The Butterfly Plague

by Timothy Findley

  He rather liked her. Except for one thing. Her eyes. Something was not quite nice about her eyes. They glistened. Oddly. And then, too, she did a startling thing that seemed quite rude. When the camera got too close to her, she suddenly turned away and placed a veil over her face. Then, when she turned back, you couldn’t see her.

  Could it be, Octavius wondered.

  No. She was much too feminine for that.

  Letitia Virden may have been many mysterious things, but she was certainly not a man.

  11:45 p.m.

  Mother sat once more before the mirror.

  She was tired.

  It had been an extremely long day.

  She took off her little gloves, her jewelry, and slipped off her shoes. She wiggled her toes.

  She removed her hair and put it back in its box.

  She gave herself a tired stare.

  Well.

  She removed her earrings. She leaned in closer to the mirror. The shoulders of her lovely green dress made a perfect frame for her face.

  She squinted.

  If…

  She squinted some more.

  Yes. If she just…

  She sat back, eyeing herself as she might some distant painting.

  If she lifted that eyebrow—so.

  Mother grabbed up an eyebrow pencil.

  Touch.

  Yes!

  Her hands shook.

  And if…

  And if she…

  And if she thinned out…if she just lengthened her upper lip—so. Like that. Like so…just very carefully so. Thus…

  (My God.)

  And if she…

  Yes. A touch by the eyes.

  (Great Jesus.)

  Mother.

  (Jesus’ mother.)

  The Little Virgin.

  Mother stood up and knocked over her chair.

  She walked away and looked back at herself and then she walked forward and peered more closely and then she walked away again, staring with her mouth open.

  She looked at the whole effect.

  It was incredible.

  Mother was incredulous. She nearly fainted dead away.

  How could it be?

  Well, never mind how, it was true. That’s all. It was true.

  Yes!!

  A clock struck.

  Mother turned.

  Twelve.

  Midnight.

  The witching hour. Yes.

  The hour when carriages turn into pumpkins. Yes.

  And mothers into sons.

  The Chronicle of

  Evelyn de Foe

  Thursday, September 29th, 1938:

  The Black Stocking Restaurant,

  Beverly Hills

  12:30 p.m.

  When Ruth arrived at the Black Stocking, her father had already been seated and was intoxicated.

  He greeted her from a crouching position, neither in nor out of his chair.

  Ruth sat down.

  The waitress, who wore black stockings on her arms, appeared and disappeared, accepting, in the meantime, an order for drinks.

  George glared at Ruth from narrow, blue-red eyes. His lapels were covered with ash and dandruff, one camouflaging the other. He smelled of cocktails mixed over the days and nights inside his stomach. His rust complexion could be only barely seen through the gray patina of ill-health. He rumbled.

  “Well,” he said, “you’re not as smart as all that after all. Eh?”

  “What do you mean, Father?”

  Ruth’s approach was distaste mingled with distrust.

  “You couldn’t…stick. Stick it out with Br…uno.”

  “It wouldn’t have taken brains to’ve done that, Father.”

  “Pizzlesticks! Bah and poop! Don’t you wool-pull on me, daughter. That Bruno is the very rage of Europe. But you didn’t have the sense to stick it out. Only a fool would leave the rage of Europe in his hour of glory!”

  “The rage of Germany, perhaps. For now. But not the rage of Europe, Father. Bruno’s mystique, or whatever it is, won’t last.”

  “It will last. It will last. He has stamina, that Bruno. Stamina and guts.”

  George glared at Ruth, the implication of her lack in these departments quite clear. He smiled his yellow smile.

  “So you ran, eh?”

  Ruth sighed. Boredom mingled with fear.

  “If you want to put it that way, Father, all right—I ran. Now what do you want with me?”

  George sidled into the corner of his chair like a giant, molting bird. His little red claws clutched the arms of his nest and he sniffled. Then he wiped his beak with the magenta handkerchief and took a drink. From the way he was drinking, Ruth realized that she was going to pay the bill.

  “You’re pretty Jeedy certain I want something, aren’t you?”

  “Of course I am, Father. Otherwise you wouldn’t want to see me. So, what is it? A message for Mother?”

  This was a mistake.

  George immediately bellowed his vulgar laugh and rocked in the chair, nearly falling over backward in the process.

  “Ha! That’s a good one!” he roared. “Oh, that’s just peachy precious!”

  At once he sobered.

  “No! No, I don’t want to send messages to your mother.

  I don’t want you to mention your mother. I don’t want to know how your mother is, or what she is. I don’t want to know! Dead! Alive! Anything about your Jeedy mother!”

  “Very well, Father. But please be quiet. You’re making a spectacle of yourself.”

  “Well, it’s about damn well time I did! Eh? Make a spectacle—or make something.”

  He roared an accusatory look around the room.

  “They know who I am,” he said. “I don’t need to tell them who I am.”

  He stood up.

  “All right, Father. Sit down.” (He sat down.) “That’s fine,” said Ruth. “Now please. What do you want?”

  “What’s the matter with your hair?” said George, taking another gulp of drink. “You look like a bloody effing lesbian.”

  “It was cut off,” said Ruth, as simply as she could. She was attempting to avoid the stare of what felt like the entire world.

  “Are you a Jeedy lesbian?” said George.

  “No, Father.”

  “Hunh. That would be a dandy,” said George. “My son’s a hemo-homo and now my daughter’s a lesbian.”

  “No, Father. I’m not.”

  The red eyes poked and pried.

  “Well, you should be. What else are you any good for? You can’t have babies.”

  The last sentence was uttered, word by word, like the separate volleys of a firing squad.

  “No.”

  “You aren’t going to have any babies, are you? I hope. By God.”

  “No, Father.”

  “You have tainted blood, you know.”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “Tainted blood. All my children have tainted blood.”

  “Yes. I’m quite aware of it.”

  “Tainted blood. Any baby of yours’d bleed to death. In five minutes.”

  “Yes.”

  “Like my son.”

  “Yes, Father. Like Dolly.”

  “Don’t call—him—Doll-y.”

  “Adolphus.”

  “He’s going to die.”

  “Adolphus who’s going to die. Yes, Father.”

  “A terrible, horrible, ghastly, bloody, awful death. Bleeding. To death.”

  “Yes.”

  “Aaah! You don’t care. You don’t care. You don’t give a Jeedy damn. You don’t give…”

  “Father!”

  “What?”

  “Stop it. Stop. Be quiet. Please”

  George pulled his head back and stared, or tried to, at his daughter.

  “You telling me to shut up?”

  “Yes.”

  Silence. The room waited.

  The quiet was circular. It surrounded them and held them prisoner until the waitress, bearing more
alcoholic ammunition, broke through and set some freshly filled glasses on the table.

  “Now,” said Ruth, once the waitress had gone, “what-is-it-you-want-of-me?”

  “I won’t tell you,” said George with genuine petulance.

  “Oh, really!”

  “Don’t you ‘oh, really’ me girl. I’m your father.”

  Ruth bit her lip.

  “You always were an impudent no-good. A nothing. Cipher. That’s what you are. An impudent cipher. Everything you wanted you had—and all you could do was—talk back.”

  This was all so patently untrue that it silenced even George.

  Ruth drank for dear life from her own glass. This was unbearable—to have to sit here with this drunken man who everyone knew was her father, and to have to listen to him rant and roar about her private life in public, and not to be able to escape. Unless she could, somehow, contrive to leave him. Perhaps if she went to the ladies’ room. Perhaps…

  But escape, at least temporary, was provided for her. The attention of the room was withdrawn from their table by the entrance of someone at first not visible, far away across the restaurant.

  It was a movie star, Evelyn de Foe, but she was new and had not got around to being used very much. She did not generally “hit the hot spots” in the daytime. She was a night person, young and still unscathed in appearance. She was very much the new style of girl, the style just coming in, with square instead of round shoulders, and bosoms and bottoms instead of hands, feet, and face.

  The new girls, too—like Evelyn—were mostly tarnished looking. Blonde, but not blonde; tanned, but it was makeup. They did not know how to dress and consequently wore too much Technicolor. They were “tough.”

  Evelyn de Foe strode in, a painted collage—overlipped and overlashed, with her brassy hair yanked back so that her profile seemed enormous. She wore large gypsy earrings and her ensemble included red trousers with fly buttons, a man’s yellow shirt, and (looped down seductively over ample buttocks), a double length of white angora stole. Her wrists made cymbalic noises, for they were sheathed in bangles and a jangle of other bracelets and beads.

  Men walked in front of her, clearing a path for her progress, and behind her there followed a retinue of oddly dressed women with male hair and no makeup.

  While George busied himself lighting, misplacing, finding, and relighting a cigarette, Ruth took advantage of his preoccupation to watch the progress of this astonishing creature.

  Evelyn de Foe seated herself and arranged her assorted favorites around her. Everyone at her table seemed to be very bad tempered. The reason was quickly obvious. Evelyn de Foe had been pinched beneath her angora by someone standing near the door. Use might have been made of this gesture if the pincher had been someone well known, but since he was of the class non grata, nothing could be done with it. Thus, the gesture and Evelyn’s consequent reaction had wrecked the arrangement of her triumphal entry into the room. She had lost her place in the line-up (carefully prearranged in the parking lot) and so it had seemed that one of the male women in the retinue (the masseuse, in fact) was the center of attention.

  As Ruth watched and listened, a tide of vicious language rose about Evelyn’s table. Ruth had just endured a fairly normal tirade of her father’s favorite words, but she had never witnessed an oral display to equal this. The words were archaic, almost lost to civilization, but had been retained with a kind of determined and sadistic wrenching of animal memory.

  Evelyn’s words could hardly be contained in her mouth but, like bile, were spat with the appropriate facial gestures onto the tablecloth, where they lay in the physical incarnation of salival excrement. The words hurt the mind. And the phrasing had the cadence of Neanderthalic orgies. Perhaps, exactly as there should have been in the given circumstances, there was also a great deal of table-pounding, handbag-thumping, and chair-banging. This language was foreign and unknown.

  Finally, a waitress crept over and served Evelyn’s table as graciously as was possible. But then, Ruth remembered, the waitress was paid to remember where she was.

  At this point George mastered his recalcitrant weed and, puffing away on it like a Lazarus returning from the dead, he spoke. His manner was that of someone who had interrupted himself to die.

  “Excuse me,” he said. “Where are we?”

  Ruth looked away from Evelyn de Foe, but could perceive nothing where George sat except a smoke screen.

  “What do you mean, Father?”

  “Where are we in our Jeedy conversation?”

  Ruth approached her glass with tentative fingers.

  “I wasn’t aware that we were having a conversation,” she said.

  “Well, we are. We are. Who’s that?”

  “I don’t know, Father. She just came in.”

  George looked, or rather squinted, at the Devil. There she was.

  “Well,” he said. “She sure beats Titty for tits.”

  “What?”

  “She wins, that’s all,” said George. “Now listen, Ruth, and listen to me very carefully.”

  “All right.”

  George averted his gaze. His fingers played nervously and undecidedly with glass, cigarette, table silver, and the magenta handkerchief.

  “I need,” he said, “your help.”

  Ruth could not tell what was coming next. His voice was not demanding and it was not pleading. It was thoughtful, which was extremely rare.

  “Do you know the name Cooper Carter?”

  “Yes. The industrialist. He produces steel or something.”

  “That’s right. Steel. And weapons.”

  “Weapons?”

  “Weapons.”

  “What sort of weapons?”

  “Any sort you want. Guns, tanks, bombs. Anything. Sometimes,” he gave a long, significant pause, and then: “Sometimes…movies.”

  “Movies?”

  “Mo-tion pic-tures.”

  George raised his eyes and there was a terrible fanaticism in them. It was sad.

  Ruth watched.

  “A motion picture is not a weapon, Father,” Ruth said.

  “But it can be,” said George. “It can be.”

  “Yes. I suppose…”

  George reverted to his introspective tone. His fingers busied away with ashes and alcohol, smoke and handkerchief.

  “Titty Virden has come back.”

  Ruth shuddered. Yes. Ruth knew that. It had been Letitia on the train. At Alvarez, too. And hadn’t George been at Alvarez?

  “Father?”

  “Shut up. Listen to me.”

  Ruth suddenly realized that tears were wandering slowly down his cheeks.

  “What is it?”

  “I’ve always—I have always…”

  The tears wandered faster, finding their mark on the backs of his fat little hands.

  Again, Ruth waited, and at last George continued.

  “She wants to make a film, you see. An immensely important film.”

  “Yes.”

  “And she needs a great deal of money. She doesn’t want studio bosses hanging over her head telling her what she can and cannot do. This film is too important for that. You know what I mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, Cooper Carter…”

  The tears welled up in another threat, but abated before the fall.

  “Cooper Carter is already interested. He’s building her a studio…”

  George blew his nose at this point, startling Evelyn de Foe, who dropped her embossed menu with a clank and a loud God damn!

  “They’re going to make a picture, you see. You see? Oh, don’t you understand? They’re going to make the most important motion picture ever made. And they’re going to make it without me.”

  This did not amaze Ruth and she wondered why it should amaze her father. His inability to work, his condition—he was notorious.

  Now he blubbered like a little boy into his handkerchief.

  “I’d walk through South America for Titty Vir
den,” he said, knowing full well he would never be asked to do any such thing. “South-effing-America! On foot!”

  Ruth thought she might feel sorry for George if he were not her father. Or perhaps for her father—if he were not George Damarosch.

  “Yes,” he said. “South-effing-America.”

  There was a pause.

  Possibly George was watching himself float out over the Andes and down the Amazon.

  Ruth had a headache. She tightened into silence. She drank.

  Suddenly, there was a crash at the de Foe table. A waitress had dropped a tray of food.

  Evelyn, invective flying, rose. Two of her men and one of her women rose with her, but she barked at them and they fell back into their places.

  The poor waitress got up apologetically, but seeing Evelyn, impulsively backed away.

  Evelyn rang her bangles busily. She had a hungry, fangy pout like a petulant lioness. There was seafood sauce on her stole. The waitress had put it there.

  Evelyn barged two and a half steps forward through the empty space between herself and the hapless girl. (Evelyn, it should be said, barged everywhere. She even barged where no one and nothing barred the way. Touring abroad, Evelyn de Foe would barge into St. Peter’s Square. She would barge into the Sahara Desert. But for now she merely barged those two and a half steps across the floor of the Black Stocking Restaurant fixing the waitress with her bawling gaze.)

  She raised her glistening, false-nailed hands.

  “Someone should do something,” said Ruth. But no one did.

  Like a helpless martyr standing on the sands of the Roman Colosseum, the waitress stared with horror at what had been released from its cage before her.

  Evelyn spoke to her—zoologically.

  The waitress went a Christian shade of pale.

  Evelyn’s words fell between them, or were flung onto the floor as though someone should bend down and pick them up—perhaps even dust them off and hand them back to her. But instead they just lay there until, like worms, they wriggled a little, oozed a few liquids…and dried up.

  Slowly the waitress joined them as in supplication. She fell to her knees.

  The maître d’ approached as close as he dared, looked down at the humiliation on the floor, and said, “You’re fired.”

  “Well,” said Evelyn de Foe, bumping each word with a hip, “I would for fuck’s sake, think so!”

  And that was the end of it. Or nearly.