Three by Finney

by Jack Finney

  Eleven girls did it by baring their teeth in rigid smiles, as though the camera wouldn’t record a smile unless the teeth were exposed, while blinking rapidly to show they were fighting back tears. Marion did it with a strained lips-closed smile, the lower lip just barely trembling now and then, while she stared out and beyond the audience, not seeing it, so that she made you wonder what she was thinking. But you knew what she was thinking—the picture had told you—so you believed that you saw her feeling it. The others pantomimed grief but Marion showed it to you—or let you perceive it yourself. Apparently they’d had two cameras going, one for close-ups. Because now cuts began from full-stage views to a close-up of one or the other of the girls’ faces. But more and more these cuts returned to Marion’s face. Beside me, she was murmuring excitedly to herself, “I thought they would, but I wasn’t sure! They’re using my close-ups, mine.”

  Again a cut to a close-up of Marion, her smile remaining, shoulders swaying, lifted fingers snapping, but now actual tears were running down her face. The camera backed off just enough to show her dancing full figure, smiling for the audience, crying in her own inner grief, and I was thrilled, wanting to shout or cry out or do something, and I knew Joan Crawford had not, could not possibly have, been better than what I was staring up at now.

  The room lightened, whitening the screen, dimming the picture, and I felt annoyed the way you do when someone opens a door at a movie, and turned to see who’d done it now. But no door was open, and even in the moment it took my head to turn, the light had subsided. Only a swarm of yellowish-white moths of light, strangely, was fluttering and zigzagging over the surface of the big worktable back there. Very fast they moved, sparking a little, like fuses.

  They were fuses, I understood then, a dozen or so twisting lengths of film burning with frantic speed back toward the cans they’d come out of, and even while I was trying to push up out of the low-slung lounge, I knew what had happened. I knew because I’d glimpsed the achingly brilliant light of the arc inside the projector, and I shouldn’t have been able to see it. That meant the protective metal door Ted had slammed shut in his hurry to reach the organ had simply bounced open again, a little way at least. All it had taken then, presently, was one of the occasional sparks from the glowing carbon sticks to flare out through that narrow door-ajar opening onto a length of film. A moment when a ragged-edged hole had expanded across a single frame—of Greed? The Great Gatsby? A lost Griffith?—then a puff of fire lightening the screen for a moment, and now dozens of fuses were lighted and racing.

  On my feet, running across the front of the little theater toward the side aisle, I saw the first can of film and an instant later all of them flare up into yellowy fire, sudden thick, black, greasy smoke swelling and expanding like a dozen evil genies, merging at their tops, then sucked like a steadily rising black curtain into the ceiling-high air vent across the back of the room. Before I even reached the side aisle the drapes directly beside the burning film at the end of the table went up suddenly—brightly and softly crackling.

  Halfway up the aisle I caught a sickening whiff of the stink and stopped dead. It’s a gas, the smoke produced by burning film, intensely poisonous. It’ll kill you quick, and now I knew what was going to happen. Old film is almost literally dynamite, chemically allied to nitroglycerin, I believe; it was going to explode, and no one was going to be able to go into that gas to stop it.

  Standing halfway up the aisle, staring at the back of the room and the open cans of film, like flat smudge pots of poisonous yellow fire, the black smoke rising like a wall from table to vents, I could already feel a pressure of heat moving down the aisle. Old nitrate film ignites at only 300 degrees. In moments now—not only the drapes but now the varnished wood paneling under them was crackling brightly—the temperature in the bins we’d left open just inside the vault would softly explode into flame, lids flying off. After that, the heat continuing to build, the closed bins would explode.

  I yelled, “Ted!” He sat on the organ bench, stricken, frozen, staring back at the fire. Running back down the aisle for Marion, I shrieked, “Out, Ted, out! Put a handkerchief over your face and get out!” Turning to race across the front of the theater toward Marion, I saw her—incredibly—turn her face from the blaze to look up at the screen again. The projector, on the other side of the room from the blazing drapes and film, was still turning, Marion’s movie flickering steadily up on the screen.

  I gripped her wrist but she yanked it instantly and violently, shaking her head without ever taking her eyes from the screen. “No! You go, Nickie! I’ve got to see my picture!”

  I tried again but she gripped the big upholstered arm and jammed her feet far under the lounge, tugging hard at the wrist I held . . . and the film rolled steadily on, sixteen frames a second, the fire behind us slowly whitening the screen. But the image was still clear: Marion in her own living body of half a century ago, fingers soundlessly snapping, smiling bravely as she danced, staring ahead almost as though at the fire, the tears sliding down her cheeks. And here, hungry-eyed before that screen sat—not really Marion, this was my wife’s body, and I took the entire rounded back of her head into the grip of my spread left hand, drawing my right fist carefully back to hit her with just precisely the right force if I could do it to knock her unconscious without breaking her jaw. She saw me, eyes flicking momentarily from the screen to my fist. And in the instant before I struck she went limp with a little sigh, eyes closing.

  Partly running, partly staggering, I carried Jan’s unconscious body across to the side aisle and part way up it. There I got ready for the run around the table’s end, through the wall of poisonous smoke toward the vague, smudged red of the exit sign on its other side. My right arm under her limp knees, my left arm supporting her upper body, I worked my left hand up over her face—ready to clamp down across her mouth, thumb and forefinger gripping her nostrils closed while I ran, holding my breath.

  Ted sat watching me from across the theater. Then he turned on the organ seat to look up front, and involuntarily I did, too. Transparent but perfectly clear, Marion sat in the front row, the blondness of her hair apparent in the beam of the projector, face lifted to the screen on which she danced. Ted turned, both old hands dropped to the keyboard, and a mighty chord burst from the organ. He played, then, thrillingly, all stops open, and up front the dancing ghost on the screen like the ghost seated before it steadily lightened and whitened as they both moved toward final disappearance.

  Then Marion turned to stare back at Jan and me. She smiled: mockingly, affectionately. And touching her forehead in a kind of casual Joan Blondell salute, she turned back to the screen.

  I ran then, looking over at Ted once more as, still playing, he looked back over his shoulder at me. And what I saw then, I knew I had seen before. The human mind works strangely, at the strangest times, and even as I ran through the wall of acrid smoke with a hand over Jan’s face, to crash through the doors out into the clear air of the long corridor beyond them—I was trying to remember where I had seen that face before.

  Jan stirred, murmured, and opened her eyes. I set her on her feet, we raced down that long hall, and as we ran I understood what I’d seen when Ted’s high-domed, sparse-haired head had turned to show his eyes, round and staring, and those strange flaring nostril holes, black in the flicker of that growing fire. It was the scene, almost precisely, far down in the cavern below the opera house, in which the Phantom of the Opera turns from the organ to stare—horribly, pathetically—across the room.

  • • •

  Out on the great dark lawn we stood with the dozen servants and the beginning crowd—growing fast, people pouring in through the great iron gates—staring up at Graustark, hearing the distant approaching hoot of the fire trucks’ sirens. Inside, the electricity had gone off suddenly, and now the great house against the night sky was a silhouette except for three reddening windows; I didn’t know where they were. Then the roof—over the film vault and projection room, t
he servants said—exploded in a great roaring gush of flame, thick sparks, and black flying objects, the sky turning pink.

  And now the fire was free and we watched it begin its race down the long hall of bedrooms in which once had slept Vilma Banky herself . . . Nazimova . . . Tom Mix . . . Constance Binney . . . Milton Sills . . . Lya de Putti! Then the first of the great arched windows lighted—for the last time and more brilliantly than ever before—searingly lighted from within. In Renee Adoree’s outstretched hand the rose brightened . . . brightened. And in the furious turbulence of roaring flame she seemed actually to move, straining toward the doughboy in the truck just beyond her reach. Then the great glass picture sagged, broke, and hundreds of bright fragments of The Big Parade fell outward and down, some actually flaming in colors.

  The fire smashed through the hall roof, the light of it widening outward on the lawn, turning the people before us into rosy-edged silhouettes; and now, my arm around Jan’s minutely trembling shoulders, we could feel the heat. Up on the distant fortress of the next great window the tricolor of France glowed impossibly bright. For a moment it shivered, and seemed to flutter. Ronald Colman and his weary column swayed as though about to drop to the desert sand, and then did, sagging into nothingness as the entire center of the window touched melting point.

  Down the long hall the fire raced and roared, then Buddy Rogers’ Allied plane, like the distant plane it had just shot down, took fire, or seemed to, flames licking its wings. Near the wing tip a pane popped out, black smoke instantly pouring through as though trailing from the wing edge. Then, still smiling, the upraised hand peeling off his helmet, touching his forehead as though in final salute, Buddy disappeared behind a bursting-out black-and-red smear of flame.

  A moment later, no longer, Doug Fairbanks’ costume brightened into a beautiful, achingly brilliant emerald-green, and his indomitable white-toothed grin became visible, I’m certain, over half of Hollywood in that last instant before Robin Hood burst outward and was gone. Then Jan and I turned, and in the flickering wash of pink light, the long shadows of Graustark’s great trees wavering before us, we walked toward the gateway as the first fire truck turned through it, gravel and dead leaves spitting under its wheels.

  • • •

  People change with experience, we’re told, or ought to, and maybe Marion Marsh changed us; maybe she did. Certainly she was an experience we’re not ever going to forget. And much, much later that night in our bedroom at the Beverly Hills Hotel, I thought for a moment as I walked out of the bathroom that Marion had returned once more—smiling wantonly as she waited in bed, wearing the filmiest negligee I’d ever given Jan. But it wasn’t, it was Jan, wanting to make me think, I’m almost sure, that maybe it was Marion. Trying at least, and not altogether failing, either, to be a little more like her, a little more wild and free. But we don’t really change much. We remain ourselves, and mostly this was Jan, and that was fine with me. After all, and I knew it, I’m not Rodolpho Guglielmi myself.

  We were a little reckless: we didn’t go straight home. We spent a couple days at Disneyland and really did visit Forest Lawn cemetery, though I didn’t find Felix the Cat’s marble mausoleum. Then we drove home, because we were running out of money, and I had the new bathroom to finish.

  Some ten days later a batch of papers arrived from Hollywood, and we filled them out and returned them, signed with our real names, with a note explaining that Marsh and Guglielmi were pseudonyms. So for a while, as long as those damned Huntley Tomato Catsup commercials ran, we got checks for something called residual payments. I bought The Narrow Trail, starring William S. Hart; Nomads of the North, with Betty Blythe; and Captain January, with Baby Peggy. Al got a new plaid wool coat for winter, which he didn’t like and resisted, even though, as I pointed out to him, it had a cute little pocket big enough for a dog-bone biscuit. And Jan bought a couple new pieces of furniture and had the living room redecorated.

  Except for the one wall, of course. That hasn’t changed, and never will as long as we’re in this house. Marion Marsh lived here, it still says in that enormous, free-swinging scrawl of lipsticked letters across it, Read it and weep.

  • • •

  THE NIGHT PEOPLE

  • • •

  The great bridge, arched across the blackness of San Francisco Bay, seemed like a stage set now. Empty of cars in the middle of the night, its narrow, orange-lighted length hung wrapped in darkness, motionless and artificial. At its center, where the enormous support cables dipped down into the light to almost touch the bridge, two men stood at the railing staring out at the black Pacific, preparing themselves for what they had come here to do. They wore denims, sneakers, dark nylon jackets, knit caps, and each wore a daypack. Because this had been his idea, Lew Joliffe, the smaller of the two, felt he had to go first, and now he gripped the red-painted bridge railing and swung a leg over, trying not to think of what came next. He drew his other leg over, sat balanced on the rail momentarily, then pushed himself off, out and away from the bridge.

  His feet stepped onto the bottom two rungs, his hands seizing the railings of the small steel ladder that is mounted at midpoint of the ocean side of Golden Gate Bridge. Its dozen rungs angle outward away from the side of the bridge to lead up to a small railed platform level with the top of the great support cable. Ladder and platform are open, a spiderwork of thin metal, and Lew’s eyes looked out between the rungs at a black void he knew stretched on to China. Focusing his mind on the need to hurry, willing himself never to look down, he climbed, feeling through his rubber soles the terrible thinness of the steel-rod rungs suspended over what, on this side of the bridge, was the open sea, two hundred feet directly below. He moved with tense care; if he stumbled even slightly he was afraid he would be unable to continue with this.

  Behind him he heard the small sounds of Harry following him over the bridge rail, then he stepped up onto the little railed platform, turning away from the black emptiness, and felt a rush of relief at sight of the warmly lighted roadway some fifteen feet below him. It looked wonderfully inviting; he longed to be on it. But Harry sat on the bridge railing, a foot moving out toward the ladder, and now, finally, nothing more stood between Lew and what he had to do.

  Waist-high handholds run the lengths of the support cables of Golden Gate Bridge. They are of thin wire cable stretched tautly between support stanchions mounted at intervals along the big cables. Lew bent cautiously forward, reaching with his left hand, and gripped the nearer of these handholds. It felt cold in his palm and damp, and he wondered if they should have worn gloves. He extended his right foot, and set it carefully down on the huge swell of the cable, gratefully feeling his rubber sole grip. Ducking head and shoulders under the handhold wire in his left hand, he eased his torso and center of balance forward onto the big cable, and stood upright between the waist-high wires, facing north toward Marin County.

  Standing on the cable, Lew looked ahead along its incredible length stretching off orange-red and almost level, it seemed; then curving up and up, leaving the bridge lighting and turning black; and beyond that, thinning to a thread, then fading from sight high in the night-time sky. Under his feet he felt the awful roundness of the cable, slightly and uncomfortably bowing his ankles, and the thought of a foot slipping off it clenched his stomach. On the platform Harry stood in the yellow light from the bridge, waiting: a big man, inches taller than Lew and many pounds heavier.

  Lew had to move, and he took the first step forward, then another, and—hands gripping and regripping the taut wire handholds in unison with his moving feet—he was walking the enormous cable; slowly, hardly daring to lift his feet from the great round surface; then more rapidly, beginning to stride, chin lifting. And then they were doing it! The talk finally over, he and Harry were climbing up through the night toward the distant winking red beacons at the top of the long, long arc of the great ocean-side support cable of Golden Gate Bridge.

  His motions were fluid, the steady stride of an athlete
, it seemed to Lew, and suddenly he felt exuberantly alive. The air from the ocean pressed his left cheek coolly, and he tried to imagine how they must look from below. The evenly spaced vertical suspension cables, touched by the yellow-orange lights of the bridge, would stand like graph lines against the ocean-side blackness. The heavier line of the main cable curving smoothly across their tops would chart their steady rise; and plodding upward along it, their two tiny figures must seem like symbols in a newspaper cartoon. He liked this image and thought about telling Harry, but didn’t quite want to turn his head, and he walked on.

  Two minutes passed, and three; they moved swiftly, mechanically, hardly thinking. Then Harry said, “God damn,” and Lew stopped, gripping the handrails, firmly setting his feet. Slowly he turned his head, and saw Harry staring back over his right shoulder and down, then Lew saw it, too. Reduced in size, a model of the van that had brought them to the bridge, he saw it standing on what had turned into a concrete ribbon, saw the doll-like heads of the two women in the roof opening, their orange-tinted faces staring up. “Move, Jo, move,” Harry was muttering. “You’ll have the god-damn highway patrol on our ass!” As though hearing him, a head ducked down into the van, then the other, and a moment later the van rolled on.

  Lew turned to resume his climb but did not; all was changed. The thick roundness under his feet—he’d hardly noticed in the easy rhythm of the climb—was no longer lighted: now the bridge lamps stood far below, their light shaded toward the roadway. And because the upward climb had been so gradual, only now steepening and beginning to be felt in his calves, they’d climbed higher than he’d understood until he looked back and down onto the diminished roof of the van. They were up now, really up: What if one of the handhold wires ahead had broken? He saw his hand sliding off it before he saw the break, feet stumbling, body plunging. . . . He stopped this thought, switched it off, then made a mistake.