The Butterfly Plague

by Timothy Findley

  “Those are my people,” Myra said. She tried very bravely to wave and smile.

  ‘That’s right. You wave and smile. Go ahead. I’ll just sit here and die.”

  “You are not going to die.”

  The crowd took in its breath.

  “Yes I am. Dead.”

  “Really, Dolly.”

  “Wait and see. Dead! And then what?”

  “God knows, Dolly. God knows.”

  “God doesn’t know anything. He’s just a wretched, sadistic old tyrant sitting up there inflicting diseases on innocent people!”

  “Now, now, Dolly.”

  “We are born to be driven mad at the whim of fate!”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, have a piece of gum and shut up.”

  “No, thank you. And I will not sit here in this parking lot while you chew gum in public.”

  “Where the hell else am I supposed to chew it?”

  “In the privacy of your bedroom.”

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake!”

  “Gumchewing, Myra—for your information—is a manifestation of the lower classes’ taking over our culture and society. I forbid you to do it. And if you can’t think of me, at least think of your image.”

  “They’re all chewing it,” said Myra, indicating with a wave of her hand the amassed cudding faces of her fans.

  “Yes, and look at them,” said Dolly.

  “They’re my public,” said Myra. “If they’re gonna chew, I’m gonna.”

  “No, my dear. If you’re ‘gonna’ chew, they’re ‘gonna.’ Look what it’s done to your mouth.”

  “My mouth happens to be my best-known feature, I’ll have you know. I’m famous for my mouth.”

  “My dear, I hate to disillusion you, but if you really think you’re famous for your mouth…”

  “I am. I am. Pretty mouth. Pretty mouth. Pretty-mouth Myra!”

  Myra bounced in the seat as she chanted this, and the whole crowd took it up. “Pretty mouth! Pretty mouth! Pretty-mouth Myra!”

  “There! See?” said Myra triumphantly.

  “If you’d stop bouncing up and down like a pair of rubber balls, you’d see.”

  Myra burst into immediate tears.

  “Oh, God! Now what’s the matter?” said Dolly.

  “You called them rubber balls!” Myra wailed, clutching herself with both hands.

  The teen-age boys giggled. Dolly silenced them with a look.

  “Now, now, Myra.”

  “Don’t you now-now me, you…homo-feely—”

  Dolly blushed and stammered. “Myra. Please. Hemo. Hemo. Hee-mo-philiac!”

  Myra turned and gave Dolly one of her dazzling pouts.

  “I gotcha!” she said. “I got Dolly!”

  And she burst into marvelous, resounding, and infectious laughter.

  Dolly’s pale-blue suit was impeccable in cut and condition. His Panama hat had been dyed the same shade. Underneath these garments his stockings and underclothes—even the handkerchief in his pocket—were all pale-blue. He had chosen the color himself. It showed up blood.

  Adolphus Damarosch was a hemophiliac.

  He was also a film director employed by Niles Studios and his current film was Heirs Babies, still before the cameras. Its star, Myra Jacobs, now sat in the front seat of Dolly’s purple Franklin. Dolly did not drive. No hemophiliac does. They are accident-prone and die all too easily. So Myra had done the driving and that is why she had so much to complain of. Fifteen miles an hour.

  They had come to Culver City Railroad Station to meet Ruth Damarosch, Dolly’s sister, who was returning from Europe after a lengthy absence.

  Dolly was understandably nervous.

  “How long has it been, did you say?” said Myra.

  “Nineteen hundred and thirty-six.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yes, Myra. ‘Yes.’ Please say ‘yes,’ not ‘yeah.’”

  “Yes, Dolly.”

  “She went away to swim in the Berlin Olympics. Don’t you remember that?”

  “Of course I remember that. Jeepers. It was only two years ago.”

  “Well, I wonder sometimes. Anyway, she went over there in 1936 and hasn’t been home since.”

  “Goodness.”

  “Yes. My older, older, older, older sister.” Dolly sighed.

  “Is she that old?” said Myra.

  “How old?”

  “Older, older, older, older.”

  “Four years older, to be exact. She was born in nineteen hundred and seven.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Yes. That’s all. And she was a bully to boot,” he reflected.

  “She kicked you?”

  Dolly closed his eyes. Really. Sometimes Myra was too much to bear, for all her loveliness.

  “A bully of the mind, Myra. An in-tel-lect-ual bully.”

  “Oh,” said Myra, dumbfounded. She turned away to think about it.

  Dolly desperately wanted the washroom and wondered if he dared to excuse himself. The washrooms were so far away, and all those dangerous people lingered between. He decided against it. He thought about the fate of Mickey Balloon. It was sad the way some things turn out. Now Ruth was coming home.

  Sunday, August 28th, 1938:

  Aboard the Santa Fe Super Chief

  1:30 p.m.

  Ruth Damarosch Haddon finished her lunch, set aside her utensils, and looked out of the windows. She was seated all alone at a table in the dining car. She had been seated alone for every meal since leaving New York but she did not know why.

  She was nervous.

  Ruth was a tall woman. Her figure was attenuated and spare; strong. It befitted an athlete. Her hair, cut extremely short, was pure white—a prematurity, for Ruth was now but thirty-one years of age. Her face was flat and wide and her eyes blue-gray, protruding slightly like the eyes of someone suffering from a thyroid condition. Her expression in repose mirrored the fact that she would not let go of innocence. She held onto it like a renegade child. Innocence was sanity. Just as silence was sanity.

  Ruth believed that she was living in a nightmare. Childlike, she insisted there was darkness when all around her the adults were proclaiming light. She moved and sat like one who expects attack. And she had good reason.

  Now he sat directly behind her, occupying a small table for one, at which he ate every day. He had followed her all the way from Hamburg. He had never for an instant not been close at hand. Yet he had never menaced her, touched her, or spoken. He was merely constant. At her back.

  He was blond from top to toe, probably German, and he smelled of leather. He was extraordinary to look at. He could have been an advertisement for racial perfection. His eyes were blue; his hair was golden; his teeth were white and even. Every bone was perfection itself. He radiated strength, health, and stamina. Yet, he never seemed to sleep.

  Then there was the woman.

  Ruth knew her, or was certain that if she could see her she would recognize her, perhaps even as someone close and well known. But this woman, who had been on board only since Chicago, never presented her face. Over it she wore a wide, dark—perhaps a widow’s—veil. Her clothing was expensive and beautifully tailored, and the coloring of the fabrics was autumnal—browns, golds, and indescribable reds. She inevitably wore gloves—long gloves, kid, calf, or pigskin, which were worn to the elbow and occasionally above. Her hats were small and seemed designed merely to hold the veiling in place. She was small herself, very finely made, and she moved efficiently, as though given to command an immediate respect. Her gestures were significantly brief.

  It was the unswerving set of this woman’s head that told Ruth she was being stared at. The gaze was leveled through the veiling, pronounced and definite as a pair of lights. In fact, this was a quality that pervaded the whole figure—the quality of light—of something metallic that shone. Insect-like, the woman’s brilliantly clouded head would turn to follow Ruth’s every move. Or it would lock, like the head of a mantis, into one poised and tran
ce-like position. Ruth wondered if there were lids on the eyes or if they ever closed.

  The woman was accompanied by a large, uniformed servant, who followed her everywhere, sat her down with quiet ceremonious gestures into chairs, opened doors for her, lifted baggage from her path, and shaded her by placing his bulk between her and bright light. He was a Negro. They never spoke. He did these things with inbred reactionary calm. It was his life, it seemed, to make a path for her wherever she went and to close it behind them after their passage. At mealtimes the Negro stood near the doorway of the dining car, watching the trays pass by shoulder-high beneath his nose. Ruth was certain that he was fed with the dogs in the baggage car. He had an eye for food not natural to human beings.

  Ruth lit a cigarette. She practiced poise. She placed her free hand on her presentation copy of Mein Kampf, which rested on the table beside her half-emptied dishes. She gave the woman a stare of her own. She began to make up her mind—using a recipe of one part courage, two parts reason, and seven parts desperation—that she would accost this woman, pleasantly, and ask for her name. Perhaps the woman could not for some reason make the advance herself. Perhaps she was shy—or ill. Perhaps the Negro was her guardian. She might even be a prisoner…

  It had crossed Ruth’s mind a day after Chicago there might be some connection between the blond man and the staring woman. But since they never met and seemed not even to see each other, Ruth had decided they were, after all, separate watchers, nothing at all to do with one another.

  Ruth poured a second cup of coffee, staining the whiteness of the tablecloth. Her composure, born of years of training as an athlete, gave way, and instead of righting the pot and redirecting its flow, she experienced a small, ridiculous moment of indecision and just went on pouring, watching the large brown mark grow larger and larger. A waiter approached, his mouth open, certain he was beholding an act of vandalism or of blindness. Ruth settled for blindness.

  “I—am—so—sorry…” she forced. “The sun. The sun, you see.” She wiped her eyes, as though removing the sun itself, and smiled.

  The waiter, satisfied and relieved, retreated with a sigh.

  Now was the moment to do it. Before thought. Before confusion could be blamed. Before regret. She rose, using the pretext of the spilt coffee. She took up Mein Kampf. She took up her purse. She paid her bill. She strode eight steps in the right direction, and the train lurched. Ruth set her gaze on the distant stare of the seated figure. Swimming in its direction against the current of the disturbed gravity beneath her feet, she arrived at the woman’s table.

  “Hello.”

  The head rose.

  Its veiling billowed slightly.

  There was no vocal response.

  Ruth went right on. “I must introduce myself. Pm Ruth Haddon. I was Ruth Damarosch. Perhaps we’ve met. I couldn’t avoid the fact that you were looking at me. I thought perhaps you wondered who I was. I…”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “No. And please leave at once.”

  “But…”

  “Leave me immediately, Mrs. Haddon. Or I shall have you removed.”

  The Negro.

  Ruth looked down, frozen with panic, into the depths of the veiling.

  “Who are you?” she said.

  The eyes lifted. Ruth could just perceive them. They glistened. Dragonfly’s eyes. On the tablecloth the little gloved hands took delicate hold of one another.

  “I am no one,” said the voice (vaguely recognizable—deadly), “I am—no one. Go away.”

  Ruth shivered. All at once, she knew who it was.

  2:05 p.m.

  Ruth hurried along the corridor toward her compartment, impelled by the knowledge of her discovery.

  The blond man followed in leather-scented pursuit.

  Ruth got to her door. She opened it and went inside. She turned then and hissed at the man, speaking to him for the very first time. Her words ridiculously echoed the words of the woman in veils: “Go away,” she whispered. “Go away and leave me alone. I am no one.” Then she slammed the door and burst into tears.

  2:10 p.m.

  Finished with her crying, Ruth sat back and counted: One, two, three and four. Five and six and seven. Eight. Nine and ten. Eleven.

  The suspense was unbearable for her. To be losing one’s mind. To be followed. To be stared at. To see, after so many years, that woman, and to look again into that gaze, too well remembered.

  Something was going to happen. Something more terrible than anything that had happened before. It would happen to Ruth first, but she sensed that it would also happen to someone else. Perhaps to everyone. It was in the air of her mind: in the air around her. Did she carry it? She wondered.

  She refocused her gaze.

  The train whizzed on through an intersection, and Ruth saw carloads of waving people stopped at the crossing. She waved back and then she thought, Why do I wave? I hate you.

  The Santa Fe Super Chief went on by, its brown and yellow cars going clickety-click.

  The people went on waving, unaware of being hated.

  2:17 p.m.

  “There goes Bully Moxon.”

  “Where? Where?”

  “Right there. Going into the station. Oh, Dolly—Bully Moxon!”

  “Calm yourself, Myra.”

  “I can’t. It’s too exciting. He’s marvelous.”

  “I thought he was dead,” said Dolly.

  “Well, there he is,” said Myra, standing up in the front seat of the car. “Just as alive as you and me or anybody.”

  “Pickled to the gills, no doubt.”

  “No. Not at all. Looking wonderful.”

  Dolly stroked his beard, which was red. He did not mind shaving his cheeks—they were pretty straightforward and safe—but his chin was doubtful territory and he did not dare to lay a razor to it. So he wore a chin beard—handsome and short.

  “I don’t see him,” he said.

  “Stand up, then,” said Myra.

  “In the rumble seat?” Dolly whined.

  “Of course, in the rumble seat.”

  Dolly carefully hoisted himself until he stood on the cushions with which he perpetually surrounded himself to ward off his death.

  Spying Bully, he observed, “He looks nine hundred.”

  “No. No. He looks sweet. He looks lovely. Lovely. Bully Moxon. Oh Dolly, look! He’s going to dance.”

  “By God!”

  “Yes. Yes. There he goes. Dancing.”

  They watched.

  Bully Moxon, in patent-leather shoes, in brass-buttoned blazer, in white flannels, in boater, and carrying a cane, did his famous “Waiting for My Favorite Dream” routine. His features, adored across the land for their pronounced and swollen redness, reflected a kind of wistful wickedness. He hated dogs, cats, children, and Sunday afternoons. But he loved to dance.

  Now he danced without benefit of music—or certainly without benefit of the right music, for in the distance, nearer the tracks, the Hollywood Extras’ World War Band was still playing. Bully did not seem to mind what music played. He lifted his cane; he flashed his famous feet; he did his high-stepping cakewalk—straight along the white lines leading off through the gate.

  The crowd gave way. They clapped and cheered. They loved forgotten Bully Moxon, who hadn’t been capable of making a film for six or seven years. The remarkable thing about Bully had always been that he had been a dancer during the silent era. Not for Bully the orchestrated tangos of Valentino, played by the local theaters’ hired musicians. Not for Bully the gramophone record scratchily blared. Bully had danced to silence. The way he did now. His audiences had always hummed, and now they began to hum again.

  “See,” said Myra just before the humming reached them, “he has the white carnation in his lapel. Just the way he always did in all his pictures. Good old Bully Moxon.”

  Myra waved.

  Dolly remembered. “Bully Moxon stole a carnation from my father’s garden once.”

>   Another time. Long ago, it seemed, but not so long ago at all. Only 1922. Ruth’s fifteenth birthday party.

  “I was just a child, more or less,” Dolly said, but mostly to himself, for Myra, misty-eyed, was caught up in humming and swaying to Bully’s tune. “When I was a child and you were a child, Annabelle Bully Moxon. Hah! Dancing on our lawn.”

  “He’s heading for the gates,” said Myra. “Oh, please, please, Dolly. Can’t we go, too?”

  Dolly knew he would regret it, but he had to say yes. Where Bully led, others had always followed. And so, clambering down with care from his pillows and cushions, Dolly held onto Myra’s waist with both hands and, like two conga dancers, they made their perilous way toward the platform with Bully in the lead.

  In moments, the Santa Fe Super Chief would arrive.

  The festival was about to explode, like Mickey Balloon.

  2:18 p.m.

  Ruth splashed cold water on her face and studied her gray-blue eyes for a long moment in the mirror of her tortoise-shell compact. A gift from Hermann Goering.

  “What’s happening?” she said aloud to the image and then snapped shut the lid. A little puff of powder exploded into the air as she did this. She brushed her lapels and sat down.

  In a few moments they would reach Culver City and she would be met by Adolphus and Myra and driven home to the house on the beach. To her mother.

  People she had not seen for two years would crowd around her and she would have to be brave and lie and tell the story of her life as though it were a true story. She would hate every minute of it and hate all the people. Hate. Oh, why? She did not know why. She was forgetting how to be strong. How to be faithful and loyal: how to be kind and how to remember the dead. Or to brush her teeth twice a day. Or to brush her clothes in the morning. Or to wear clean underwear. To forgive and forget. To pay attention. To cultivate friendship. To be alive. To love. She wept again. She had not forgotten tears. She closed her eyes.

  2:20 p.m.

  Dolly allowed Myra to help him through the crowd and finally up onto a bench where he would be safe from the hands and feet that always menaced him wherever he went. Myra climbed up beside him.