The Butterfly Plague (24 page)

As Ruth watched and listened, a tide of vicious language rose about Evelyn’s table. Ruth had just endured a fairly normal tirade of her father’s favorite words, but she had never witnessed an oral display to equal this. The words were archaic, almost lost to civilization, but had been retained with a kind of determined and sadistic wrenching of animal memory.

Evelyn’s words could hardly be contained in her mouth but, like bile, were spat with the appropriate facial gestures onto the tablecloth, where they lay in the physical incarnation of salival excrement. The words hurt the mind. And the phrasing had the cadence of Neanderthalic orgies. Perhaps, exactly as there should have been in the given circumstances, there was also a great deal of table-pounding, handbag-thumping, and chair-banging. This language was foreign and unknown.

Finally, a waitress crept over and served Evelyn’s table as graciously as was possible. But then, Ruth remembered, the waitress was paid to remember where she was.

At this point George mastered his recalcitrant weed and, puffing away on it like a Lazarus returning from the dead, he spoke. His manner was that of someone who had interrupted himself to die.

“Excuse me,” he said. “Where are we?”

Ruth looked away from Evelyn de Foe, but could perceive nothing where George sat except a smoke screen.

“What do you mean, Father?”

“Where are we in our Jeedy conversation?”

Ruth approached her glass with tentative fingers.

“I wasn’t aware that we were having a conversation,” she said.

“Well, we are. We are. Who’s that?”

“I don’t know, Father. She just came in.”

George looked, or rather squinted, at the Devil. There she was.

“Well,” he said. “She sure beats Titty for tits.”

“What?”

“She wins, that’s all,” said George. “Now listen, Ruth, and listen to me very carefully.”

“All right.”

George averted his gaze. His fingers played nervously and undecidedly with glass, cigarette, table silver, and the magenta handkerchief.

“I need,” he said, “your help.”

Ruth could not tell what was coming next. His voice was not demanding and it was not pleading. It was thoughtful, which was extremely rare.

“Do you know the name Cooper Carter?”

“Yes. The industrialist. He produces steel or something.”

“That’s right. Steel. And weapons.”

“Weapons?”

“Weapons.”

“What sort of weapons?”

“Any sort you want. Guns, tanks, bombs. Anything. Sometimes,” he gave a long, significant pause, and then: “Sometimes…movies.”

“Movies?”

“
Mo-tion pic-tures
.”

George raised his eyes and there was a terrible fanaticism in them. It was sad.

Ruth watched.

“A motion picture is not a weapon, Father,” Ruth said.

“But it can be,” said George. “It can be.”

“Yes. I suppose…”

George reverted to his introspective tone. His fingers busied away with ashes and alcohol, smoke and handkerchief.

“Titty Virden has come back.”

Ruth shuddered. Yes. Ruth knew that. It had been Letitia on the train. At Alvarez, too. And hadn’t George been at Alvarez?

“Father?”

“Shut up. Listen to me.”

Ruth suddenly realized that tears were wandering slowly down his cheeks.

“What is it?”

“I’ve always—I have always…”

The tears wandered faster, finding their mark on the backs of his fat little hands.

Again, Ruth waited, and at last George continued.

“She wants to make a film, you see. An immensely important film.”

“Yes.”

“And she needs a great deal of money. She doesn’t want studio bosses hanging over her head telling her what she can and cannot do. This film is too important for that. You know what I mean?”

“Yes.”

“Well, Cooper Carter…”

The tears welled up in another threat, but abated before the fall.

“Cooper Carter is already interested. He’s building her a studio…”

George blew his nose at this point, startling Evelyn de Foe, who dropped her embossed menu with a clank and a loud
God damn!

“They’re going to make a picture, you see. You see? Oh, don’t you understand? They’re going to make the most important motion picture ever made. And they’re going to make it without
me
.”

This did not amaze Ruth and she wondered why it should amaze her father. His inability to work, his condition—he was notorious.

Now he blubbered like a little boy into his handkerchief.

“I’d walk through South America for Titty Virden,” he said, knowing full well he would never be asked to do any such thing. “South-effing-America! On foot!”

Ruth thought she might feel sorry for George if he were not her father. Or perhaps for her father—if he were not George Damarosch.

“Yes,” he said. “South-effing-America.”

There was a pause.

Possibly George was watching himself float out over the Andes and down the Amazon.

Ruth had a headache. She tightened into silence. She drank.

Suddenly, there was a crash at the de Foe table. A waitress had dropped a tray of food.

Evelyn, invective flying, rose. Two of her men and one of her women rose with her, but she barked at them and they fell back into their places.

The poor waitress got up apologetically, but seeing Evelyn, impulsively backed away.

Evelyn rang her bangles busily. She had a hungry, fangy pout like a petulant lioness. There was seafood sauce on her stole. The waitress had put it there.

Evelyn barged two and a half steps forward through the empty space between herself and the hapless girl. (Evelyn, it should be said, barged everywhere. She even barged where no one and nothing barred the way. Touring abroad, Evelyn de Foe would barge into St. Peter’s Square. She would barge into the Sahara Desert. But for now she merely barged those two and a half steps across the floor of the Black Stocking Restaurant fixing the waitress with her bawling gaze.)

She raised her glistening, false-nailed hands.

“Someone should do something,” said Ruth. But no one did.

Like a helpless martyr standing on the sands of the Roman Colosseum, the waitress stared with horror at what had been released from its cage before her.

Evelyn spoke to her—zoologically.

The waitress went a Christian shade of pale.

Evelyn’s words fell between them, or were flung onto the floor as though someone should bend down and pick them up—perhaps even dust them off and hand them back to her. But instead they just lay there until, like worms, they wriggled a little, oozed a few liquids…and dried up.

Slowly the waitress joined them as in supplication. She fell to her knees.

The maître d’ approached as close as he dared, looked down at the humiliation on the floor, and said, “You’re fired.”

“Well,” said Evelyn de Foe, bumping each word with a hip, “I would for fuck’s sake, think so!”

And that was the end of it. Or nearly.

Waving her red-and-white smile and doing forbidden things with her angora, Evelyn made it all the way across the room, untouched by human hand. A triumph.

Her retinue followed. More triumph. Plus applause.

Intoxicated by this reaction, Evelyn turned to blow a few red kisses at the crowd. But instead of offering more applause and accolades, as might have been expected, the diners and drinkers burst into instant laughter.

Laughter?
Evelyn was furious.

But even the swiftest perusal of her person would have given her the answer.

Her fly was undone.

1:45 p.m.

Only Ruth ate. George just went on drinking and arranging things on the table top.

Finally, when her coffee came, Ruth said, “You were about to tell me about Letitia and her comeback, Father.”

“Oh, yes,” said George, as though there had been no interruption at all.

“Well?”

His red eyes slid toward her.

“You a rich woman?” he asked.

It was gentle.

“Moderately,” said Ruth, who had her answer all prepared. She feigned ignorance of his true intent.

“Well,” said George. “If I could have a little money—if I could have a little money—you know,” he said, the tears welling up again for the last time, “you know—I have always…”

“If you had a little money—what?” said Ruth. She got out Hermann Goering’s compact.

“If I had a little money, I could buy in. Take an interest. And with my interest they would have to let me—they would simply have to let me be the one…”

Ruth powdered her nose industriously.

“Be the one to what?”

She licked her lips.

“Be the one to direct Titty’s great comeback film.”

The simplicity of it was appalling.

“How much is a little?” Ruth asked, by now at the lipstick touch-up stage.

“A million dollars,” said George.

There.

Ruth snapped the lid shut, carefully dusted her suit front and put the compact away, and the lipstick, and lit a cigarette and inhaled and exhaled and said, “Father, I have lied to you.”

George’s eyes lit up. Visions of millions danced brightly in the red-banked fires of his little eyes. His daughter had lied to him. It was charming. She was not just moderately rich after all. She was a multi-millionaire. Millionairess.

“Yes? Yes? What lie?” he said, the saliva mounting.

Ruth stared straight into his face.

“I cannot let you have any money, Father,” she said.

“Can’t? Can’t? What do you mean can’t?”

“Just that. I can’t.”

“Why?”

Ruth paused and then said, “I can’t because I’m going to have a baby.”

The Chronicle of
Myra Jacobs

Monday, October 10th, 1938:

Beverly Hills

11:00 a.m.

Adolphus picked up the telephone and carried it across the white expanse of his living room, so that while he was talking he could look out of his window at the shaded tennis courts and the sunny swimming pool beyond. It was not his pool and not his tennis court, but he liked to look anyway—at the beach hats, the bathing suits, the tennis rackets, the tennis balls, and the net. He also liked to look at the water.

He sat down, placing the white telephone on a large glass table beside him. He was wearing slacks, sandals, and a sport shirt and he dialed CRestwood 5329. The table offered support to, besides the telephone, a bottle of rye whiskey, an ice bucket, a tumbler, an ashtray, a cigarette lighter, a cigarette box, and a copy, in plaster, of a Grecian frieze depicting a one-legged white man on a horse. Everything excluding the rye bottle was white.

Far away in Brentwood the telephone bell was jingling in response to its dialed message. It stopped ringing and a Negro voice said, “Elbow?”

“Hullo, Ida. It’s ‘Dolphus Damarosch speaking. Is Miss Myra there?”

He lit a cigarette.

“Toozabed. Shizabad.” (Too bad, she’s in bed.)

“Is she asleep?”

“Zzzz. Fotodin.” (Yes. Folded in.)

“Listen, for heaven’s sake, surely she’ll talk to me, Ida. I’m not Studio.”

“Zizint mother. Shintin nomaddtax.” (That doesn’t matter. She ain’t in no mood to talk.)

“Well at least for gawd’s sake ask her. Tell her I’m on the line.”

“Ho kaymizindamenpsst. Isst casaway.” (O.K., Mr. Damarosch. Just ‘cause it’s you.)

Clank. Ida laid the phone down distantly. Adolphus could hear her walk away across the tiled floor of Myra’s house. He heard her perform moving-all-over-the-house-looking-for-Myra noises, plus a questionable imitation of Myra’s dainty sibilance, and as he listened he made a picture for himself of the scene.

Ida had large, white-shoe-encased feet. She also had large hands, tall legs, a long, flat body, and a small head. She looked as a giant must look to a baby lying on the floor—the top parts of her receding into diminishing perspective. She clothed herself entirely in white, and since there was no mixture of blood in her veins, she was that uncommon North American phenomenon, a truly black Negro. To look at her you might imagine she had been born on the outskirts of Nairobi, instead of on the outskirts of Philadelphia.

Drawn to Hollywood on a general principle of racial ambition (engendered by the successful rise of Ethel Waters and Bojangles), Ida had failed as a singer and dancer, but she had succeeded mightily as a servant to the rich and famous. Before working for Myra Jacobs she had been employed briefly by Alice Gottschalk and then by the Bronson Baileys, and when Myra first used her, it had been when the Bronson Baileys were away on their much-publicized European vacation, without servants. When Mr. Bailey died (a famous tragedy) Ida became Myra’s permanent property. Then Myra left Huge Company and went over to the Manning Brothers Studios. That was in 1934. Then she went over to Tremendous, ‘34 - ‘35. Then she went over to Marvel, August ‘35. Then she went over to Civic. Then she went over to Gaylord, ‘36. Then she went back over to Huge Company, ‘37. And now she was at Niles, ‘38, which is where she was about to go phhhht!

Ida had been with Myra ever since her rise to the top, ‘34, and she always talked about “us killing Mr. Danton” (a perfectly ordinary scandal) in 1936 (hushed up) and “us being counteracted to the new studios” (whichever, whenever) and now “our trembles” (presumably troubles) in October 1938.

Ida bumped around in the tiled hallway, giving her performance.

“Miss Myra! Miss Myra!”

(Change of voice.)

“Yes, Miss Ida. Yes, Miss Ida.”

(Nobody, least of all Myra Jacobs, knew the origin of the “Miss” in front of the “Ida.”)

“Mr. Dolly’s on the telephone. Mr. Dolly’s on the telephone.”

“Yes, Miss Ida. Yes, Miss Ida.”

Clump, clump, clump. Ida did a little large-footed imitation of Eleanor Powell.

“He wants to talk to you Miss Myra. Mr. Dolly wants to talk.”

(Adolphus listened to all of this impatiently. He had heard variations of it every day for over a week. He poured himself another drink and watched the bathing suits and the tennis balls, thinking that he had the answer to Ida’s failure in show business.)

“Tell Mr. Dolly no. Tell Mr. Dolly no.”

(Dolly whispered involuntarily, “Tell Mr. Dolly no.”)