned away again. "Pacing restlessly," I said to myself, then realized that was only a phrase, and wasn't true; she was calm enough. I've watched a zoo tiger glide endlessly around and around the limits of his cage, eyes no longer even seeing the curious changing crowd outside it. And realized that he's not restless but everlastingly patient. He doesn't know what he's waiting for. But when and if it finally happens he'll recognize it: the latch left unfastened one day; the grating gradually weakened by unnoticed rust.

Marion was simply wandering the house waiting for whatever might happen next; we'd said all there was to say. I watched her; my wife's face under the absurd blond wig, but not her. Not Jan but Marion Marsh, who might have become a star of the silents. She'd been down there! Actually been in Hollywood in the far-off, almost mythical days of the silents. I said "Marion, did you ever see any of the stars?"

She nodded. "Lon Chaney; once."

"No kidding? Where?"

"On a studio street. At lunchtime. I was on my way to buy a box lunch at the canteen, and I cut through an alley between buildings." She stopped before me, and I crossed my legs, looking up at her, listening. "And there he came around the corner walking right toward me. They were making a picture; he was in full make-up and looked absolutely horrible. He had a scar down across his left eyebrow, and his eye was dead white."

"Singapore Joe! He was in his Singapore Joe make-up for Road to Mandalay!"

"Did you see it?"

"No, I'd sell my soul for a print; I've only read about it. His eye was covered with the skin from an egg."

"How do you know?"

"I collect old films, not that I have much: The Mark of Zorro, Broken Blossoms. A couple serial chapters. Some early newsreel footage. But I know a lot about them, and they say that egg skin permanently injured Chaney's sight."

"Well, it looked just awful, Nickie." She sat down beside me. "He saw I was a little scared, just the two of us alone in that narrow alley. And as he came close, he deliberately closed his other eye so there was only that one white eye just staring at me! I let out a little shriek, and he grinned, closed the white eye, and just as we passed he winked at me with the good one. He was really a very nice man, you know; everyone said so. Actually kind of good-looking, in a tough kind of way."

"Lord; to have actually seen Lon Chancy. In his makeup for Road to Mandalay." I was smiling, shaking my head. "Who else did you see?"

"Oh ... Laura La Plante."

"You did?"

"Yeah. She was filming on the set next to ours. And when they didn't need me on our set I'd go next door and watch."

I nodded; in silent-film days, noise didn't matter, and they often filmed pictures side by side on adjoining sets. "What was the picture?"

"I don't remember."

"You don't remember!"

"No." She glanced at me curiously.

"Well, what were some of the scenes? I might recognize it from that."

"Oh, Nickie, what's the diff! She was in a kitchen fixing dinner or something. It was Laura La Plante I wanted to see."

"Well, how was she?"

She shrugged. "Okay. But I was better." She saw me smile, and smiled, too. "I know. It sounds conceited. And is. But it's also true: I was far better. Still am. And still will be."

"You ever know any stars?"

"Yes. Well, not really, not very well. But I did get to know Valentino a little; he was on a set next to mine once, too, and we talked a little, two, three times."

"My God: Valentino. What did you talk about?"

"Oh..." She frowned, looking down at the floor. Then she looked up. "About how proud the people of his village were of him, some Italian village. I think he was really a very simple man. And a very nice one. To me, anyway."

I sat shaking my head. "You actually knew Valentino. I can't get over it. There's a picture of his playing now at the Olympic. The Four Horsemen. I've seen it twice."

"You really are a movie nut, aren't you. I knew a man at Paramount who collected films, too. Stole them, actually."

"What?"

"Yeah. He worked in whatever you'd call it—the distribution depart­ment. He was just a shipping clerk, actually; he'd pack prints of the new films and ship them to distributors. A dozen to New York maybe, half a dozen to Chicago, a couple to Milwaukee, and so on. It was a punk job, and didn't pay much, but he was a movie nut, too. So was I. So were most of us. We were all crazy about movies; being in them, being connected with them. One time—"

"Wait a second: what about this guy who collected films?"

"I told you. He was crazy about movies, but he knew he couldn't ever be in them; he had a snub nose, turned way up. I didn't really like looking at him, though he was nice, and liked me a lot. Pictures he liked, he'd keep, that's all; just order an extra print and take it home with him."

I was slowly standing, turning to face her. I could feel the excitement welling up and tried to stop it: it seemed to me I had to be very careful somehow, or everything I was hearing would break up and fade away like a dream you can't recall any more. "Marion. Listen. What kind of films did he like?"

She shrugged, then turned away, thinking. "Oh..." She looked at me again. "Griffith's, for one. You know; the director? D. W. Gr—"

"Yes! I know."

"Well, he had all his films, I remember; all the features."

"All?" I said softly. I felt my knees go momentarily weak and fluid. "All of D. W. Griffith's features? Oh, Jesus. Do you know that several of them are gone now? Lost! Not a copy known to exist anywhere in the world! And he had them ... all?"

"Yes." She sat looking up at me wonderingly.

"What else? Marion, what else did he have?"

"Nickie, I don't know. Lots of pictures. He traded prints with friends in the same job at other studios."

"Oh, my God." I sat down beside her, then stood right up again. "Where, for example?"

"Well, he had a buddy at Universal he traded w—"

"Universal! NO! Listen, there was a fire at Universal! After your time. Hundreds of absolutely priceless films lost! Fabulous films! Mythical films now!" I stood blank-faced for a moment, staring down at her. "And he had some of them. To think he once had them. Listen, when was this?"

"Nineteen-twenty-six."

"And how old was he then?"

"Oh ... thirty."

I did the arithmetic, then shook my head. "Be dead by now. Maybe not, though; maybe not. What was his name?" I swung around, ran to the bookshelves, grabbed up the three Los Angeles books, and hurried back to the window seat. "What was his name, Marion? He just might be alive, just might be in here!" I sat down, the three books in my lap, BEVERLY HILLS on top.

"You know, when I was down there, there was only one phone book, and it wasn't any bigger—"

"Marion!" She shut up. "What ... was ... his ... name?"

"I can't remember."

"YOU CAN, TOO, REMEMBER!"

"Well, wait a second! Good night, Nurse! It was an unusual last name. And a short first name. Dick? No, not Dick—he was that tall electrician—but something like that." She sat frowning. "Norman? No, that was that dark young carpenter. And Ned Berman was a cameraman—"

"Didn't you know any women, for crysake!"

"I don't remember them as well. I'll think of this in a minute; quit interrupting."

I sat trying to wait, but I was so excited I had to jump up and go to the bathroom, but I hurried back. She was still frowning, staring at the floor, lower lip between her teeth. "Did you think of it?" I stopped before her.

"No, not yet. What's all the excitement, Nick? I know you're inter­ested in movies, but so am I, and I don't get all—"

" 'Interested'?" I had to laugh at the word. "Oh, boy. If you'd ever collected anything—You never did, did you?"

"Just men." She was smiling up at me, pleased as always at any excitement. "Why?"

I couldn't stand still. Hands jamming into my back pockets, I began walking up and down before her, fast. "Listen, if you're a collector, you always have your—what?—your Holy Grail. A manuscript collector probably pictures himself in the back of some run-down, out-of-the-way secondhand bookstore. Finding a bundle of old papers at the back of a bottom shelf in a dark corner behind some books, where it's been for years. He unties it and looks through old paper after useless old paper And then—down in the middle of the bundle—there it is. His hands start shaking because there under his eyes at last is the tiny handwriting he has so often studied in reproductions of the man's signature. Just his signature, the only specimen of that handwriting ever before found. Kept under glass and permanent guard in the British Museum. Worth a million dollars, they think, if it were ever sold. Yet now"—I was listening to myself, enjoying my own eloquence, and Marion sat grinning—"now here is page after page of that tiny, rusty-inked handwriting. With notes in the margins! And then, then ... far into this long handwritten script, he finds a speech. The first words have been crossed out, but he can read them. And they say"—I stood thinking—"they say 'To exist or die is my dilemma,' and there's a pen stroke through them. And just above them in even smaller letters is written for the first time in the world, in the author's own handwriting ... 'To be or not to be: that is—' "

She burst out laughing, and I grinned. "All right. Okay. I went too far, it's ridiculous. Only not quite, Marion. Just barely not quite. The unknown Rembrandt hanging on the wall of a Goodwill Thrift Shop marked four and a half bucks has been found. So was a secondhand metal teapot marked seventy-five cents, and also marked on the bottom in lettering so small and tarnished that everyone else missed it ... P. Revere, Silversmith. A little book was picked up out of a ten-cent sidewalk bin. Printed in Boston in 1827, according to the title page, which also read, Tamerlane and Other Poems, by Edgar A. Poe! The almost impossible dream is why you collect. And you want to know what mine is?"

She nodded, smiling.

"All the reels ... all forty-two incredible reels of Erich von Stroheim's lost masterpiece ... Greed."

"He had them."

"You don't know what you're talking about!"

"I do too! I remember that picture; everyone in San Francisco was talking about it! They filmed it here, and I watched some of it! Finally Von Stroheim finished it, and it was dozens and dozens of reels long; and they cut it way down. That was at ... M-G-M!"

I nodded, barely breathing the word—"Yes. They cut it to only ten reels. And even some of those are lost now. Marion"—I squatted down before her, looking up at her face, almost whispering—"are you sure you remember? That he had all forty-two reels?"

"Of course; he talked about it. He'd had to trade three Paramount features to get them all. But he got them."

I got up, sat down beside her, and took her hand between mine, looking into her eyes. "Then, Marion," I said gently, "do you understand now? Do you understand why you have got to remember his name?"

She nodded. "Yes. I understand. How you feel." She yanked her hand away and jumped up. "Why don't you understand how I feel!" She stood glaring down at me, then her expression changed. "Listen, the theater, whatever it is, where they're showing The Four Horsemen..."

"The Olympic; it's an old movie house."

"Do they have matinees?"

"Today; Saturday? Yeah, every weekend."

"Take me to see it." I started to say something, and she almost screamed at me. "Nickie, don't argue! I'm sick of it! Just do it!"

"I was going to say yes."

I gave Al a couple of bone-shaped dog biscuits, the kind he doesn't much like to eat but loves to bury, and gave his tail a little yank. Then I drove Marion to the Olympic.

It's a fine old theater. I think it must date from the Twenties itself, and they run a complete old-time program, including organ accompaniment. They get good sharp prints, and the pictures are taken seriously. We bought popcorn, which they sell in old-fashioned candy-striped bags, and sat down. There was a pretty good house for a matinee, but we found two together at the side.

The lights went down, the organ began, the old red-velvet curtains parted and rolled squeakily back, and a Pathe News came on, a rooster crowing soundlessly before the trademark. To appropriate organ music, we watched a forgotten horse race. We saw an equally forgotten senator from Oklahoma waving from the back of a train; a caption told us that he'd just come out foursquare and courageously against repeal of the Volstead Act. And we watched a chimp on a bicycle.

A sing-along next, the words of "Rose Marie" sliding up from the bottom of the screen line by line, the organ playing the tune as a moving white ball touched each word or syllable as it was to be sung. Not many people joined in, but Marion did, loud and clear, and of course I had to join her, sliding down in my seat a little. But then eight or ten others came in, and some more after that. And after a half dozen lines of "Rose-ma Reeee, yiii luh vue ... Rose-ma Reeee, mide ear," it turned into fun, both of us belting out those fine poetic lyrics, and I was a little sorry when it ended.

Title and credits for The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse came on, and we settled down to watch it. I was a little bored at first—I'd seen it twice before—but pretty soon it caught me, and I was enjoying it again. The Four Horsemen is the Valentino with the famous tango sequence, a big scene and a fine one. At tables surrounding the dance floor of an Argentinian cafe, dozens of spectators sit watching Rudolph Valentino, in gaucho costume as Julio, dance with Helena Domingues in a Spanish outfit, including a long-fringed shawl.

Valentino holds her romantically close, bending her far back, leaning over her to gaze deep into her eyes, and you can watch it for laughs or you can enjoy it. I sat enjoying it; I get bored with the idiots at silent-film showings who demonstrate their deep sophistication to the rest of the audience with constant guffaws. The old acting conventions and the stories can be foolish, but look past them and you can often see a lot worth watching.

This was worth watching. It's a great dance scene—Valentino was a professional before he got into pictures—and the organist was really fine, as he generally is at the Olympic, his tango perfectly synched with their movements, as good as sound-on-film.

It seems strange to me yet that I instantly recognized what began happening to me then, though it wasn't really strange: more than once I'd sat listening to Jan hunting for words to describe it. This was almost a physical sensation as though—if you can possibly imagine a sensation like this—someone had sat down in the same seat with me, pushing steadily toward me yet somehow without crowding. So that suddenly we were occupying the same space. All in one swift, smooth gliding motion I was taken over: literally "possessed."

My own self immobilized then—helpless and dwindling—I was some­how put aside, pushed off into a remote corner of my own being. I still knew what impulses were coming through my senses. For a few moments longer I knew what messages my eyes and ears were receiving—but remotely and from a great and increasing distance, like a child drifting rapidly to sleep. Within two seconds, three at most, I was very nearly completely gone, huddled up somewhere far inside myself, as Rudolph Valentino took over almost completely.

At intervals then—sensed like a very sleepy child, or a child in fever— the hold over my being would relax for a moment or half moment. Almost instantly the grip would tighten down again with fresh strength, but in that instant I'd have a fragmentary glimpse of what he was seeing, hearing, and feeling, and the memory of those moments can shake me yet.

Because what he was seeing, not only in but beyond the shifting blacks, whites and grays of that square old screen up on the dusty stage of the Olympic—and what he felt—were more than anyone else ever could. Sitting bolt upright, far forward in the seat, hands clenched to chest, chin lifted, he saw not only the visible flickering screen. Beyond its edges in his memory a narrow-eyed director in cloth cap and holding a short megaphone stood watching. The eye of a camera on its wooden tripod followed his movement, the man behind it standing bent-kneed, eye pressed hard against the viewfinder; he wore knickers, a white shirt and tie, and his right fist revolved in a rigidly steady motion as he cranked the film the Olympic audience sat watching now. Behind the camera, a knot of bystanders and studio technicians, two of them in overalls, one holding a hammer. And at a piano, playing the tango to which they danced, a man in a vest and, oddly, a wide-brimmed felt hat. Sitting motionless staring up at the screen, he saw all these things in memory. And above all, he felt still another memory: the skyrocketing surge of triumph at the beautiful knowledge, even as he danced, that this scene was going to be great.

Sudden nothingness then. Pure nothingness; not even emptiness. Then another drugged, half-glimpsed moment: the magnificent tango up on the screen was ending. Cut to another scene, other characters, and in the instant of that cut, a rush of feeling. It was a wave of despair so bleak that I would not convey it in all its strength if I could. It was total: an unbearable horror of longing, the very worst of all—the hopeless yearning for what might have been.

In the eyes of the face still lifted to the screen, tears began to well. They brimmed, dashed down my cheeks, and Marion's hand reached out to lie on my arm. "I'm sorry, Rudy," she whispered, "so very sorry. But he had to know. Thanks."

My head nodded, my hand reached over to lie on hers for an instant, then Valentino was gone, and I sat staring blindly up at the screen knowing what I didn't want to know: the enormity of the loss when a life, talent and career are cut short. Human ego is staggeringly immense, and with the exception, of course, of national politicians, greater self-love hath no man than an actor. For Rudolph Valentino, only thirty-one years old, decades of world-wide fame and adulation stretched far, far ahead. Suddenly and senselessly all of it is lost. Cut off! Gone! It simply wasn't bearable.

"Now do you understand?" Marion was watching me, and I blinked, managed to nod, then swiped the back of my hand across my eyes.

"Yes. Oh, Jesus. Let's get out." I was standing, pushing out to the aisle past six knees, two beards, and a pair of metal-rimmed glasses reflecting the screen, Marion following.

Driving home, I had the top down, letting the foggy late-afternoon San Francisco air cool my face. I didn't say anything till we sat stopped for a light a couple of blocks from home. "That poor son of a bitch," I said softly then. "The poor cheated bastard. All he yearned for was his lost career. I don't think he gave even one thought to The Woman in Black."

"Who?"

"The veiled mystery woman all dressed in black who visited his grave every year. Some years there were four or five of them."

She wasn't listening. The light changed, I started up, and she mur­mured, "Sooner or later everyone loses his life, and it's not too bad, really. Once it happens most people don't seem to mind very much. But for the few of us who had something tremendous cut short..." She just shook her head. "I really had to show you, Nickie. And even now you don't really know. Because Rudy doesn't feel the way I do; he's never had the will to do what I'm doing! He's accepted it."

I turned onto Divisadero, then slowed at the curb before my house, stopped, turned off the ignition, pulled the hand brake up tight, and Marion put a hand on my arm. "Help me, Nickie. You've got to."

"But how, Marion, how?"

"Make Jan see that she ought to! Just for a year. Or six months. Even for just one more picture! It's a better use of a little part of her life than she's making of it: make her see that, Nickie. Please. Please."

I leaned forward and sat with my arms crossed on the big old steering wheel, staring through the windshield at the motionless street. It seemed true; it did seem true that Marion actually needed a small part of Jan's life more than Jan did. But ... I looked at Marion and shook my head. "It's not right, Marion. To talk Jan or anyone into giving up a part of her life."

"Just talk to her! Just tell her what happened today. Tell her how you felt. And let her decide. You can talk to her, at least!"

After a moment or so I nodded and shrugged. "Yeah, I can do that. But then it's up to her."

"All right. You talk to her." Marion leaned back to rest her head on the leather seat back, staring up at the wispy fog moving across the darkening sky. "By the way," she said lazily, "I remembered that name."

My head jerked around and I stared at her, but she didn't move. Still staring dreamily up at the sky, she said absently, "Hours ago, in fact. Up in the apartment. I looked it up in the L.A. phone book while you were in the bathroom." She rolled her head to look sideways at me, face and eyes innocent. "It's there, Nickie, darling. The man with the films is still alive. And I'm absolutely certain he'd still have them." She looked up at the sky again. "So come on down to Hollywood with me and you and I can go see him. I'll tell you his name"—she turned to smile at me again, sweetly, lovingly—"after we're down there. After you've talked to Jan."

She closed her eyes, took a slow deep breath, then another, and her eyes opened. "Oh, God—again." Jan sat looking around at where she was, and I spoke fast.

"Listen, all we did was go to the movies!"

She nodded and pressed a finger to her forehead. "I know; I always get this little pressure headache from movies in the daytime. Besides, that's so ridiculous I know it's true." She frowned; her hand on her forehead had felt something. The hand moved up, touched, then gripped the blond wig. She yanked it off and sat staring at it. "What the hell is this?"

"Come on upstairs"—I leaned over to open her door—"I've got a lot to tell you."
 

We took Al for a walk, Jan changing clothes first; she didn't like the black slacks and sweater outfit. Walking into the bedroom, she stopped short, looked around at the torn fragments of black cloth lying all over the floor, and surprised me. "Maybe she's right," she murmured, and changed to her orange dress, the brightest she owned.

We walked Al to the schoolyard three blocks away; he likes that because there are usually kids who flatter him, play with him, and occasionally feed him candy. Not a soul there today, though, so Al made the best of it, counting the swings, teeter-totters, and the one lone tree. Sitting on the wide edge of the big kindergarten sandbox while Al roamed around, I talked to Jan.

Very factually, I told her what Marion wanted and what had happened to me at the Olympic. She sat listening so intently she hardly moved. Then for a good half minute she was silent. "Would you do it?" she burst out suddenly, almost angrily. "Would you give up part of your life for—say, Valentino?"

"Well ... I don't know about Valentino. Maybe for Cary Grant."

"He doesn't need it, for heaven sakes! Nick, I know how Marion feels; in the same way you found out, little glimpses now and then. I never dreamed anyone could want something so badly, and yet—you know something? I almost envy her sometimes: I wish I wanted something that much. You know what I mean?"

"Yeah. When my father was a young guy just out of school, he wanted a job. You know why? So he could 'make good.' He got one here in San Francisco with a wholesale food distributor. Working long hours in a warehouse loading delivery trucks. Really hard work, and for damn little money. But it suited him. Because it gave him a chance to 'show what he was made of.' Well, I know better than that. Who believes such stuff today? Nobody, and we're right; they were only exploiting him. But the thing is that I almost envy the way people once felt about things, falsely or not. Because I don't have anything to take its place. And neither do you. So yeah, I know what you mean."

"Tell me what to do, Nick! And I'll do it. If you say I ought to, I will! Maybe my dumb little life isn't important, doesn't matt—"

"Hey, don't say that!" I put an arm around her shoulders and squeezed her knee. "What do you mean, a 'dumb little life'? It's no such—"

"Oh, yes, it is," she said quietly. "It's a little nothing life. I think I've really done something if I try a new recipe and you like it. Or decorate a room the way some magazine tells me. Or even read all the way through a hard book."

I talked and argued, trying to comfort her, and she nodded and pretended that she was. We called Al then, snapped on his leash, and started home. It was still day, but the late-afternoon fog had whitened the sky, and it was suddenly chilly.

"Tell me what to do, Nick," she said again, walking home, but I shook my head.

"Nope. You have to decide that."

A few more steps, and she said, "All right. But tell me what you'd do. You can tell me that much."

It seemed to me I was thinking honestly. And I believed that if it were me, I would do it. So I nodded presently and said, "Yeah. I think I would."

"Then I will. I'll give her"—she hesitated, then finished almost angrily—"a couple of weeks, that's all. To get started. Then we'll see how long after that. Nick, is that fair?"

"It sure as hell is. Look, give her a full two weeks, and if nothing's happened, that's it; we'll drive home then, during the third week of my vacation. Take our time."

"Oh. You're going, too?"

I felt my face flush; it hadn't occurred to me that I wouldn't. "Well, yeah. You don't think I'd ... leave you there alone? You'll be there part of the time, you know. By yourself, if I'm not along."

"All right. But you know, I can force her out sometimes; I've learned how, and I've done it. It's like a little struggle, and sometimes I've been able to ... just push her out. She knows it. So you tell her that I'm to be there every evening, from the moment she gets back to the hotel! And all night, every night. Or I just might show up in the middle of her comeback and cut it off at the knees."

"Good idea, damn good."

At home we fed Al, then went out to dinner; neither of us felt like dinner at home. I was depressed, I wasn't sure why, and I thought maybe Jan was, too. We walked down toward Haight and a little restaurant I find charming because it's so cheap; "our neighborhood Up-Chuck Wagon," as I've been forbidden to call it. And as we walked, a true story I'd once read rose up in my mind.

A man was murdered, for no apparent reason, in his apartment. Left in it were money, jewelry, various valuables, including a stamp collection. But nothing seemed to be missing; a mystery. One of the detectives, it happened, was a stamp collector. He leafed through the murdered man's albums and found a page of rare stamps, the early Hawaiian issues, every one except the two cent. He knew what the other cops didn't; that stamp was the rarest of all the Hawaiians. He checked through the dead man's friends till he found another stamp collector. Then he made the man's acquaintance. Presently they became friends. And finally, one night, the man showed the detective his pride and joy, a collection of the early Hawaiian stamps, complete. Where had he found the two-cent stamp? He wouldn't say. He was arrested, charged with murder, and still wouldn't explain; couldn't. He was tried, convicted, and then he con­fessed; his friend had refused to sell him that stamp, the one stamp he needed to make his collection complete. So he murdered him and stole it, murdered his friend for a canceled two-cent stamp.

Walking along with Jan toward Haight Street, I told myself that a jury of that man's peers—twelve other collectors—would have acquitted him, but it didn't help. Why hadn't I told Jan about the man in Hollywood who just might have a stunning collection of incredibly rare old films? Why not? Had I really been honest in nudging her down the path of letting Marion have her chance ... in order that I could go along? Was I selling my wife—down south!—for the bare chance of somehow getting my hands on a mess of footage? "My God," I thought, "I'm living the script of an old silent: the film I want ... is Greed!"

So at dinner I told her about it; showed her how doubtful my motives really were. And Jan said, "I'm so relieved, Nick. I was afraid you wanted to go down there just to be with Marion!" And all of a sudden I felt great, and expansively ordered a carafe of the mysterious muddy red liquid that the Up-Chuck Wagon calls wine. Raising our glasses in salute, we drank, mouths shriveling, eyes wincing shut, and I found myself wondering if going down to Hollywood with Marion wasn't my real reason, my real real reason. To hell with it, I said, and bravely refilled our glasses. Later, for the first time in my life, I worked up the nerve to ask for a "doggy bag" so that old Al could join the festivities.

In the morning, packing, Jan was a little grim, but if she felt like changing her mind, and I think she was tempted, she didn't, and we were ready by eight. She wore a pink washable dress, her cloth coat, and a scarf for her hair in case we drove with the top down. I had on tan wash pants, loafers, sport shirt, and a sleeveless sweater.

Last thing I did was carry a carton of dog food down to the Platts' back porch; they'd said they'd take care of Al. And when Al came trotting up onto their porch to investigate, I explained what was going on. I'm not at all sure they don't get something from an explanation, whether they understand every word or not.

Squatting beside him, I rubbed his ears, occasionally pulling up the great wad of loose skin around his shoulders and neck; bassets seem to come equipped with twice the skin they need. I said, "Listen. It's not true that you've been fired from the position of Dog; you have tenure. And it's not true that you're adopted either; you're our real son. Now, we are going away for a while, but we'll be back. And the Platts will minister to your physical if not your spiritual needs. So don't worry; okay?" He wagged his tail and, I'm inclined to think, nodded. I pulled up an enormous handful of skin from around his shoulders. "I don't know where you got this crummy dog suit, by the way, but it's sure a lousy fit." He tried for my ear with his tongue, but I took evasive action. "And when I get back I'd like to see you in something newer and smarter; nobody wears long ears any more." He looked interested. "Next time why not try a poodle suit? They're pretty smart. The kind with rings around the ankles and tail? Have them shorten the legs, though." I stood up. "Now, remember, we'll be back, we'll be back. Meanwhile, play your cards right and you can con the Platts out of all sorts of forbidden delicacies." I leaned down and punched him on the shoulder, which is stronger and more massive than mine, and went up to take our bags to the car.

We didn't know when Marion would show up, but she arrived when we were leaving. I was coming down the stairs with our bags, Jan behind me with her keys out to lock up after me, when I heard her turn and go back up as though she'd forgotten something. When I looked up from the canvas-covered trunk on the rear bumper where I was stowing the bags, she was coming down the steps, both arms raised, elbows winged out, adjusting the blond wig. And it suddenly struck me that I was actually about to drive down to Hollywood with the ghost of a 1926 movie actress. I must have stood staring at her then because she walked around the front of the car, opened her door, then stopped to look back at me. "Come on, Nickie; step on it! We're forty-seven years late."

Only a couple of things of any note happened on the drive down: it's a long haul for one day, the old Packard isn't actually the easiest car to drive for any distance, and I didn't talk a lot. I asked Marion right away if she agreed to Jan's terms and she said yes. Then I asked her the name of the man with the films, the astounding collection of old silent films— if he still had it; if they still existed.

"Bollinghurst," she said. "His name is Ted Bollinghurst." It was just a name, but my stomach tensed; I could feel the excitement rising again, and I knew that name was etched in my mind forever. "He lives at 1101 Keever Street in Beverly Hills, according to your phone book. And that's all I know, Nick. I don't know whether he still has his films or anything else about him."

Marion chattered a lot from then on, pointing out changes. There were plenty of them since 1926, and I mostly just nodded and listened. For lunch we pulled into a drive-in, and Marion loved it, insisting on leaning over to my side to give our order through the standing micro­phone: milk shakes for both of us, cheeseburger for me, hamburger for her, with everything. She sat back, then frowned, and leaned across me again. "Hold the onions on the hamburger!" she said into the micro­phone, then smiled at me wanly. "Hi, Nick," she said, and I patted her knee quickly, while she was still there; Jan gets indigestion from onions.

The only other thing that happened is that I found myself struggling with the big wooden steering wheel, the speedometer at 65, which is very, very fast for the Packard, the tires howling on a curve.

I was able to hold it to the road, decelerating cautiously, till we hit the straightaway again; Marion's scarf was around my neck, streaming romantically back over the rear of the car. "What happened?"

"Rudy was driving," she said apologetically. "Said he'd spell you for a while."

"Well, he's one lousy driver!"

"I know. He said it was handling a lot harder than his Isotta-Fraschini and that he'd better let you take over again."

"On a curve!?"

"I know; he's coo-coo."
 

Around ten-forty that night Jan and I had dinner in the coffee shop of the Beverly Hills Hotel. Sitting in a booth waiting for it, we were so tired we just sat and stared at each other stupidly. "I get left with her headaches, hangovers, and now her exhaustion," Jan said, massaging her forehead. Her hand brushed her hairline, and she reached up, felt the blond wig, and dragged it off, shrugging. We skipped the delicious-looking bread-pudding dessert and were in bed and asleep by eleven-ten, the blond wig on a bedpost.

I woke up once and knew Jan was awake, too.

"Nick?"

"Yeah."

"I'm not so sure I want to go through with this. What do you think?"

"Decide in the morning." I was asleep again.

It was daylight the next time I woke, and Marion, in wig and Jan's orange dress, sat on the edge of the bed, an open phone book beside her, eyes on the little traveling clock. "Is six-forty-five too early to phone, Nickie?"

"Yeah." I went back to sleep.

I woke up again to the sound of dialing and looked at the clock; it was 8:01. "It's not too early!" Marion said defensively, and then into the phone, "Hello? Mr. Dahl, please. Mr. Hugo Dahl?" She listened. "I see. I wonder if I could reach him there?" She listened, then nodded. "On North Gower Street; thank you very much." She put the phone aside slowly and looked over at me, her face suddenly frightened. "He's on his way to the studio—he's still in pictures. Oh, Nickie, I'm scared! He's my only hope, really; I've been hunting through the phone books, and of all the people I knew there's no one else could possibly still be in pictures. What if he doesn't remember me?" I didn't see how he could, but didn't say anything, and she jumped up to run over and sit on the edge of my bed. "Nickie, you're coming with me today, aren't you? I can't go to the studios alone! I'm scared, I really am!"

"All right."

She looked relieved and glanced over at the clock. "It's too early to go now; he's not there yet. Why don't we just—"

"Nope."

"We could at least neck a little. For luck."

"Bad luck." I rolled to the other side of the bed, sat up, dragged the phone book across the bed, found the B's, and found "Bollinghurst, Theo N, 1101 Keever Street." I looked up at Marion and grinned. "HOO-ray for HOLLywood!" I began singing, and jumped up and took a shower, still singing.

Downstairs in the cab, I sat back to look out the window as we headed east on Wilshire Boulevard. I didn't know much about this town and was curious. But every block we drove through, stopping often for lights, seemed just about like the last one—the buildings generally white, new or looking new, and of a general height, so that they merged into sameness. Yet I noticed that their individual designs were often striking, sometimes unique or even bizarre. Any one of a lot of the buildings we were passing would have been memorable anywhere else, a town monument. But here there were so many of them trying for distinctiveness that the total effect was blandness. They were of stone, but it was hard to believe anyone really meant them to last. And in the queer washed-out Los Angeles sunlight that comes filtering down through the haze of perpetual smog, these featureless blocks after block seemed insubstantial, ownerless, and without significance. There are nonbooks and noncelebrities; people whose only fame is that somehow their names are known. It seemed to me that we were in a nonplace, and I said so to Marion.

"It used to be, though. It was a wonderful place once; a town, and a real one." She looked out the window, then shook her head and sat back as though withdrawing from the scene around us. "But I don't like this, I could never like it. I don't see how anyone could." Suddenly she leaned forward to speak to the driver. "Take us back to the hotel!"

"Okay." The cabby shrugged, and checking his rear-view mirror for cops, he slowed, waiting for a break in the approaching traffic. Then he swung his wheel in a quick, illegal U-turn.

I sat waiting for an explanation, and after a moment or so she reached up with both hands and lifted off her wig.

"Jan?"

She nodded defiantly. "I don't know that I want to go through with this, Nick, now that we're here. I don't like this place! What are we doing here!" She blinked suddenly, jumping slightly, then leaned for­ward. "Take us to Gower Street!" she said, and pulled the wig back on.

"Oh, God." I slumped far down in my seat, turning to the window, disassociating myself from whoever the hell was beside me now.

"Lady, I don't mind." The driver turned to smile with forced calm. "Do this all day if you want, round and round, long as you pay the meter. But if I get grabbed for this turn, you pay the fine!" Directly in front of the hotel again, he swung in a tight U-turn and we headed back east on Wilshire.

"Back to the hotel!" She snatched off the wig.

"No!" Braking hard, he swung in to the curb and stopped. "I won't do it! Nothing could make me! Get another ca—"

"Hold it," I said placatingly. "Wait a second; we'll make up for it with the tip." Murmuring quietly, I talked to Jan, reminding her that she'd promised, urging her to hold off and see what happened, and finally she agreed. "Go ahead," I said to the cabby. "North Gower Street, and this time we won't change our mind."

I was disappointed, really let down, by the outside of the studio. I don't know what I'd expected, except that I thought it would be at least a little glamorous. But this was just a high, block-long, almost blank stucco wall directly beside the public sidewalk across from a mangy, broken-asphalted public parking lot with a broken-down white fence, and strewn with papers no one was ever going to pick up. Mounted on the studio walls were a few billboards advertising motion pictures, otherwise this could have been a warehouse. And the door, apparently the main entrance to a world-famous studio, was an ordinary street-level door, the varnish worn off around the handles, the glass a little dirty. If I'd found a cut-rate dentist's office inside I wouldn't have been surprised.

What we did find was a cubicle just about large enough for us and the small desk we stood facing, which looked as though a Goodwill Thrift Shop had thrown it out. On the plywood walls hung a few large tinted photographs of two or three movie actors and television stars, and behind the desk a pleasant-faced, middle-aged man in a vaguely coplike uniform looked up from a copy of The Hollywood Reporter. "Can I help you?"

If I'd been worried about Marion's reception here, I stopped when her smile came on; I saw from the man's eyes that he appreciated it. "If you would, please," she said, looking at him with what seemed to be genuine interest, and clearly wishing she could spend an hour or so talking with him. "I'd like to see Mr. Hugo Dahl."

"Do you have an appointment?" He began nodding unconsciously, trying to will an appointment into being for her.

"No, but I'm an old friend. If you could let him know Marion Marsh is here, I think he might see me."

The man consulted a printed, much marked over phone list taped to his desk top with yellowing Scotch tape, then he dialed. "Reception: Miss Marion Marsh to see Mr. Dahl." He listened, then waited, smiling up at Marion. "Just a second," he said into the phone, then to Marion, "You did say Marion Marsh?" She nodded, giving him another great smile, and he returned it. "Yep," he said firmly into the phone, then hung up. "He'll be right down."

I didn't say anything. Had Marion actually forgotten that Hugo Dahl was going to see Jan's face? We waited, taking the few paces the little room allowed, looking at the big grainy photographic enlargements. Pretty soon I heard elevator doors open somewhere down the hall to the left of the entrance, footsteps approaching, then a tall, still thin but now paunchy man of maybe seventy wearing a dark-blue suit and turtleneck sweater walked in. He was bald, his longish hair fringe and sideburns gray, his face lined and sagging, permanently tired. But his eyes were alert and wary. "You're—Marion Marsh?"

Staring at the late-middle-aged or early-elderly man, she didn't answer for a moment. Then, dazzlingly, she smiled, and his mouth opened in incredulous surprise. "I'm the granddaughter of the Marion Marsh you knew. But maybe you don't remember her?"

He was smiling back at her, the lines of his face momentarily lifted, and now you could see what he'd looked like when he was younger. "Nobody ever forgot Marion Marsh. I remember her ten times better than the people I had lunch with yesterday. You're her granddaughter?" he said incredulously, and Marion nodded, still smiling. "You don't look like her, except for your smile; the smile is hers, exactly. How come your name's Marsh?"

"I was named Marion after her. And I admired her so much—she was so talented—that I took Marsh as my stage name." Shyly she added, "Movie name, I should say. Or at least I hope so."

He smiled, knowingly but nicely. "And that's why you're here. She mentioned me, did she? Is she ... still alive? Seems to me I heard—"

"Oh, yes! Very much! She was badly hurt. Years ago. But she recovered. And she's mentioned you often." She hesitated convincingly. "Maybe I shouldn't say this, but ... I've always had the feeling she liked you. Something in her voice whenever she mentioned your name."

He laughed. "If that's not true—and it's not—I don't want to hear it. Well, I'm running auditions this morning, and if Marion Marsh's granddaughter wants in, she's in. Come on along." He started to turn, remembered me, and said, "You coming, too?"

"Oh, I'm sorry!" Marion said. "I'm terribly nervous. This is my friend who's ... he's an actor, too! Giving me moral support. I'm scared to death."

"Well, come on, both of you, and we'll get you outfitted, Marion." We walked out of the little reception room to the right, Marion turning to smile back at the reception cop, then down a corridor lined with flush doors and white-on-black plastic name plates. We stepped out onto a narrow asphalted street or alley—very narrow—and walked past an old-fashioned, one-story wooden building of clapboarded sides painted gray, white double-sash window frames, and a peaked shingle roof. Behind several of the windows women sat typing under brilliant fluorescent light. Far ahead down the narrow street a row of grimy brick buildings extended, each four or five stories high; there were very few windows in any of them and the few there were seemed scattered randomly, so you couldn't count stories. Fire escapes cluttered their sides, people lounging on most of them. For at least a city block we walked along past them, building after building, and I was proud of Marion—and a little surprised, I'll admit—because she remem­bered me. "There's someone else I'm supposed to look up," she said to Dahl. "Ted Bollinghurst; did you ever know him?"

''Oh, yeah, sure, we were all at the same studio. He moved on then. To United Artists, I think. But I'd run into him every once in a while all through the Twenties and into the Thirties. Hollywood was a lot smaller then. Then I heard he'd left the picture business and gone into real estate, and after that I didn't hear of him for years. If you're not in pictures, you know, you don't exist. But years later I read about him, and he was rich. Like a lot of people who got into Hollywood real estate at the right time. Jesus, when I think of the land I could have bought. In the summer of 1928 I bought a secondhand Dodge roadster for exactly the price of six acres of useless land that is now downtown Beverly Hills. If I'd bought that instead and hung onto it, I'd be rich today and wouldn't have to—ah, to hell with it. Bollinghurst and lots of others did, and I didn't. Last I heard of him, some time in the Fifties, he'd bought Graustark."

"Bought what?" I said.

"Graustark, the old Vilma Banky mansion; you never heard of it?" I shook my head. "It was like Pickfair, the Doug Fairbanks-Mary Pickford place. At one time everyone in the civilized world knew about Pickfair and Graustark. Fabulous places. Built on eight or ten acres, a million rooms. Swimming pools. Tennis courts. Stables. Garages full of Daimlers, Duesenbergs and Hispano-Suizas. Well, Ted bought Graustark. Because it had been Vilma Banky's, I'm sure; he was a real movie nut. It was run-down, gone to seed, empty for years; a white elephant. Even the real estate wasn't particularly valuable for Hollywood. But he bought it and restored it, even the grounds. And moved in. For a while you'd hear about parties he gave; the place had its own ballroom. I never went, but I heard. But I haven't heard of any parties for years now. He was a lot older than the rest of us, and I doubt if he's alive any more. Or whether Graustark's still there; probably a parking lot now."

I said, "Where was it?"

He thought for a moment. "Keever Street. Out on Keever Street somewhere."

"Eleven-hundred block?"

"Be about it. Why?"

"Just wondered."

Up ahead a pair of gray-painted steel doors stood ajar, and a thin black-haired woman of forty walked out and turned up the street ahead of us. "Marie," Dahl called, and the woman turned and stood waiting. "I've got one more for you," he said as we came up, and he nodded toward Marion. "Could you outfit her? Quick? We'll take care of the paper work later." The woman measured Marion with her eyes, then nodded. "Sure." She gestured with her chin at Marion. "Come on."

They walked off ahead, and Dahl motioned me toward the open gray-painted doors of the same brick warehouse-like building, and we walked in. I had nothing better to do and was curious. The interior was enormous, the building all floor space, the ceiling lost in darkness. I couldn't see much. Except for a few scattered light bulbs that illuminated very little, and the red glow of exit signs, most of the building was dark except for a corner far ahead. Off in the gloom I could see vague bulky objects and a great wooden scaffolding of some kind.

We were walking ahead, toward the one lighted area of the huge warehouse-like space. This was a brick-walled corner starkly lit by a pair of powerful work lights mounted on portable standards. Under their light a dozen people, mostly men, two or three women, stood talking idly, most of them holding plastic coffee cups. One of them spotted us, a youngish partly bald man in blue slacks and jacket, and came walking toward us, carrying a clipboard. "Fred," said Dahl as he stopped before us, "here's another prospect. Talk to him," he said, his interest in me fading fast. "Find out his specialty if any. If you can work him in, do it." To me he said, "Fred's head of the exterior unit," whatever that meant, and he walked on toward the group around the work lights.

"Name?" Fred said, pencil poised over his clipboard. We were at the very outer edge of the circle of light, but I could see eight or ten names penciled on the mimeographed form in Fred's clipboard. I was about to reply to tell him there'd been a mistake, when I was horrified; I seemed about to faint. The man before me and the building we stood in had begun to disappear. I'd once fainted in college from economizing by not eating breakfasts; it had begun like this, and now I wondered if I'd hit my head when I fell. But I didn't fall. Dim as things were becoming—sounds growing fainter too—I heard my faraway voice reply, and its tone was calm, assured, and several notes deeper.

"Rod. Rod Guglielmi."

"Rod for Rodney?"

"No. Rodolpho."

"Any specialty?"

"Anything you want." The scene was shrinking fast, the sound fading with it.

"Well, we need a stunt man, that's about all."

A moment's hesitation, then my mouth spoke the words: "I can do it."

"Do what?"

"Whatever you want. Race-car driving. Wing-walking. Plane-to-train transfers. Parachu—" Nothingness, then; not even blackness, only pure colorless nothingness. Just as you can tell awakening from sleep about how much time has passed, I knew that it was no more than an hour later. But this was like awakening from an unnatural fevered sleep for only a moment or so of superclarity. I was in a closetlike space, a dressing room with a mirrored table, a chair, and wall hooks on which my clothes hung. I was standing, I realized, one foot on the floor, the other on the chair, staring down at myself. My upper body, I saw, wore a white nylon shirt open at the collar and cut very full in the chest and sleeves. My pants were whipcord jodhpurs. I was wearing blunt-toed shoes laced up over the ankles, and the leg on the floor was wrapped in a leather puttee fastened with two brass buckles. The other puttee was in my hands; apparently I was about to fit it around the other leg. Then the faintness, the rushing diminishing of everything I saw into nothingness.

Again, I knew that more time—an hour and a half, maybe two—had passed. I simply opened my eyes as though from a dreamless sleep and saw—I didn't know what I was seeing. It was a floor, an enormous endless floor, but not in a room. I was staring down at it through an evenly distributed haze, puzzling over a random pattern of gray-white lines, sometimes straight, sometimes curving, and a succession of fingernail-sized green and red squares in parallel rows. Far, far away, near the edge of the floor, lay a thicker, irregular lead-gray curve, and then I saw a momentary glint of light on its surface and realized that I was seeing an actual river. And that the gray-white lines were roads, the red and green squares were rooftops, and that this enormous floor stretched out before me just past the edge of a fabric-covered surface on which my laced shoes were standing side by side.

There was a sound, too, I realized, a hammering roar, and a sensation: I was chilled by a steady pressure of air against my ribs and chest. And now I could hear and feel the loose-cut cloth of my shirt fluttering audibly, tugging at my skin. My eyes moved slightly and I saw a taut varnished surface just over my head and caught a glimpse of angled guy wire.

I held off the knowledge as long as I could: that I was not dreaming but actually stood crouched on the lower wing of an ancient biplane thousands of feet above Los Angeles. My head turned a little more; I saw my own white-knuckled left fist wrapped around a stanchion, and—to my left and behind me—the leather-helmeted, goggled head of the pilot, and my throat went dry, my intestines shriveled, my eyes widened in shock. For a moment longer I stared out at the misty, infinitely distant horizon miles ahead and miles below me, then the dimming sensation roared up through my senses, and this time I understood that I was truly and genuinely about to fall unconscious.

Just before it happened I felt once again the sense of someone pushing toward me, pushing against me yet without crowding, until suddenly we were occupying the same space, and Rodolpho Guglielmi was back. Curiosity is the strongest emotion, of course, and I was able to wonder where I had heard or read this vaguely familiar name, then I remem­bered. This was Rudolph Valentino up here with me on this cloth-covered wing, signed up under his actual name as a stunt man, if that's what he had to do for a comeback.

But he wouldn't take over completely. We stood there, far up in the sky, standing on a piece of varnished cloth ... and then I understood that he was as scared as I was!

He deserted me! Took a look at the horror stretched out before and below us, and left me once again! My arm was going dead, I was squeezing the stanchion so hard. I looked past it: at the long, long old-fashioned hood of the plane; at the rusty exhaust pipe stretched along its side; at the paint peeling off its vents; at the shivering, filmily transparent circle of the propeller. And my knees went fluid, shoulders sagging, about to pitch limply forward into space.

Let me say to the eternal credit and glory of Rudolph Valentino—that he came back! He came back; we stood together, took a deep, deep breath, then he turned to the pilot and he made himself smile. It was a heroic act. He was a real man. He'd got us up here, and he'd get us back. With infinite relief I let nothingness overwhelm me.

Only minutes passed I understood this time, as—abruptly, no warn­ing—I once again saw the vast misty plain that was most of the Los Angeles area horizon to horizon, this time from an even greater height.

But the wing was gone! I heard the steady, hammering, old-fashioned drone of the single engine close by, yet the plane had disappeared! I was looking straight up—Up? Yes, up!—at the tiny lines that were roads and dots that were rooftops. The backs of my knees hurt—why?—and the blood was congested in my face and neck. Then I understood: I was upside down, my head tilted far back to stare straight down through nothingness at the slightly tilted, slowly revolving earth far below. I looked away fast, looked down—up?—saw my wildly fluttering white shirt from mid-chest to wide leather belt, my jodhpurred legs to the knees, and—that's all. No puttees, no shoes, only the fabric-covered wing of the plane. I heard a strangled sound in my own throat because—oh, God—I was hanging upside down by my knees from the metal loop of the skid at the tip of the wing.

My head swung away in terror and I saw the helmeted, goggled head watching me. His lips grinned, he lifted a gloved hand to wave at me, and the blackout began, and I was glad, truly preferring to slide into unconsciousness and die than continue for even one more second to see and understand the horror of where I was.

More time had passed, much more, when I felt thought and con­sciousness returning again, and this time I felt it return all the way, felt how terribly tired I was in my body and mind both, and I knew that Valentino was fully gone. I couldn't, would not open my eyes, afraid to look. But I heard, and the drone of the airplane motor was gone. I realized that I was hearing the murmur of scattered voices in casual talk, and I opened my eyes.

I was indoors, in a room—no, it was a movie theater, though a strange one. The blank white screen up front, the first thing I saw, was miniature, two-thirds size at most. And there were only half a dozen rows of perhaps a dozen seats each. People sat here and there, maybe a dozen of them. Two rows ahead and off to my left, Hugo Dahl sat with two other men, including Fred of the exterior unit. A girl with a clipboard on her lap sat just behind Dahl; she held a metal pencil with a tiny light near its tip, and she flicked it on and off a couple of times. Here and there sat other men and women—actors maybe. I felt a nudge, turned, and Marion—I knew it was Marion from the expression—sat beside me. She'd been back to the hotel, apparently, because she wore a green dress, one Jan had never liked and seldom wore, though it looked good on Marion. I looked down at myself; I'd been back to the hotel, too; I was wearing another suit, shirt, and tie. Marion said, "I think they're going to start, Rudy. I'm so nervous."

I whispered, "It's not Rudy; it's Nick."

"Well, believe me, I'm glad! He's impossible! I never realized but with him it's nothing but I, I, I, I. I couldn't get a word in all through dinner!"

"Marion, what's happening? What time is it, did you take your test? Where are—"

"Oh, yes; this morning. They developed prints late this afternoon. We're going to see them now; Hugo invited us."

"Well, what are they for? What's the picture?"

"I don't know; no one has said. But I think—"

Hugo Dahl had turned in his seat to look around the theater. "Everyone here?" he called now and, without waiting for an answer, glanced up at the projection booth. "Okay, Jerry. Let 'em roll."

The houselights went out immediately, and a rectangle of light appeared on the screen, slightly flickering. It turned milk-white, and a scribbled number 4 in reverse flashed by, then some felt-penned letters, also in reverse, a scrap of old film used as a leader. Abruptly and out of focus, a man appeared on the screen, facing the camera and holding something: the focus instantly sharpened into a long-haired young man with a drooping mustache and wearing a fringed leather jacket. He was holding up a slate on which HUNTLEY was roughly printed in white chalk, and below it, TAKE 1, KAY MEISSNER. In his other hand he held the lower jaw of a black-and-white clap board attached to the bottom of the slate, and he immediately slapped it shut and walked off the scene.

The scene—he'd hidden most of it—was a four-man band in close-up, wearing red-and-white-striped coats and straw hats. Hands poised, the pianist sat looking at the others, then brought his hands down to the keys; the trombonist lifted his instrument and the right hands of the other two, banjoists seated on high stools, began to move so rapidly they blurred. The sudden burst of music was marvelous old-time jazz, the beat fast and pronounced.

Immediately the camera drew rapidly back to reveal a scrap of footlighted stage with a white-velvet backdrop, a girl walking out from the wings. She wore a knee-length fringed red dress and a headband across her forehead and around her short hair. Smiling professionally out at us, she began to dance. It was fast and in exact time, an approximation of the Charleston, I realized. But there was a learned, mechanical quality about her movements, and I had a sudden hunch that this girl had bluffed, saying she knew the dance when she didn't, maybe having a quick coaching session the night before the test. The dance lasted maybe twenty seconds; then, winking broadly at a supposed audience whose sound-track applause burst out, she walked quickly off the stage as a final note sounded from the banjos. From the strained quality of her wink I felt that she knew she'd failed.

There was no response from the real audience. Marion leaned toward me to murmur, "That's about as close to a Charleston as a polka," and with no pause after the final note, the young man in the fringed jacket walked on screen, holding up his slate. The bottom two lines had been rubbed out, and now chalked in new letters under huntley I read TAKE 2, JUNE VAN CLEE.

The stick clapped, he walked off, revealing the band again, the pianist's hands once more poised over the keyboard. The camera drew back as his hands came down, and the same tune began again—wild, and with a great disciplined beat; I wished I could hear hours of it. A second girl, taller and thinner than, but dressed like, the first, walked on from the wings.

She was much better, very skilled. But all she was doing up there on the tiny stage was performing an accurately done chore for money. In spite of her smile, it was joyless and uninspired. So was her departing wink—and so were the girls in takes three, four, and five.

Again with no break of the film, the slate was held up—TAKE 6, MARION MARSH—the black-and-white sticks were clapped together, and the pianist's hands dropped to the keys. The driving blare of sound began again, and now Marion walked out onto the tiny stage in a short tomato-red dress, red headband, and—this was different from all the others—a string of beads that hung to her waist. As she walked out, she, too, smiled at the imaginary audience across the footlights, but this was a smile easy with the confidence of what she knew she could do superbly. Her smile said she was pleased with herself and that she was happy, that she liked the audience that was about to have the pleasure of enjoying her. For a moment I remembered the tiny black-and-white figure I'd seen on the screen of my television set—long, long ago, it seemed—in Flaming Flappers. This was that girl—larger than life now, in full brilliant color and blaring sound—but with that same magic presence. I was smiling, responding to her happy arrogance, and I knew with an actual physical thrill moving up my spine how good she was going to be.

Her body slipped effortlessly from walk into dance without pause or transition, her rhythm free and easy. She wasn't listening to the music and carefully coordinating her movements with it: her body simply flowed into, joining and becoming part of that wild, happy jazz. Feet and elbows flashed so effortlessly that the beat seemed slower than it had in other takes. And then—just once and simultaneously—the fingers of each hand snapped, abandon shot through her body, and the dance took fire. Her legs flew in a controlled ecstatic frenzy, her chin slowly lifting, her eyes closing in sensual pleasure. She loved what she was doing—you could see that and feel it—every atom of her excited body thrilled by it. It was wild, and then on an abrupt final note it stopped, her eyes opened, and when she smiled and winked out at us, it was so lecherous a man yelped, and we broke into real applause.

On the screen the man with the slate for Take Seven was walking forward to hold it to the camera, but Hugo Dahl was on his feet saying, "I knew it! I knew it! I said so! Jerry, did you splice a lead-in and lead-out to a print of that? I asked you to!"

"Yeah! It's set up on the second projector," a muffled voice called from the projection booth.

"Then show it for crysake! That's it! That's the one!" On the screen the band had begun once more, but the screen abruptly went black, the sound cutting off. The little audience murmured, and in the darkness Dahl called out, "Marion, Baby, grandma never did better! You got a future in this lousy business, that I can promise you!"

Marion's hand had gripped my forearm, lying on the arm of the seat, squeezing so hard I could feel each separate finger. The screen lighted up, a numbered countdown began flashing past, and in its light I looked at Marion. Her one hand gripping my arm, the other lay spread on her chest as she stared up at the screen, her mouth slightly open in stunned, incredulous, glorious relief, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3—I thought we'd see Marion again, but a giant squatly shaped bottle suddenly filled the screen, and its label, though plainly visible, was read aloud by a man's deep voice: "Huntley's Old-fashioned Tomato Catsup!" The wide bottle top revolved itself loose, flew off the screen, and the bottle tilted forward, the voice continuing, "In the smart new bottle with the great big mouth!" On the word "mouth" a comic-strip speech balloon appeared over the bottle's mouth, and as the words popped into being inside the balloon, a high, nasal comic voice—the voice of the catsup bottle—spoke the same words: "But I've still got all my old-fashioned flavor ... with all its Huntley old-time zing!" And now Take Six, Marion's dance, began on the screen once more, but this time as the pianist's hands dropped to the keyboard the high funny voice was saying, "Yessir! All the fine old-fashioned flavor..."—the blaring jazz began simultaneously with "flavor," and smiling out at us again, Marion was walking on stage in her tomato-red dress—"...with all its Huntley old-time zing!" the voice continued as she walked, and precisely on "zing" she began to dance.

During the twenty seconds of that spectacular dance, the funny voice was saying, "Yep! Still that fine old-fashioned flavor ... that famous Huntley old-style taste." And again, the dance ending, the voice was saying, "With all its old-time Huntley"—precisely as Marion winked—"zing!"

Marion off stage, the final banjo-string fillip dying, the giant bottle again filled the screen, tilting forward to reveal its open mouth, another speech balloon appearing above it. Simultaneously the printed word and comic voice both said "Wow!" and the screen went white.

"Great! Oh, great!" Hugo Dahl was shouting. "That's it, that's it! That's all we need to see. Marion, love, have your agent phone me in the morning. Fred, your stuff ready?"

In the moment before the projection beam cut off, I saw Marion's face. It was pale; it was stunned and astonished, as though someone she loved had slapped her. Then in the darkness I felt the breath of her voice on my cheek as she whispered, "Nick, what is that? What is it?"

Up ahead Fred was talking, and I leaned toward Marion and whis­pered miserably, "A commercial."

"A what?"

"It's ... like an ad. An advertisement. It's ... not for the movies, Marion. It's for television."

"That ... thing we saw my movie on? That's what this was for? Not a movie, but—That's all my dance was for, to advertise catsup?" I nodded in the darkness, and reached over to take her hand.

Fred was saying, "We tried a pool-table sequence with a professional; trick shots. And the guy was great. Interesting but no excitement, no zing; I eliminated it. We tried some comic stuff; villain tying the girl to railroad track; you know. It doesn't work, Hugo. But we filmed one thing that did; a damn good day's work. We spliced on a lead-in and lead-out; wait'll you see it. Jerry, you ready? Roll it."

I knew. As the giant catsup bottle tilted forward, the comic voice booming "In the smart new bottle with the great big mouth!," I knew what was going to appear on the screen, and closed my eyes. But when the catsup stuff stopped, and the drone of an ancient biplane motor abruptly filled the tiny theater, I clapped a hand over my eyes just as they popped open. Then I spread my fingers and sat helplessly watching.

Incredibly, there I stood in flowing white shirt, jodhpurs, and leather puttees on the lower wing of an antique biplane against a pale-blue sky. The view was from the side and back at a little distance from the plane; I hadn't noticed the camera plane or heard its engine over the drone of our own. The view was taken from just slightly below. My stomach contracting, I knew that Los Angeles lay a mile under my feet on that cloth-covered wing on the screen, but the camera showed only the man on the wing and the sky above; it might have been only twenty feet above the ground.

Again, and almost physically, just as it had happened in the Olympic theater in San Francisco, I felt the merging, felt my body occupied—felt the almost irritable attempt to push me aside down into some remote corner of my own being. But this time I resisted angrily. This time I held on, and—up on the screen the scene changed, and, our interest caught—we watched it together.

An old-fashioned touring car, its black canvas top down, was speeding along a dirt road, weaving erratically from side to side; the view had obviously been taken from a helicopter flying just above and behind it and well to one side. The bareheaded driver of the old car, one hand on the steering wheel, was holding a struggling girl beside him. She wore a long white dress, her hands tied behind her back, and was gagged. "Yep!" the comic voice was saying. "All that great old-fashioned flavor..." and now the ancient biplane edged onto the upper corner of the screen from the other side of the speeding car, my own upside-down body, white shirt fluttering, hanging by its jodhpurred knees from the wing skid. Directly over the back seat of the car—I actually let out a muffled cry in the theater—the figure dropped from the plane, revolving in mid-air in a neat somersault to land on its feet in the back seat. Cut to a close-up: standing in the back seat of the racing car, I held the driver around the neck with one arm, reaching past him with the other to turn off the ignition and grab the steering wheel. Cut to another shot: the car stopped beside the road, the driver tied and gagged, the girl in my arms looking over my shoulder at the audience. "With all the old-time zing!" said the funny voice, and precisely on "zing" the girl in my arms winked, and I felt the sudden disengagement from my muscles, nerves, senses and mind.

Up front, filling the screen, the great catsup bottle tilted forward, the funny voice speaking. But I had turned in my seat to stare toward the rear of the theater, and I saw him. Walking slowly across the back cross aisle just under the white beam of the projector light, clear but trans­parent, the wall of the theater visible behind him, I saw the eagle profile, narrowed brown eyes, and slicked-down black hair—utterly familiar to me from a hundred old-movie books and a dozen pictures—of Rudolph Valentino. He was wearing what may have been the costume he had chosen for eternity: long, dark baggy pants almost to the ankles; boots; a ten-inch-wide studded leather belt; a coarse striped shawl thrown over one shoulder of his shirt. But now the once proud shoulders under that shirt and shawl were slumped. And upside down in his hand, he carried the rest of that costume by its chin strap: the broad-brimmed, flat-topped hat of a gaucho, dangling in rejection and defeat. His face averted from the screen, cringing from the voice of the Huntley catsup bottle, he walked toward but never visibly reached the exit. As the funny voice from the screen said "Wow!" Rodolpho Guglielmi disappeared like a light snapped off.

We left, Marion and I, slipping into the aisle and hurrying up it just before the lights came on. Outside we walked along the narrow asphalt street, badly lighted by widely separated old-style lampposts, possibly left over, I thought, from a forgotten picture. There was a high moon, almost full, the street bright and luminous in the soft wash of light. The old wood and brick buildings we passed stood unlighted and silent, their windows ink-black or shiny yellow from the light of the moon. At the corner we turned toward a studio gate and the lighted hut of the guard inside it reading a newspaper. There Marion put a hand on my arm and we stopped.

She looked back down the length of that empty moon-bright street, motionless as a ghost town. She stared up at the dark still building beside us. Then she turned to me. "Put your arms around me, Nickie." I did, and she leaned back to study my face. "You look just like him, almost. Almost exactly, but ... you're not. You're not. Kiss me, though, Nickie, kiss me good-bye! Because I'll never be back."

I drew her close and kissed her gently and lovingly. I touched her face then, my fingers brushing her cheek, smoothing her hair back from her temples, and, pale in the moonlight, she smiled at me. Then I kissed her again, and after a moment or so she stepped back. "Well. Was that for me or for Marion?"

"For Marion. That was for Marion. I wanted her to know that someone gave a damn. And would remember." I reached for Jan. "But this is for you."

We found a cab to head back to the hotel for an early start home in the morning. I was never going to see whatever lay inside 1101 Keever Street, I understood, but I had to see it, and I asked the cabby to drive past it on the way.

When we turned onto Keever Street and I read the street sign, I glanced around, not sure whether this was Beverly Hills or not: it didn't look like my idea of Beverly Hills. There were small businesses on both sides of the street: an enormous brilliantly lighted drugstore, the people in it actually pushing shopping carts; a discount record place; a dry cleaner; gas stations; three take-out food places in a row, all busy—it was only nine o'clock. And scattered among them, alone and in twos and threes, were the asbestos-shingle-covered remains of the residential area this had once been. They were no longer one-family residences—you could see eight or ten mail slots on every porch—but rooming houses, with no future now but demolition. The area wasn't shabby, I don't think that's allowed, but it was the Los Angeles equivalent.

We drove slowly through the seven-hundred block, the eight-, the nine-, the ten-, and they were all alike. And so was the eleven-hundred block, on our side of the street. But not on the other.

Motor idling, our cab stood at the curb across from what had to be 1101 because there was no other house, and we stared. Behind us the sidewalk was bright from the lights and signs of a bicycle shop and a liquor store, both open; and a quarter block away on a corner, the brighter-than-day white lighting of a giant Standard station lit up the walks to beyond the curbs. But across the street a vast dark area lighted only by the moon stood silent and motionless in another time.

Under the high white moon lay a great city block surrounded by a chest-high stone wall that was the base for a ten-foot fence of closely spaced pointed iron pickets. The wall was interrupted in only one place, directly across from us, by a pair of twenty-foot magnificent wrought-iron gates across the entrance to a graveled driveway. Behind those gates and the wall extending far down the street in both directions lay acres—black masses washed with pale light—of huge trees, their tips outlined against the luminous sky; great clumps of high shrubbery; silvered stretches of sloping lawn; white paths and glimpses of statuary; and the wide driveway leading back through the black masses of trees and bushes to the house itself, an enormous, four-story Spanish-style mansion.

Not a window of the part we could see was lighted. The great house stood, far off and more hidden than visible, looking as though it had never been lighted and would never be. I had to get out and cross the street to those gates. And there at the curb I looked up at them. In the center of each, suspended in the wrought-iron tracery, hung a great convex metal oval framed in a wreath. On the one at the left stood a raised, ornate art-nouveau V and on the other a B. I gripped the bars and stared in at blackness. All I could hear was the sound of branches in the small nighttime wind, and the fragile sound of a leaf scraping along the graveled driveway. On impulse I tried to shake the bars in my fists but they were as immovable as though set in concrete. I stared in through them for a moment or so longer, then turned away.

Across the street, standing at the cab for a moment before getting in again, I looked back. Somewhere in there—But I shook my head irritably, trying not to think of what might be somewhere inside that distant house far back in that moon-touched blackness, and got into the cab.

Back at the hotel, I told Jan about the day and about Rodolpho Guglielmi, and she listened, shaking her head, looking at me to smile incredulously and shake her head again. And we talked about Marion, saying what little there was to say. On our way through the lobby I'd bought a Los Angeles Times, and we sat in bed looking through it, but it seemed hard to follow and without any real news, the way an out-of-town paper generally does. I got up and standing at the desk turned through the pages of the little magazine telling what there was to do in town, almost none of it outside this hotel, apparently. There were some postcards in a drawer, already stamped by the management, I discovered, a thoughtful "touch." And since I knew I was paying for it, I picked one—a view of the pool—and sat down and wrote a card. "Dear Al: Well, here we are in glamorous, exciting Hollywood, 'seeing the stars'! Tomorrow, Forest Lawn, to visit the world-famed mausoleum of Felix the Cat. Love, yr. friend, Nick." There was no one in the hall, and leaving the room door open, I darted out in pajamas, dropped the card in the chute next to the elevator, and got back safe and sound. Around eleven, or a couple minutes past, we turned out the lights, and almost instantly the phone rang.

Jan was nearest, found the phone, and picked it up. "Hello?" I fumbled for and found the bedside-lamp switch and turned it on. Jan sat wincing at the loudness of the voice in her ear, then moved the phone away from her head, and I slid over to listen.

"What the hell happened to you!" a man's voice was yelling. "Where were you? I had to—"

"Who is this?"

"Hugo Dahl, goddamn it! I been phoning all night every half hour! Now, listen: you saw the guy with me in the projection room? Young; bald; brown suit? Well, that's Jerry Houk! A producer here. Movies, not television; he's a big man here, and he likes you. They're making a picture; finishing it up. But there's a part in it. Very small. One quick scene. Which they've already filmed. But they're still on the same set; tomorrow's the last day. Be there at one and they'll try to get in a couple of takes of you in the part before they wrap up. If they like it, they'll use it. Okay? Jesus, I been trying to reach you for an hour and a half!"

Jan sat staring at the phone. She looked up at me, and actually made a motion to give me the phone, then drew it back.

"Well!?" said the voice in the phone. "What about it? Do you—Listen, is this Marion Marsh?"

For an instant longer Jan hesitated. Then, voice firm, she replied. "Yes. Yes, this is Marion Marsh. And I'll be there. Tomorrow at one. I was stunned for a moment, Mr. Dahl, and couldn't talk. But I'll be there. And I can't tell you how much I appreciate it."

"Don't mention it, I always was a pushover for Marion Marsh. Good luck, kid, and say hello for me to—my God!—your grandmother."

Jan put the phone on its cradle and sat holding it, staring across the foot of the bed. I said, "How—"

But Jan just shook her head.

"She'll know," she said. "She'll know. And she'll be there."
 

The same reception cop—after the same exchange of mutually admiring smiles and glances—found Marion's name on a list of expected visitors. Mine wasn't on it, but Marion just told him that that was all right, and he explained how to find Stage 2. Then we walked back down the same little studio street, bright with sunlight and busy with people now, that we'd walked up last night in silence and moonlight.

Through a pair of gray-painted steel doors onto Stage 2, another enormous barnlike building; far across the gloom of the vast concrete floor we saw a brilliantly lighted set filled with people. The sound of a hammer on wood echoed—actually did echo—through the great enclosed space, and a man in white carpenter's overalls walked in after us and hurried by carrying a two-by-four.

Approaching, we saw that the set represented three sides of a great room almost fantastically modern in its furnishings. Huge unframed paintings—smears and swirls of color—hung on the walls; statuaries on pedestals and in wall niches were intricate assemblages of metal, plastic, wood; the rugs and furniture were white; but everything else, including the actors' clothes, was aggressively colorful.

They weren't working, we saw as we walked—more and more slowly and timidly—toward the set. They stood or sat talking, drinking coffee from plastic-foam cups, as three workmen in white overalls worked to shift the angle of a small metal track spiked onto plywood sheets. The track led to the set, projecting a yard or so onto it. And at the track's far end stood a wheeled camera, low to the ground and so big there was a seat mounted behind it on which a thin nervous-faced man peering through a viewfinder sat as though mounted on a small tractor.

We stopped at the edge of the set, a few people glancing at us. Across the set from us two men, not in party clothes, stood talking earnestly; they looked to be in their middle twenties, both with sideburns and fairly long hair. They wore sweaters and wash pants; working clothes. Glanc­ing at us, they continued talking, then one of them, a clipboard under his arm, walked across the set toward us. As he approached he lifted his brows questioningly, and Marion smiled at him. "I'm Marion Marsh."

He consulted his clipboard. "Right." He smiled back then, pleasantly enough. "Well. Mr. Hiller hopes to get to you, Miss March."

"Marsh, Marion Marsh."

"Marsh; sorry. He hopes to get to you; meanwhile..." He glanced around, then pointed to a big gray wooden box stenciled with the studio name. It stood beside the set a yard from where the white-carpeted floor began. "Would you sit there, please? At all times. Don't move." He smiled again and walked back to the man he'd been talking with; Mr. Hiller, I assumed.

The overalled men got their track shifted. A pair of men in dark-green work shirts and pants pulled the camera slowly along it and just onto the set, then dragged it back again, testing the track and angle as the operator sat behind the rolling camera watching through his viewer. Then the operator nodded at Hiller, who yelled, "Okay, places every­one!" and the actors began handing their coffee cups to one of the green-uniformed men who walked around with a tray collecting them. They positioned themselves on the set in pairs and groups, a few sitting down, most of them standing. A woman with a tray of partly filled liquor glasses began moving among them; some took glasses and stood or sat holding them; some lighted cigarettes. A girl with what looked to be a tray of make-up walked around inspecting the actors, dabbing powder onto some of their faces.

For three hours then, we sat on the gray box, the camera track being shifted once more, and the scene was filmed three times, with long, long waits in between; I never knew why. After two hours one of the men in green work uniform brought us two Cokes in paper cups. "From Mr. Hiller."

The actors, men and women, were young or youngish and very modishly dressed, their costumes extreme and exaggeratedly colorful. Marion sat eying them. And in each take they stood or sat, holding their drinks and cigarettes, talking, laughing. And that was all for maybe twenty seconds. Then one of the guests, a chunky bearded man talking to a girl, burst into very loud laughter, everyone turning to look at him, and the scene cut.

At a little after four o'clock the scene ended for the third time, and the director called, "All right, that'll do it." He sighed, blinked a few times, took a clipboard from the other man, and looked at it. Then he looked over at us, handing back the clipboard, and came over.

"We'll do you now, Miss Marsh," he said, stopping before us. "Sorry to be so late. You'll have to be dressed and made up, and we'll save time if I talk to you while they're doing it." Gesturing for her to come along, he walked around a corner of the set toward the wall of the building and a large trailer-like structure mounted on wooden sawhorses. There were half a dozen doors in its side, unpainted wooden steps leading up to a platform before them; dressing rooms, I guessed. A middle-aged woman joined them, and they all walked in through one of the doors and pulled it closed behind them.

The young guy with the clipboard yelled "Quiet! Quiet, please!" and when the talk simmered down, he said, "All right, we've got a retake now. Of..." he looked at his clipboard—"eighty-one. Check scripts if you have to; this is the one with the girl in the robe." Nothing happened. The chatter and coffee and Coke drinking continued, and the man with the clipboard dropped into a chair and sat staring absently at the floor.

The director and Marion came out, Marion wearing make-up and a long pale-blue gown belted with a darker-blue tasseled cord. As they walked toward the set I saw that her feet were bare. "Places, everyone," the director called, and again the actors positioned themselves. Their places were different now; same party but another scene. Again glasses were passed out, make-up retouched.

The director walked Marion through the scene, the actors in position but silent, watching them. Murmuring instructions, he walked her onto the set and positioned her. An actor walked over to her, smiled, and said, "Blah, blah, blah, blah," and Marion smiled and said something. She was walked to a second position, the young man going with her, and now two men turned from a painting they were discussing and walked toward Marion.

They went through the motions of the entire scene, the director pointing finally to a place on the floor with his toe, and I watched Marion nod. He glanced at his watch, then called, "Okay, we'll do it now, and we're going to film."

The actors took their original positions, lights brightened, then music burst from somewhere, hard and raucous but not overly loud. Someone called, "Quiet on the set!"; lights brightened still more; another voice yelled, "Roll 'em!" A man with a slate was on the set walking toward the camera, which had come down its track to the edge of the set. He held up the slate, and I read 81; Marion Marsh; Take One. He clapped the striped sticks, stepping quickly out of camera range, the party chatter began, and I sat fascinated, excited, and tense with anxiety for Marion.

She stood just off the set, beside the director, and the people on the set talked, laughed, moved casually apart, came together in new group­ings. The pair of men stood looking at the canvas on the wall, seeming to discuss it. Then the director nodded at Marion, and she walked onto the set and stopped in the place he had positioned her first. She stood looking the party over with a faintly amused, faintly bored air—and I felt a sudden little thrill of anticipation. She seemed so at ease and in charge; in a way I didn't and never will comprehend, she had made me understand from the manner in which she walked, looked, and now stood that a person of importance to it had arrived at this party.

The actor who had come over to her in the brief rehearsal to say, "Blah, blah, blah," came over again now and said something that was inaudible over the music. And when Marion replied, and smiled, I saw his chin rise a little, and his smile of response wasn't acted but genuinely interested. The two men at the painting stood looking at it, one shrugged and said something, and the other laughed, turning from the wall. He noticed Marion then, and he and the other man walked over to her. She saw them, smiled with pleasure, holding out a hand in welcome, and the one nearer took a little skip step to hurry to her and take it, greeting her by name, which was Essie. The four of them stood talking, smiling, and then the room—by ones, pairs, and by groups—became aware almost at the same time that Essie was here. People would turn, see her, stare silently, then begin talking eagerly to whoever was nearest. So that there was a ragged moment of growing silence, reaching almost silence, the room staring, then an excited rise in the conversational hum. And although conversations resumed, people sneaked little glances at Essie, not really listening to one another. But what was also happening was—that it had all become real.

I don't know that anyone has ever actually explained it but there are an occasional few people born into the world who are different from the rest of us. They are able to turn on something that is as real, invisible, and as actual in effect as electricity. And Marion was doing it. Standing in the center of that party, she held it in her hand. They were intensely aware, not just acting it. They were interested and were held by Marion's each word, gesture, and smile. The party was real now—I forgot it was being filmed—because a magnetism was at work. There must have been a moment like this, I realized, when Garbo first stood before a turning camera.

Marion turned from the people she was talking to and walked on: to her final position, the place on the floor the director had touched with his shoe. For a moment she stood lazily smiling, aware of but ignoring the attention she was drawing. Then as though she hardly realized she was doing it, her shoulders, arms and hips moved slightly, idly, and a little insolently in a suggestion—she couldn't possibly have learned this, she'd intuited it—of modern dancing. She was about to dance; the room knew it now, all conversation dying, everyone staring in a fascination that was real. For an instant Marion stood motionless, hesitating, and the director—calling "Cut! Cut!"—was walking onto the set toward her.

But he was smiling. "Good," he called as he walked toward her. "Jesus Christ, it was great! Listen," he said, voice astonished as he stopped before her, "you've got something, you know that? It's"—he shrugged—"I don't know; presence, I guess. Can you do it again?" He was suddenly worried that she couldn't—"Listen, can you do it again? Exactly the same! Don't change a thing. Except..." He smiled, holding up a hand to show it was no rebuke, anxious not to upset her in any least way. "Except no hesitation," he said gently. "Okay? Essie wouldn't hesitate. Can you do that?" Marion nodded. "Okay!" he called, but the man with the clipboard was tapping his upper arm for attention. They murmured together for a couple of moments, the director glancing at his watch. "Okay, let it be overtime," he said. "We got to have this. Okay, places everyone!"

Again the make-up girl made her rounds, the camera operator did something to his lens, the man with the slate appeared, clapped his boards—and it happened once more. Not quite the same, though. This time—I wouldn't have thought it possible, but this time it was better. Better because now everyone on the set knew from the first moment that something important was happening today, and the air was alive with the excitement of that. They did it again, and the scene was a marvel. Who was this, the scene said as Marion walked forward to her final position, who was this incredible Essie, and what was she going to do?

Moving away from the three men, walking to the last position, she reached it, and stood there again, lazily, insolently, serene and proud. Again she moved her body to the music, just a little, but it caught the breath in my throat with the strength of its sensual promise. And without any hesitation this time, her hand moved to the dark-blue cord around her waist and pulled the single knot loose. Stepping forward as she did so, and already dancing with her shoulders, she shrugged loose from her gown, letting it fall to the floor behind her, and stood smiling at the party, completely naked. On the curve of her stomach a heart had been drawn in red lipstick; a blue-inked feathered arrow pierced the heart as though arrow tip and half the shaft had entered at her navel. And the heart and arrow turned her nudity into something salacious.

She stood smiling at the audience in the instant before her dance began; and then she frowned. She looked down at herself, then up again but staring past her audience now. And then this girl of 1926—wild though she could be but a girl of 1926 all the same—said, "No." She said it loudly enough but to herself. "Why, no, goddamn it. This isn't the movies." She looked around at them, her glance sweeping across their faces. "You bastards," she said. Then she turned around to look back at the director and, her voice rich with contempt, she said, "You bastard: this isn't the MOVIES at all!"

He came to. "Cut! Cut!"—he was striding toward her. "Listen, you! If you want to make this goddamned test, if you ever want to even work again—" He stopped and, like the others, stood watching.

Marion had stooped and picked up her robe, and—not bothering to put it on, not troubling to hide her nakedness—she flung it contemp­tuously over one shoulder, and head erect, walked off the set to the dressing room.

They were suddenly busy, everyone finding something to do, ignoring me as though I were invisible. The director especially was never still: walking angrily about; ordering the set irrevocably struck as fast as it could be got to; releasing his actors; ordering lights off and removed, equipment taken away. And when Marion came out dressed, everyone on and around the set was pointedly unnoticing as she walked down the stairs toward the set and me, her head up, ready to look at anyone. I walked forward to meet her, took her arm under mine, and as we walked across a corner of the set toward the distant exit, I had my head up, too, in challenge, trying to find someone who would meet our eyes. And some did. Some of the actors and some of the technical people met our eyes and—a little mockingly maybe, but still—they smiled in approval. But off in the gloom on the long walk toward the big metal doors and the studio street outside them, Marion cried a little, then she stopped.

I thought she'd leave. And standing outside the studio on the street flagging a cab parked at the hack stand a dozen yards down, I said, "Jan?"

"No, it's Marion, Nickie. I'm a selfish bitch, and I know it. But not all the time, not quite all of it." The cab stopped before us; she leaned toward the open front window to speak to the driver and said, "1101 Keever Street."

She wouldn't talk in the cab. When I tried, she just reached over to put her hand on mine for a moment, quieting me and letting me know she understood that I'd comfort her if I could; then she turned away to stare out her window.

We got out at the Standard station a quarter block from the great wrought-iron entrance gates. There was a phone booth at the edge of the lot, and Marion called the number listed beside Bollinghurst, Theo N. "You reach him?" I said when she folded the door back.

"No, but I sent word—that Marion Marsh was waiting. Outside the gates."

Angling across the street toward the wall and high iron fence stretch­ing off into the distance of both directions, she said, "I've been here before. When this was new. I saw it from a sightseeing bus." We walked along beside the wall, then stopped at the great ornate gates across the driveway, and Marion pointed at the oval plaques in their centers, one bearing a V, the other a B. "They were polished then, and shined like gold." In the daylight I could see that the plaques weren't iron like the gates themselves; they were bronze, green with verdigris. Set into the keystone of the arch that curved over the gate tops, a bronze scroll surmounted by a knight's plumed helmet read GRAUSTARK. But it, too, had turned green, and I saw that paint was flaking from some of the pickets, rusting patches showing through. On the stone wall just to our right The Word had been crudely spray-painted long ago, the paint fading.

We heard a sound, a rattle, and a man on a bicycle was riding bumpily down the driveway toward us: youngish, bald, and wearing a kind of butler's uniform, though without a coat—black pants with a narrow white stripe down the sides, black-and-white horizontally striped vest, wing collar, bow tie. Swinging off the ancient loose-fendered bike, he rode the last few yards standing on a pedal. He nodded pleasantly, and with a big brass key unlocked a small gate within one of the large ones, its design blending with the whole so that I hadn't realized it was there. He gestured us in, we stepped through, and he locked it. Then, walking his bike, he led us back up the long curved drive toward the house.

"The lawns were marvelous when I saw them," Marion murmured. "The bus stopped at the gates so we could all look in, the sprinklers were on, and every one made a rainbow, and the grass was just perfect." It wasn't now. The lawns had been freshly mowed, but here up close they were disfigured by great islands of cropped-off dandelion tops and crab grass. "The gravel was whitewashed and freshly raked." But if the thin scatter of stones left on the driveway now had ever known white­wash, it was long gone, and not enough was left to rake. Mostly the driveway was two dirt ruts through a weedy stubble half-covered with browning leaves.

Yet the grounds weren't uncared for; the banks and clumps of shrubbery and small trees we were passing needed trimming, clipping back, but they weren't running wild. The place was looked after but in a slovenly way, as though, I thought, no one any longer checked to see how well it was done.

The driveway gradually curving, the house growing larger and larger as we walked toward it, expanding in both directions, I saw that it was truly enormous: a great two-story, flat-roofed mansion in, I suppose, a Spanish style, of rough-finished beige-colored stucco. Wide shallow stone steps led from driveway to stone-flagged portico and the massive double entrance doors of carved wood.

Up the two or three stairs, across the portico, and into the entrance hall, large though not enormous, paved in great black and white stone blocks, checkerboard style. A two-story ceiling, and hanging from it by a velvet-covered chain, the largest crystal chandelier I've ever seen in a private house. And there we waited for twenty-five minutes, sitting across from each other in velvet-upholstered straight-backed chairs.

I sat facing two sliding oak doors closed across a great arched entrance flanked by standing suits of armor each holding a ten-foot lance. To my right, an angled flight of carpeted stairs and the closed arch-top door to what I supposed was a hallway. Marion sat facing me and an eight-foot window just behind my chair, which overlooked a sweep of lawn and a great empty fountain, the bottom of its bowl black with sodden leaves.

We waited, here in the luxury and grandeur, both impressive and pathetic, of another time and taste, occasionally hearing distant house­hold sounds from behind far-off closed doors. Then the corner of my eye caught a movement, I turned my head, and there—up at an angle of the stairway, slowly rounding it to face us—there he came, wearing what I took to be an old-style tuxedo with a stiff wing collar.

No mistake, this was an old, old man. And no mistake, this was Ted Bollinghurst. If he was approaching forty in 1926, he was well into his nineties now, and that is what I'd have guessed him to be—wrinkles upon wrinkles and not to be mistaken for the seventies, but into the wispy fragility of the nineties or more. We stood up to face him; he was smiling down at us, but peering, too, not quite certain he saw us, and before we spoke I had time to study him.

It was the nose that said Ted Bollinghurst: Marion had described it as snubbed, but I wasn't prepared for a nose so turned up, the nostrils long black holes, that it was very nearly a deformity. He wasn't bald and he wasn't not bald; on an unusually high domed skull grew not much hair but so evenly thinned that there were no actual bald spots. It was strangely dark, like a Presidential candidate's, and he wore it carefully parted in the center as, no doubt, he always had. But now it hung limp and lifeless straight down on each side to the tops of his big crinkled old ears.

He was closer now, halfway down the stairs, and I saw that of course his hair was dyed, and that there was a faint touch of red just under each prominent cheekbone, and I knew why we'd waited twenty-five minutes. He'd been carefully preparing himself, making up his ancient face a little, and dressing in—not a tuxedo, I saw, but a "smoking jacket" of deep maroon with silk-faced roll lapels. To meet Marion Marsh this old, old man had wanted to look his best.

Slowly, slowly, advancing always with the right foot, one careful step at a time like a child, hand never leaving the banister, he saw us for sure now, the smile suddenly turned real, and in that instant I liked him, liked even his strange face. "Marion?"

"Yes. Yes, it is ... Ted." She'd slowly stood up, staring, openmouthed. But now as she spoke she smiled at him, beautifully, and walked quickly toward the foot of the stairs. He moved down onto the final step and reached a hand out to her, still smiling but near to crying, too, I thought.

"Marion, Marion, Marion," he said. He'd once been taller, I sup­posed, but now, even standing on the bottom step, he was no taller than she. "How good to see you; oh, my dear, how good, how good." He had released the banister and was holding her hand in both of his, peering into her face; and Marion stood, smiling still but blinking, close to crying, too.

She replied, genuinely pleased and touched to see him, then she introduced me to him, and the old man welcomed me. His voice was quite firm, surprisingly deep, and if he spoke a little slower than a younger person, it wasn't much. He seemed ancient but vigorous, seemed still in complete easy possession of his mind and faculties. But I realized it wasn't true; if not actually senile he was into the kind of uncritical vagueness that precedes it. Because it seemed not to occur to him that the Marion Marsh he had known would be a woman of eighty now. Obviously Marion was simply Marion to him, and that was a young woman, just as in memory she always had been. Yet he remembered this: "You've changed the color of your hair, haven't you?" He shook a finger like a dry stick at her, smiling, and stepped down to begin moving slowly across the big checkerboard toward the sliding doors. "It was blond! And bobbed," he said, winking at me, shaking his head, as though to say, These women! "But you haven't changed otherwise. Not a bit; I'd have known that smile anywhere."

"And neither have you, really. I recog—"

"You recognized this nose!" He chuckled phlegmily, then suppressed a cough. "That doesn't change!"

"I think it's cute!"

"But the rest of me has changed, I'll tell the world; oh, boy, oh, boy, oh, boy." He stopped at the big doors, setting his fingertips into the grip plates. "You haven't been here before, have you?" he said uncertainly. "Were you at any of the parties we used to have?"

"No."

"And you, sir? Nick. Is this your first visit to Graustark?"

"Yes, sir."

"Well, good. People thought I was bugs to buy it, but I like to show it off." He began sliding the door open, I stepped forward to help, then he gestured us past him into a room that quite literally wasn't much smaller than the high-school gym I'd played intramural basketball in.

Like the hall, it was two stories high; the drapes drawn, every lamp softly lighted. It was more like a fashionable hotel lobby of the Twenties than a living room; obviously this had been meant for enormous parties. Standing just inside the doorway we were staring off into a room of as many as twelve or fourteen big chesterfields and I just don't know how many dozens of chairs, all fatly upholstered in a bygone style, and still it was spacious and uncrowded. There were deep-pile rugs, three grand pianos—three—each draped with a fringed Spanish shawl, their tops crowded with framed photographs. And tables, lamps, huge vases, ornaments, statuary, paintings. There were standing lamps five or six feet high, the kind my mother called "bridge lamps," one entirely of wicker, even the shade, the light shining through it, and most of them were draped with still more fringed, embroidered shawls. Halfway up the wall a railed balcony of closed doors ran around the room on all sides but the one we'd come in at. More Spanish shawls hung draped on these railings, one embroidered with a cactus, the others with roses.

I saw all this, an impression only, in a slow sweeping glance, then my head stopped and I stood staring at the staircase at the opposite end of this great room, realizing in the moment I saw it that this entire vast space was really a setting for it.

From the railed balcony, stairs led down along the wall opposite us, beautifully railed and banistered. Then, at no more than a yard above the floor level of the room, they ended in a landing of white marble as large as a small stage. Only three shallow but immensely wide steps from it to the floor, each a little wider than the last, the final step, its ends gracefully rounded, a good eighteen feet long. The landing was a stage, planned for the dramatic entrance from above, and the final pause at the center of attention, before stepping down into and joining the room.

But then I understood that even this landing was only the setting within a setting for something else. Hung on the wall of the landing, to face the length of the entire room and the great entranceway we stood in, was a full-length—and at the very least, life-sized—portrait of a woman so magnificent that a little physical chill moved up my spine as I stared at it. I knew the face: this was Vilma Banky, standing in a knee-length, loosely hanging evening gown of the Twenties, a Spanish shawl draped over one shoulder. Her head was turned, chin slightly lifted, to show her marvelous profile. In the center of her forehead a curl spiraled round and round to a final point, but if that sounds funny it wasn't: this was a beautiful, beautiful woman and nothing could make her absurd. Concealed lighting illuminated the painting without shine and from all sides, its gilt frame ten feet high if it was an inch. And it was hung just exactly high enough so that no matter who, short of King Kong, came down the stairs to pause on the stagelike landing before it, she'd be upstaged by Vilma Banky.

Ted stood waiting till we'd looked our fill, as no doubt he'd always done the first times he took people into this room. Finally we turned to him, murmuring our compliments, and he nodded, smiling, and accepted them on her behalf. "Yes. Thank you. This is Vilma's room. It's her house still, very nearly as she left it. I had a staff of researchers working full time for something over a year, while the house itself was being renovated. They consulted old newspaper and magazine photographs and accounts. Interviewed or corresponded with people who'd been here often. Of whom there were a great many. And many of whom loaned us photographs they'd taken. They consulted diaries and letters of Vilma's time here. Read her household accounts. And fortunately we had the auction catalog, illustrated and with full descriptions of virtually every­thing this house once contained. So we were able to track down many of the things that had been sold. Including the painting. Especially the painting. In most instances we were able to buy them back. Much of the furniture has been rebuilt, restored to just as it was, even to the reweaving of certain materials. Some of the furniture is duplicated. So that now—well, she'd be at home here, if only she could walk back into it. But there are a few things I've added."

He walked slowly forward to what I'd thought was a delicate, thin-legged, oval-topped table, but as we moved closer I saw first that the top was glass, and then that a small shaded light inside it illuminated the interior of what wasn't a table but a shallow display case lined with pale-blue watered silk. We stopped before it, looking down into it—and I didn't understand what I was seeing, lying there in the center of the case just above a printed card.

It was a shapeless lump about the size of a dime, its surface wrinkled and shriveled, grayish pink in color. It lay squashed down onto the center of a raggedly cut, roughly circular piece of heavily varnished canvas about the size of a man's hand. Before I could read the card, Ted explained, voice lowering respectfully. "The wad of gum Spencer Tracy stuck on the back of Clark Gable's plane in Test Pilot." Marion's head lifted slightly to look across his bent back at me, frowning, and I read her expression: Who is Spencer Tracy? Who's Clark Gable?

"And this..." Ted Bollinghurst was turning to move on, and now I saw that half the tables in the room weren't tables but duplicate glass-topped display cases. We stopped at the next, lined with identical watered silk except that it was canary yellow, and bent over it. "Ramon Navarro's whip. From Ben Hur." And now Marion, nose almost touching the glass, was smiling: satisfied; pleased; impressed.

We walked slowly around a piano, and among the dozens of photo­graphs on its closed top, all inscribed to Ted and often misspelling his name, I recognized Clive Brook, Leatrice Joy, Aileen Pringle, Larry Semon, Rod La Rocque, Clara Kimball Young. Marion and I looked up from them at the same time, our eyes meeting, and we smiled in recognition of what seemed like a mutual bond. It wasn't, though; we'd each seen all these people in the same pictures, every last movement on the screen identical for each of us, but of course we'd each seen something different. For her they'd been young and beautiful people, still very much alive, the pictures new and with more to come. But for me they'd been resurrections, the miracle that movies finally made possible, of long-gone mythical people. But we smiled and nodded, each with his own pleasure, and walked on with Ted to another case like the others except that this was lined in pink.

All these watered-silk linings matched in weave and texture, differing only in color, and all were applied at the sides in tucks and flounces, but stretched tautly over smooth padding on the bottoms. On the softly lighted pink of this case lay—What was this? Hair: it was hair, jet-black, and I saw that although it lay crumpled, it retained a shape. If there'd been a way to apply it, this might have been a false beard; the Vandyke chin beard, sideburns, and joining mustache were clearly discernible. The printed card read RUDOLPH VALENTINO'S BEARD, SHAVED OFF IN THE SUMMER OF 1924 AT THE REQUEST OF THE NATIONAL BARBERS ASSOCIATION. Marion was nodding. "Yes, I remember: it was in all the papers."

"Charley Morrison bought it. Right from the barber; it's the real thing, all right. For only ten smackers, the lucky stiff. He'd never sell it to me, but when he died, in 1950,1 bought it from his widow; made the deal at his funeral. Had to; I'd heard The Woman in Black was after it."

On the pale apple-green lining of the next case lay a typed sheet much amended in the margins and between the lines in several handwritings. "A real prize," Ted said. "This is the fourth and next-to-final draft of Shirley Temple's annual letter to Santa Claus, published nationwide every December. This was written when she was fourteen, one of the last; some of the marginal corrections are in L. B. Mayer's own hand­writing." We stared in awe, bent over the delicate little cabinet, and I read the sheet down to "and plese, plese dear Sandy, don't ferget all the poor childern..." Then I stopped.

We saw Lon Chaney's hump from The Hunchback of Notre Dame, a marvelous thing of plaster of Paris attached to a leather harness that I wouldn't have minded owning myself and wearing around the house now and then.

We moved on to a blackened, shriveled something I thought was a meteorite lying on white silk, and I had to give Ted credit: he scrupu­lously explained that he wasn't entirely certain of the authenticity of this. He thought, he had reason to believe, that this was probably the actual grapefruit half James Cagney had shoved into Mae Clarke's face in The Public Enemy. He'd paid twenty dollars for it to a stagehand on the set who swore it was the real thing, but Ted wasn't quite convinced that this particular rind hadn't actually been one used only in rehearsal.

We saw, lying on silk the color of orange sherbet, three shattered ornaments shot off a Christmas tree with a popgun by William Powell in The Thin Man. And on deep-blue silk—this was authentic, because Ted had stolen it himself from Marlene Dietrich's dressing room right after the last day's shooting on Morocco—a bottle of leg depilatory.

On silver cloth: four crescent-shaped objects of gold. Bent over the case, I saw that their inner edges were sharp, worn to ragged paper thinness, and looking like miniature scimitars punctured with small holes. RUBY KEEPER'S TAPS: WORN OUT ON THE SET OF "42ND STREET."

"Gold?" I said to Ted.

"I had them plated."

We saw the artificial butterfly Lew Ayres had been reaching for from his trench just as he was shot in the final scene of All Quiet on the Western Front; and a half dollar tossed by George Raft. And in one of the last cases, a small object about an inch and a half long, lying on scarlet silk. In shape it was a vague, elongated figure eight wrapped in cloudy cellophane, cinched at the middle by a paper band. There was no explanatory card, and Ted glanced uneasily at Marion, then leaned toward me. "From an Andy Hardy picture," he whispered. "That's the actual contraceptive Lewis Stone found in the watch pocket of Andy's pants the morning after the junior prom. It didn't actually show in the film, of course. Judge Hardy held it cupped in his hand when he showed it to Andy, and he didn't say what it was; but you knew. The Judge handed me that himself."

We'd reached the staircase landing and stopped for a moment; the wall beside it was bookshelves from floor to eye level, filled with leather-bound volumes stamped in gold on the spines. Each volume was a year's copies of Photoplay, Silver Screen, or one of the other old movie mags, each bound in its own distinctive color. The entire lower shelf was packed with leather-bound scripts, beginning with The Great Train Robbery.

Looking at them, I was remembering an article I'd read by a psychi­atrist who said it was probably lucky that not many obsessed people were rich. He gave an example of one who was: a man ridden by fear of germs. He'd begun like people we've all encountered, who open doors with their hand in a coat pocket to avoid germs on the knobs. But he was rich, and able to let his obsession grow unchecked. Presently he was living in a Paris hotel suite into which no one else but a single servant was ever admitted. Next he rented and kept vacant the rooms on each side, then the rooms above and below him. Isolated in space, finally, he still had to eat. And eventually reduced himself to subsisting only on overcooked meat; enormous roasts brought to the door by the hotel cook, left there for him to take in when the cook had gone. And then in the room, with his own knife, he would cut out a cube from deep in the very heart of the roast, a chunk of cooked meat that no other hand could possibly have touched before.

Ted Bollinghurst, too, was simply a man with a common obsession—a movie fan, an old-film buff, of which there are a lot of us—but with the money to take it just as far as he wanted to go. And I knew that here but for a few million dollars or so stood I. At the foot of Vilma Banky's staircase, ready and anxious to see where they led.

I'd dreaded the question for fear of the answer, and when Marion asked it now, flicking a glance at me, I literally held my breath. "Ted, you used to collect prints of films you liked," she began.

"Yes. Stole them, you mean." He chuckled, and had to cough.

"Do you ... still have them?" I wanted to put my hands to my ears, but stood openmouthed, straining for the answer.

"Well, of course. Would you like to see them?"

I exhaled so audibly that he glanced at me, and when Marion answered yes, all I could do was nod.

We turned to the stairs, and Ted led the way up them slowly but very steadily, right foot always advancing first, dry old hand sliding up the banister rail. He said, "D. W. Griffith climbed these stairs; we know that for sure. So did Mary Pickford, Dolores del Rio, Dustin Farnum, Milton Sills, Ernst Lubitsch, Alma Rubens, and many, many more. Several, in fact, have fallen down them. And I have nine authenticated instances of stars, of both sexes—several of whom would astound you—who were chased up them."

We turned left at the top to walk along the railed balcony looking down into the immense room below us, its dainty display cases pastel ovals of color from here. On our right, closed doors each labeled with a small brass plate: TURKISH BATH ... BILLIARD ROOM ... RADIO LOUNGE ... two doors side by side, one labeled SHEIKS, the other SHEBAS ... and at the end, labeled SODA FOUNTAIN, a door that Ted pushed open invitingly. The room was just that: there was a marble soda fountain with chromed spigots and a back mirror; round tables with chairs whose legs and back were made of heavy twisted wire. "Like a soda? It's all equipped; a couple dozen flavors." We said no thanks, and he nodded, letting the door swing shut, walking on. "Sometimes I go in there and fix one myself."

We'd reached the end of the balcony, turning right to face a pair of leather-padded swinging doors, and I pushed through, holding one open for Marion and Ted. We were in a corridor, and as I turned and we began our slow walk along it, I had my first look at it.

It was very wide, surely a dozen feet or more. And so long you could actually see the diminishing perspective, the four lines of its floor and ceiling angles slanting in to the corners of the distant square that was the corridor's far end—so distant I couldn't make out what was down there; something, I couldn't quite see what. The ceiling was high, and the floor white marble, white because the wall at our left was an outside wall into which four high, arch-topped windows of stained glass were set at long intervals, the first of them a dozen yards ahead. Natural light from outside these windows, augmented now by spotlights—it must have been dusk out—illuminated the corridor, patterning the white marble floor and the walls with colored light, a fine effect.

As we said so to Ted, who looked pleased, we were slowly approaching a door on the inside wall at our right. Fastened to the wall beside the door at eye level hung a shaped wooden plaque of what I took to be polished walnut. Carved into its surface, the letters picked out in gilt, was a listing of some kind. As we moved slowly nearer, I was able to read it: ALLA NAZIMOVA, ANTONIO MORENO, HOPE HAMPTON, EDMUND LOWE, DOLORES COSTELLO, RICHARD DIX, TOM MIX. "All of them stayed in that bedroom at one time or another," Ted said. "Some at the same time." I heard Marion inhale sharply and turned.

We were approaching the first of the great stained-glass windows, and I hurried several steps closer, then stopped to stare. So brilliantly illuminated that it seemed to hang in space, it was made of hundreds of pieces of glass, some as small as a thumbnail, some big as a man's arm. Marvelously cut and leaded together, they formed a vertical scene of every conceivable color and shade, but predominately green in a dozen or more shades and gradations of shades, and each piece was afire with light.

It was a picture, made of glowing flat jewels of glass. From the crest of a tree-dotted hill rose a great gray battlement, the edge of a lush forest far in the background. Before it, a blue-filled moat and a raised draw­bridge. And high on that battlement—in green tights, jerkin, and peaked hat; a quiver of arrows slung on his back; a fist on one hip, bow raised high in the other hand; feet arrogantly wide apart, and grinning so widely that the dazzle of his teeth made me blink—stood—Yes, of course, and I said it aloud, "Douglas Fairbanks."

"In Robin Hood," Marion breathed.

Ted nodded. "These are my additions. They took the artist four and a half years." After a long minute or more, we walked on.

NITA NALDI headed the list on the next bedroom-door plaque: REGINALD DENNY, POLA NEGRI, HERMAN MANKIEWICZ, LEATRICE JOY, MARY MILES MINTER, CONRAD NAGEL ... but I stopped reading: we'd reached the second great picture of shimmering glass.

Filling the entire lower left corner, behind the blur of its propeller, hung the engine and cockpit of an airplane headed straight at us. The plane was dramatically tilted, its double wings on one side slanting sharply toward the upper right corner. At lower right, far below the slanted wings, a shell-cratered battlefield. Above it, rising clear to the top of the window and a background for everything else, a cloud-dotted blue sky. And at upper center of the sky, a small and distant plane heading straight down and trailing black smoke, on each upper-wing tip a black Maltese cross. The pilot of the first plane, the big one filling the lower left corner of the huge window, was grinning, a hand lifted in the act of peeling off his leather helmet and goggles. I knew the grin, knew the face: Buddy Rogers, of course, in Wings, and I meant it when I told Ted Bollinghurst I thought this window was great.

On past the next bedroom door: CONSTANCE BINNEY, THOMAS MEIGHAN, MAE MURRAY, CLAIRE WINDSOR, RICHARD BARTHELMESS, NATACHA RAMBOVA ... And on the window across the hall, a blue-coated, white-kepied soldier, wearing white-canvas puttees, and ankle deep in sand, looked back over his shoulder, face anguished, at the struggling column of men he was leading toward a distant fort, high in the upper left corner, the tricolor limp on its staff at the near corner of the battlements. "Beau Geste," Marion said softly, "Ronald Colman. Oh, I love him!" and I nodded and said, "So do I."

LILA LEE, BARBARA LA MARR, JACK HOLT, MABEL NORMAND, WALLACE REID, CONSTANCE COLLIER, BULL MONTANA...

The rose in her hand a spectacular glowing red, Renee Adoree ran through the village street that slanted across and up the last great window, trying vainly to catch the olive-drab army truck from which John Gilbert, behind the raised tailgate, yearned after her, rifle in one hand, the other arm straining for the rose, in The Big Parade.

EVELYN BRENT, SESSUE HAYAKAWA, OLGA BACLANOVA, BUCK JONES, BILLIE DOVE, GEORGE ARLISS, MADGE BELLAMY, LYA DE PUTTI ... "Oh, my God," I said, "if I could have been here! If only I could have been here then." And Ted and Marion nodded.

Two carved wooden doors inlaid with gilt and flanked by gold pillars studded with lapis lazuli filled the end of the corridor just ahead; a shadowed projection jutted out over them into the hall. Ted flicked up a wall switch, and the filaments of dozens of half-size bulbs—of clear glass and with spiked ends—came to life, outlining the rectangular shape of a miniature marquee. Across its front tiny colored bulbs spelled VILMA'S VISTA. They were of every color, bright and gay, flashing on and off enticingly, welcoming us, offering the old magic of "going to the movies." Ted pulled open a door, lights coming on inside, and Marion and I walked in, grinning with excitement. "Vilma's projection room," Ted said, letting the door swing silently closed behind us, "almost exactly as she had it."

It was a marvel, a pure joy; my heart leaped in envy. We stood at the back of a miniature movie palace of the Twenties: painted and gilded pillars and plaster ornamentations; burnished mahogany side walls, an elaborate tiny Spanish balcony halfway up each of them; a vaulted ceiling inset with softly lighted giant jewels. Up front, a square screen, maybe half size. And lined up before it in three rows, not seats but low softly upholstered chesterfields and chairs, enough to seat maybe twenty people, aisles at the sides only.

We stood at the rear of this little beauty, the fronts of our thighs touching the back edge of a long worktable extending nearly all the way across the rear of the theater. Fastened to the table were film-viewing and editing equipment, including a pair of hand-cranked reel holders for rewinding film. Off to the left, directly beside that end of the worktable, stood the great black bulk of an old-style arc-light projector.

I turned to Ted to say, "I'd give my arm, I really would; the left one anyway."

"It's beautiful," Marion breathed. "Oh, Ted, it is!"

"Yes." He nodded, not smiling. "It's like a chapel to me. I come in here often. Just to meditate. Then I run off an old favorite, accompa­nying it myself." He pointed, ahead and to the left, and I saw something I'd missed. A shell-like alcove curved into the left wall, just off the aisle and halfway up it. In it stood a miniature gilt pipe organ. "I learned to play it. To accompany the older pictures. They should never be run in silence, of course." He turned to finger the drapery that hung in loose folds across the entire back wall except for the doors, and extending up the side aisles a little. "But I had to install these for sound film," he said apologetically. "There was an echo."

We stood looking around. It was pleasantly cool, I could feel a steady flow of air rising up past us from the floor, and I turned and found the continuous vent across the back of the theater set into the wood walls just under the ceiling and above the tops of the draping. Directly behind us, the doors we'd entered by bore a red exit sign, and I thought they were the only doors. But Ted had walked across the back of the theater behind the worktable, to the right. Now he parted the drapes on the mahogany side wall to reveal another door, and when I saw it I felt the excitement close my throat.

There'd been a question I hadn't even wanted to admit existed: How could Ted Bollinghurst possibly have kept old nitrate film stock of the Twenties from disintegrating over the years? This was why so many old films had been lost; they'd slowly moldered away in the vaults of uncaring studios.

But the door Ted had exposed was white, enameled, and angled across its upper left corner a chromed script read westinghouse. He was opening the door now; it had not a knob but a long chromed locking handle. Reaching inside, he flicked on the ceiling lights and we saw the overhead piping white with frost. It was a vast walk-in refrigerator, the kind built for meat wholesalers. "The only practical way I know of to preserve the old film," Ted said, standing half turned toward us in the doorway. He smiled. "I used ice in the earliest days; kept my film in secondhand wooden iceboxes. I didn't always eat lunch, but I always found money for ice. Later I used old Frigidaires, and now this. Every inch of film I have is in perfect condition. Every print flawless, diamond clear. Not a scratched frame in this entire vault." Suddenly he grinned. "Come on in!"

My knees were trembling minutely as I walked, my breathing shallow, and passing through the vault door I bumped Marion's shoulder. I'd forgotten she was there, forgotten everything but the lighted rectangle of that doorway, Ted standing just inside it beckoning.

It was cold, but I didn't care. Both sides of the vault were lined with stainless-steel drawers. Each had a heavy vertical handle, and above each handle a metal frame held a card. When I saw what some of them said, I had to turn and stare down at the floor for a moment because I actually felt dizzy.

Then I lifted my eyes again. I stood facing three drawers labeled WM. de MILLE, and typed below this on each label a list of titles. I pulled a handle, the drawer rolled out on bearings, and I stared down at the double row of film cans, a dozen deep the length of the drawer. There they were. There they really were, films directed by William de Mille, with the small de, not brother Cecil, with the big De, most of whose films have unfortunately been saved. Here were the films of the brother who made the good ones, and I lifted out a film can, the metal chill on my palms and fingers, and read the label aloud: "World's Applause." I looked slowly up at Ted. "This must be the only print in the world."

He bobbed his head eagerly, eyes bright. "I'm sure of it. Want to see it! I'll run it off!"

"Wait." I held up a hand and put the can back. I'd seen drawers labeled garbo, and I rolled the de Mille drawer shut and began reading Garbo labels. It wasn't on the first or second. Behind me Marion exclaimed, "I remember this: Shoulder Arms! I saw it when I was a girl during the war." On the third label, I found it: The Divine Woman, with Garbo and, I remembered, Polly Moran, John Mack Brown ... a lost Garbo. Was this the film I wanted Ted to run off? I began to feel a little frantic; we could hardly see more than one picture, yet—I stood looking around—the vault was filled with film I had to see!

I began reading labels, yanking open drawers, staring for a moment, rolling them shut, opening another. Here lay the films of Edward Sloman, maybe a greater director than Griffith himself, but ... The National Film Archive has Sloman's Ghost of Rosie Taylor, made in 1918; the Museum of Modern Art in New York has a few reels of Shattered Idols; but nearly all the rest of his work is gone. Possibly one of our finest directors, if we could only see his work, and here it was, certainly most of it. Did I want to see one of these? Or maybe a reel from each of several. Yes, yes, but...

"Mary Pickford," Marion murmured, rolling open a bin.

Ted stood alternately lifting one foot, then the other, in a slow little dance of excitement. "Pick one out, Marion! I'll show it! I've got Tess of the Storm Country!" That was another lost film, and I almost called yes, but Marion was pushing the drawer closed.

"I've seen it."

I stepped over beside her to read the Pickford labels, and found it—Fanchon and the Cricket—near the top of the first list of titles, and was tempted. It was made in 1915, starring Mary Pickford, and featuring a very, very young Fred Astaire and his sister, Adele.

Then I saw them, two drawers there in the row just above the Pickford bins, and they were labeled GREED. I couldn't talk, only point, but when Ted stepped closer to read the labels, I managed to say, "All? All forty-two reels?"

Eyes sparkling, he nodded. "All of them. A complete and absolutely perfect print made by their three best technicians working all night right up until dawn of the morning the studio had the negative destroyed."

I just stood there: I didn't know what to do. To see all forty-two reels of Greed would take ten hours. "That it?" Ted was demanding. "That what you want to see? All of it? Part of it? I'll show anything you want!" He was beside himself.

I said, "Ted. One reel was tinted—"

"I've got it, I've got it!" He yanked open a bin, ran his eyes along the cans, then plucked one out. "This is it! Right at the beginning of the reel. Want to see it? I'll thread it up!" He ducked out into the tiny theater, and, plumping the can onto the worktable, pulled off the lid.

I walked over and tapped his arm; I knew what I wanted now. "No need to run it off, Ted. Just let me hold it."

He'd unreeled the couple yards or so of leader and a half a dozen feet of the start of the reel; now he turned to stare at me. Then he nodded slowly and smiled. "I understand; yes, I do." Suddenly anxious, he said, "You know how to handle film?"

"Believe me, yes; by the edges only. I've never left a finger mark on a strip of film in my life."

He handed me the leader, I raised it high, then took the first of the film between thumb and middle finger, its edges lightly pressing into them. "Thread it on the viewer, if you like," Ted said, but I shook my head. I'd raised the film to the ceiling light, and that was enough: there was the famous scene, Zasu Pitts, but a very young and lovely Zasu Pitts, lying naked on a bed she'd scattered with gold coins. In the tiny progressions of each frame, I could see that she was literally rolling in gold, feeling the coins press into her body, the very epitome of greed. And this scene, this was the scene Von Stroheim had actually ordered to be tinted by hand: on the strip I held high to the light, every tiny coin had been tinted gold by the tip of a brush, and my hands shook at the thought of what I was holding.

I put it down finally and started to rewind it into the can, but Ted was jouncing with excitement. "I'll do that! Leave it!" I don't suppose he'd ever left film like that in his life before, but he was too excited to take time now. "Come in here; find whatever you want to see; find it!"

I couldn't. And neither could Marion. "Lost films" meant nothing to her; she'd seen most of them when they were new. It was pictures she'd missed that she exclaimed over: a Charlie Chaplin, a Dolores Costello, some of which you can buy from Blackhawk. Once I heard her say to Ted, "Look; I saw this being filmed."

I found The Patriot, a lost Ernst Lubitsch, and took it to the table to pull out just enough film to have the pleasure of reading the cast and credits. But this wasn't the one, the one, and Ted almost literally dragged me back to the vault to find it.

I looked through the unbelievable collection of all D. W. Griffith's features, trying to pick. I chose The Greatest Thing in Life, finally, because Lillian Gish always claimed it was the master's greatest. "I think I'd like to see some of this," I said, handing the first reel to Ted, and he nodded quickly, and we walked out to the worktable. But when he opened the can, I suddenly said, "No, wait! That's not the best choice," and almost ran back into the vault.

Put a hungry child in a candy store, tell him he can have whatever he wants but one choice only and nothing more ... that was me. I could not make up my mind because, always, there might be something even better I hadn't yet seen.

I found The Miracle Man, directed in 1919 by the mysterious George Loane Tucker, lost for decades. And Peg o' My Heart, with Laurette Taylor. Films starring Marie Doro, Marguerite Clark, and Elsie Ferguson, all of whose films have been lost.

And then I found it. Walking past the second drawer labeled ERNST LUBITSCH, a corner of my eye caught a title on the label, and from that bin I brought out the picture I knew I had to see, the long-lost silent version of The Great Gatsby. At least I thought it must be, and I took the first reel out to the table to check the credits. The worktable was crowded with the film we'd opened, which bothered me; I'm sure it wasn't customary with this collection. But although it looked helter-skelter, winding lengths of film curling out of the open cans, it wasn't.

No film tangled with any other; each can lay in a little space of its own. I had to make room for The Great Gatsby but I moved the other film carefully, clearing a little space for this. Then I uncoiled the leader from the outer edge of the big fat disk of wound film, found the cast listing, and held it to the light.

And there in tiny white letters on the black background of each of the frames stretched between my two hands was the incredible cast: Rudolph Valentino as Gatsby himself ... Gloria Swanson as Daisy Buchanan ... Greta Garbo as Jordan Baker ... John Gilbert as Carraway ... Mae West as Myrtle, her only silent role, I was almost sure ... George O'Brien as Tom Buchanan ... Harry Langdon, in his only serious role, that I did know, as Myrtle's husband...

Ted was standing beside me peering up at my film, and I said, "Isn't this the one with the party sequence at Gatsby's estate?"

"Yes, with Gilda Gray, Chaplin, and F. Scott Fitzgerald himself as part of the crowd."

I lowered the film.and stood staring up at the empty screen for a moment. Not only had this incredible picture been lost for decades, it had never even been shown; suppressed by Gloria Swanson, supposedly, because Lubitsch had given too much footage to Garbo and West. I turned to Ted. "This is the one," I said. "This is the one I want to see." Then, from inside the vault, Marion gave a little scream.

She was standing at a closed bin, pointing at the label. As we stopped beside her she read it aloud: "Daughters of Jazz ... Oh, damn it, Ted, why did you keep this! I want to see it, and I don't want to look at it!" She turned to me. "That's the one, Nickie. They replaced me with Crawford ... I'd have been the discovery, not her, if only—" She shook her head. "No, goddamn it! I don't want to see it!"

But Ted had opened the bin; only two film cans lay inside. "Marion ... she's not in this."

"Yes, she—What do you mean?"

"I saved your outtakes." His chin lifted suddenly, and he stared at her, his old eyes blinking in puzzlement. "We thought you'd been killed! Yes ... we thought that. And I had prints made of your outtakes before they discarded the negatives. When the picture was finished, with Crawford in your part, I took her bits out of my print. And spliced in yours."

He was standing at the open bin, hand still on the edge of the metal drawer. After a moment Marion reached out to put her hand on his. "Ted, why?"

He looked away. "You know why. Don't you?"

"Yes ... I think I do."

"Because I loved you. I always did."

Watching, listening, I finally knew, really knew, why the old, old movies had once been so incredibly popular. Why out of a population only half the size of ours, sixty million people went to the movies every week of the Twenties. We laugh at their pictures and the stories they took seriously. But they were in tune with their movies, and their movies with them; that's the way people were, or at least how they thought they wanted to be. Now Ted and Marion acted as their movies had, and sounded like their subtitles. Ted slowly withdrew his hand from under Marion's: if I'd been filming it, their hands would have filled a close-up. His big, veined, wrinkled hand patted hers gently. Then hers turned, the two palms clasped, and parted. "But I knew it wasn't to be," Ted said. "I was older. So much older." He grinned. "And a funny-looking gink besides!"

"No, you weren't." She brought up a fist slowly and touched the side of his jaw in a pantomimed punch. "You big lug..."

"Come on!" Ted grabbed up the two film cans. "This is what we want to see! It's the first third only, just your part of the picture. Your picture, Marion!" Fade-out.

It was what we wanted to see. Marion did, and out of everything in that astounding vault, so did I. The old man at work bringing the massive old projector to life, I flicked off the vault lights, and let Marion lead the way, down the side aisle to the front row, then across to a low upholstered settee for two.

There we sat, Marion staring up at the empty screen, waiting like a child. Half-turned in my seat, I watched Ted thread up. He worked surprisingly fast, winding the leader through its gate, onto the sprockets, fastening the end onto the big take-up reel. He slammed the little metal door shut on the film, opened another behind the projection mechanism, adjusted the carbons, slammed the door shut, struck the arc, and ran a few feet of leader, houselights still on. He yanked open a metal door, and peered in at the reeled film, started it again, slammed the door shut, flicked off the houselights, and actually ran across the back of the theater and down the side aisle.

I didn't understand the hurry until up on the screen the last of the white leader flicked past and, superimposed on a line drawing of a saxophone, the title appeared: JESSE L. LASKY PRESENTS "DAUGHTERS OF JAZZ," A HOWARD BERMAN PRODUCTION, FROM THE NOVEL BY WALTER BRADEN. And in just that moment the first chord of Ted's accompani­ment began; he'd reached the organ in time.

Rapidly, not nearly so many screen credits as now, the titles appeared, and then the cast, in white letters on black. But I never read it as I generally always do, and I don't think Marion did. Because opposite the very last listing, ADELE, something else appeared instead of the JOAN CRAWFORD that should have been there. It was a badly flickering rect­angle of white, and I knew what had happened. On every last frame of that listing, Ted had carefully scraped off a narrow rectangle of emulsion and Joan Crawford's name along with it. In its place we now read—the letters jiggling and vibrating—the name he had inked in to replace it, MARION MARSH.

The picture started then, continued, and it was nothing; neither Ted nor anyone else would have preserved it for itself. I'd heard of it once, I recalled now; a film collector I'd met had seen it run off. He was a Crawford fan, collecting her pictures, and had seen this simply because it was her first, the only reason it had been preserved. She'd been good, he said. It was why she'd been noticed, how she'd got her start.

It was a comedy of sorts. The star was Alicia Conway, who'd made a few pictures in the Twenties. In this she was a show girl out to marry a millionaire. Instead she falls helplessly in love with his handsome young valet, and marries him for pure love. After a lot of nonsense, it turns out that he is the millionaire posing as his own valet because he's tired of women chasing him for his money.

We watched for quite a while, the organ unobtrusive, its mood skillfully shifting with the action on the screen. Once I turned to watch him, and Ted sat swaying gently on the organ bench, fingers drifting over the keyboard; happy.

I felt a nudge and turned. On the screen, a swimming pool, rectan­gular, old-fashioned, the scene filmed outdoors in a little too much sun. And yes, there among a group standing beside the pool—the girls in dark, short-skirted, knit bathing suits, and rubber caps; the men in dark trunks and white tops—stood the girl I'd seen on my television screen and, that same night, in transparent but vivid and colorful reality. The screen was black-and-white but in the sunlight her blondness was plain, as one by one the girls—show girls at the millionaire's pool—walked onto the diving board, posed at its end, glancing around at the spectators, then dived.

I couldn't make out how it happened. The others were simply actresses miming the part, waggling their hips and shoulders as they walked out on the board, batting their eyes as they posed, diving in. But now again, and as always, Marion Marsh made you lean forward. She walked out onto the board, not waggling, very simply and directly, but I was aware of her figure, her body, her movements, and herself—the person. And, genuinely unconscious, I think, of a change in their actions, so were the men beside the pool. For each of the four girls who'd preceded Marion, they'd grinned, worked their eyebrows up and down, made side-of-mouth comments. But for Marion they just stood and watched, motionless, not remembering to talk, and it made her the only moving figure on the screen. When she stood on the end of the board, ankles together, looking around with the Marion Marsh arrogance I'd come to know, even the girls dog-paddling in the pool stared up at her. Abruptly she dived in, knifing into the water out of sight, the next girl wriggling toward the board, and the scene went lifeless again.

"What did you do?" I whispered. "What were you thinking; did you actually feel that part?"

"The part? Hell, no. All I was thinking was that I was damn well going to make them look at me. The camera was what I thought about."

On the screen, a street scene, and beside an enormous interurban trolley car, I caught a glimpse of an ancient electric automobile, the tall old kind that ran on batteries and steered with a tiller bar.

A little later, a chase: a touring car racing along a narrow asphalt road beside a railroad track trying to catch a speeding train. On the observa­tion platform, Alicia Conway, arm outstretched, waited for a man crouched on the car's running board to get close enough to toss her a weighted envelope containing her marriage license, the car wavering from side to side of the road.

Cut to a front view facing the car. We see the driver and three or four people in both front and back seats, men and women. They're excited, the driver hunched over his wheel, twisting it back and forth, eyes wide, demonstrating great speed. The girls shriek, grimace, sway from side to side, and it occurs to me that they don't trust this medium to actually record on film and, months later, make an audience believe. Except Marion.

You didn't even notice her at first. But after the first dozen seconds of that swaying, gesticulating chase, you spotted a girl in the back seat almost hidden by the others. You became aware of her, I realized, because she wasn't doing anything. She just sat, chin lifted a little, eyes nearly closed, and faintly smiling—but you sensed the rush of air she must be feeling on her face, detected her quiet exhilaration. Just as the bit ended, your eyes on her, she suddenly flung both hands up and outward, half rising in her seat, and you saw the word she spoke as though you'd heard it: Faster...

The scene was hers, locked up and stolen from everyone else while they weren't even noticing her, and when I turned to look at Marion in the darkness, she was grinning. Eyes still on the screen, she murmured, "That was my idea, the last bit. I didn't say anything for fear they'd stop me; just did it. And I'll bet Crawford stole it."

The reel ended, and Ted hurried back, turned on the houselights, pulled the reel out, set it down, and fitted in the second. Again he threaded up fast, checked both reels, slammed the little metal door closed, started the projector, flipped off the houselights. As the leader flickered by, he was hurrying down the aisle, and once again the first soft organ chord and the first frame of the reel came into being together.

"My last scene," Marion murmured. "I think it comes early."

It did, within a minute or two. A beloved old man, producer of a Broadway musical, had just collapsed backstage. Now the chorus, a dozen girls, had to go on, smiling out at the audience, snapping their jazz-age fingers while inwardly their hearts were anguished.

Eleven girls did it by baring their teeth in rigid smiles, as though the camera wouldn't record a smile unless the teeth were exposed, while blinking rapidly to show they were fighting back tears. Marion did it with a strained lips-closed smile, the lower lip just barely trembling now and then, while she stared out and beyond the audience, not seeing it, so that she made you wonder what she was thinking. But you knew what she was thinking—the picture had told you—so you believed that you saw her feeling it. The others pantomimed grief but Marion showed it to you—or let you perceive it yourself. Apparently they'd had two cameras going, one for close-ups. Because now cuts began from full-stage views to a close-up of one or the other of the girls' faces. But more and more these cuts returned to Marion's face. Beside me, she was murmuring excitedly to herself, "I thought they would, but I wasn't sure! They're using my close-ups, mine."

Again a cut to a close-up of Marion, her smile remaining, shoulders swaying, lifted fingers snapping, but now actual tears were running down her face. The camera backed off just enough to show her dancing full figure, smiling for the audience, crying in her own inner grief, and I was thrilled, wanting to shout or cry out or do something, and I knew Joan Crawford had not, could not possibly have, been better than what I was staring up at now.

The room lightened, whitening the screen, dimming the picture, and I felt annoyed the way you do when someone opens a door at a movie, and turned to see who'd done it now. But no door was open, and even in the moment it took my head to turn, the light had subsided. Only a swarm of yellowish-white moths of light, strangely, was fluttering and zigzagging over the surface of the big worktable back there. Very fast they moved, sparking a little, like fuses.

They were fuses, I understood then, a dozen or so twisting lengths of film burning with frantic speed back toward the cans they'd come out of, and even while I was trying to push up out of the low-slung lounge, I knew what had happened. I knew because I'd glimpsed the achingly brilliant light of the arc inside the projector, and I shouldn't have been able to see it. That meant the protective metal door Ted had slammed shut in his hurry to reach the organ had simply bounced open again, a little way at least. All it had taken then, presently, was one of the occasional sparks from the glowing carbon sticks to flare out through that narrow door-ajar opening onto a length of film. A moment when a ragged-edged hole had expanded across a single frame—of Greed? The Great Gatsby? A lost Griffith?—then a puff of fire lightening the screen for a moment, and now dozens of fuses were lighted and racing.

On my feet, running across the front of the little theater toward the side aisle, I saw the first can of film and an instant later all of them flare up into yellowy fire, sudden thick, black, greasy smoke swelling and expanding like a dozen evil genies, merging at their tops, then sucked like a steadily rising black curtain into the ceiling-high air vent across the back of the room. Before I even reached the side aisle the drapes directly beside the burning film at the end of the table went up suddenly—brightly and softly crackling.

Halfway up the aisle I caught a sickening whiff of the stink and stopped dead. It's a gas, the smoke produced by burning film, intensely poisonous. It'll kill you quick, and now I knew what was going to happen. Old film is almost literally dynamite, chemically allied to nitroglycerin, I believe; it was going to explode, and no one was going to be able to go into that gas to stop it.

Standing halfway up the aisle, staring at the back of the room and the open cans of film, like flat smudge pots of poisonous yellow fire, the black smoke rising like a wall from table to vents, I could already feel a pressure of heat moving down the aisle. Old nitrate film ignites at only 300 degrees. In moments now—not only the drapes but now the varnished wood paneling under them was crackling brightly—the tem­perature in the bins we'd left open just inside the vault would softly explode into flame, lids flying off. After that, the heat continuing to build, the closed bins would explode.

I yelled, "Ted!" He sat on the organ bench, stricken, frozen, staring back at the fire. Running back down the aisle for Marion, I shrieked, "Out, Ted, out! Put a handkerchief over your face and get out!" Turning to race across the front of the theater toward Marion, I saw her—incredibly—turn her face from the blaze to look up at the screen again. The projector, on the other side of the room from the blazing drapes and film, was still turning, Marion's movie flickering steadily up on the screen.

I gripped her wrist but she yanked it instantly and violently, shaking her head without ever taking her eyes from the screen. "No! You go, Nickie! I've got to see my picture!"

I tried again but she gripped the big upholstered arm and jammed her feet far under the lounge, tugging hard at the wrist I held ... and the film rolled steadily on, sixteen frames a second, the fire behind us slowly whitening the screen. But the image was still clear: Marion in her own living body of half a century ago, fingers soundlessly snapping, smiling bravely as she danced, staring ahead almost as though at the fire, the tears sliding down her cheeks. And here, hungry-eyed before that screen sat—not really Marion, this was my wife's body, and I took the entire rounded back of her head into the grip of my spread left hand, drawing my right fist carefully back to hit her with just precisely the right force if I could do it to knock her unconscious without breaking her jaw. She saw me, eyes flicking momentarily from the screen to my fist. And in the instant before I struck she went limp with a little sigh, eyes closing.

Partly running, partly staggering, I carried Jan's unconscious body across to the side aisle and part way up it. There I got ready for the run around the table's end, through the wall of poisonous smoke toward the vague, smudged red of the exit sign on its other side. My right arm under her limp knees, my left arm supporting her upper body, I worked my left hand up over her face—ready to clamp down across her mouth, thumb and forefinger gripping her nostrils closed while I ran, holding my breath.

Ted sat watching me from across the theater. Then he turned on the organ seat to look up front, and involuntarily I did, too. Transparent but perfectly clear, Marion sat in the front row, the blondness of her hair apparent in the beam of the projector, face lifted to the screen on which she danced. Ted turned, both old hands dropped to the keyboard, and a mighty chord burst from the organ. He played, then, thrillingly, all stops open, and up front the dancing ghost on the screen like the ghost seated before it steadily lightened and whitened as they both moved toward final disappearance.

Then Marion turned to stare back at Jan and me. She smiled: mockingly, affectionately. And touching her forehead in a kind of casual Joan Blondell salute, she turned back to the screen.

I ran then, looking over at Ted once more as, still playing, he looked back over his shoulder at me. And what I saw then, I knew I had seen before. The human mind works strangely, at the strangest times, and even as I ran through the wall of acrid smoke with a hand over Jan's face, to crash through the doors out into the clear air of the long corridor beyond them—I was trying to remember where I had seen that face before.

Jan stirred, murmured, and opened her eyes. I set her on her feet, we raced down that long hall, and as we ran I understood what I'd seen when Ted's high-domed, sparse-haired head had turned to show his eyes, round and staring, and those strange flaring nostril holes, black in the flicker of that growing fire. It was the scene, almost precisely, far down in the cavern below the opera house, in which the Phantom of the Opera turns from the organ to stare—horribly, pathetically—across the room.

Out on the great dark lawn we stood with the dozen servants and the beginning crowd—growing fast, people pouring in through the great iron gates—staring up at Graustark, hearing the distant approaching hoot of the fire trucks' sirens. Inside, the electricity had gone off suddenly, and now the great house against the night sky was a silhouette except for three reddening windows; I didn't know where they were. Then the roof—over the film vault and projection room, the servants said—exploded in a great roaring gush of flame, thick sparks, and black flying objects, the sky turning pink.

And now the fire was free and we watched it begin its race down the long hall of bedrooms in which once had slept Vilma Banky herself ... Nazimova ... Tom Mix ... Constance Binney ... Milton Sills ... Lya de Putti! Then the first of the great arched windows lighted—for the last time and more brilliantly than ever before—searingly lighted from within. In Renee Adoree's outstretched hand the rose brightened ... brightened. And in the furious turbulence of roaring flame she seemed actually to move, straining toward the doughboy in the truck just beyond her reach. Then the great glass picture sagged, broke, and hundreds of bright fragments of The Big Parade fell outward and down, some actually flaming in colors.

The fire smashed through the hall roof, the light of it widening outward on the lawn, turning the people before us into rosy-edged silhouettes; and now, my arm around Jan's minutely trembling shoulders, we could feel the heat. Up on the distant fortress of the next great window the tricolor of France glowed impossibly bright. For a moment it shivered, and seemed to flutter. Ronald Colman and his weary column swayed as though about to drop to the desert sand, and then did, sagging into nothingness as the entire center of the window touched melting point.

Down the long hall the fire raced and roared, then Buddy Rogers' Allied plane, like the distant plane it had just shot down, took fire, or seemed to, flames licking its wings. Near the wing tip a pane popped out, black smoke instantly pouring through as though trailing from the wing edge. Then, still smiling, the upraised hand peeling off his helmet, touching his forehead as though in final salute, Buddy disappeared behind a bursting-out black-and-red smear of flame.

A moment later, no longer, Doug Fairbanks' costume brightened into a beautiful, achingly brilliant emerald-green, and his indomitable white-toothed grin became visible, I'm certain, over half of Hollywood in that last instant before Robin Hood burst outward and was gone. Then Jan and I turned, and in the flickering wash of pink light, the long shadows of Graustark's great trees wavering before us, we walked toward the gateway as the first fire truck turned through it, gravel and dead leaves spitting under its wheels.

People change with experience, we're told, or ought to, and maybe Marion Marsh changed us; maybe she did. Certainly she was an experience we're not ever going to forget. And much, much later that night in our bedroom at the Beverly Hills Hotel, I thought for a moment as I walked out of the bathroom that Marion had returned once more—smiling wantonly as she waited in bed, wearing the filmiest negligee I'd ever given Jan. But it wasn't, it was Jan, wanting to make me think, I'm almost sure, that maybe it was Marion. Trying at least, and not altogether failing, either, to be a little more like her, a little more wild and free. But we don't really change much. We remain ourselves, and mostly this was Jan, and that was fine with me. After all, and I knew it, I'm not Rodolpho Guglielmi myself.

We were a little reckless: we didn't go straight home. We spent a couple days at Disneyland and really did visit Forest Lawn cemetery, though I didn't find Felix the Cat's marble mausoleum. Then we drove home, because we were running out of money, and I had the new bathroom to finish.

Some ten days later a batch of papers arrived from Hollywood, and we filled them out and returned them, signed with our real names, with a note explaining that Marsh and Guglielmi were pseudonyms. So for a while, as long as those damned Huntley Tomato Catsup commercials ran, we got checks for something called residual payments. I bought The Narrow Trail, starring William S. Hart; Nomads of the North, with Betty Blythe; and Captain January, with Baby Peggy. Al got a new plaid wool coat for winter, which he didn't like and resisted, even though, as I pointed out to him, it had a cute little pocket big enough for a dog-bone biscuit. And Jan bought a couple new pieces of furniture and had the living room redecorated.

Except for the one wall, of course. That hasn't changed, and never will as long as we're in this house. Marion Marsh lived here, it still says in that enormous, free-swinging scrawl of lipsticked letters across it, Read it and weep.