Three by Finney

by Jack Finney

  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 com
e 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.

  • •

  CHAPTER THREE

  • •

  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.