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Listen for the Whisperer
Phyllis A. Whitney
In appreciation and admiration for Gunvor V. Blomqvist, who has translated so many of my books with understanding of the mood they are intended to convey.
Chapter 1
I sat in the darkened theater with my hands clasped tensely in my lap and my eyes fixed unblinkingly upon the screen. The man beside me touched my arm and I pulled away from him, not wanting anything to break the spell of the scene that was moving inexorably to its climax.
“Let up, Leigh,” Dick whispered. “This is pure corn, even if Laura Worth did win an Oscar nomination for it years ago.”
Twenty years ago. I knew. But I would not listen to him. I shut him out and watched the screen. I knew the scene by heart, but the impact was always the same. My ambivalence was always the same. I was fascinated by every move the woman on the screen made, yet at the same time I detested her utterly. No one had a better right to detest her.
In the role of Helen Bradley in the movie adaptation of my father’s novel, The Whisperer, Laura Worth was coming down that famous Victorian staircase that had been almost a character in the book. Not only I, but the entire audience sensed her fear. Terror seemed to emanate from her as she descended the stairs, one hand clinging to the banister, the other held to her throat in dread. She was a woman going to meet death—and knowing it. The audience knew it too. Sure of the outcome, sure she would finally escape, they still felt the fright she meant to convey. Even Dick was silent, watching as she reached the foot of the stairs.
The black and white screen managed to reproduce the eeriness of gaslight; even the furnishings seemed to suggest the gray flicker that was the very color of terror. Helen Bradley knew that she lived in this house with a husband who intended to kill her. She knew that no one would believe her accusation if she made it, and that there was no escape from what was going to happen—very soon. Yet she must go down those stairs, cross the hall, and enter the parlor where he waited for her. The background music was hushed, suitably tense and anticipatory. You forgot this was Laura Worth, the actress. You became Helen Bradley.
Her walk across that dim hallway toward the parlor, her pause before the door was memorable. Surely no one had ever managed so short a walk more graphically. I even knew the exact shade of the dress she wore. Although the screen was black and white, the true color was a rich Venetian red, as it had been in my father’s book. Helen’s hand was on the china doorknob and the audience held its breath. Some of us who had seen the picture before knew what was coming. As the woman steeled herself to open the door, the chilling voice from nowhere came whispering out of the air.
“Listen …” And then ominously closer. “Listen …”
Helen Bradley tore open the door and rushed into the parlor. Anything was better than to stand in the dim hallway and hear that evil whispering.
She rushed into the room, the camera following. For a moment there was only her intense fear—and silence. Even the music held its breath. The camera panned about the room, touching the mantel with its ornate clock, moving toward the dining room door. My hackles rose as they always did at this point—because of what was not there. In an earlier scene an iron doorstop in the shape of a cat had propped open that door. Now the doorstop was gone—and, dreadfully, I knew why. The reason had nothing to do with make-believe and a movie screen.
Then the camera turned upon Helen’s face, and you saw the widening of her eyes in new terror. The view flashed to the body of the man who lay upon a rug before the narrow Victorian fireplace—then back to Helen’s face. You saw the growing of this new, more dreadful terror as she realized that her husband was not murderer, but victim, that he lay dead across the room. You could see the realization drawn in Helen’s eyes that the murderer was unidentified and still about—he was not, after all, the known quantity of the man she had married. Now she was alone in this house with the Whisperer. That was when she screamed, and the sound was one that went echoing down the nerves of every listener for hours afterwards.
I stumbled to my feet and pulled Dick with me. “Let’s get out. I don’t want to see the rest.”
He rose, startled, and followed me from the theater. We stood blinking on the lighted street and for a moment I clung to his arm, shivering, though the spring night was gentle. Behind us theater placards spread Laura Worth’s unforgettable face across the foyer. Above, the lights of the marquee announced the Worth Festival now running.
Dick patted my hand. “I don’t blame you,” he said. “I take it all back about corn. She made that scream sound as real as any scream could be. I’ve got prickles down my spine.”
“It was real,” I said. “She knew what she was screaming about. Walk me back to the house, Dick. I want to go home.”
He looked at me curiously as we walked toward Fifty-ninth. “You’ve got an obsession about her, haven’t you? You really are a little nutty when it comes to Laura Worth. Is it true that she was your mother?”
“Not was—is.” I could hear the chill in my own voice. I would not let Dick know all that I was feeling. “She’s still alive, you know. She was fifty-eight a month ago.”
“No, I didn’t know. She disappeared after The Whisperer, didn’t she? Wasn’t there a scandal that hurt the picture? So that she lost out on the Oscar and never played another role?”
He was still curious, but idly so. He didn’t really care. And I cared so deeply that it tore me apart.
We had reached the brownstone town house that had belonged to my father, Victor Hollins, and we paused beside iron-railed steps.
“Thanks for taking me, Dick,” I said. “I’m sorry I got upset.”
He waved a careless hand. “It was worth seeing. Someday you’ll have to tell me the end. I’m sorry if I’ve asked you too many questions.”
I didn’t invite him in, and he did not expect it. We were friends. He had told me once that at twenty-three it was time for me to wake up and fall in love. Not necessarily with him. He had only a small inkling as to how I felt about love. I never paraded what they might call my aberrations to the men I knew. Eventually they discovered that I couldn’t be reached, and they either kept me as a friend, or drifted away. No one got hurt, and that was the way I wanted it.
I ran up the steps and let myself into the house. A lamp burned in the lower hall, and there were lights on upstairs. Ruth called to me over the stair rail.
“You’re home early, dear. Did you see a good picture?”
I hesitated, not wanting to wound her. She was my stepmother and very dear to me. But this time hurt would be necessary if I was to follow my father’s wishes. He had died just a month ago, and he had left a letter for me that was explicit in its instructions. Ruth knew nothing of the letter. I had locked it away in a drawer until I could decide what I must do. Tonight I had gone deliberately to see The Whisperer, and watching Laura Worth on the screen had brought me at last to resolution.
I answered in as gentle a tone as I could. “Dick took me to see a Laura Worth movie.”
The faint catching of her breath was audible, but she turned from the rail without answering. I heard her pad back to her room in her fluffy mules. I had never known anyone more gentle and kind and loving—yet somehow it had always made a difference to me that she was not my mother. And even when I was small I had sensed that the love my father gave her was not the same sort of love he had cherished for Laura Worth. This knowledge had been given its final confirmation when
my father was dying. He had held Ruth’s hand, but he had seen another woman’s face, and a strange, touching joy had dawned in his eyes. “Laura,” he had murmured. “My darling Laura.” And he was gone, leaving me to try to comfort Ruth, with a dark, bitter hatred draining me.
Now I considered running upstairs to put my arms about Ruth’s small person, and to tell her why I had gone to see that particular picture at this time. But I must be more certain of myself first.
I went down the hall to my father’s study and turned on the lamp that lighted the desk. My desk now. My study. He had taken pride in my writing, though it was so different from his own. He had been even more delighted than I when a newspaper had published my first little “personality” piece. He had always said that this room was to be mine when he was gone—but I had not expected that day to come for a long time. His loss was all about me. It must always wound those who are left when a man’s possessions outlive him.
I had kept the room as it had always been, except for adding a few things of my own. His library still packed the shelves. There was a long shelf next to the fireplace that held his books—all the novels he had written. Novels that had made him famous and had once earned him a good living. He had not been clever at saving money, and his books were not as popular as they’d once been, so there was very little left. Ruth would have barely enough to live on—and I wanted nothing. I could earn my own living, and I would help her if it became necessary. But here were the books which had made his reputation, with Maggie Thornton first in the row, and all its hardcover and paperback editions lined alongside it. The book had been translated into thirty-two languages, and as a little girl I could remember coming into this room to count the editions as the number increased.
Maggie Thornton was the first book of his made into a screen play for Laura Worth, and he had gone out to Hollywood to write the film script for her. The combination had been so successful that she had won her first nomination for an Academy Award, and that time the Oscar had been hers. It was during the making of the picture that they had fallen in love. Victor Hollins had wanted to marry her, but she had refused. Her work was everything. She meant to have love affairs, but never to be tied down. Victor would not stay in Hollywood and dance attendance to her ego. He had his pride and his own satisfying work, and he had returned home to marry a girl who had been in love with him for a long time.
When I was old enough, he had told me all these things. He had told me how, when he knew that Laura was going to bear his child, he had asked Ruth to take the baby. She had never hesitated, and she had loved me as her own—and I had loved her. At least I had been secure in having my own father.
Nothing in his telling had ever been meant to make me hate Laura. He did not hate her himself, and he felt that there should be room in every human heart for many loves of many kinds, and much forgiveness. Something went wrong with his intent. I saw only the pain in his eyes when he spoke of Laura. I saw only the hurt to Ruth, the injury to me because I’d had a mother who did not want me.
So I grew up with that disturbing ambivalence. I was greedy to learn all I could about Laura Worth. I found old movie magazines which contained pieces about her that were often unflattering and gossip-filled. I could see very clearly that she was a person I would not want to know—yet I went on gathering my secret fund of probably faulty knowledge. Once in school I bragged openly that she was my mother, shocking my teacher and puzzling my schoolmates, only to deny the whole thing the next day. Even in play with my dolls, I was haunted by the specter of a mother who had never wanted to see me. I would tell my doll children that I was their mother, but I was very busy and I could not keep them. Then I would burst into tears because I could not bear to give them up. Afterwards I would try to make it up to them with the kind of love Ruth gave me. But that was never satisfactory because I knew they would never forget the cruel words I had spoken, and they could never love me back.
Laura had been thirty-four when I was born. Four years later she had made The Whisperer, though this time my father had not written the script. Laura’s career was over before the end of the picture—though she could not have known it then. Often as I grew up I relished the fact. I hoped she had not given up her work willingly. I hoped that she had suffered when it was taken from her. For try as I would, I could not see that she deserved any sympathy or kindness.
I sat at the huge desk where Victor Hollins had written his novels so painstakingly in longhand. My portable typewriter was dwarfed by its mahogany expanse. I pushed the typewriter away, pushed away the unfinished piece I was writing for a magazine, and reached for the framed photograph beyond it. Across the lower right-hand corner a strong feminine hand had written: “For my darling Victor, with all my love—Laura.”
I had found the photograph in a locked drawer in my father’s desk, and I had set it out deliberately where it would taunt me, goad me, anger me into deciding. Ruth had not understood, and I could not tell her how I felt. She had been able to pity Laura as the years went by—where there was no pity in me.
Now I studied Laura Worth’s face. She had been stunningly beautiful, but never with a conventional beauty. Pretty she was not. Her father had been an American who married a fair-haired Norwegian girl, and Laura had taken after him with dark hair and eyes. In the portrait her hair was brushed into the fluffy bob of the early thirties, her chin tilted to show the long beautiful line of her throat. Above those wide cheekbones her great dark eyes wore their naturally thick lashes, and her brows had been darkly penciled. Her strong nose with sensitively flared nostrils and her wide, generous mouth all added to a face that could belong only to Laura Worth. It was a face that would be recognized anywhere, even though it had not been seen on the screen in a new film for all those years since 1950.
I turned the portrait so that it caught the light and the glass became a mirror, with my own face superimposed upon hers. I looked like neither Laura Worth nor Victor Hollins. My chin was not softly rounded like Laura’s. It was a chin as strong and stubborn as Laura Worth’s nose. My eyes were a hazy blue, my hair a darkish blond that I wore straight in a cut that fell just below my jawline. I looked nothing at all like the picture, yet I felt the unwanted resemblance inside me. I knew I had something of her stormy, indomitable nature. I wanted to be gentle like Ruth. I did not want to feel so deeply and be so torn by my emotions. This was one reason why I was wary of love. Love between a man and a woman was dangerous, hurtful—I wanted none of it.
Once when I was ten my father took me to a movie matinee. The picture we went to see was Maggie Thornton. “I want you to know what your mother was like,” he had told me.
The dynamic woman on the screen fascinated me. Beside her I felt like a zero. How could any daughter grow up to equal such a mother? Was that what my father wanted, I wondered—for me to be like her?
On the way home we were silent, both of us haunted by what we had seen. When we reached the house Father took me into his study and perched me on his desk. I did not want to hear what he might say.
“I don’t want to grow up to be like her!” I cried. “She didn’t want me, and I don’t want her. I only want you and Ruth. I hate her—I hate her!”
He held me very close and let me cry out a storm against his shoulder. I think my wild emotions alarmed and distressed him. This was not what he had intended.
When I’d spent myself he kissed me gently. “You must never do that again,” he said. “This is the way Laura used to be. It is necessary for you to forgive her, but not to be like her.”
I never forgave her, and I was terribly afraid that I was like her.
Two days before his death, my father took me into his study again.
“I want you to have something,” he said.
He opened a locked drawer in the desk and took out an object I had never seen before. It was a beautiful French paperweight—“millefiori,” it was called, he said. Under the glass were a multitude of tiny glass flowers in red and blue and green and yellow. I
held it reverently in my hands while he told me about it.
“Laura Worth gave it to me to celebrate the completion of Maggie Thornton. It is very old and very valuable. I want you to have it. Keep it to remember us both.”
Two days later he was gone. I did not need the paperweight to remember him by. Now I had his letter, written in the knowledge that his heart was faulty. In it he told me that he had always wanted me to know my mother, and for her to know me. Now that I was grown it might be possible for me to bridge the gap that she, apparently, had never even tried to bridge. As I knew, she lived in Bergen, Norway, and he wanted me to go to her, make her acquaintance.
“I know you’re gathering pieces for a book about great women movie stars of the past,” he wrote. “No such book can be complete if it leaves out Laura Worth. She hasn’t granted an interview in twenty years, but if you take her the millefiori paperweight, I think she’ll see you.”
I could understand very well how his letter attempted to trap me. I took pride in the fairness and objectivity with which I wrote the pieces that were beginning to win me a name. If I interviewed Laura Worth, I must look at her without stormy subjective emotions. That was what he intended.
“If you have any difficulty in reaching her,” the letter went on, “you are to go to my good friend Gunnar Thoresen. The accompanying letter is for him.”
I knew who Gunnar was. He would be about thirty-eight now, but years ago when he was in college he had written my father an unusually perceptive letter about one of his novels, and they had begun their long correspondence. Gunnar’s father, now dead, had owned a line of merchant ships that sailed from Bergen, and he had a partnership in the company and worked for it himself. On occasions when Gunnar had been sent to New York, my father and he had met, and had become close friends, in spite of the difference in their ages. Gunnar knew Laura Worth, and I had realized that he sometimes brought my father word of her. I had seen him once or twice when I was younger, but I did not remember him. My father usually met him away from the house, perhaps where no constraint would be set upon their conversation.
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