Marion's Wall

by Jack Finney

  He consulted his clipboard. “Right.” He smiled back then, pleasantly enough. “Well. Mr. Hiller hopes to get to you, Miss March.”

  “Marsh, Marion Marsh.”

  “Marsh; sorry. He hopes to get to you; meanwhile…” He glanced around, then pointed to a big gray wooden box stenciled with the studio name. It stood beside the set a yard from where the white-carpeted floor began. “Would you sit there, please? At all times. Don’t move.” He smiled again and walked back to the man he’d been talking with; Mr. Hiller, I assumed.

  The overalled men got their track shifted. A pair of men in dark-green work shirts and pants pulled the camera slowly along it and just onto the set, then dragged it back again, testing the track and angle as the operator sat behind the rolling camera watching through his viewer. Then the operator nodded at Hiller, who yelled, “Okay, places everyone!” and the actors began handing their coffee cups to one of the green-uniformed men who walked around with a tray collecting them. They positioned themselves on the set in pairs and groups, a few sitting down, most of them standing. A woman with a tray of partly filled liquor glasses began moving among them; some took glasses and stood or sat holding them; some lighted cigarettes. A girl with what looked to be a tray of make-up walked around inspecting the actors, dabbing powder onto some of their faces.

  For three hours then, we sat on the gray box, the camera track being shifted once more, and the scene was filmed three times, with long, long waits in between; I never knew why. After two hours one of the men in green work uniform brought us two Cokes in paper cups. “From Mr. Hiller.”

  The actors, men and women, were young or youngish and very modishly dressed, their costumes extreme and exaggeratedly colorful. Marion sat eying them. And in each take they stood or sat, holding their drinks and cigarettes, talking, laughing. And that was all for maybe twenty seconds. Then one of the guests, a chunky bearded man talking to a girl, burst into very loud laughter, everyone turning to look at him, and the scene cut.

  At a little after four o’clock the scene ended for the third time, and the director called, “All right, that’ll do it.” He sighed, blinked a few times, took a clipboard from the other man, and looked at it. Then he looked over at us, handing back the clipboard, and came over.

  “We’ll do you now, Miss Marsh,” he said, stopping before us. “Sorry to be so late. You’ll have to be dressed and made up, and we’ll save time if I talk to you while they’re doing it.” Gesturing for her to come along, he walked around a corner of the set toward the wall of the building and a large trailer-like structure mounted on wooden sawhorses. There were half a dozen doors in its side, unpainted wooden steps leading up to a platform before them; dressing rooms, I guessed. A middle-aged woman joined them, and they all walked in through one of the doors and pulled it closed behind them.

  The young guy with the clipboard yelled “Quiet! Quiet, please!” and when the talk simmered down, he said, “All right, we’ve got a retake now. Of…” he looked at his clipboard—“eighty-one. Check scripts if you have to; this is the one with the girl in the robe.” Nothing happened. The chatter and coffee and Coke drinking continued, and the man with the clipboard dropped into a chair and sat staring absently at the floor.

  The director and Marion came out, Marion wearing make-up and a long pale-blue gown belted with a darker-blue tasseled cord. As they walked toward the set I saw that her feet were bare. “Places, everyone,” the director called, and again the actors positioned themselves. Their places were different now; same party but another scene. Again glasses were passed out, make-up retouched.

  The director walked Marion through the scene, the actors in position but silent, watching them. Murmuring instructions, he walked her onto the set and positioned her. An actor walked over to her, smiled, and said, “Blah, blah, blah, blah,” and Marion smiled and said something. She was walked to a second position, the young man going with her, and now two men turned from a painting they were discussing and walked toward Marion.

  They went through the motions of the entire scene, the director pointing finally to a place on the floor with his toe, and I watched Marion nod. He glanced at his watch, then called, “Okay, we’ll do it now, and we’re going to film.”

  The actors took their original positions, lights brightened, then music burst from somewhere, hard and raucous but not overly loud. Someone called, “Quiet on the set!”; lights brightened still more; another voice yelled, “Roll ‘em!” A man with a slate was on the set walking toward the camera, which had come down its track to the edge of the set. He held up the slate, and I read 81; Marion Marsh; Take One. He clapped the striped sticks, stepping quickly out of camera range, the party chatter began, and I sat fascinated, excited, and tense with anxiety for Marion.

  She stood just off the set, beside the director, and the people on the set talked, laughed, moved casually apart, came together in new groupings. The pair of men stood looking at the canvas on the wall, seeming to discuss it. Then the director nodded at Marion, and she walked onto the set and stopped in the place he had positioned her first. She stood looking the party over with a faintly amused, faintly bored air—and I felt a sudden little thrill of anticipation. She seemed so at ease and in charge; in a way I didn’t and never will comprehend, she had made me understand from the manner in which she walked, looked, and now stood that a person of importance to it had arrived at this party.

  The actor who had come over to her in the brief rehearsal to say, “Blah, blah, blah,” came over again now and said something that was inaudible over the music. And when Marion replied, and smiled, I saw his chin rise a little, and his smile of response wasn’t acted but genuinely interested. The two men at the painting stood looking at it, one shrugged and said something, and the other laughed, turning from the wall. He noticed Marion then, and he and the other man walked over to her. She saw them, smiled with pleasure, holding out a hand in welcome, and the one nearer took a little skip step to hurry to her and take it, greeting her by name, which was Essie. The four of them stood talking, smiling, and then the room—by ones, pairs, and by groups—became aware almost at the same time that Essie was here. People would turn, see her, stare silently, then begin talking eagerly to whoever was nearest. So that there was a ragged moment of growing silence, reaching almost silence, the room staring, then an excited rise in the conversational hum. And although conversations resumed, people sneaked little glances at Essie, not really listening to one another. But what was also happening was—that it had all become real.

  I don’t know that anyone has ever actually explained it but there are an occasional few people born into the world who are different from the rest of us. They are able to turn on something that is as real, invisible, and as actual in effect as electricity. And Marion was doing it. Standing in the center of that party, she held it in her hand. They were intensely aware, not just acting it. They were interested and were held by Marion’s each word, gesture, and smile. The party was real now—I forgot it was being filmed—because a magnetism was at work. There must have been a moment like this, I realized, when Garbo first stood before a turning camera.

  Marion turned from the people she was talking to and walked on: to her final position, the place on the floor the director had touched with his shoe. For a moment she stood lazily smiling, aware of but ignoring the attention she was drawing. Then as though she hardly realized she was doing it, her shoulders, arms and hips moved slightly, idly, and a little insolently in a suggestion—she couldn’t possibly have learned this, she’d intuited it—of modern dancing. She was about to dance; the room knew it now, all conversation dying, everyone staring in a fascination that was real. For an instant Marion stood motionless, hesitating, and the director—calling “Cut! Cut!”—was walking onto the set toward her.

  But he was smiling. “Good,” he called as he walked toward her. “Jesus Christ, it was great! Listen,” he said, voice astonished as he stopped before her, “you’ve got something, you know that? It’s”—he shrugged—“I
don’t know; presence, I guess. Can you do it again?” He was suddenly worried that she couldn’t—“Listen, can you do it again? Exactly the same! Don’t change a thing. Except…” He smiled, holding up a hand to show it was no rebuke, anxious not to upset her in any least way. “Except no hesitation,” he said gently. “Okay? Essie wouldn’t hesitate. Can you do that?” Marion nodded. “Okay!” he called, but the man with the clipboard was tapping his upper arm for attention. They murmured together for a couple of moments, the director glancing at his watch. “Okay, let it be overtime,” he said. “We got to have this. Okay, places everyone!”

  Again the make-up girl made her rounds, the camera operator did something to his lens, the man with the slate appeared, clapped his boards—and it happened once more. Not quite the same, though. This time—I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but this time it was better. Better because now everyone on the set knew from the first moment that something important was happening today, and the air was alive with the excitement of that. They did it again, and the scene was a marvel. Who was this, the scene said as Marion walked forward to her final position, who was this incredible Essie, and what was she going to do?

  Moving away from the three men, walking to the last position, she reached it, and stood there again, lazily, insolently, serene and proud. Again she moved her body to the music, just a little, but it caught the breath in my throat with the strength of its sensual promise. And without any hesitation this time, her hand moved to the dark-blue cord around her waist and pulled the single knot loose. Stepping forward as she did so, and already dancing with her shoulders, she shrugged loose from her gown, letting it fall to the floor behind her, and stood smiling at the party, completely naked. On the curve of her stomach a heart had been drawn in red lipstick; a blue-inked feathered arrow pierced the heart as though arrow tip and half the shaft had entered at her navel. And the heart and arrow turned her nudity into something salacious.

  She stood smiling at the audience in the instant before her dance began; and then she frowned. She looked down at herself, then up again but staring past her audience now. And then this girl of 1926—wild though she could be but a girl of 1926 all the same—said, “No.” She said it loudly enough but to herself. “Why, no, goddamn it. This isn’t the movies.” She looked around at them, her glance sweeping across their faces. “You bastards,” she said. Then she turned around to look back at the director and, her voice rich with contempt, she said, “You bastard: this isn’t the MOVIES at all!”

  He came to. “Cut! Cut!”—he was striding toward her. “Listen, you! If you want to make this goddamned test, if you ever want to even work again—” He stopped and, like the others, stood watching.

  Marion had stooped and picked up her robe, and—not bothering to put it on, not troubling to hide her nakedness—she flung it contemptuously over one shoulder, and head erect, walked off the set to the dressing room.

  They were suddenly busy, everyone finding something to do, ignoring me as though I were invisible. The director especially was never still: walking angrily about; ordering the set irrevocably struck as fast as it could be got to; releasing his actors; ordering lights off and removed, equipment taken away. And when Marion came out dressed, everyone on and around the set was pointedly unnoticing as she walked down the stairs toward the set and me, her head up, ready to look at anyone. I walked forward to meet her, took her arm under mine, and as we walked across a corner of the set toward the distant exit, I had my head up, too, in challenge, trying to find someone who would meet our eyes. And some did. Some of the actors and some of the technical people met our eyes and—a little mockingly maybe, but still—they smiled in approval. But off in the gloom on the long walk toward the big metal doors and the studio street outside them, Marion cried a little, then she stopped.

  I thought she’d leave. And standing outside the studio on the street flagging a cab parked at the hack stand a dozen yards down, I said, “Jan?”

  “No, it’s Marion, Nickie. I’m a selfish bitch, and I know it. But not all the time, not quite all of it.” The cab stopped before us; she leaned toward the open front window to speak to the driver and said, “1101 Keever Street.”

  She wouldn’t talk in the cab. When I tried, she just reached over to put her hand on mine for a moment, quieting me and letting me know she understood that I’d comfort her if I could; then she turned away to stare out her window.

  We got out at the Standard station a quarter block from the great wrought-iron entrance gates. There was a phone booth at the edge of the lot, and Marion called the number listed beside Bollinghurst, Theo N. “You reach him?” I said when she folded the door back.

  “No, but I sent word—that Marion Marsh was waiting. Outside the gates.”

  Angling across the street toward the wall and high iron fence stretching off into the distance of both directions, she said, “I’ve been here before. When this was new. I saw it from a sightseeing bus.” We walked along beside the wall, then stopped at the great ornate gates across the driveway, and Marion pointed at the oval plaques in their centers, one bearing a V, the other a B. “They were polished then, and shined like gold.” In the daylight I could see that the plaques weren’t iron like the gates themselves; they were bronze, green with verdigris. Set into the keystone of the arch that curved over the gate tops, a bronze scroll surmounted by a knight’s plumed helmet read GRAUSTARK. But it, too, had turned green, and I saw that paint was flaking from some of the pickets, rusting patches showing through. On the stone wall just to our right The Word had been crudely spray-painted long ago, the paint fading.

  We heard a sound, a rattle, and a man on a bicycle was riding bumpily down the driveway toward us: youngish, bald, and wearing a kind of butler’s uniform, though without a coat—black pants with a narrow white stripe down the sides, black-and-white horizontally striped vest, wing collar, bow tie. Swinging off the ancient loose-fendered bike, he rode the last few yards standing on a pedal. He nodded pleasantly, and with a big brass key unlocked a small gate within one of the large ones, its design blending with the whole so that I hadn’t realized it was there. He gestured us in, we stepped through, and he locked it. Then, walking his bike, he led us back up the long curved drive toward the house.

  “The lawns were marvelous when I saw them,” Marion murmured. “The bus stopped at the gates so we could all look in, the sprinklers were on, and every one made a rainbow, and the grass was just perfect.” It wasn’t now. The lawns had been freshly mowed, but here up close they were disfigured by great islands of cropped-off dandelion tops and crab grass. “The gravel was whitewashed and freshly raked.” But if the thin scatter of stones left on the driveway now had ever known whitewash, it was long gone, and not enough was left to rake. Mostly the driveway was two dirt ruts through a weedy stubble half-covered with browning leaves.

  Yet the grounds weren’t uncared for; the banks and clumps of shrubbery and small trees we were passing needed trimming, clipping back, but they weren’t running wild. The place was looked after but in a slovenly way, as though, I thought, no one any longer checked to see how well it was done.

  The driveway gradually curving, the house growing larger and larger as we walked toward it, expanding in both directions, I saw that it was truly enormous: a great two-story, flat-roofed mansion in, I suppose, a Spanish style, of rough-finished beige-colored stucco. Wide shallow stone steps led from driveway to stone-flagged portico and the massive double entrance doors of carved wood.

  Up the two or three stairs, across the portico, and into the entrance hall, large though not enormous, paved in great black and white stone blocks, checkerboard style. A two-story ceiling, and hanging from it by a velvet-covered chain, the largest crystal chandelier I’ve ever seen in a private house. And there we waited for twenty-five minutes, sitting across from each other in velvet-upholstered straight-backed chairs.

  I sat facing two sliding oak doors closed across a great arched entrance flanked by standing suits of armor each holding a ten
-foot lance. To my right, an angled flight of carpeted stairs and the closed arch-top door to what I supposed was a hallway. Marion sat facing me and an eight-foot window just behind my chair, which overlooked a sweep of lawn and a great empty fountain, the bottom of its bowl black with sodden leaves.

  We waited, here in the luxury and grandeur, both impressive and pathetic, of another time and taste, occasionally hearing distant household sounds from behind far-off closed doors. Then the corner of my eye caught a movement, I turned my head, and there—up at an angle of the stairway, slowly rounding it to face us—there he came, wearing what I took to be an old-style tuxedo with a stiff wing collar.

  No mistake, this was an old, old man. And no mistake, this was Ted Bollinghurst. If he was approaching forty in 1926, he was well into his nineties now, and that is what I’d have guessed him to be—wrinkles upon wrinkles and not to be mistaken for the seventies, but into the wispy fragility of the nineties or more. We stood up to face him; he was smiling down at us, but peering, too, not quite certain he saw us, and before we spoke I had time to study him.

  It was the nose that said Ted Bollinghurst: Marion had described it as snubbed, but I wasn’t prepared for a nose so turned up, the nostrils long black holes, that it was very nearly a deformity. He wasn’t bald and he wasn’t not bald; on an unusually high domed skull grew not much hair but so evenly thinned that there were no actual bald spots. It was strangely dark, like a Presidential candidate’s, and he wore it carefully parted in the center as, no doubt, he always had. But now it hung limp and lifeless straight down on each side to the tops of his big crinkled old ears.

  He was closer now, halfway down the stairs, and I saw that of course his hair was dyed, and that there was a faint touch of red just under each prominent cheekbone, and I knew why we’d waited twenty-five minutes. He’d been carefully preparing himself, making up his ancient face a little, and dressing in—not a tuxedo, I saw, but a “smoking jacket” of deep maroon with silk-faced roll lapels. To meet Marion Marsh this old, old man had wanted to look his best.