I bit the back of my hand, waiting. place to play. Sets
Quietness. Her eyes twitched, remembering.
Sets toys electric trains. Boys, yes. Ten She took a breath. Eleven years old.
The candle flames flickered.
he always said Christmas always never away. Hed die if its not Christmas silly man. But twelve he made parents take back socks ties sweaters. Christmas day. Buy toys. Or he wouldnt talk.
Her voice trailed off.
I glanced at Crumley. His eyes bulged from wanting to hear more, more. The incense blew. I chimed the bell.
And ? he whispered for the first time. And ?
And she echoed. She read her lines off the inside of her eyelids. Thats how he ran studio.
The bones had reappeared in her body. She was being structured up in
her chair as if her remembrance pulled strings, and the old strengths and the lost life and substance of herself were eased in place. Even the bones in her face seemed to restructure her cheeks and chin. She talked faster now. And, finally, let it all come.
Played. Yes. No work played. The studio. When his father died.
And as she talked, the words came now in threes and fours and finally in bursts and at long last in runs and thrusts and trills. Color touched her cheeks, and fire her eyes. She began to ascend. Like an elevator coming up a dark shaft into the light, her soul arose, and herself with it, rising to her feet.
It reminded me of those nights in 1925, 1926, when music or voices in far places played or sang in static and you tried to twist and fix seven or eight dials on your super-heterodyne radio to hear way-off Schenectady where some damn fools played music you didnt want to hear but you kept tuning until one by one you locked the dials and the static melted and the voices shot out of the big disc-shaped speaker and you laughed with triumph even though all you wanted was the sound, not the sense. So it was this night, the place, with the incense and the bell and candle fires summoning Emily Sloane up and up into the light.
And she was all remembrance and no flesh, so listen, listen, the bell, the bell, and the voice, the voice, and Constance behind the white statue ready to catch it if it fell, and the statue said:
The studio. Was brand new, Christmas. Every day. He was always. Here at seven. Morning. Eager. Impatient. If he saw people. With shut mouths. He said open! Laugh. Never understood. Anyone depressed, when there was one life. To live. Much not done
She drifted again, lost, as if this one long burst had tired her to exhaustion. She circulated her blood a dozen heartbeats, filled her lungs, and ran on, like one pursued: I same year, with him. Twenty-five, just arrived from Illinois. Crazy for films. He saw I was crazy. Kept me near.
Silence. Then:
Wonderful. All first years The studio grew. He built. Blueprints. Called himself Explorer. Chart maker. By thirty-five. He said. Wanted the world inside walls. No travel. Hated trains. Cars. Cars killed his father. Great love. So, see, lived in a small world. Grew smaller, the more cities, countries he built on lot. Gaul! His. Then Mexico. Islands off Africa. Then Africa! He said. No need travel. Just lock himself inside. Invite people. See Nairobi? Here! London? Paris? There. Built special rooms each set to stay. Overnight: New York. Weekends: Left Bank wake to Roman Ruins. Put flowers. Cleopatras tomb. Behind the fronts of each town put carpets, beds, running water. Studio people laughed at him. Didnt care. Young, foolish. He went on building. 1929, 1930! 31, 32!
Across the room, Crumley raised his eyebrows at me. Lord! I thought I had hit on something new, living and writing in my grandparents Green Town house!!
Even a place, murmured Emily Sloane, Like Notre Dame. Sleeping bag. So high up over Paris. Wake early to sun. Crazy? No. He laughed. Let you laugh. Not crazy it was only later
She sank under.
For a long while we thought she had drowned for good.
But then I chimed the bell again and she gathered her invisible knitting to stitch with her fingers, looking down at the pattern she wove on her breast.
Later on it truly mad.
I married Sloane. Stopped being secretary. Never forgave. He kept playing with great toys he said he still loved me. And then that night accident. It. It. It happened.
And so I died.
Crumley and I waited for a long minute. One of the candles went dark.
He comes to visit, you know, she said at last to the fading sound of more candles flickering out.
He? I dared to whisper.
Yes. Oh, two three times a year.
Do you know how many years have passed? I wondered. Takes me out, takes me out, she sighed.
Do you talk? I whispered.
He does. I only laugh. He says He says. What?
After all this time, he loves me. You say?
Nothing. Not right. I made trouble. You see him clearly?
Oh, no. He sits out in no light. Or stands behind my chair, says love. Nice voice. The same. Even though he died and Im dead.
And whose voice is it, Emily?
Why she hesitated. Then her face lit. Arby, of course. Arby ?
Arby, she said, and swayed, staring at the last lit candle. Arby. Made it through. Or guess so. So much to live for. The studio. The toys. No matter me gone. He lived to come back to only place he loved. So he made it even after the graveyard. The hammer. The blood. Ah, God! Im killed. Me! She shrieked and sank down in her chair.
Her eyes and lips sealed tight. She was done and still and back to being a statue forever. No bells, no incense would stir that mask. I called her name, softly.
But now she built a new glass coffin and shut the lid. God, said Crumley. What have we done?
Proved two murders, maybe three, I said. Crumley said, Lets go home.
But Emily didnt hear. She liked it right where she was.
And at long last the two cities were the same.
If there was more light in the city of darkness, then there was more darkness in the city of light.
The fog and mist poured over the high mortuary walls. The tombstones shifted like continental plates. The drywash catacomb tunnels funneled cold winds. Memory itself invaded the territorial film vaults. Worms and termites that had prevailed in the stone orchards now undermined the apple yards of Illinois, the cherry trees of Washington, and the mathematically trimmed shrubs of French chateaus. One by one the great stages, vacuumed, slammed shut. The clapboard houses, log cabins, and Louisiana mansions dropped their shingles, gaped their doors, shivered with plagues and fell.
In the night, two hundred antique cars on the backlot gunned their engines, smoked their exhausts, and gravel-dusted off on some blind path to motherlode Detroit.
Building by building, floor by floor, lights were extinguished, air conditionings stifled, the last togas trucked like Roman ghosts back to Western Costume, one block off this Appian Way, as the captains and the kings departed with the last gate guards.
We were being pushed into the sea.
The parameters, day by day, I imagined, were shutting in.
More things, we heard, melted and vanished. After the miniature cities and prehistoric animals, then the brownstones and skyscrapers, and with Calvarys cross long gone, the dawn tomb of the Messiah followed it into the furnace.
At any moment the graveyard itself might rupture. Its disheveled
inhabitants, evicted, homeless at midnight, seeking new real estates across town at Forest Lawn, would board 2 A.M. buses to terrify drivers as the last gates banged shut and the whiskey-film vault-catacomb tunnel brimmed with arctic slush reddened in its flow even as the church across the street nailed its doors and the drunken priest fled to join the maitre d from the Brown Derby up by the Hollywood sign in the dark hills, while the invisible war and the unseen army pushed us farther and farther west, out of my house, out of Crumleys jungle clearing, until at last, here in the Arabian compound with food in short supply but champagne in large, we would make our last stand as the Beast and his skeleton army shrieked down the sands to toss us as lunch to Constance Rattigans seals, and shock the ghost of Aimee Semple McPherson trudging up the surf the other way, astonished but reborn in the Christian dawn.
That was it.
Give or take a metaphor.
Crumley arrived at noon and saw me sitting by the telephone. Im calling for an appointment at the studio, I said.
With who?
Anyone who happens to be in Manny Leibers office when that white telephone on the big desk rings.
And then?
Go turn myself in.
Crumley looked at the cold surf outside. Go soak your head, he said.
Whatre we going to do? I exclaimed. Sit and wait for them to crash the door or come out of the sea? I cant stand the waiting. Id rather be dead.
Gimme that!
Crumley grabbed the phone and dialed.
When answered, he had to control his yell: Im all well. Cancel my sick leave. Ill be in tonight!
Just when I need you, I said. Coward.
Coward, crap! He banged down the phone. Horse handler! Horse what?
Thats all Ive been all week. Waiting for you to be shoved up a chimney or dropped downstairs. A horse handler. Thats the guy who held the reins when General Grant fell off his horse. Gumshoeing obits and reading old news files is like laying a mermaid. Time to go help my coroner.
Did you know the word coroner only means for the crown?
