Was

by Geoff Ryman

  They went down Oldfield and turned left onto the Sierra Highway again. “Go slow,” begged Jonathan, but he was disappointed. There was hardly anything left from Back Then. Everything was huge and flat and spread out, a car lot, a Swedish smorgasbord, an empty stretch of bare brown earth alongside the train tracks. MICHAELS COACHWORKS, boasted a sign, SINCE 1974. “Slow,” said Jonathan. They passed a brick building with mildly Art Deco decoration along the roof.

  “What are we looking for?” Ira asked.

  “An old movie theater. It was made out of brick. It burned down.” They both looked, but saw nothing like it. They came to Lancaster Boulevard—Tenth Street as it had once been. “Might as well turn,” sighed Jonathan. As they did, a movie house with huge, decrepit, late fifties, early sixties lettering slipped past. “No, that’s not it, and it wouldn’t be here anyway,” said Jonathan. He looked disgruntled.

  Lancaster Boulevard looked left behind by the postmodern world. The flat-roofed, flat-fronted storefronts tasted of the early sixties. There were cars parked, but no people walking, and a hush. The shadows were long. Ira was about to say, as if it were his fault, that he was sorry.

  And then Jonathan sat up. “Oh wow!” he said, like the old hippie he secretly was. “Pull over.”

  They did. There was plenty of parking space. “Will you look at that!” said Jonathan.

  An old wooden building, scarred in a line where a porch had been torn away from its frontage, stood perched absurdly on stilts. It looked like a woman afraid of a mouse, holding up her skirts.

  “I reckon I know what that is,” said Jonathan, his grin fierce. He grabbed the Lancaster book and flipped through the pages and turned a page of photographs around. “Yup,” he said. “Look, see these photographs? They were taken in ’36 from the water tower, so you see about half the town. Now the water tower was on Cedar. And look!”

  Jonathan pointed. Ira waited for an explanation.

  Jonathan read from the caption, “‘Far left is the Western Hotel.’ See the two palm trees?”

  By the sidewalk, on the other side of the chain-link fence from the old building, there were two tall palm trees. In the photograph, taken from high up, the palm trees were smaller, below roof height. They shaded the doorway.

  “What they’ve done is hoist the whole building up and move it back,” said Jonathan, and grinned. “They’re saving it!” He was pleased.

  He sat still for a moment. Then suddenly he said, in a gathering voice, “Oh boy!” He jumped out of the car. Ira turned to look.

  On the corner of Cedar Street, there was a theater. Behind the large white plastic sign, there was another, smaller one. The letters were slotted into bars of metal, Art Deco, three-dimensional:

  LOS ANGELES COUNTY

  OFFICES AND ASSEMBLY HALL

  On either side of the entrance were two Art Deco lamps and beside them a long, narrow, frosted window with a kind of trelliswork of metal holding in the glass. On the wall, clumsily hand-painted in black, was another sign, with an arrow:

  MENTAL

  HEALTH

  UPSTAIRS

  Ira sat in the car and looked at Lancaster Boulevard. There was a shop called Windsor, and a J. C. Penney Co. It couldn’t have been more ordinary. But it interested him now.

  Ira began to look at the book again, the photographs from the water tower first. It was a shock to see just how much of the old town had gone, with its dust, its trees and its wide, wide spaces. He flipped back a few pages and saw a photograph of three sisters on the steps of an airplane. Ira read the caption. Ira covered his face.

  Of course! That’s why they were here. It was because of Jonathan’s play! He was playing the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz.

  “Jonathan,” Ira said aloud in a joke schoolmistress voice. “This is unbelievably tacky.”

  Ira had only seen the film once, when he was seventeen, and had not thought much of it. The songs were mediocre, the dialogue silly, and the sentiment—There’s no place like home—was nauseating. It was all right for kids, but why adults?

  Jonathan was loping back to the car. He was carrying a handbill, smiling with anticipation. Jonathan looked sweet and goofy and he could dance. Perfect casting for a scarecrow, Ira thought. Ira looked at the man he loved but did not desire.

  “A theater on Cedar Street!” called Jonathan, as if something had been vindicated. “They’re still doing it. They’re still putting shows on for each other just as if L.A. were a thousand miles away.”

  “Jonathan,” Ira said. “Judy Garland?”

  Lancaster, California

  1927

  Where is Vaudeville?

  — Confused child to Jack Haley

  In 1894, Horace Henderson Wilcox, a Kansas prohibitionist, bought 120 acres near Los Angeles for his country home. His wife called the place Hollywood…

  The fine weather was certainly a major incentive for many companies to move their entire organizations to the West Coast, but Hollywood offered another advantage. An industrial dispute, known as the Patents War and fought with weapons and violence enough to justify the term, had forced several producers to flee…These producers had infringed the Edison patents by making equipment built from pirated designs…Hollywood offered an ideal sanctuary for refugees of the Patents War, for should trouble appear, the Mexican border was a mere hundred-mile drive away.

  — KEVIN BROWNLOW

  The Parade’s Gone By…

  It was cool inside the movie house. Daddy kept it cool. There was a beautiful woman in the movie and Frances knew why it was so dark around her eyes. It was the black that you put on your eyelashes when you sing. Only people couldn’t sing in movies because there was no sound. That was why people needed Frances and Jinny and Mary Jane. You could only sing on stage.

  It was Daddy’s movie house and everybody in town knew him and everybody in town knew Frances. They had come here from Grand Rapids, where Granny lived, but that was a long time ago, almost before Frances could remember, though it must have been nice, because everybody, Mom and Jinny and Daddy, they all said so, because Grand Rapids was cool and green. Lancaster was flat and hot. Hot enough to fry an egg.

  In the movie a man had been running along the tops of the skyscrapers and had fallen off and now he was hanging on to the hands of a big clock. Frances laughed, ha ha, very forcefully and kicked her legs and looked to make sure her sisters were laughing. If her sisters were laughing, it would mean the movie was meant to be funny, and Frances wouldn’t have to be afraid for the man. Virginia and Mary Jane were laughing and looking at her, to make sure she was okay, so she grinned very hard, to make sure they could see she was happy.

  Daddy’s movie house. Frances said it to herself. They were all together in Daddy’s movie house. They were all part of the show together. Mom played the piano and Daddy sang, and Jinny and Mary Jane sang. Baby Frances sang. And everybody came to see them.

  The man in the movie was swinging from a rope now. It was caught around his ankle. He swung between skyscrapers, up and onto a roof and suddenly he was safe, and his girlfriend was there and hugged him and everybody clapped. Frances clapped too, though she always found the endings of movies a mystery. Why end there, when it could have ended anywhere? Why end there when he could have gone on running for as long as he liked? But Frances cheered. “Yayyyyyy!” She cheered because it was Daddy’s movie, because they always cheered each other.

  “You like that, Baby?” Mary Jane asked, as the lights went up.

  “I surely did,” said Frances, with a sideways wobble of her head that she had learned from her father. Frances liked Mary Jane just a bit better than Jinny, her middle sister. Mary Jane was older and kinder. And she had a huge, wide smile. Frances wanted to have a smile like hers when she grew up. Everybody always said that Jinny was pretty and they never said that about Mary Jane, but Frances thought different.

  “We’re going home now,” Frances announced, and slid down from her seat, her pretty white dress riding up. “It’s tim
e,” she explained. Her sisters smiled and shook their heads and followed as Frances stomped up the aisle in round-toed buckle shoes. One strap flapped.

  Frances generally did whatever she liked, expecting people to like what she did. She went to Harriet, who wore a red kind of suit and a red hat. “Have you seen my daddy?” she demanded.

  “He’ll be out front, Baby,” the usherette said. “Good movie, wasn’t it?”

  “Oh yes, it surely was,” said Baby. “But movies can’t sing.” She didn’t really like movies. “Can you buckle my shoe for me?” She stuck out her foot, toes curled down like at ballet class. “It came unbuckled.”

  “That’s okay, Harriet, one of us will do it,” said Jinny echoed by her older, shyer sister. It was her older, shyer sister who crouched down to do up the buckle, quickly, almost furtively.

  “You don’t have to buckle my shoe now,” Frances reassured Harriet. She didn’t want Harriet to feel she had missed out. “You coming along to the show tonight?”

  “Um,” said Harriet.

  Jinny laughed. “She’s probably already seen it a hundred times, Baby.” Jinny did not always make Frances look good.

  Frances knew how to deal with that. “That’s why we do it different each time. We do different songs, don’t we, Harriet?”

  To Frances’s great pleasure, Harriet agreed. The shoe was buckled. “Goodbye, Harriet!” called Frances as they were leaving. Then Frances ran up the aisle to find her daddy.

  She found him in what her mother and no one else called the foyer. Daddy was there talking to some men, and Frances ran up to him, shouting, “Daddy, Daddy, it was good!”

  Her father laughed and scooped her up and swung her around. “You bet it was!” he said and gave her a shake. “I was thinking of you when I booked it!” He turned toward the two men. “Hey, boys, this is my little girl. This is Frances.”

  Frances saw then that the two weren’t men at all, but teenagers. Frances didn’t like them. They didn’t know how to smile. Their smiles were all twisted, and their feet shuffled, and their hands were in their pockets. They looked like they could be rough. “Hiya, Kid,” one of them managed to say, with a voice with a catch in it, as if a string had been plucked.

  “These are my other daughters, Mary Jane and Virginia.” They had just come up. Mary Jane hid slightly behind Jinny, but both of them looked scared, or something like it. Frances was going to say something to make them all happy. She was going to, and then decided not to. There was something nasty about those two men. Why did Daddy know people like them? Frances could see her daddy wanted to get away too. His voice went breathless, and he began to talk too fast and move his head a lot. “Got to be getting on.”

  “Sure,” said one of the boys, his smile even more twisted, and Frances felt something she had no words for. She felt the contempt the boys had for her father. Her father turned and quickly walked away.

  “Who wants a swing?” he asked as he turned. Why did he let them talk to him like that? Frances hugged his thick neck that smelled of aftershave and was prickly with stubble.

  “Me,” said Frances, coyly, forgetting the boys in her affection for her father.

  “Jinny?” her father asked, eyebrow arched.

  Jinny said nothing but got into place beside him. Her father lowered Frances, and they each took a hand, and Frances felt a delicious tingle in her stomach.

  “One…two…three!” they all said in a chorus and swung her over the movie-house carpet.

  “Again,” she said and giggled.

  “One…two…threeeeee!” Frances was swung up high over their heads, and Mary Jane had run ahead to push open the big glass door, and as if flying, Frances soared up out of shadow, and down into a blanket of hot Lancaster air.

  “Now it’s Jinny’s turn,” Frances said.

  “You can’t swing me, I’m too big,” said Jinny. “And besides, it’s too hot out here.”

  “I can swing you,” said Frances and chuckled at the idea.

  “No you can’t,” said Jinny, beginning to giggle too.

  They all played a game. Daddy and Frances pretended to swing Jinny. One, two threeeeee! and Jinny would whoop. “Golly, that was some good swing,” Jinny said, joking. Mary Jane followed quietly. Frances didn’t want Mary Jane to feel left out so she turned and winked at her. Mary Jane smiled back, gently, her arms folded in front of her.

  “Who were those boys?” Mary Jane asked quietly. Daddy walked on a couple of steps. “Those boys in the movie house?”

  “Just some kids, honey,” said Daddy, walking on ahead. “They come in for the show on Saturdays. Nice boys.”

  “They didn’t look nice,” said Janie.

  “No, they did not,” said Frances, holding on to her father’s soft, fat finger.

  “You don’t like anybody, Janie,” said Jinny, and there was enough truth in it for none of them to say anything else.

  “Race you to the car,” said Daddy.

  Only he and Frances ran.

  “It’s too hot,” said Jinny, behind them.

  The car was a special treat. Mom had driven to and from Los Angeles again, and she had left the car outside the theater, so the girls, particularly the Baby, wouldn’t have to walk home in the heat.

  It was a Buick. Frances liked the word and said it over to herself. Big, beautiful Buick. Her daddy concentrated on opening the door, and she clambered in, hoisting herself up onto the large front seat. Janie came up, scowling in the sunshine, hand sheltering her eyes. Janie didn’t like Lancaster. She was always uncomfortable in it. Frances bounced up and down on the big seat.

  “It’ll be cooler when we get going,” said her father. He pushed open the windshield in front, so that the air could blow in. The Buick had a little metal awning that hung out over the windshield like the brim of a hat. The hood was dusty again.

  “We’ll wash the car tomorrow,” announced Frances.

  “And I’ll turn the hose on you.”

  “No,” said Frances. She loved washing the car and being hosed down in the heat. Janie reached forward and scratched the top of Frances’s head. It was a familiar game.

  “Don’t,” said Frances and pretended to slap her hand away. Janie did it again. Frances squealed. “Don’t!”

  Her father turned the key in the car and it started the first time, with a low rumble and a delicious smell of gas fumes. The Buick pulled away, with Frances giggling as both sisters tickled her from behind.

  Daddy always drove quickly, to get the air moving. Suddenly the car roared and shot forward. It sped along Antelope Avenue, a current of air pouring in through the open window. Frances stood up on the seat to feel the wind on her face. The wind seemed to make her eyes shake. She saw the low flat buildings shivering past them, out to where Lancaster straggled to an end. It was late afternoon, and the shadows were long. The hills seemed to have more shape in the low slanting light, their clefts and gullies full of blue shadow, their blue crags kissed pink. The high desert looked more gentle, less bleak and blasted.

  “Daddy, be careful!” said Mary Jane.

  Frances realized something was wrong.

  The car was going faster and faster, and Frances’s father had a strange, set expression on his face, and his eyes looked gray and blank. He looked angry. Frances giggled to make him turn to her with his eyes that could be so gentle. He didn’t. Frances began to sing—that almost always worked. But her father kept staring ahead and his face stayed grim, and the car kept roaring forward.

  A jackrabbit suddenly darted across the road. He father blinked and tried to swerve, and the car skidded around on the sand and gravel that had blown onto the road. Mary Jane screamed. The car turned tight around in the middle of the road. Thrown sideways, Frances was lifted up and hurled onto her father’s lap. The car stopped.

  Silence and sudden settling heat. Frances could feel her father. He was shaking. He put his hands on her head, as if trying to cushion it. “Sorry, girls,” he murmured. He helped Frances sit up and
started up the car again. It coughed and shuddered. Very slowly, carefully, he turned the car around in a wide arc, back into its lane, back toward the town.

  Frances stood up on the seat again. “Faster, Daddy, faster!” she said. Wordlessly, looking ahead, her father reached out and gently made her sit. The car moved slowly home.

  One side of Antelope Avenue was lined with telephone poles, the other with tamarisk trees that made long, cool shadows. A woman walked under them. The car slowed and stopped, and Frank Gumm wound the window down, prepared, as he must be, to talk a spell. He always said if you were in business, you had to set and talk a spell with folks. Frances thought it meant he talked magic.

  They didn’t know the woman. She looked quizzical as the car crept up to her. Frances’s father stuck his head out of the window and said loudly, too soon, to reassure her, “Hello, Mrs. Story, I don’t believe we’ve met.” He leaned out of the window, resting his arms on the sill of the car door. “I’m Frank Gumm.”

  “Oh,” she said, surprised. “Hello, Mr. Gumm. Pleased to meet you.” Her eyes flickered over him. Mr. Gumm was wearing a sporty checked cap and sporty checked jacket that didn’t quite match, and without doubt was also wearing golf trousers with long checked socks up to the knees. “How did you know it was me?” she asked.

  Frank Gumm grinned widely. “Just a process of elimination, Mrs. Story. Mrs. Abbot tells me you haven’t been to see the show and you’re one of the few folks around here I haven’t spoken to yet. Can I offer you some free tickets?”

  Definitely sporty, Mrs. Story seemed to think. A plump little man done up to look like he plays golf. “Well, I hardly…”

  “These are my little girls, Mary Jane, my oldest, and Virginia—we all call her Jinny—and Baby Frances. They’re the ones who do all the work.”

  Mrs. Story still looked uncertain. Frances thought she would pep her up.

  “Howdy, Mrs. Story. I like your hat!” In fact she did. It was a nice felt cloche like Mom wore.

  “Frances,” murmured Janie, embarrassed.