Maggie Botwin was a nice dish of nonmelting vanilla ice cream. Dear Fritz, she said. I was born in Glendale in 1900. I could go back there and die of boredom or I could hide in Laguna, but all those bums, as you call them, make my girdle creep.
Anyway, Fritz, and you, my dear young man, I was here every night at three A.M. that year, pedaling my Singer sewing machine, sewing up nightmares to make them look like halfway not so disreputable dreams, wiping the smirk off dirty little girls mouths and dropping it in the trash bins behind the badly dented cots in the mens gym. I have never liked parties, either Sunday-afternoon cocktails or Saturday-night sumo wrestling. Whatever happened that Halloween night, I was waiting for someone, anyone, to deliver me film. It never came.
If a car crash happened beyond the wall I never heard. If there was one or a thousand funerals the next week I refused all invitations and cut the stale flowers, here. I didnt go downstairs to see Arbuthnot when he lived, why should I go see him dead? He used to climb up and stand outside the screen door.
Id look out at him, tall in the sunlight, and say, You need a little editing! And hed laugh and never come in, just tell the dressmaker tailor lady how he wanted so-and-sos face, near or far, in or out, and leave. How did I get away with being alone at the studio? It was a new business and there was only one tailor in town, me.
The rest were pants pressers, job seekers, gypsies, fortunetelling screenwriters who couldnt read tea leaves. One Christmas Arby sent up to me a spinning wheel with a sharp spindle and a brass plate on the treadle: GUARD THIS SO SLEEPING BEAUTY PRICKS NO FINGERS AND GETS NO SLEEP, it said. I wish I had known him, but he was just another shadow outside my screen door and I already had a sufficiency of shadows in. I saw only the mobs at his memorial trip out of here and around the block to cold comfort farm. Like everything else in life, including this sermon, it needed cutting. She looked down at her bosom, to hold some invisible beads, hung there for her restless fingers.
After a long silence, Fritz said, Maggie Botwin will be quiet now for a year!
No. Maggie Botwin fixed me with her gaze. You got any last notes on the rushes weve seen the last few days? You never know, tomorrow we may all be rehired at one-third the salary.
No, I said lamely.
To hell with that, said Fritz. Im packing!
My taxi still waited, ticking off astronomical sums. Fritz stared at it with contempt. Why dont you learn to drive, idiot?
And massacre people in the streets, Fritz Wong style? Is this goodbye, Rommel?
Only till the Allies take Normandy.
I got into the cab, then probed my coat pocket. What about this monocle?
Flash it at the next Academy Awards. Itll get you a seat in the balcony. Whatre you waiting for, a hug? There! He wrestled me, angrily. Outen zee ass!
As I drove away, Fritz yelled: I keep forgetting to tell you how much I hate you!
Liar, I called.
Yes, Fritz nodded and lifted his hand in a slow, tired salute, I lie.
Ive been thinking about Hollyhock House, said Crumley, and your friend Emily Sloane.
Not my friend, but go on. Insane people give me hope.
What!!!! I almost dropped my beer.
The insane have decided to stay on, Crumley said. They love life so much that, rather than destroy it, they go behind a self-made wall to hide. Pretend not to hear, but they do hear.
Pretend not to see, but see. Insanity says: I hate living but love life. Hate the rules but do like me. So, rather than drop in graves, I hide out. Not in liquor, nor in bed under sheets, nor in a needles prick or snuffs of white powder, but in madness. On my own shelf, in my own rafters, under my own silent roof. So, yeah, insane people give me hope. Courage to go on being sane and alive, always with the cure at hand, should I ever tire and need it: madness.
Give me that beer! I grabbed it. How many of these you had? Only eight.
Christ. I shoved it back at him. Is all this going to be part of your novel when it comes out?
Could be. Crumley gave a nice, easy, self-satisfied burp and went on. If you got to choose between a billion years of darkness, no sun ever again, wouldnt you choose catatonia? You could still enjoy green grass and air that smells like cut watermelons. Still touch your knee, when no one was looking. And all the while you pretend not to care. But you care so much you build a crystal coffin and seal it on yourself.
My God! Go on!
I ask, why choose madness? So as not to die, I say. Love is the answer. All of our senses are loves. We love life but fear what it does to us. So? Why not give madness a try?
After a long silence, I said: Where the hell is all this talk leading us? To the madhouse, Crumley said.
To talk to a catatonic?
It worked once, didnt it, a couple years ago, when I hypnotized you, so you finally almost recalled a killer?
Yeah, but I wasnt nuts! Who says?
I shut my mouth, Crumley opened his.
Well, he said, what if we took Emily Sloane to church? Hell!
Dont hell me. We all heard about her charities every year for Our Ladys on Sunset. How she gave away two hundred silver crucifixes two Easters running. Once a Catholic, always a Catholic.
Even if shes mad?
But shed be aware. Inside, behind her wall, shed sense she was at mass andtalk.
Rant, rave, maybe
Maybe. But she knows everything. Thats why she went mad, so she couldnt think or talk about it. Shes the only one left, the others are dead, or hidden right in front of us, with their mouths shut for pay.
And you think shed feel enough, sense enough, know and remember? What if we drive her even more mad?
God, I dont know. Its the last lead we have. No one else will own up. You get half a story from Constance, another fourth from Fritz, and then theres the priest. A jigsaw, and Emily Sloanes the frame. Light the candles
and incense. Sound the altar bell. Maybe shell wake after seven thousand days and talk.
Crumley sat for a full minute, drinking slowly and heavily. Then he leaned forward and said:
Now, do we get her out?
We did not take Emily Sloane to church. We brought the church to Emily Sloane. Constance arranged it all.
Crumley and I brought candles, incense, and a brass bell made in India. We placed and lighted the candles in a shadowed room of the Hollyhock House Elysian Fields Sanitarium. I pinned some cotton cloths about my knees.
What the hells that for? griped Crumley. Sound effects. It rustles. Like the priests skirt. Jesus! said Crumley.
Well, yeah.
Then, with the candles lit, and Crumley and me standing well out of the way in an alcove, we fanned the incense and tested the bell. It made a fine, clear sound.
Crumley called quietly. Constance? Now. And Emily Sloane arrived.
She did not move of her own volition, she did not walk, nor did her head turn or her eyes flex or motion in the carved marble face. The profile came first out of darkness above a rigid body and hands folded in gravestone serenity upon a lap made virgin by time.
She was pushed, from behind, in her wheelchair, by an almost invisible stage manager, Constance Rattigan, dressed in black as for the rehearsal of an old funeral. As Emily Sloanes white face and terribly quiet body emerged from the hall, there was a motion as of birds taking off; we fanned the incense smokes and tapped the bell.
I cleared my throat.
Shh, shes listening! whispered Crumley. And it was true.
As Emily Sloane came into the soft light, there was the faintest motion, the tiniest twitch of her eyes under the lids, as the imperceptible beat of the candle flames beckoned silence and leaned shadows.
I fanned the air.
I chimed the bell.
At this, Emily Sloanes body itselfwafted. Like a weightless kite, borne in an unseen wind, she shifted as if her flesh had melted away.
The bell rang again, and the smoke of the incense made her nostrils quiver.
Constance backed away into shadows. Emily Sloanes head turned into the light. Ohmigod, I whispered.
Its her, I thought.
The blind woman who had come into the Brown Derby and left with the Beast on that night, it seemed a thousand nights ago.
And she was not blind. Only catatonic.
But no ordinary catatonic.
Out of the grave and across the room in the smell and the smoke of incense and the sounding of the bell.
Emily Sloane.
Emily sat for ten minutes saying nothing. We counted our heartbeats. We watched the flames burn down the candles as the incense smoke sifted off.
And then at last the beautiful moment when her head tilted and her eyes dilated.
She must have sat another ten minutes, drinking in things remembered from long before the collision that had left her wrecked along the California coast.
I saw her mouth stir as her tongue moved behind her lips.
She wrote things on the inside of her eyelids, then gave them translation: No one she murmured, under stands
And then
No one ever did. Silence.
He was she said at last, and stopped.
The incense smoked. The bell gave a small sound. the studio
