The Butterfly Plague (2 page)

Down came Mickey Balloon in flames and little pieces: little pieces so very small that no one ever found them.

2:10 p.m.

“Myra!”

“What, Dolly? What?”

“Get down! Someone is shooting at us.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Dolly.”

“Shooting at us, I tell you.”

“No, Dolly. No. It was only some kid’s balloon.”

“What kid’s balloon? Where?”

“That Mickey Mouse balloon. It exploded.”

“Someone fired a gun!”

“Nonsense.”

Myra Jacobs, she of the pink-and-tangerine dress, the garden hat, and the heart-shaped glasses, beamed at the group assembled before the car. Dolly sat tensely crouched in the rumble seat amidst his pillows.

“Can’t you make them go away, Myra?”

“How can I make them go away! They’re fans.”

“They’re revolting. Pimply-faced, dirty little boys.”

“Fiddlesticks. They’re lovely.”

“Hah! It’s easy to see where your taste lies.”

“Don’t get smart, Dolly.”

“They’ll attack us. And then what?”

“Nonsense.”

“Well, they’re staring at you with some kind of intent, and it’s odious.”

“They’re just interested, that’s all. They love me.”

“Phooey—they’re preadolescent.”

“Oh, come on! Leave them alone. Smile. Go on,” said Myra.

“I will not smile!”

“O.K., then. Have it your own way, Dolly.”

Myra waved and blew kisses. The children waved and blew kisses and whistled.

Dolly cringed. “Dear me, I wish the train would come.”

“It’ll come. It’ll come. Hi, there! Hi!”

“Don’t solicit, Myra. Really! Twelve-year-olds. It’s shameless.”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake! You’re gonna drive me crazy. It’s all your fault anyway, getting us here so early.”

“That’s right. Blame it on me.”

“And making me drive like that. Fifteen miles an hour. Do you realize how long it took us to get here?”

“One hour and forty-five minutes. Exactly.”

“Right. But driving so slowly they must’ve thought we were a funeral procession of one.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Well, who else but a corpse would drive down Sunset Boulevard at fifteen miles an hour? I ask you.”

There was a pause.

“Are you implying that I am a corpse?” Dolly asked.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake.”

“Are you imply…ing that I am a…corpse, Myra?”

“No, Dolly.”

“Sitting back here dead. Is that it?”

“Oh, come on.”

“A stiff in the rumble seat! I know.”

“Dolly—
please
.”

“You wish I was dead.”

“I do not.”

“Calling me a corpse.”

“Everyone’s staring.”

“Let them. You love it, anyway. You thrive on it. It’s your damned bread and butter.”

“Oh, Dolly. Please!”

Myra waved and smiled. She lit another cigarette.

“Here we are,” Dolly went on, “in broad daylight in an open car, surrounded by pubescent hooligans, being fired on from all sides, and you sit there calmly insulting me and waving at brats like a tart.”

“I did not insult you calmly,” said Myra.

“We have to meet this train. I am terrified of speed and you know it. So we left a little early. I can’t help that. I bleed.”

“Now, Dolly dear…”

“Bleed! Will you never understand?”

“Yes, Dolly.”

“Bleed at the drop of a hat.”

“Yes, Dolly.”

“Inside…outside…”

“…All around the town.”

“It’s no joking matter.”

“I’m sorry, Dolly.”

“How would you like to bleed when a person so much as shakes hands with you?”

“I wouldn’t.”

“Or when it rains.” Dolly went right on.

“You do not bleed when it rains.”

“I bled in a hailstorm once.”

“Phooey!”

“Phooey, nothing. I did. But a lot you care. You’re just like all the rest. I could lie down right here and die…”

“Everyone carries a cross, Dolly.”

“You’re damn well right I carry a cross. Bang! Bang! Bang! Crucified.”

The fans pressed forward, fascinated by this tale of blood and horror.

“Everybody wants to crucify poor old Dolly. They can’t wait. They go around with hammers and nails. Hammers and nails! Look at them.”

“Those are my people,” Myra said. She tried very bravely to wave and smile.

‘That’s right. You wave and smile. Go ahead. I’ll just sit here and die.”

“You are not going to die.”

The crowd took in its breath.

“Yes I am. Dead.”

“Really, Dolly.”

“Wait and see. Dead! And then what?”

“God knows, Dolly. God knows.”

“God doesn’t know anything. He’s just a wretched, sadistic old tyrant sitting up there inflicting diseases on innocent people!”

“Now, now, Dolly.”

“We are born to be driven mad at the whim of fate!”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, have a piece of gum and shut up.”

“No, thank you. And I will not sit here in this parking lot while you chew gum in public.”

“Where the hell else am I supposed to chew it?”

“In the privacy of your bedroom.”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake!”

“Gumchewing, Myra—for your information—is a manifestation of the lower classes’ taking over our culture and society. I forbid you to do it. And if you can’t think of me, at least think of your image.”

“They’re all chewing it,” said Myra, indicating with a wave of her hand the amassed cudding faces of her fans.

“Yes, and look at them,” said Dolly.

“They’re my public,” said Myra. “If they’re gonna chew, I’m gonna.”

“No, my dear. If
you’re
‘gonna’ chew,
they’re
‘gonna.’ Look what it’s done to your mouth.”

“My mouth happens to be my best-known feature, I’ll have you know. I’m famous for my mouth.”

“My dear, I hate to disillusion you, but if you really think you’re famous for your
mouth
…”

“I am. I
am
. Pretty mouth. Pretty mouth. Pretty-mouth Myra!”

Myra bounced in the seat as she chanted this, and the whole crowd took it up. “Pretty mouth! Pretty mouth! Pretty-mouth Myra!”

“There! See?” said Myra triumphantly.

“If you’d stop bouncing up and down like a pair of rubber balls,
you’d
see.”

Myra burst into immediate tears.

“Oh, God! Now what’s the matter?” said Dolly.

“You called them rubber balls!” Myra wailed, clutching herself with both hands.

The teen-age boys giggled. Dolly silenced them with a look.

“Now, now, Myra.”

“Don’t you now-now me, you…homo-feely—”

Dolly blushed and stammered. “Myra. Please.
He
mo.
He
mo.
Hee
-mo-philiac!”

Myra turned and gave Dolly one of her dazzling pouts.

“I gotcha!” she said. “I got Dolly!”

And she burst into marvelous, resounding, and infectious laughter.

Dolly’s pale-blue suit was impeccable in cut and condition. His Panama hat had been dyed the same shade. Underneath these garments his stockings and underclothes—even the handkerchief in his pocket—were all pale-blue. He had chosen the color himself. It showed up blood.

Adolphus Damarosch was a hemophiliac.

He was also a film director employed by Niles Studios and his current film was Heirs Babies, still before the cameras. Its star, Myra Jacobs, now sat in the front seat of Dolly’s purple Franklin. Dolly did not drive. No hemophiliac does. They are accident-prone and die all too easily. So Myra had done the driving and that is why she had so much to complain of. Fifteen miles an hour.

They had come to Culver City Railroad Station to meet Ruth Damarosch, Dolly’s sister, who was returning from Europe after a lengthy absence.

Dolly was understandably nervous.

“How long has it been, did you say?” said Myra.

“Nineteen hundred and thirty-six.”

“Yeah?”

“Yes, Myra. ‘Yes.’ Please say ‘yes,’ not ‘yeah.’”

“Yes, Dolly.”

“She went away to swim in the Berlin Olympics. Don’t you remember that?”

“Of course I remember that. Jeepers. It was only two years ago.”

“Well, I wonder sometimes. Anyway, she went over there in 1936 and hasn’t been home since.”

“Goodness.”

“Yes. My older, older, older, older sister.” Dolly sighed.

“Is she that old?” said Myra.

“How old?”

“Older, older, older, older.”

“Four years older, to be exact. She was born in nineteen hundred and seven.”

“Is that all?”

“Yes. That’s all. And she was a bully to boot,” he reflected.

“She kicked you?”

Dolly closed his eyes. Really. Sometimes Myra was too much to bear, for all her loveliness.

“A bully of the mind, Myra. An in-tel-lect-ual bully.”

“Oh,” said Myra, dumbfounded. She turned away to think about it.

Dolly desperately wanted the washroom and wondered if he dared to excuse himself. The washrooms were so far away, and all those dangerous people lingered between. He decided against it. He thought about the fate of Mickey Balloon. It was sad the way some things turn out. Now Ruth was coming home.

Sunday, August 28th, 1938:

Aboard the Santa Fe Super Chief

1:30 p.m.

Ruth Damarosch Haddon finished her lunch, set aside her utensils, and looked out of the windows. She was seated all alone at a table in the dining car. She had been seated alone for every meal since leaving New York but she did not know why.

She was nervous.

Ruth was a tall woman. Her figure was attenuated and spare; strong. It befitted an athlete. Her hair, cut extremely short, was pure white—a prematurity, for Ruth was now but thirty-one years of age. Her face was flat and wide and her eyes blue-gray, protruding slightly like the eyes of someone suffering from a thyroid condition. Her expression in repose mirrored the fact that she would not let go of innocence. She held onto it like a renegade child. Innocence was sanity. Just as silence was sanity.

Ruth believed that she was living in a nightmare. Childlike, she insisted there was darkness when all around her the adults were proclaiming light. She moved and sat like one who expects attack. And she had good reason.

Now he sat directly behind her, occupying a small table for one, at which he ate every day. He had followed her all the way from Hamburg. He had never for an instant not been close at hand. Yet he had never menaced her, touched her, or spoken. He was merely constant. At her back.

He was blond from top to toe, probably German, and he smelled of leather. He was extraordinary to look at. He could have been an advertisement for racial perfection. His eyes were blue; his hair was golden; his teeth were white and even. Every bone was perfection itself. He radiated strength, health, and stamina. Yet, he never seemed to sleep.

Then there was the woman.

Ruth knew her, or was certain that if she could see her she would recognize her, perhaps even as someone close and well known. But this woman, who had been on board only since Chicago, never presented her face. Over it she wore a wide, dark—perhaps a widow’s—veil. Her clothing was expensive and beautifully tailored, and the coloring of the fabrics was autumnal—browns, golds, and indescribable reds. She inevitably wore gloves—long gloves, kid, calf, or pigskin, which were worn to the elbow and occasionally above. Her hats were small and seemed designed merely to hold the veiling in place. She was small herself, very finely made, and she moved efficiently, as though given to command an immediate respect. Her gestures were significantly brief.

It was the unswerving set of this woman’s head that told Ruth she was being stared at. The gaze was leveled through the veiling, pronounced and definite as a pair of lights. In fact, this was a quality that pervaded the whole figure—the quality of light—of something metallic that shone. Insect-like, the woman’s brilliantly clouded head would turn to follow Ruth’s every move. Or it would lock, like the head of a mantis, into one poised and trance-like position. Ruth wondered if there were lids on the eyes or if they ever closed.

The woman was accompanied by a large, uniformed servant, who followed her everywhere, sat her down with quiet ceremonious gestures into chairs, opened doors for her, lifted baggage from her path, and shaded her by placing his bulk between her and bright light. He was a Negro. They never spoke. He did these things with inbred reactionary calm. It was his life, it seemed, to make a path for her wherever she went and to close it behind them after their passage. At mealtimes the Negro stood near the doorway of the dining car, watching the trays pass by shoulder-high beneath his nose. Ruth was certain that he was fed with the dogs in the baggage car. He had an eye for food not natural to human beings.

Ruth lit a cigarette. She practiced poise. She placed her free hand on her presentation copy of Mein Kampf, which rested on the table beside her half-emptied dishes. She gave the woman a stare of her own. She began to make up her mind—using a recipe of one part courage, two parts reason, and seven parts desperation—that she would accost this woman, pleasantly, and ask for her name. Perhaps the woman could not for some reason make the advance herself. Perhaps she was shy—or ill. Perhaps the Negro was her guardian. She might even be a prisoner…

It had crossed Ruth’s mind a day after Chicago there might be some connection between the blond man and the staring woman. But since they never met and seemed not even to see each other, Ruth had decided they were, after all, separate watchers, nothing at all to do with one another.

Ruth poured a second cup of coffee, staining the whiteness of the tablecloth. Her composure, born of years of training as an athlete, gave way, and instead of righting the pot and redirecting its flow, she experienced a small, ridiculous moment of indecision and just went on pouring, watching the large brown mark grow larger and larger. A waiter approached, his mouth open, certain he was beholding an act of vandalism or of blindness. Ruth settled for blindness.

“I—am—so—sorry…” she forced. “The sun. The sun, you see.” She wiped her eyes, as though removing the sun itself, and smiled.

The waiter, satisfied and relieved, retreated with a sigh.