by Jack Finney
Slowly, slowly, advancing always with the right foot, one careful step at a time like a child, hand never leaving the banister, he saw us for sure now, the smile suddenly turned real, and in that instant I liked him, liked even his strange face. “Marion?”
“Yes. Yes, it is … Ted.” She’d slowly stood up, staring, openmouthed. But now as she spoke she smiled at him, beautifully, and walked quickly toward the foot of the stairs. He moved down onto the final step and reached a hand out to her, still smiling but near to crying, too, I thought.
“Marion, Marion, Marion,” he said. He’d once been taller, I supposed, but now, even standing on the bottom step, he was no taller than she. “How good to see you; oh, my dear, how good, how good.” He had released the banister and was holding her hand in both of his, peering into her face; and Marion stood, smiling still but blinking, close to crying, too.
She replied, genuinely pleased and touched to see him, then she introduced me to him, and the old man welcomed me. His voice was quite firm, surprisingly deep, and if he spoke a little slower than a younger person, it wasn’t much. He seemed ancient but vigorous, seemed still in complete easy possession of his mind and faculties. But I realized it wasn’t true; if not actually senile he was into the kind of uncritical vagueness that precedes it. Because it seemed not to occur to him that the Marion Marsh he had known would be a woman of eighty now. Obviously Marion was simply Marion to him, and that was a young woman, just as in memory she always had been. Yet he remembered this: “You’ve changed the color of your hair, haven’t you?” He shook a finger like a dry stick at her, smiling, and stepped down to begin moving slowly across the big checkerboard toward the sliding doors. “It was blond! And bobbed,” he said, winking at me, shaking his head, as though to say, These women! “But you haven’t changed otherwise. Not a bit; I’d have known that smile anywhere.”
“And neither have you, really. I recog”
“You recognized this nose!” He chuckled phlegmily, then suppressed a cough. “That doesn’t change!”
“I think it’s cute!”
“But the rest of me has changed, I’ll tell the world; oh, boy, oh, boy, oh, boy.” He stopped at the big doors, setting his fingertips into the grip plates. “You haven’t been here before, have you?” he said uncertainly. “Were you at any of the parties we used to have?”
“No.”
“And you, sir? Nick. Is this your first visit to Graustark?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, good. People thought I was bugs to buy it, but I like to show it off.” He began sliding the door open, I stepped forward to help, then he gestured us past him into a room that quite literally wasn’t much smaller than the high-school gym I’d played intramural basketball in.
Like the hall, it was two stories high; the drapes drawn, every lamp softly lighted. It was more like a fashionable hotel lobby of the Twenties than a living room; obviously this had been meant for enormous parties. Standing just inside the doorway we were staring off into a room of as many as twelve or fourteen big chesterfields and I just don’t know how many dozens of chairs, all fatly upholstered in a bygone style, and still it was spacious and uncrowded. There were deep-pile rugs, three grand pianosthreeeach draped with a fringed Spanish shawl, their tops crowded with framed photographs. And tables, lamps, huge vases, ornaments, statuary, paintings. There were standing lamps five or six feet high, the kind my mother called “bridge lamps,” one entirely of wicker, even the shade, the light shining through it, and most of them were draped with still more fringed, embroidered shawls. Halfway up the wall a railed balcony of closed doors ran around the room on all sides but the one we’d come in at. More Spanish shawls hung draped on these railings, one embroidered with a cactus, the others with roses.
I saw all this, an impression only, in a slow sweeping glance, then my head stopped and I stood staring at the staircase at the opposite end of this great room, realizing in the moment I saw it that this entire vast space was really a setting for it.
From the railed balcony, stairs led down along the wall opposite us, beautifully railed and banistered. Then, at no more than a yard above the floor level of the room, they ended in a landing of white marble as large as a small stage. Only three shallow but immensely wide steps from it to the floor, each a little wider than the last, the final step, its ends gracefully rounded, a good eighteen feet long. The landing was a stage, planned for the dramatic entrance from above, and the final pause at the center of attention, before stepping down into and joining the room.
But then I understood that even this landing was only the setting within a setting for something else. Hung on the wall of the landing, to face the length of the entire room and the great entranceway we stood in, was a full-lengthand at the very least, life-sizedportrait of a woman so magnificent that a little physical chill moved up my spine as I stared at it. I knew the face: this was Vilma Banky, standing in a knee-length, loosely hanging evening gown of the Twenties, a Spanish shawl draped over one shoulder. Her head was turned, chin slightly lifted, to show her marvelous profile. In the center of her forehead a curl spiraled round and round to a final point, but if that sounds funny it wasn’t: this was a beautiful, beautiful woman and nothing could make her absurd. Concealed lighting illuminated the painting without shine and from all sides, its gilt frame ten feet high if it was an inch. And it was hung just exactly high enough so that no matter who, short of King Kong, came down the stairs to pause on the stagelike landing before it, she’d be upstaged by Vilma Banky.
Ted stood waiting till we’d looked our fill, as no doubt he’d always done the first times he took people into this room. Finally we turned to him, murmuring our compliments, and he nodded, smiling, and accepted them on her behalf. “Yes. Thank you. This is Vilma’s room. It’s her house still, very nearly as she left it. I had a staff of researchers working full time for something over a year, while the house itself was being renovated. They consulted old newspaper and magazine photographs and accounts. Interviewed or corresponded with people who’d been here often. Of whom there were a great many. And many of whom loaned us photographs they’d taken. They consulted diaries and letters of Vilma’s time here. Read her household accounts. And fortunately we had the auction catalog, illustrated and with full descriptions of virtually everything this house once contained. So we were able to track down many of the things that had been sold. Including the painting. Especially the painting. In most instances we were able to buy them back. Much of the furniture has been rebuilt, restored to just as it was, even to the reweaving of certain materials. Some of the furniture is duplicated. So that nowwell, she’d be at home here, if only she could walk back into it. But there are a few things I’ve added.”
He walked slowly forward to what I’d thought was a delicate, thin-legged, oval-topped table, but as we moved closer I saw first that the top was glass, and then that a small shaded light inside it illuminated the interior of what wasn’t a table but a shallow display case lined with pale-blue watered silk. We stopped before it, looking down into itand I didn’t understand what I was seeing, lying there in the center of the case just above a printed card.
It was a shapeless lump about the size of a dime, its surface wrinkled and shriveled, grayish pink in color. It lay squashed down onto the center of a raggedly cut, roughly circular piece of heavily varnished canvas about the size of a man’s hand. Before I could read the card, Ted explained, voice lowering respectfully. “The wad of gum Spencer Tracy stuck on the back of Clark Gable’s plane in Test Pilot.” Marion’s head lifted slightly to look across his bent back at me, frowning, and I read her expression: Who is Spencer Tracy? Who’s Clark Gable?
“And this…” Ted Bollinghurst was turning to move on, and now I saw that half the tables in the room weren’t tables but duplicate glass-topped display cases. We stopped at the next, lined with identical watered silk except that it was canary yellow, and bent over it. “Ramon Navarro’s whip. From Ben Hur.” And now Marion, no
se almost touching the glass, was smiling: satisfied; pleased; impressed.
We walked slowly around a piano, and among the dozens of photographs on its closed top, all inscribed to Ted and often misspelling his name, I recognized Clive Brook, Leatrice Joy, Aileen Pringle, Larry Semon, Rod La Rocque, Clara Kimball Young. Marion and I looked up from them at the same time, our eyes meeting, and we smiled in recognition of what seemed like a mutual bond. It wasn’t, though; we’d each seen all these people in the same pictures, every last movement on the screen identical for each of us, but of course we’d each seen something different. For her they’d been young and beautiful people, still very much alive, the pictures new and with more to come. But for me they’d been resurrections, the miracle that movies finally made possible, of long-gone mythical people. But we smiled and nodded, each with his own pleasure, and walked on with Ted to another case like the others except that this was lined in pink.
All these watered-silk linings matched in weave and texture, differing only in color, and all were applied at the sides in tucks and flounces, but stretched tautly over smooth padding on the bottoms. On the softly lighted pink of this case layWhat was this? Hair: it was hair, jet-black, and I saw that although it lay crumpled, it retained a shape. If there’d been a way to apply it, this might have been a false beard; the Vandyke chin beard, sideburns, and joining mustache were clearly discernible. The printed card read RUDOLPH VALENTINO’S BEARD, SHAVED OFF IN THE SUMMER OF 1924 AT THE REQUEST OF THE NATIONAL BARBERS ASSOCIATION. Marion was nodding. “Yes, I remember: it was in all the papers.”
“Charley Morrison bought it. Right from the barber; it’s the real thing, all right. For only ten smackers, the lucky stiff. He’d never sell it to me, but when he died, in 1950,1 bought it from his widow; made the deal at his funeral. Had to; I’d heard The Woman in Black was after it.”
On the pale apple-green lining of the next case lay a typed sheet much amended in the margins and between the lines in several handwritings. “A real prize,” Ted said. “This is the fourth and next-to-final draft of Shirley Temple’s annual letter to Santa Claus, published nationwide every December. This was written when she was fourteen, one of the last; some of the marginal corrections are in L. B. Mayer’s own handwriting.” We stared in awe, bent over the delicate little cabinet, and I read the sheet down to “and plese, plese dear Sandy, don’t ferget all the poor childern…” Then I stopped.
We saw Lon Chaney’s hump from The Hunchback of Notre Dame, a marvelous thing of plaster of Paris attached to a leather harness that I wouldn’t have minded owning myself and wearing around the house now and then.
We moved on to a blackened, shriveled something I thought was a meteorite lying on white silk, and I had to give Ted credit: he scrupulously explained that he wasn’t entirely certain of the authenticity of this. He thought, he had reason to believe, that this was probably the actual grapefruit half James Cagney had shoved into Mae Clarke’s face in The Public Enemy. He’d paid twenty dollars for it to a stagehand on the set who swore it was the real thing, but Ted wasn’t quite convinced that this particular rind hadn’t actually been one used only in rehearsal.
We saw, lying on silk the color of orange sherbet, three shattered ornaments shot off a Christmas tree with a popgun by William Powell in The Thin Man. And on deep-blue silkthis was authentic, because Ted had stolen it himself from Marlene Dietrich’s dressing room right after the last day’s shooting on Moroccoa bottle of leg depilatory.
On silver cloth: four crescent-shaped objects of gold. Bent over the case, I saw that their inner edges were sharp, worn to ragged paper thinness, and looking like miniature scimitars punctured with small holes. RUBY KEEPER’S TAPS: WORN OUT ON THE SET OF “42ND STREET.”
“Gold?” I said to Ted.
“I had them plated.”
We saw the artificial butterfly Lew Ayres had been reaching for from his trench just as he was shot in the final scene of All Quiet on the Western Front; and a half dollar tossed by George Raft. And in one of the last cases, a small object about an inch and a half long, lying on scarlet silk. In shape it was a vague, elongated figure eight wrapped in cloudy cellophane, cinched at the middle by a paper band. There was no explanatory card, and Ted glanced uneasily at Marion, then leaned toward me. “From an Andy Hardy picture,” he whispered. “That’s the actual contraceptive Lewis Stone found in the watch pocket of Andy’s pants the morning after the junior prom. It didn’t actually show in the film, of course. Judge Hardy held it cupped in his hand when he showed it to Andy, and he didn’t say what it was; but you knew. The Judge handed me that himself.”
We’d reached the staircase landing and stopped for a moment; the wall beside it was bookshelves from floor to eye level, filled with leather-bound volumes stamped in gold on the spines. Each volume was a year’s copies of Photoplay, Silver Screen, or one of the other old movie mags, each bound in its own distinctive color. The entire lower shelf was packed with leather-bound scripts, beginning with The Great Train Robbery.
Looking at them, I was remembering an article I’d read by a psychiatrist who said it was probably lucky that not many obsessed people were rich. He gave an example of one who was: a man ridden by fear of germs. He’d begun like people we’ve all encountered, who open doors with their hand in a coat pocket to avoid germs on the knobs. But he was rich, and able to let his obsession grow unchecked. Presently he was living in a Paris hotel suite into which no one else but a single servant was ever admitted. Next he rented and kept vacant the rooms on each side, then the rooms above and below him. Isolated in space, finally, he still had to eat. And eventually reduced himself to subsisting only on overcooked meat; enormous roasts brought to the door by the hotel cook, left there for him to take in when the cook had gone. And then in the room, with his own knife, he would cut out a cube from deep in the very heart of the roast, a chunk of cooked meat that no other hand could possibly have touched before.
Ted Bollinghurst, too, was simply a man with a common obsessiona movie fan, an old-film buff, of which there are a lot of usbut with the money to take it just as far as he wanted to go. And I knew that here but for a few million dollars or so stood I. At the foot of Vilma Banky’s staircase, ready and anxious to see where they led.
I’d dreaded the question for fear of the answer, and when Marion asked it now, flicking a glance at me, I literally held my breath. “Ted, you used to collect prints of films you liked,” she began.
“Yes. Stole them, you mean.” He chuckled, and had to cough.
“Do you … still have them?” I wanted to put my hands to my ears, but stood openmouthed, straining for the answer.
“Well, of course. Would you like to see them?”
I exhaled so audibly that he glanced at me, and when Marion answered yes, all I could do was nod.
We turned to the stairs, and Ted led the way up them slowly but very steadily, right foot always advancing first, dry old hand sliding up the banister rail. He said, “D. W. Griffith climbed these stairs; we know that for sure. So did Mary Pickford, Dolores del Rio, Dustin Farnum, Milton Sills, Ernst Lubitsch, Alma Rubens, and many, many more. Several, in fact, have fallen down them. And I have nine authenticated instances of stars, of both sexesseveral of whom would astound youwho were chased up them.”
We turned left at the top to walk along the railed balcony looking down into the immense room below us, its dainty display cases pastel ovals of color from here. On our right, closed doors each labeled with a small brass plate: TURKISH BATH … BILLIARD ROOM … RADIO LOUNGE … two doors side by side, one labeled SHEIKS, the other SHEBAS … and at the end, labeled SODA FOUNTAIN, a door that Ted pushed open invitingly. The room was just that: there was a marble soda fountain with chromed spigots and a back mirror; round tables with chairs whose legs and back were made of heavy twisted wire. “Like a soda? It’s all equipped; a couple dozen flavors.” We said no thanks, and he nodded, letting the door swing shut, walking on. “Sometimes I go in there and fix one m
yself.”
We’d reached the end of the balcony, turning right to face a pair of leather-padded swinging doors, and I pushed through, holding one open for Marion and Ted. We were in a corridor, and as I turned and we began our slow walk along it, I had my first look at it.
It was very wide, surely a dozen feet or more. And so long you could actually see the diminishing perspective, the four lines of its floor and ceiling angles slanting in to the corners of the distant square that was the corridor’s far endso distant I couldn’t make out what was down there; something, I couldn’t quite see what. The ceiling was high, and the floor white marble, white because the wall at our left was an outside wall into which four high, arch-topped windows of stained glass were set at long intervals, the first of them a dozen yards ahead. Natural light from outside these windows, augmented now by spotlightsit must have been dusk outilluminated the corridor, patterning the white marble floor and the walls with colored light, a fine effect.
As we said so to Ted, who looked pleased, we were slowly approaching a door on the inside wall at our right. Fastened to the wall beside the door at eye level hung a shaped wooden plaque of what I took to be polished walnut. Carved into its surface, the letters picked out in gilt, was a listing of some kind. As we moved slowly nearer, I was able to read it: ALLA NAZIMOVA, ANTONIO MORENO, HOPE HAMPTON, EDMUND LOWE, DOLORES COSTELLO, RICHARD DIX, TOM MIX. “All of them stayed in that bedroom at one time or another,” Ted said. “Some at the same time.” I heard Marion inhale sharply and turned.
We were approaching the first of the great stained-glass windows, and I hurried several steps closer, then stopped to stare. So brilliantly illuminated that it seemed to hang in space, it was made of hundreds of pieces of glass, some as small as a thumbnail, some big as a man’s arm. Marvelously cut and leaded together, they formed a vertical scene of every conceivable color and shade, but predominately green in a dozen or more shades and gradations of shades, and each piece was afire with light.
