Indeed it was for his most famous painting that Mr. Grahame had received the gun when he himself was quite young. This had come in the painter’s one true moment of glory, at the age of thirteen. He had completed an epic titled Convention Hall During the Reign of Terror to accompany a film premiere in the early twenties. The painting was quite large, amply filling the wall of the study now, and it brought the prodigy real fame. The young painter was even brought to Paris to see his painting hanging in the Opéra where the film was to debut. When, inexplicably, the movie was withdrawn the day of its scheduled opening, an opportunity was quashed for the painter as well: the boy took his painting back to the village where he grew up, and later to Canada when he left France. He changed his name to the decidedly English Franklin Grahame, and married an English girl fifteen years younger and lived among the English half of segregated Montreal, all of this reflecting some sense of having been betrayed. Nevertheless he kept the flintlock which had been presented to him for the painting, and which had been used in the film itself, and which as far as anyone knew had remained unloaded and unfired since revolutionary days. Now in the smell of gunpowder and continuing echo of the gun’s resurrection, to Fletcher Grahame the people in his father’s Convention Hall During the Reign of Terror looked as though they were holding back not only the deluge of blood but this same explosion, even Danton and Robespierre and Marat themselves—as though the entire assembly was driven to frenzy by a sound they couldn’t shake from their heads.
Reasonably, Fletcher didn’t blame his father for the gun’s death throes; inexplicably, he blamed himself. His affection for his father was so overpowering that the boy could only hold himself accountable for his father’s grief, which he assumed, because he was so young, had everything to do with the accident. Later, as he grew older, neither his dedication nor his guilt were shaken by potentially disillusioning realizations about his father’s so-called genius. In fact, Franklin Grahame was not a good painter at all, and became an increasingly disturbed one after the incident with the gun; neither his style nor technique nor vision progressed beyond his one big masterpiece done at the age of thirteen, and finally the study became filled with portraits of children peering in the window—the Saint Lawrence behind them—screaming through the glass at the flash of a weapon stupidly detonated. Later, the painter began rendering pictures of little bodies actually shot down, some falling through the glass, some lying just beyond the walkway. After Mr. Grahame died, Fletcher’s mother continued to maintain her husband was a great and overlooked painter and turned the house into a museum of his work, explaining the paintings’ power and the details of the artist’s life to her guests, habitually subtracting ten years from Grahame’s age—this to convince people he died a young tragic prodigy rather than a middle-aged failure. Still later, when Fletcher corrected his mother on the age, she denied it vehemently, though the arithmetic would have seemed irrefutable. But by this time the young Grahame had already known the truth awhile, ever since he bought through a retailer a one-reel silent movie with no credits titled The French Revolution and saw his father’s masterpiece in celluloid. Then it became clear that this was the same movie which Convention Hall was painted for, and that his father was not even really a talented young prodigy but rather a talented young copier, who expertly derived this epic from a single frame of film.
One night when he was fifteen he took the film to the Montreal Cinema Archives to show its curators. These men found the picture a source of some amusement and fascination; the head of the archives, a man old enough to have seen The Great Train Robbery as a youth, was impressed with Fletcher’s interest and promised him he would pursue it. He also offered to let Fletcher keep the film in the archives vault; they signed an agreement to this effect, establishing that the film belonged to the boy. I would think the film belongs to whomever made it, said Fletcher, and the archives director liked that. In the meantime he caught the boy’s enthusiasm, which was difficult to analyze; Fletcher hadn’t told anybody about his father’s painting, and at this point Fletcher wasn’t sure why the film was so important to him: he knew its passion and recklessness captivated him, though he was not a passionate person. The archives director, whose name was Aggie, called the boy about a week after the film’s showing and invited him to come over and talk about it.
Dr. Aggie was genuinely excited when Fletcher showed up that night. He led Fletcher into his study and they talked awhile about mundane things like Fletcher’s schooling and Fletcher’s interest in movies. Fletcher explained to the old man that he’d begun collecting pictures as a hobby, his father was a painter and the notion of paintings that moved impressed him, and he’d send away for a number of films through advertisements and journals. This particular one he ordered with several others through an ad, almost as an afterthought. It had become his favorite, like history peering back at him through a white window. “Well, I have made an exciting discovery,” said Aggie, pulling a reference book from his shelf; he reseated himself in a reclining chair. “I have reason to think this is a lost reel from The Death of Marat. Do you know that picture?”
“No,” said Fletcher.
“It was made by a young director named Adolphe Sarre a few years after World War I, then was never shown to the public. Supposedly this Sarre, who wasn’t all that much older than you when he began the film, continued working on it for decades. Those who have seen it,” said Aggie, “say it’s the greatest film to come out of the French cinema in the silent era. Some say it’s the greatest silent picture ever, presaging other film makers by years. Thirty years ago this film was a real legend.”
“Why didn’t he finish it?” said the boy.
“Some say he did finish it. But he insisted it was never done, so he went on with it, long after the actors and most of the crew were gone. The actor who played Marat succumbed in a mental institution a couple of years after the film was to have premiered in Paris. The woman who played Charlotte Corday is believed to have died after World War II, also in Paris. The only one who stayed with him was his Danish cameraman, by the name of Rode.”
“So what happened to the movie?”
Aggie shrugged. “Hollywood bought him out. He didn’t know that of course; he thought they were going to help him finish his masterpiece. They brought him over in the late thirties, with his son Jacques, and Erik Rode. But they really had no interest in finishing the picture, they only wanted to invest enough money in it so they could take it away from him.”
“But why?”
“It terrified them,” said Aggie. “The man was expanding the screen and dividing it up, shuffling it like a deck of cards. Hollywood found it trying enough adjusting to sound, they didn’t want to go through all that again. Ironically, sound was a concept Sarre never went for. So fifteen or twenty years later when Sarre’s own son was made head of the studio, Jacques himself sabotaged the picture. Tried to burn it.”
“Is Sarre still alive?”
“I have no idea. The last anyone heard, apparently, he was still living in Los Angeles.” Aggie put the book aside.
“And the movie?” said the boy.
There was no ready answer to that one either. By the time Fletcher was a student at the university, he had read everything written on the subject of Adolphe Sarre and La Mort de Marat, all of it from before the second world war. Fletcher’s dreams became filled with scenes of Marat, each freezing at a given moment, celluloid transforming to tapestry, blacks and whites taking on the muted tones of oils. At that same moment each character looked the same, faces constructed in concentric designs; and Fletcher Grahame was always awakened by the sound. He would sit up in bed and wait in the night, his hands on his head, waiting for it all to stop.
It was not that Fletcher visualized his father every time he thought of Adolphe Sarre, because he had seen pictures of Sarre as a younger man; it was that, years later, every time Fletcher thought of his father he visualized Adolphe. He saw Adolphe Sarre in his mind, painting those awful paintings in
the studio, only they were wonderful paintings once Sarre finished with them. Convention Hall During the Reign of Terror looked like it did in the movie—more real and lifelike than anything Franklin Grahame actually painted. This was because Sarre was more than an expert copier: he was a genius, an extraordinary prodigy; he was the things the older Grahame had professed to be, and which Fletcher’s mother continued insisting he had been.
Sometimes Fletcher even saw Adolphe Sarre firing the flintlock behind his own head; sometimes it was Sarre’s face that appeared so anguished to him, and remorseful.
By the time he finished his university work he had collected well over half the picture. It was about this time Fletcher began trying to locate Sarre in Los Angeles. Bit by bit he gleaned all the essential footage of the movie except for the film’s editing. He still hadn’t found a scene with the flintlock. During the following years he traveled all over the world in search of the ending, with the financial support of the archives who, though Aggie was now dead, persisted in the old curator’s commitment to helping Fletcher recover what was considered a lost masterpiece.
When his efforts to track down Sarre failed, when he was unable to ascertain that Sarre was even still alive, Fletcher tried Sarre’s son, Jacques, who was producing films in Los Angeles under the name of Jack Sarasan. The conflict between Sarasan and his father was a matter of record at this point; but Fletcher assumed that if someone else wanted to save La Mort de Marat, Sarasan could no longer have a reason to object. Moreover, Sarasan would at least be able to tell Fletcher where Adolphe Sarre was, whether the director was dead or alive. But nothing came back to Fletcher from Los Angeles; telephone calls were not answered; a flight out to the coast produced not even a cursory interview. People in the studio came to know exactly who Fletcher was, what he was doing, and just how much of a nuisance he had become doing it.
He finally found Jack Sarasan due south of Montreal in Manhattan. Sarasan was sitting with a starlet in a French restaurant on East 57th Street, when Fletcher appeared at their table. At first Sarasan professed not to know Fletcher or what he was talking about, and the restaurant’s maître d’ was prepared to escort the intruder out. Fletcher told Sarasan he was thinking of eventually writing a book about his efforts to restore the film, that he was certain Sarasan would be interested in clarifying the history involved. “I couldn’t care less,” Sarasan told him, looking up from the table as he wiped his mustache with the napkin. Still, when the maître d’ placed his hand around Fletcher’s elbow, Sarasan indicated to let him be. “Yes, all right, I know who you are, Grahame.” He looked at the chair across from him. “Sit down. Listen,” he said. “My nephew’s in with you on this, right?”
Fletcher stared at Sarasan blankly.
Sarasan drank some wine. He didn’t offer Fletcher a glass. “You would’ve thought the old man was his father. He didn’t know Adolphe existed until someone told him he was living in Hollywood.” The starlet stared between the two men at a spot of velvet on the opposite wall.
“Is he alive?”
Sarasan never looked at Fletcher, always directing his attention toward the meal. “You tell me about my nephew, I’ll tell you about my father.”
“Still in Hollywood?”
“Adolphe? Paris.”
“I had heard—”
“He’s in Paris, Grahame.” Sarasan now stared straight at him. “I sent him back to Paris years ago. What is it with you and this movie? Is it art?”
“Yes,” said Fletcher, “it’s art.”
“So why are you talking to me about it? I have nothing to do with art.”
Fletcher pursed his lips. “I realize that at one point in time the industry may have been frightened of this picture—”
“Frightened!” said Sarasan. “What are you talking about?”
“So ahead of its time. But films have caught up, there can’t be anything about it that’s threatening anymore.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The starlet focused more intently on the spot. “You know, you do sound like my nephew. Except it doesn’t take you all day to get one word out. In my boardroom, in front of my directors, he stood there screaming at me when he found out I sent my father back to Paris, do you know that? I think you’re obsessed with this movie.”
“I was about to say the same of you,” said Fletcher.
Sarasan called the mâitre d’. “Publish your fucking book,” he snarled. The maître d’ approached and Fletcher was escorted out.
Fletcher Grahame arrived in Paris one autumn afternoon via the Gare du Nord (via Dunkerque, Dover, London, Shannon, Montreal), bringing with him a large trunk. At his hotel he negotiated with the concierge to keep the trunk in the hotel cellar; he paid the concierge fifteen francs a day simply that he might have a key to the cellar where he could check on the trunk whenever he liked. It was clear to the concierge that there was something about the trunk of the utmost importance, because Fletcher checked often.
Fletcher was making arrangements. By now he was a man of about thirty—tall and thin and taciturn, with wire-rimmed glasses and thinning hair of moderate length, always dressed in businesslike fashion, suit and tie, carrying a briefcase. He spent a lot of time going to newspaper offices, film academies, libraries. On his fourth day at the hotel he told the concierge he thought he’d be leaving soon, and the concierge could have his cellar back. He said it with a slight smile, making a joke.
That day Fletcher wore a different suit, cleaned and pressed, dark gray; he spoke to the concierge on his way out. He was a bit nervous this morning. Forty minutes later he was standing before another hotel, on the other side of the city, near Montparnasse. Fletcher looked at the buzzers by the door and, not finding the name he wanted, rang the concierge. A woman answered a moment later. Like most Parisian concierges, she stared at him suspiciously.
Fletcher asked if she spoke English. Of course not, she said. He nodded and asked in a stilted French if there was an older gentleman living in the hotel, “he must be in his eighties,” Fletcher said. “His name is Adolphe Sarre.”
No, she told him. There was nobody staying in her hotel by that name.
He said he’d been led to believe that somebody by that name was in fact living in the hotel. He stepped back into the street to check the address. Seventeen rue de Sacrifice.
Nobody by that name, she said. Then she closed the door.
He went back to the hotel and told the concierge he couldn’t have his cellar yet.
Several weeks passed. Fletcher reinvestigated every lead. He couldn’t go on paying the concierge fifteen francs a day to store a trunk he had hoped to deliver within his first week. The concierge asked Fletcher what it was he had come to Paris for. Fletcher looked at the concierge—a man in his early fifties—and asked him if he knew the name Adolphe Sarre. The concierge had never heard of Adolphe Sarre. Fletcher asked if the concierge ever went to the movies. Not often, said the concierge; few movies he much liked anymore. Adolphe Sarre, said Fletcher Grahame, made the greatest movie of all time. It was never finished, and it was never shown. Fletcher told the concierge he had come to Paris to finish Adolphe Sarre’s movie.
After exploring several more leads, and coming to several dead ends, Fletcher went back to seventeen rue de Sacrifice. He gave the concierge his card, and told the concierge he was sure there was no Adolphe Sarre in her hotel if she said so; but if perhaps the concierge was mistaken, to give Monsieur Sarre the card, on the back of which Fletcher wrote: Marat. Fletcher returned to his hotel and sat in his room, on the bed, without the lights on, in his dark gray suit. Some hours later he was still sitting there when, at a few minutes past five in the afternoon, he heard the phone ring in the lobby. It continued ringing, and after four or five rings there was triggered in his brain a gunshot, ascending in shrill intensity. As usual he put his hands to his ears in a futile attempt to stop the sound; and since sometimes it blocked out all other sound and left him partially deaf for a while, he could not hear the
concierge’s voice when the phone was answered, and he could not hear the concierge’s steps all the way up the stairs—though he could feel the series of small vibratory thuds. In this way he did not hear but felt the concierge outside the door, and presumed that there was a knock. Still Fletcher didn’t move, only sitting on the bed in his dark gray suit, now rumpled, with his hands clamped firmly over his ears. “Oui?” he called out, and barely discerned the concierge’s reply: “Monsieur, there is a call.” After a pause: “Are you resting?”
“I’ll take the call,” Fletcher said, swinging his legs over the side of the bed. The concierge seemed to jump with a start when the door opened. He stared at Fletcher a moment and then turned and led him down the steps to the phone. When Fletcher took the receiver the hum in his head seemed to come and go. “Hello.”
There was silence on the other side; Fletcher knew he was there, and maybe he was talking to him right now, and Fletcher wasn’t hearing him because of the sound. The hum had seemed to die, but Fletcher felt a flash of panic and couldn’t decide whether to speak presumptuously. “Monsieur Grahame?”
Days Between Stations Page 14
