The Butterfly Plague (30 page)

She had loved retirement.

Perhaps it was the fact of her great beauty that made her retirement professionally easier. She did not have to fret about what she had been. She had been perfect. And knew it. Simply.

It was a chapter. She closed it finally, with love.

Now she was a mother. And a wife.

It is hard to know which comes first, or should be placed first. You chose to love your husband. You love your children without choice. One involves privilege. The other—wonder.

George tampered with the mechanics of their marriage. He was off on a journey of his own that more and more rarely involved either his wife or his children. One of his objectives was a bigger—a better—a more astounding film than he had ever made before. The other objective was a mystical bed, filled with made-up, imaginary women.

George’s greatest gift as a film maker had been his devotion to self-improvement. Unlike so many others in that “industry” (Naomi hated the word; George hated it, but it was becoming increasingly a fact of life), unlike so many others, George never set out to better or to beat another man’s product. Only his own. There were many screenings on the specially whitewashed wall in the Falconridge library. (George liked the granular texture of a wall more than the new and always-being-improved textures of professional screens. He said walls were an ingredient of his ideal film. A wall gave substance. It had those wonderful lumps and dots. It added depth to the projection.)

Naomi sewed and knitted, did petit point, and even painted pictures (water colors, flowers, birds, beasts, and insects). She was beginning to celebrate life. She watched her husband’s creations. They grew in stature, but she sensed that there was something missing—something that George had not thought of. She did not know for a long while what it was. Ultimately (he made
Tarnish and Rust
, his lyric masterpiece, in 1921), the films no longer reached the public he had made them for.
Tarnish and Rust
had left both critics and audiences speechless and spellbound. The decline began immediately after this work. It was slow and at first unnoticed. He invited his elder brother to join him. Then his younger brothers, one by one (they “offered” to come; discreetly). George was beginning to look under stones for his ideas. He panicked. But that was later. By the time the cousins were arriving in what seemed to be droves, George had forgotten what he was looking for. He was looking for “something”—and that was all.

What had happened to his films and to him and what Naomi puzzled over and wondered at and could not define (and afterward, could) was that following
Tarnish and Rust
, the films ceased to imitate life and to celebrate life. They began to imitate and to celebrate film. He ceased to be an artist. He commenced the life of an industrialist. He might as well have made furniture. Pianos.

Then there was the party.

1922.

Ruth’s birthday. She was fifteen.

It is not known why this birthday party was to have been so special. No one was going anywhere. Nothing had happened. Perhaps George was simply showing off to his daughter. It was too bad that he had not chosen to show her off, instead.

Ruth wore a blue dress. How well Naomi remembered all of this. Each single detail. Her own dress was rose and gray. Dolly’s suit, specially tailored, was white and had satin facings. He wore long white stockings, the way children had before the war. Naomi maintained always a sense of her own period. It had been right for her. Fashionably, she never grew out of it, until these recent weeks, the weeks of her death, when she had broken her own traditions to celebrate such colors as orange and green and turquoise and yellow.

And this is her dream of celebrations.

Ruth’s fifteenth birthday.

It was an exemplary day for nature. All that was best, existed. The flowers were more spectacular than they had ever been; there were more of them and they shone with brighter colors and scented the air with deeper mysteries. The lawns were like emerald rugs made in China or Turkey. The trees filled up with birds (so many of them, in fact, and so brilliantly colored that someone remarked to George that he must have hired a wandering company of opera singers and induced them to stand among the trees in their costumes for
The Magic Flute
. This same someone credited George with the wrong imagination; Naomi might have done this, but not George).

The air was crystal clear and cool. The temperature hovered just over seventy-two degrees. Not a single cloud appeared.

The coolies wore their blue uniforms and their hats. Some were in silks. They threaded the crowded lawns with large straw trays of sandwiches and hors d’oeuvres. They passed drinks on inverted brass gongs. The glasses were tall and each was encased in woven raffia of bright colors.

The guests themselves had nothing whatever to do with a fifteen-year-old child or with her birthday, and Ruth remained alone. (She was an early romantic; she believed in undiscovered princesses. It was the following winter she began to swim. Disillusionment? Naomi never knew.)

Everyone was in love with Bully Moxon that year. He was everywhere.

A vaudevillian, he told visual jokes and danced. His art was movement. Mimic art. He rarely, even in theatres, needed words. His films were noted for their lack of printed titles. He was not handsome. He was downright ugly. He drank too much. He was afraid of women. He worshipped them. He had an exemplary cleanliness, a sense of neatness and correctness of dress common among alcoholics. His shoes were like stars, always shining brightly. His cravats were exquisite. He changed his collars four times a day. He ate peppermint drops to keep his breath from startling the effect of his appearance. He parted his hair in the middle. He gave such pleasure and like a child was capable of so much adoration and wonder that you could not revile him. He wore flowers and Naomi remembered him with tears.

He came across the lawns of memory. He always came in silence.

In this dream in the heart of Naomi Nola, Bully dances toward her with gloves on his hands. He is mock serious. He presses her fingers to his lips. He exudes peppermint and bourbon, a delightful aroma of mixed sweetness and acid, the aroma of a comically wicked child.

He lisps kisses onto her fingers and they play the game. There is no laughter. Not even a smile. Naomi blinks with mischievous alarm, retrieves her hand, and assumes one of her more famous poses. “
I am not to be had for a kiss and a smile!
”

Bully bowed. Naomi grinned.

“Dear Bully…”

“Madame!”

“No. Now, be serious, Bull. No more games. Tell me how you are.”

(Every word. She could remember every word.)

He slackened his hold. For a moment she could see an honest feeling struggling to hide itself in the comedy of his eyes.

“I am in love,” he said.

“You always are,” said Naomi. “Dear, dear Bully.” She took and held his white-gloved hands. Both of them. (She recalled the little padded fingers, the fact that the gloves were made of cotton. Waiter’s gloves. An old routine.)

“No,” he said. And this was absolutely true. “No. I have never been in love before.”

“Is it me, Bully?” (She wanted to help him. She knew it wasn’t.)

“No, my dear. You I simply adore. That is all.”

“Thank you.”

He looked off over the lawn.

He struggled for a line—a joke—a dance—anything for relief.

It was Letitia. There she was.

The Virgin.

He stared down at his feet. Once more he kissed Naomi’s fingers. Silent, he drifted away.

Later he danced for them.

On the nasturtium bed.

And stole a white carnation from the garden.

And went into some kind of private history.

And would never be forgotten.

Until now, when Naomi must wake.

Wednesday, November 16th, 1938: 8:45 p.m.

Naomi stirred. The dream always became unhappy. She wished that she could master that. Then she went back again, searching.

There were two incidents.

The first was a death.

One of the Chinamen fell over the cliff into the canyon, and died. This was one of those scandals of silence, in the same vein as Myra Jacobs’s shooting Mr. Danton. It happened at the party. Ruth’s birthday party. The circumstances were clouded. Very little was said. The police came, were paid, and went away. It had something to do with George. Naomi never knew what. She did not glean the connection with her husband for many years.

At any rate, it was on this day, at the birthday party, that George discovered her secret.

It was on this day that he dismissed her from his presence.

The discovery was made in the following manner:

Adolphus was sitting under a table…

(Miss Bonkers entered the room on the toes of her white shoes, and approached the deathbed.)

“Hello, my dear. Hello, my dear. Hello,” she said, very softly, very carefully enunciating every syllable of every word. But there was no response. Her patient’s eyes were open, and they gave her a look that was distant, but alive. Still, there was no real response—no indication that Naomi wanted to have or to say anything.

Miss Bonkers gave the folded hands a gentle pat and wandered over to the window.

The pelicans were flying…

Miss Bonkers sat down in her chair. She did not care to read. She had her book there, but she held it almost as though it were offensive—carefully, to one side. She would watch now, instead, and see what really happened.)

Adolphus was sitting under a table…

He often did this if there were large numbers of people. He did it because his mother and his doctors had made him aware that he was safe under tables and chairs. He was afraid of feet. And of falling.

The only place you could not fall from was the ground. The only place people did not walk was under tables. Ergo, he sat on the ground under tables.

George took his son’s eccentricities at face value. He adored Dolly and was proud of his strangeness. “My son sits under tables!” he would announce, proudly introducing Dolly to his friends. “My son, Adolphus, lies for many hours on the ground,” he said. And, “This is my son, who sleeps under his bed,” and, strangest and proudest of all, “Say hello to Adolphus…” and then, leaning in, confiding, perhaps, the laurels of genius, he would whisper with eyes significantly narrowed, “My son is very strange, you know.” With a wave of the hand he would indicate Dolly’s clothes. “His mother dresses him in white. She won’t tell me this, but she takes him to visit priests. Could be a saint. Maybe even the Pope, some day. My son, Adolphus. Very strange.”

So, Adolphus was sitting under a table.

It happened that a woman dropped a brooch.

Adolphus reached for it. A foot appeared. He withdrew his hand with overviolent self-protection. He was stabbed.

The brooch stuck into his palm.

He screamed.

The sight of blood was rare to Dolly (so much care had been taken) and he rose, spilling the table and its contents onto the grass.

Under ordinary circumstances, nothing need have gone wrong. A doctor would have been summoned (George was never there; today he was). The flow of blood was minimal, but to Dolly it looked like a flood. He screamed and screamed and screamed. He screamed about bleeding to death. His father (closer than his mother) rushed across the lawn to his side. In his fear and in the urgency to get help for himself (Naomi had said, always let me know at once if you bleed), Dolly told all. He said it to his father. The well-guarded, the perfectly hidden facts and eleven years of lying fell by the wayside, victims of panic.

Now George knew.

The party continued around them.

Bully danced with Letitia.

Three hundred guests applauded. Dolly was removed to his room and a doctor was called for, came, and mended the damage. But it was the end of a marriage.

George summoned Naomi to the library.

He closed the doors.

He was white with fury. Livid.

She bowed to fate.

(“Mrs. Damarosch! Mrs. Damarosch! Please, Mrs. Damarosch, let me take your arm. I’m going to help you, Mrs. Damarosch. I’m trying to help you. Let me help your)

All the time George yelled at her she stood there (in rose and gray) staring at the sky outside through the windows. She could remember that particular shade of blue for a long time.

As the tirade continued, she began to make plans. She would take the children to Topanga Beach. They would build a house. They had always wanted to live by the sea. Later, Ruth could be finished in Italy. She had always dreamed of that. Dolly would need doctors. More and more care as he grew older and more and more vulnerable. She had a great deal of money. That was all right. Falconridge had been lovely (she went right on thinking these things as the voice rose and the eyes blazed and little flecks of foam appeared at the sides of the mouth. He was screaming about purity of line, something to do with his children. He kept screaming “my children” this, and “my children” that, and things like “you are a blot on motherhood!” and “you have infamous blood!” or “for eleven years that boy has lived in the terror of your lies!” It was senseless to listen).

Falconridge had been the first home she had created from the ground up. But it had always seemed unreal. A fairy-tale castle. A monument to tenuous fame, tenuous happiness.

The very steps leading down from the gardens to the driveways and garages were built of people’s names. Wally Reid—Letitia Virden—Marie Dressier—and away down at the bottom was Naomi Nola. The first and last step. It depended on which direction you were going.

So that was Naomi’s dream.

Or parts of it. There was much more. But these things can be guessed at. We know she loved her husband. We know that she left him obediently. We know he was a fool. But Naomi knew that he was, like her, a dreamer. That she had buried his dream forever. She forgave him his foolishness and his selfishness, as perhaps readers of this chronicle may not.

When the tirade was over (and all else with it) George made his way blindly from the library. (Later that day he committed a murder.)