Was_a novel

by Geoff Ryman

  “I’ve got something to hide,” she would say in a funny voice and make Loopy peek out from behind Daddy’s back. Frances would laugh, and try to catch Loopy in a lunge and always miss. Loopy would duck away.

  “I’m doing something you can’t see!” said Loopy.

  Her father stepped away, his grin too wide. Frances ran forward, hands outstretched to try to get Loopy, and Janie threw him, high over her head, to Daddy.

  “Daddy’s got the secret now,” Janie said.

  “No, I don’t,” he said, his queasy smile suddenly unsteady. He flung Loopy away too quickly, as if the puppet could burn him, too quickly and too high. Loopy careered into the mantelpiece. A tiny dish was knocked off it.

  “Uh-oh,” said Janie, in alarm, and looked at Daddy.

  “Oops,” said Daddy, and they both laughed. Frances decided to laugh too, even louder than they did.

  “Quiet,” said Janie, her mouth stretched downward from tension. Both she and Daddy knelt down and began to pick things off the carpet.

  Loopy was forgotten. “What are you doing?” Frances asked, walking toward them.

  “We’ve knocked over your mother’s seeds,” said Daddy. “She’s going to plant them in the spring.”

  “They’re from home,” said Janie. Home was still Grand Rapids.

  Frances knelt down too, and all of them pecked at the seeds with their fingers, like birds’ beaks.

  “Looks like these are going to grow a healthy crop of throw rugs,” said Daddy, holding one up, covered in fluff.

  “Fran-ces!” called her mother from upstairs. “Come on up, honey, and I’ll do your makeup.”

  “Show time,” murmured Frances, and rolled her eyes. Sometimes she found the whole thing bored her.

  There were always two movies shown at the Valley Theater. The songs came between the movies. Tonight the first feature was a Western. As she watched, Frances played the parts along with the actors. Her face mirrored the shapes the actresses made with their mouths, the wide O’s and their wide eyes and their fanned-out fingers held up in surprise. Frances thought they weren’t putting enough into it. She would make a great deal more fuss. She would run around and help the hero more.

  She wondered if silent actors bothered to talk when they were being filmed. She wondered if they stayed as silent as the movies.

  Suppose everything was silent. Suppose you wanted to scream, but couldn’t make any sound. You couldn’t make anybody notice you. You could wave your hands, but people might not see. It would be like you were drowning.

  Suppose no one knew they were in a silent movie? They would all think they were talking. They would move their mouths and nod their heads, but no one would say anything.

  Frances watched her mother play piano to make some sound for the movie. Her mother was reading a book at the same time. Her mother was always doing two things at once. Like living in Lancaster and driving to Los Angeles all the time.

  Frances was scowling in the dark. Whenever there were guests, Frances could feel the whole family launch itself forward together, forward like it was a show. Mama took Papa’s arm, which she never did otherwise. Papa smoked cigars and swaggered, talking to the men, and Mama would laugh with the ladies. Then they played cards. Their voices would be smooth, modulated, flowing.

  “Oh, Frank always thinks that shows should be for free, and I agree. If folks can’t pay for it now, they will someday. And a full house is always better, for everyone. So you’ll always see Frank, giving tickets to people who might not otherwise go. Young boys, you know?”

  A full house always seems better, thought Frances, because movies are silent. Only people can talk.

  The movie ended. Applause. Not much. The first feature wasn’t that good. Mama stood up from her piano, looking pretty, proud and plump in her delicate blue dress. Frank Gumm sprang up onto the stage and took her hand. They gazed lovingly into each other’s eyes, for a perfectly timed beat, and broke apart.

  Jinny tapped Frances on the arm, and the girls crowded around to the side of the stage.

  “Hello, friends,” said Frank Gumm. “Welcome to the Valley Theater, the only stage in the Antelope Valley providing the finest in kinematograph and vaudeville entertainment. Though I reckon some of you are here because it’s cool.”

  A light scattering of chuckles. Jane adjusted Frances’s collar.

  “And so, on with the next part of the show. Ethel?”

  Her mother smiled with love at Daddy.

  “Girls?”

  Frances crowded up behind Jinny, as they lined up in order of height on the narrow steps.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, together, the Trio Unusual . . . the Gumm Sisters!”

  They came dancing onto the stage as their mother played, into the lights as the theater darkened, and there were the faces in rows, there never seemed to be enough faces in enough rows, but the faces transformed into those of friends, watching with anticipation. And Janie was with her, and Jinny was with her, and Mama, and Daddy, standing by.

  “When the red, red robin comes bob-bob-bobbing along, along . . .” in something like harmony, and Frances knew she was the loudest, waving her arms, and she could hear people chuckle, and she knew that they liked her, that everybody liked her, there in the lights, where everything worked, and where there was love.

  Frances woke up in the night. She didn’t remember being loaded into the car, or being carried up to the house in her father’s arms. She thought she was back in the theater, and that she would have to talk to people.

  It was dark and it was silent. Then there was a shout, and a forced whisper, a whisper of hatred that made something in Frances’s chest prickle with horror. She heard the voices of her parents.

  “It’s starting again, isn’t it? It’s starting all over again!” her mother’s voice was a whisper, but the whisper rose up with a keening wrench, like a bird taking wing from its nest.

  Baby listened. The whispering was like a scratching on her eardrum or a record at the end when it goes round and round in the same groove.

  “I’m the girls’ father, Ethel, you can’t do that.”

  In this dark world, without the lights, without music, Baby Frances began to sing, softly, to herself. It was like having to sit through a movie. All you could do was sit and watch and hope for a happy ending. Frances hated movies.

  Somewhere there was a movie that sang. Daddy had told her about it. It already existed. Al Jolson began to sing, right at the end.

  If movies sang, would people want to hear them, the Gumms? What would hold the Gumms together? Maybe the movies were talking now, and not her mother and father. Maybe movies flickered on walls at night, whispering, a new kind of ghost. Maybe it was not her mother and father who were talking at all. If sound could come from nowhere, spoken by no one.

  “Don’t touch me! Don’t touch me!” Her mother’s voice was high and breathy, panicked. “Keep away from me!”

  Nothing is hidden. Frances knew she existed to hold her parents together. She was the still point around which all the others turned. She and the music. She and the music were the same thing. Both of them had to stay in the center of attention. The center bore the weight, and if it slipped there would be disaster.

  Her sisters were going to go to school, Daddy was hiring other acts, and she was going to go to Los Angeles. Frances began to hear the unaccustomed sound of her father weeping. She sang louder, to cover the dissonance. The words of the songs were not important. The meaning behind them was, a meaning that could not be put into words. The meaning needed music. The meaning needed her, to sing it.

  Manhattan, Kansas

  Christmas 1875

  Chapman’s favourite film was The Wizard of Oz, in which Judy Garland travels continuously looking for the lost farm, the loved faces . . .

 
And here is Judy, Chapman’s first love, who had the same name as Garland . . .

  Vince Smith, the director of the YMCA camp where Chapman worked for seven years: “He was particularly good with children, like a pied piper. I didn’t see a fault in Mark. His camp name was Nemo.” He gave that name up when someone told him it meant Nothing. And Cindy, who was a sobbing child in pigtails when Chapman comforted her in his camp: “He truly cared for me and that is very odd for an adult.” The last time she saw him she backed off. “His face looked different. He had shark eyes and no feeling in his face.”

  In Hawaii he tried to kill himself . . . “You could always read Mark’s mind like a book,” said a fellow worker. We know the book. Holden Caulfield found adults phoney and Chapman fixed on Lennon, now living as a rich recluse, as the ultimate phoney . . .

  Nemo does not, of course, mean Nothing. It means a Nobody.

  —Nancy Banks-Smith,

  reviewing a television documentary

  about Mark Chapman,

  The Guardian, February 3, 1988

  Wilbur F. Jewell killed himself just before Christmas. No one seemed to know why. Some people blamed the weather.

  It had been a strange December that year. Thermometers showed eighty-eight degrees if they were on a south wall out of the wind. It made the children restless, people said, to have summer in the middle of winter.

  Then, as hard and sudden as a fist, winter slammed into them. The snow piled up in drifts, and schools were closed. Everything closed, even the sky which hung dark and low and heavy overhead. A few days before Christmas, Wilbur Jewell went missing. Uncle Henry and Will’s father spent a day out in the snow looking for him. Dorothy was rather excited. Will had always talked of getting out of here. She thought he had done it. She thought he had run away and got on a train and become a steamboat pilot on the river or even gone out to the Territory, to join the Indians. She wished he had taken her with him.

  Wilbur had walked clear to the other side of Manhattan to the telegraph poles.

  Dorothy was in bed, listening, when she heard Uncle Henry’s boots clunking up the stairs.

  “The boy went and hanged himself,” was all he said.

  “What! God have mercy. Has his mother been told?”

  There was silence for an answer.

  “Well we just got to go there,” said Aunty Em.

  “She don’t want nobody now, Em. She just sits in the corner rocking, and there’s no comforting her. She don’t want comfort. She just knocks it away.”

  “Oh! It just tears the heart! What does she say?”

  Dorothy heard Uncle Henry slump down onto the chair. “She says he was a happy boy. She just says that over and over. He was a happy boy. And she says how she doesn’t have anything to remember him by. Bob told me outside, he was going to get a photographer in. Photograph the remains.”

  “Horrible habit. I suppose they’ll have a wreath with it that says, ‘Sleeping in the arms of the Lord.’”

  “It’ll be all the woman has.”

  Dorothy could stand it no longer. She could very finely gauge what would annoy Aunty Em, what was safe and what was not. She could sense from the fine fierceness in Aunty Em’s voice that almost anything would be all right.

  “What’s happened to Wilbur?” she said, walking out from behind the blanket.

  “Oh, darling, did you hear?” Aunty Em sounded worried for her, instead of angry. Dorothy had been right.

  “Wilbur’s dead, Dorothy,” said Uncle Henry.

  Aunty Em tried to hug Dorothy. She somehow always missed, all angles and elbows. “We just have to hope that he’s happy in the arms of the Lord,” she told Dorothy.

  Dorothy did not need to be told what dead meant.

  “Was it the Dip?” she asked very quietly.

  “Oh honey, now, it wasn’t. Wasn’t your fault at all.” Aunty Em tried to kiss her. “No.”

  They weren’t going to tell her why her friend had died.

  “What does hanged mean?”

  “Dorothy. That’s something you must never mention. If you talk about it, it will only make it worse for everybody. I’ll tell you, but you must promise not to talk about it. Say yes.”

  “Yes, Ma’am.”

  “It means he killed himself, Dorothy. I’m not going to tell you how because it’ll just give you nightmares. But he killed himself.”

  Dorothy didn’t ask why. She knew. It was a way of leaving. She nodded and went back to bed.

  “Dorothy?” asked Aunty Em, her voice trailing after the child. It was Aunty Em who needed to talk. Dorothy didn’t. Dorothy threw herself on the tick mattress and pretended to be asleep. She heard Aunty Em pull back the blanket to look in.

  “She’s asleep.”

  “That’s a blessing. Leave her be.”

  Dorothy listened again.

  “I knew there was something wrong with that boy.”

  “He was all right, Em.”

  “There’s something wrong, Henry, with a boy that age who prefers to play with little children.”

  A few days before, Dorothy and Wilbur had made angels in the snow on top of the hill. They had lain down on their backs and waved their arms up and down. That made a shape like wings. The trick was to stand up from the snow and then jump away, so that there were no footprints leading from the image. Then you could say that it was a place where an angel had gone to sleep. Will would lean out and lift Dorothy out of hers. So hers were the best.

  Then Dorothy and Wilbur and his little brother, Max, had made three snowmen. Dorothy loved the way the snowballs got bigger and bigger, in layers like a cake, and the crunching noises they made on the snow underneath. Will helped them roll the biggest snowball and lift the smaller snowballs up on top. He would make snow castles.

  Wilbur made an ice road. He carried buckets of water up to the top of the hill and poured them on the ground to freeze. You didn’t have to walk on an ice road. You would run at it and stop walking. And then you’d slide. It was like flying. They made an ice road all the way down the hill. They could ride down that inside hessian sacks, spinning and giggling and landing in a heap at the bottom. It almost never hurt. When it did, Wilbur would get worried and rub Dorothy’s ankles until they were better. He never hit her, like Max did. He would stop Max from hitting her. “You don’t hit girls,” Wilbur said.

  “Why not?” said Max.

  “Because they’re smaller than you. If you hit her, then I’ll hit you, just so you know what it’s like.”

  “And I’ll tell Mama.”

  “And I’ll tell Mama that you were hitting on Dorothy, which is why I hit you.”

  Max thrust out his jaw with hatred of his bigger, stronger, wiser brother and walked away, back down the hill, leaving his snowman behind.

  Max was all right most of the time. You needed Max for most of the games. But it was nicer when it was just Dorothy and Will. After Max had gone, Will and Dorothy talked together about how much they hated Kansas.

  “Just a big pile of dirt,” said Wilbur.

  “Just a big pile of dirt and nothing to do,” said Dorothy.

  “Nothing to do but work.”

  “You just got to wait and wait.”

  “And do your chores or go to school.” The way Will said it made it sound like something disgusting.

  “Sk-ew-ew-l,” said Dorothy, imitating him. She admired Will because he had been to school and then quit and never went back.

  “Stuff your head until it hurts and then tell you you’re stupid.” Will glowered and kicked at the snow. Dorothy kicked at the snow too.

  “One day, I’ll get out of here,” he said. “One day, I’ll just get on the train, and go West.” West was the approved direction. Nobody ever went Back East, that was giving up. Everybody
talked about going West.

  “I want to see an Indian,” Dorothy said.

  “I seen loads of ’em,” said Wilbur. “Till about three years ago, there used to be a whole reservation of the Kansa, out at Council Grove. Most of ’em dressed like poor white people and were drunk a lot. I saw one once kept waving a letter and my papa read it and it was from a judge and the judge said that this was a good Indian.”

  “He didn’t wear feathers?” Dorothy was disappointed.

  “Well, that was before all the Kansa left and went down the Nation. I expect they dress like Indians now.”

  “Aunty Em talks about the Indians a lot.”

  “She don’t know nothing about it,” said Wilbur.

  Dorothy wanted to believe that, except that Aunty Em really did have a lot to say about the Indians: how they spoke, what they wore.

  “Down the Nation, the Indians wear feathers,” Dorothy said, reassuring herself, “and they’re bright red, and they ride horses without a saddle and don’t have to do anything they don’t want to do.”

  “They live in tents, not houses,” said Will. “And when they want to move, they just get up and go.”

  “And they hide in the grass, and nobody can see them,” whispered Dorothy. “They’re invisible.”

  Will was smiling, crookedly. “Well, we can’t see ’em. Maybe they’re all around us all the time, only we don’t see them.”

  “Maybe they live underground,” said Dorothy. It was a game of pretend. Will still smiled. “Maybe you can hear ’em sing at night, under the ground.”

  “I wish I was an Indian,” said Dorothy.

  “There’s some kinds of Indian I’d want to be,” said Will, leaning back and looking terribly adult. “And some I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t want to be one of them tame Indians that try to be farmers. I’d want to be out in the Territory.”