Marion's Wall

by Jack Finney

  “You know, when I was down there, there was only one phone book, and it wasn’t any bigger—”

  “Marion!” She shut up. “What … was … his … name?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  “YOU CAN, TOO, REMEMBER!”

  “Well, wait a second! Good night, Nurse! It was an unusual last name. And a short first name. Dick? No, not Dick—he was that tall electrician—but something like that.” She sat frowning. “Norman? No, that was that dark young carpenter. And Ned Berman was a cameraman—”

  “Didn’t you know any women, for crysake!”

  “I don’t remember them as well. I’ll think of this in a minute; quit interrupting.”

  I sat trying to wait, but I was so excited I had to jump up and go to the bathroom, but I hurried back. She was still frowning, staring at the floor, lower lip between her teeth. “Did you think of it?” I stopped before her.

  “No, not yet. What’s all the excitement, Nick? I know you’re interested in movies, but so am I, and I don’t get all—”

  ” ‘Interested’?” I had to laugh at the word. “Oh, boy. If you’d ever collected anything—You never did, did you?”

  “Just men.” She was smiling up at me, pleased as always at any excitement. “Why?”

  I couldn’t stand still. Hands jamming into my back pockets, I began walking up and down before her, fast. “Listen, if you’re a collector, you always have your—what?—your Holy Grail. A manuscript collector probably pictures himself in the back of some run-down, out-of-the-way secondhand bookstore. Finding a bundle of old papers at the back of a bottom shelf in a dark corner behind some books, where it’s been for years. He unties it and looks through old paper after useless old paper And then—down in the middle of the bundle—there it is. His hands start shaking because there under his eyes at last is the tiny handwriting he has so often studied in reproductions of the man’s signature. Just his signature, the only specimen of that handwriting ever before found. Kept under glass and permanent guard in the British Museum. Worth a million dollars, they think, if it were ever sold. Yet now”—I was listening to myself, enjoying my own eloquence, and Marion sat grinning—“now here is page after page of that tiny, rusty-inked handwriting. With notes in the margins! And then, then … far into this long handwritten script, he finds a speech. The first words have been crossed out, but he can read them. And they say”—I stood thinking—“they say ‘To exist or die is my dilemma,’ and there’s a pen stroke through them. And just above them in even smaller letters is written for the first time in the world, in the author’s own handwriting … ‘To be or not to be: that is—’ “

  She burst out laughing, and I grinned. “All right. Okay. I went too far, it’s ridiculous. Only not quite, Marion. Just barely not quite. The unknown Rembrandt hanging on the wall of a Goodwill Thrift Shop marked four and a half bucks has been found. So was a secondhand metal teapot marked seventy-five cents, and also marked on the bottom in lettering so small and tarnished that everyone else missed it … P. Revere, Silversmith. A little book was picked up out of a tencent sidewalk bin. Printed in Boston in 1827, according to the title page, which also read, Tamerlane and Other Poems, by Edgar A. Poe! The almost impossible dream is why you collect. And you want to know what mine is?”

  She nodded, smiling.

  “All the reels … all forty-two incredible reels of Erich von Stroheim’s lost masterpiece … Greed.”

  “He had them.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about!”

  “I do too! I remember that picture; everyone in San Francisco was talking about it! They filmed it here, and I watched some of it! Finally Von Stroheim finished it, and it was dozens and dozens of reels long; and they cut it way down. That was at … M-G-M!”

  I nodded, barely breathing the word—“Yes. They cut it to only ten reels. And even some of those are lost now. Marion”—I squatted down before her, looking up at her face, almost whispering—“are you sure you remember? That he had all forty-two reels?”

  “Of course; he talked about it. He’d had to trade three Paramount features to get them all. But he got them.”

  I got up, sat down beside her, and took her hand between mine, looking into her eyes. “Then, Marion,” I said gently, “do you understand now? Do you understand why you have got to remember his name?”

  She nodded. “Yes. I understand. How you feel.” She yanked her hand away and jumped up. “Why don’t you understand how I feel!” She stood glaring down at me, then her expression changed. “Listen, the theater, whatever it is, where they’re showing The Four Horsemen…”

  “The Olympic; it’s an old movie house.”

  “Do they have matinees?”

  “Today; Saturday? Yeah, every weekend.”

  “Take me to see it.” I started to say something, and she almost screamed at me. “Nickie, don’t argue! I’m sick of it! Just do it!”

  “I was going to say yes.”

  I gave Al a couple of bone-shaped dog biscuits, the kind he doesn’t much like to eat but loves to bury, and gave his tail a little yank. Then I drove Marion to the Olympic.

  It’s a fine old theater. I think it must date from the Twenties itself, and they run a complete old-time program, including organ accompaniment. They get good sharp prints, and the pictures are taken seriously. We bought popcorn, which they sell in old-fashioned candy-striped bags, and sat down. There was a pretty good house for a matinee, but we found two together at the side.

  The lights went down, the organ began, the old red-velvet curtains parted and rolled squeakily back, and a Pathe News came on, a rooster crowing soundlessly before the trademark. To appropriate organ music, we watched a forgotten horse race. We saw an equally forgotten senator from Oklahoma waving from the back of a train; a caption told us that he’d just come out foursquare and courageously against repeal of the Volstead Act. And we watched a chimp on a bicycle.

  A sing-along next, the words of “Rose Marie” sliding up from the bottom of the screen line by line, the organ playing the tune as a moving white ball touched each word or syllable as it was to be sung. Not many people joined in, but Marion did, loud and clear, and of course I had to join her, sliding down in my seat a little. But then eight or ten others came in, and some more after that. And after a half dozen lines of “Rose-ma Reeee, yiii luh vue … Rose-ma Reeee, mide ear,” it turned into fun, both of us belting out those fine poetic lyrics, and I was a little sorry when it ended.

  Title and credits for The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse came on, and we settled down to watch it. I was a little bored at first—I’d seen it twice before—but pretty soon it caught me, and I was enjoying it again. The Four Horsemen is the Valentino with the famous tango sequence, a big scene and a fine one. At tables surrounding the dance floor of an Argentinian cafe, dozens of spectators sit watching Rudolph Valentino, in gaucho costume as Julio, dance with Helena Domingues in a Spanish outfit, including a long-fringed shawl.

  Valentino holds her romantically close, bending her far back, leaning over her to gaze deep into her eyes, and you can watch it for laughs or you can enjoy it. I sat enjoying it; I get bored with the idiots at silent-film showings who demonstrate their deep sophistication to the rest of the audience with constant guffaws. The old acting conventions and the stories can be foolish, but look past them and you can often see a lot worth watching.

  This was worth watching. It’s a great dance scene—Valentino was a professional before he got into pictures—and the organist was really fine, as he generally is at the Olympic, his tango perfectly synched with their movements, as good as sound-on-film.

  It seems strange to me yet that I instantly recognized what began happening to me then, though it wasn’t really strange: more than once I’d sat listening to Jan hunting for words to describe it. This was almost a physical sensation as though—if you can possibly imagine a sensation like this—someone had sat down in the same seat with me, pushing steadily toward me yet somehow without crowding. So that sud
denly we were occupying the same space. All in one swift, smooth gliding motion I was taken over: literally “possessed.”

  My own self immobilized then—helpless and dwindling—I was somehow put aside, pushed off into a remote corner of my own being. I still knew what impulses were coming through my senses. For a few moments longer I knew what messages my eyes and ears were receiving—but remotely and from a great and increasing distance, like a child drifting rapidly to sleep. Within two seconds, three at most, I was very nearly completely gone, huddled up somewhere far inside myself, as Rudolph Valentino took over almost completely.

  At intervals then—sensed like a very sleepy child, or a child in fever— the hold over my being would relax for a moment or half moment. Almost instantly the grip would tighten down again with fresh strength, but in that instant I’d have a fragmentary glimpse of what he was seeing, hearing, and feeling, and the memory of those moments can shake me yet.

  Because what he was seeing, not only in but beyond the shifting blacks, whites and grays of that square old screen up on the dusty stage of the Olympic—and what he felt—were more than anyone else ever could. Sitting bolt upright, far forward in the seat, hands clenched to chest, chin lifted, he saw not only the visible flickering screen. Beyond its edges in his memory a narrow-eyed director in cloth cap and holding a short megaphone stood watching. The eye of a camera on its wooden tripod followed his movement, the man behind it standing bent-kneed, eye pressed hard against the viewfinder; he wore knickers, a white shirt and tie, and his right fist revolved in a rigidly steady motion as he cranked the film the Olympic audience sat watching now. Behind the camera, a knot of bystanders and studio technicians, two of them in overalls, one holding a hammer. And at a piano, playing the tango to which they danced, a man in a vest and, oddly, a wide-brimmed felt hat. Sitting motionless staring up at the screen, he saw all these things in memory. And above all, he felt still another memory: the skyrocketing surge of triumph at the beautiful knowledge, even as he danced, that this scene was going to be great.

  Sudden nothingness then. Pure nothingness; not even emptiness. Then another drugged, half-glimpsed moment: the magnificent tango up on the screen was ending. Cut to another scene, other characters, and in the instant of that cut, a rush of feeling. It was a wave of despair so bleak that I would not convey it in all its strength if I could. It was total: an unbearable horror of longing, the very worst of all—the hopeless yearning for what might have been.

  In the eyes of the face still lifted to the screen, tears began to well. They brimmed, dashed down my cheeks, and Marion’s hand reached out to lie on my arm. “I’m sorry, Rudy,” she whispered, “so very sorry. But he had to know. Thanks.”

  My head nodded, my hand reached over to lie on hers for an instant, then Valentino was gone, and I sat staring blindly up at the screen knowing what I didn’t want to know: the enormity of the loss when a life, talent and career are cut short. Human ego is staggeringly immense, and with the exception, of course, of national politicians, greater self-love hath no man than an actor. For Rudolph Valentino, only thirty-one years old, decades of world-wide fame and adulation stretched far, far ahead. Suddenly and senselessly all of it is lost. Cut off! Gone! It simply wasn’t bearable.

  “Now do you understand?” Marion was watching me, and I blinked, managed to nod, then swiped the back of my hand across my eyes.

  “Yes. Oh, Jesus. Let’s get out.” I was standing, pushing out to the aisle past six knees, two beards, and a pair of metal-rimmed glasses reflecting the screen, Marion following.

  Driving home, I had the top down, letting the foggy late-afternoon San Francisco air cool my face. I didn’t say anything till we sat stopped for a light a couple of blocks from home. “That poor son of a bitch,” I said softly then. “The poor cheated bastard. All he yearned for was his lost career. I don’t think he gave even one thought to The Woman in Black.”

  “Who?”

  “The veiled mystery woman all dressed in black who visited his grave every year. Some years there were four or five of them.”

  She wasn’t listening. The light changed, I started up, and she murmured, “Sooner or later everyone loses his life, and it’s not too bad, really. Once it happens most people don’t seem to mind very much. But for the few of us who had something tremendous cut short…” She just shook her head. “I really had to show you, Nickie. And even now you don’t really know. Because Rudy doesn’t feel the way I do; he’s never had the will to do what I’m doing! He’s accepted it.”

  I turned onto Divisadero, then slowed at the curb before my house, stopped, turned off the ignition, pulled the hand brake up tight, and Marion put a hand on my arm. “Help me, Nickie. You’ve got to.”

  “But how, Marion, how?”

  “Make Jan see that she ought to! Just for a year. Or six months. Even for just one more picture! It’s a better use of a little part of her life than she’s making of it: make her see that, Nickie. Please. Please.”

  I leaned forward and sat with my arms crossed on the big old steering wheel, staring through the windshield at the motionless street. It seemed true; it did seem true that Marion actually needed a small part of Jan’s life more than Jan did. But … I looked at Marion and shook my head. “It’s not right, Marion. To talk Jan or anyone into giving up a part of her life.”

  “Just talk to her! Just tell her what happened today. Tell her how you felt. And let her decide. You can talk to her, at least!”

  After a moment or so I nodded and shrugged. “Yeah, I can do that. But then it’s up to her.”

  “All right. You talk to her.” Marion leaned back to rest her head on the leather seat back, staring up at the wispy fog moving across the darkening sky. “By the way,” she said lazily, “I remembered that name.”

  My head jerked around and I stared at her, but she didn’t move. Still staring dreamily up at the sky, she said absently, “Hours ago, in fact. Up in the apartment. I looked it up in the L.A. phone book while you were in the bathroom.” She rolled her head to look sideways at me, face and eyes innocent. “It’s there, Nickie, darling. The man with the films is still alive. And I’m absolutely certain he’d still have them.” She looked up at the sky again. “So come on down to Hollywood with me and you and I can go see him. I’ll tell you his name”—she turned to smile at me again, sweetly, lovingly—“after we’re down there. After you’ve talked to Jan.”

  She closed her eyes, took a slow deep breath, then another, and her eyes opened. “Oh, God—again.” Jan sat looking around at where she was, and I spoke fast.

  “Listen, all we did was go to the movies!”

  She nodded and pressed a finger to her forehead. “I know; I always get this little pressure headache from movies in the daytime. Besides, that’s so ridiculous I know it’s true.” She frowned; her hand on her forehead had felt something. The hand moved up, touched, then gripped the blond wig. She yanked it off and sat staring at it. “What the hell is this?”

  “Come on upstairs”—I leaned over to open her door—“I’ve got a lot to tell you.”

  7

  We took Al for a walk, Jan changing clothes first; she didn’t like the black slacks and sweater outfit. Walking into the bedroom, she stopped short, looked around at the torn fragments of black cloth lying all over the floor, and surprised me. “Maybe she’s right,” she murmured, and changed to her orange dress, the brightest she owned.

  We walked Al to the schoolyard three blocks away; he likes that because there are usually kids who flatter him, play with him, and occasionally feed him candy. Not a soul there today, though, so Al made the best of it, counting the swings, teeter-totters, and the one lone tree. Sitting on the wide edge of the big kindergarten sandbox while Al roamed around, I talked to Jan.

  Very factually, I told her what Marion wanted and what had happened to me at the Olympic. She sat listening so intently she hardly moved. Then for a good half minute she was silent. “Would you do it?” she burst out suddenly, almost angrily. “Would you
give up part of your life for—say, Valentino?”

  “Well … I don’t know about Valentino. Maybe for Cary Grant.”

  “He doesn’t need it, for heaven sakes! Nick, I know how Marion feels; in the same way you found out, little glimpses now and then. I never dreamed anyone could want something so badly, and yet—you know something? I almost envy her sometimes: I wish I wanted something that much. You know what I mean?”

  “Yeah. When my father was a young guy just out of school, he wanted a job. You know why? So he could ‘make good.’ He got one here in San Francisco with a wholesale food distributor. Working long hours in a warehouse loading delivery trucks. Really hard work, and for damn little money. But it suited him. Because it gave him a chance to ‘show what he was made of.’ Well, I know better than that. Who believes such stuff today? Nobody, and we’re right; they were only exploiting him. But the thing is that I almost envy the way people once felt about things, falsely or not. Because I don’t have anything to take its place. And neither do you. So yeah, I know what you mean.”

  “Tell me what to do, Nick! And I’ll do it. If you say I ought to, I will! Maybe my dumb little life isn’t important, doesn’t matt—”

  “Hey, don’t say that!” I put an arm around her shoulders and squeezed her knee. “What do you mean, a ‘dumb little life’? It’s no such—”

  “Oh, yes, it is,” she said quietly. “It’s a little nothing life. I think I’ve really done something if I try a new recipe and you like it. Or decorate a room the way some magazine tells me. Or even read all the way through a hard book.”

  I talked and argued, trying to comfort her, and she nodded and pretended that she was. We called Al then, snapped on his leash, and started home. It was still day, but the late-afternoon fog had whitened the sky, and it was suddenly chilly.