The Butterfly Plague (25 page)

“Yes, Miss Myra. Yes, Miss Myra.” Dance.

(Bill Robinson.)

Clump. Clump, clump, clump. Clank. Adolphus winced aurally. “Yes, Ida. What’d she say?”

There was a short moment of hard breathing on the other end of the telephone. “She’s out,” said Ida. And hung up, still tapping her white-boxed toes.

October 11th, 1938:

Brentwood

Myra Jacobs owned a sparrow and the sparrow lived in a large cage which sat in the window beyond the curtains of Myra’s mezzanine sitting room.

Every day began with Myra drinking coffee on the mezzanine and listening to the sparrow sing. Every single day: workdays, Sundays and days you got fired by the Studio.

The sparrow loved to sing, especially in the mornings and evenings. So, daily, when it was bright and sunspangled and again when it was shadowy and cool, the sparrow sang its song.

Two years ago Myra had fallen in love with the sparrow at a time when they were both singing in a picture together. “Two little chippies,” everyone had said, except that it was not a chipping sparrow but a song one, as Myra herself told the jokers who threw that kind of dirt around, and, “Don’t think I don’t know what a chippie is,” she said, “either. Which I am not, nor is my sparrow.”

But this morning the sparrow did not sing.

“What is it, sparrow? Are you sick?” asked Myra.

The sparrow just sat there looking through the bars, out the window, and did not reply.

“But I can’t,” said Myra, thinking that she knew what was in the sparrow’s heart. “If I did let you out the sparrow hawks would get you. And we don’t even like the thought of that.”

She looked out the window herself.

There it was, her property: the long driveway and the lawn, the gate and the police car. The policeman was asleep. Day and night the police car was parked there for Myra’s protection. When she had gone to the studio in her own chauffeur-driven Rolls, the police car had followed all the way until she was safely inside the studio walls. Then it had followed her home again at night and parked down by the gate.

Myra thought about
Hell’s Babies
and Adolphus Damarosch. So far it had been fun in itself, and all the grips and electricians and studio personnel and everyone all said it was sensational and lovely. Except some of the executives. Those people from New York. They wore blue suits and had dirty minds.

“She’s fat,” said one.

“She’s old,” said another.

Fat and old. Fat and old.

“Nonsense.”

The next day she had been late.

“Now she’s late and fat and old. See? What’d we tell you.”

And the next day she had quarreled with the hairdresser.

“
Bitchy
, late, fat, and old. See? We told you. We told you what would happen.”

The next day she developed a rash.

“Bitchy, old, and fat, Myra got a rash and now that’s that!” The New York executives had chanted it. But the front-office Hollywood executives, especially Mr. Niles, were worried. Myra was precious to them. They had their picture to finish.

“Give her time to get well,” they said.

“We’ll give her two days.”

“Give her time,” said Hollywood.

“She’s had three weeks,” said New York.

“Just a few days more,” said Hollywood.

“No. No damn whore is gonna hold up our schedule,” said the man from New York. “Cancel that contract. Get Mitzi Tomahawk.”

“Mitzi Tomahawk can go to hell,” thought Myra when she read about it.

So, old-fat-bitchy Myra wandered for a few days around her house. The rash was gone. The itch remained. The fat had come. She watched Ida baking a cake and listened to the sparrow singing. And she was lonely. There was no one in the house to look at her.

She wasn’t really so fat. Not really. Men liked her like that. That she knew. Didn’t they like her in
Kiss Me Hullo
when she was like that, and didn’t they like that lovely transparent net-and-rhinestone dress she wore? Sure they did. And she wasn’t even old, either. Thirty-two isn’t old. Is it, sparrow? No. Thirty-two is just not old. And that’s all there is to it. Besides, the Studio always said she was twenty-six and everyone believed it. Everyone.

She wandered around the house for a couple of days more. Maybe she’d renegotiate her contract. Maybe she’d go back over to Huge Company or over to Mega, where she had never been. Wouldn’t that Mr. Mugging just love it if she came over there and knocked on his door. Wouldn’t that make everyone jump? You bet your boots it would.

Dolly phoned every day. She was sorry for Dolly. It was his picture, too, after all, and they’d been such good friends. They’d almost had an affair. But she didn’t want to talk to him. She didn’t want his pleas or his sympathy. She was sick of driving his car, anyway. She wanted the phone to ring and it would be Mr. Niles and Mr. Niles would say, “Come back, Little Myra. Please come back.” Maybe he would say, “We’re sorry.”

But Mr. Niles didn’t phone and neither did Arnold Niles, his brother, and now there was something wrong with the sparrow and Ida was uppity and Adolphus was beginning to dislike her, too, and he probably thought she was a bitch after all. Which she wasn’t. How could she be?

She just wanted them to let her look like herself, that was all—and be like herself and give up running around the studios all the time. If only they’d make Heirs Babies the way she was, then they’d see that the public did like her that way, with her body plump like that. And they’d see that if they’d only leave her alone she could still make it at the box office, too. After all, she’d had a nervous disease and was entitled to a little consideration. (The nervous disease was eczema.)

But they wouldn’t have her. Not like that. Not fat. No. It was final.

“What is it, sparrow? What is the matter with you?” said Old Fat, standing there by the cage. Old Itchy Fat.

The sparrow stared out of the window. It got down on the floor of its cage and ruffled its feathers and sat there, staring and molting and not eating its seeds. It would not drink its water, either, even when Old Fat herself put it in as a drop on the end of her finger. The sparrow just hunched there like a little, thin, unopened package on the floor of its cage, and finally Old Fat Myra fitted her finger through the bars and touched it good-bye on the head and touched it again on each wing. Good-bye.

Then Old Fat sat down in a chair and drew the curtain and they both stared out the window, Old Fat and the sparrow, and later that evening the sparrow died without having sung another song. Not even a note. And Old Fat cried.

October 15th, 1938:

Brentwood

Adolphus finally decided that he would simply show up at “Myra-treat” without telephoning, a tactic arrived at through his acute awareness of Ida’s past mastership of the telephone as an instrument of war.

So he took a taxi over on a Saturday afternoon. It was still quite hot and dry. Myra’s garden smelled of lemons and flowers and cut grass.

There was no policeman at the gate. The Studio had removed his negligible, sleepy protection, and consequently, the front of the estate seemed naked. The policeman and his car had been like a set decoration. The loss was comparable to the loss of a shady and protective tree.

Having got out of the taxi two houses up the road, where he would not be seen arriving, Adolphus strolled up to the iron gates of “Myra-treat” and, pushing them open with his cane, walked up to the house on the brick walk.

He saw Ida, dressed in her whites, sitting on a large padded wicker chair on the colonial porch. She had a palmetto fan in one hand and a gin in the other and she was fast asleep. He could hear her snoring almost as soon as he came through the gate. This was a blessing. He could walk straight through to Myra.

3:00 p.m.

The lower hallway was filled with roses—all in baskets—all from the desperate Mr. Cohn, who was in love with Myra.

Adolphus tiptoed up to the mezzanine and stopped. He looked at the cage emptied of its movement and its song. Now it, too, was filled with roses. Dead and rotten. From Mr. Cohn.

He went on.

At the top of the stairs he turned left toward a partly open door. Beyond it he could hear someone rustling little bits of paper in a box.

For a moment he closed his eyes and tried to forgive himself for ever having thought Myra was obstructive or had bad taste or was stupid or ought never to drive a car or any of the bad things he had thought about her.

He took a step nearer to the door.

He wavered. He must go in and bring her back alive. Onto the screen. For her own sake. And for the sake of seeing New York, squirming with hats in hands, watching the money roll in past them down those long executive corridors in Manhattan.

He pushed open the door. “Myra?”

“Oh!”

Old Fat sat in her bed.

She was wearing a high-collared, open-necked Chinese robe, and she was eating candies. She had one box open on her lap and another, empty, lying beside her on the covers. The rest of the bed was strewn with little brown papers that had once been wrapped around the candies already eaten. A Victrola played softly in the background.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Myra asked.

Her mouth was full of caramel, marshmallow, and nuts.

“Just passing…” said Adolphus, working so hard to control his stare that he could not finish the sentence.

“Oh.”

Old Fat swept off a portion of the coverlet and spread the brown-paper stars helter-skelter over the floor.

“Sit down,” she said. “I’ll be with you in a minute.”

She shut off the Victrola.

He sat facing her at the foot of the bed.

She closed the chocolate box, tossed aside the empty one, drew the Chinese robe tight around her expanded body, and hunched down under the covers. Her hair was stringy and uncared for. Without makeup she looked yellow and the shadows under her puffed-out eyes were deep green. There were one or two raw spots where she’d scratched the itch.

“How’ve you been?” she asked him. Her eyes wavered. “Pardon my appearance.” She waved a chubby hand, saw that her nails were dirty with chocolate and marzipan and folded both hands into the double disability of fists. She sat there, heavily, with her wrists curving over the immense roundness of her raised and swollen knees.

Adolphus gave a real smile. “Do you mind if a friend wants to say hello once in a while?”

The accusing bravery left her eyes. She smiled back. “Not a real friend, Dolly. No.”

“Good. How’ve you been keeping?”

“Fat.”

They both laughed at that and when they were through she giggled a light cadenza that ended suddenly in a pout.

“I came to ask you to come back,” Adolphus said abruptly.

She looked right at him. Then away.

“Back where?” she said, watching the room mess up around her. Chocolate wrappers had suddenly appeared everywhere.

“Back to work.”

She seemed to consider it. “Work, eh?”

“Unh-hunh.”

“It’s too late,” she said. She lifted a fat arm and let it fall. “The damage is done.”

“No,” said Dolly. “It isn’t. No damage. No damage, my dear.”

She sat up. She let the robe fall open. Her breasts broke forward like cellophane bags full of water. Her chiffon nightgown held them back from total collapse. Her weight had tripled.

“Look at me, Dolly.”

He looked. And looked away.

She sneered. This was the extremity of ugliness and sadness combined.

“Old Fat!” she exploded over the bed. “OLD-ITCHY-MIDDLE-AGED-
FAT!
”

She closed her eyes and her gown and huddled.

“You can diet, Myra. Anyone can diet. In a week…”

“I can’t diet my age. I can’t diet my damn eyes. I can’t diet my mind. Diet—hah! Don’t eat that, Charlie! Not eating won’t do anything. I’m finished. You bleed. I got old and fat. It’s over.”

Delicately horrified, he listened to her, looked at her—and knew that she was right. Something was suddenly over. Nothing could change what had happened to her will. And he knew that it was her person, not her body, that everyone really loved. Himself included. And he saw that it was her person that had taken on so much weight, had so voraciously and heftily bulked. It had grown so far out of proportion that she could never hone it down. The fineness of her vulgarity was gone. Her spirit was gone. She had lost the love of the challenge and now she was merely passive. Which is what age is, he thought. Wrinkles and fat. Passive acceptance makes all of these. It gives you fat hands.

“Well,” he said. “Well.”

“So. Well.”

They sat in silence.

She was only thirty-two. It didn’t matter. She thought it was sixty.

Finally, Adolphus sighed and rose and walked around the room. His toes kept butting up against chocolate boxes and paper wrappers and every time they did he gave a little kick of frustration. He forgot his own fear.

“You’ll make yourself bleed,” said Myra. She tried to smile.

Her face mooned out at him from pillows and sheets and blankets.

He looked at her expectantly. Perhaps if he promised her something…

“We’ll go to the Black Stocking every night,” he said. “We’ll drink gin and cocktails and brandy Alexanders and get tight as ticks. We’ll dance around to the rhumba band. Eh? Wouldn’t you like that? Artie Shaw playing solo while you entertain the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Elsa Maxwell, and the Count of Monte Cristo? Louis B. Mayer sending you mash notes from a table across the room and everyone saying, ‘Look, there she goes, that’s Myra Jacobs, the girl with all the friends. There goes…’”

“…Old Fat, ex-queen of the movies,” said Myra with a slump in her voice that brought them both down so hard that the dream could only wither and die.

“It will happen,” said Adolphus, out of breath from dancing.

“You bet my itch it will,” said Myra. “It’ll happen when hell freezes over and the North Pole has palm trees.”

“Well then. What will you do?”

“Sit.”

“Just sit?”

“Yes!”

Her vehemence was slightly hysterical.

He watched her carefully. Then he tried to lighten the blows by saying, “Who’s gonna pay for all the candies?”