The Butterfly Plague (38 page)

“Dear God,” Ruth nearly fell right off the chair, and she stood there for at least a minute, gripping the edge of the shelf with her fingers, spilling her gin, unavoidably, relentlessly down the front of her suit. She heard it touch the floor, drop by drop.

“Is everything only in my mind?”

At last, shutting her eyes, she was able to climb down blind and turn her back on what she had seen. But she could not turn her mind away from it.

She placed her free hand on her stomach and pressed her fingers against the new life.

“It is there,” she said out loud. “It’s there. It’s there. It is there.”

She was praying, but she did not know she was praying.

She slow-marched her way back to the gin bottle, and this time poured herself a good four ounces. Dolly’s clothes lay placidly, like a straw figure emptied of straw, on their chair.

Ruth fumbled in her bag for her cigarettes and, lighting up, she heard herself moan—heard it so distinctly and was so divorced from the sound that she turned, thinking momentarily that someone else had entered the room.

She sat down.

There, beyond the shattered window, there was sunshine and a garden. Flowers. Trees. Birds. The curiously large influx of butterflies—so large that some called it a plague. There were the bees. The dragonflies. Avocado leaves. Pale grass and blue sky. A row of boxed Chinese elm.

It was nothing, this madness. Nothing but madness.

She was a notorious liar. A gross exaggerator. People said so. It must be true. She lied even to herself. They said that, too.

But her fingers pressed against her womb, and it had to be true.

It was.

It had to be.

She rose.

She went back, Alvarezing, to the bookcase and looked deliberately right up into the satyr’s face.

“Are you real?” she said.

For a brief moment she dwelt all the way back to the ancient mysteries: the dancing satyrs in the groves of Arcady; the lonely seduction of Panpipes in the moonlight; the shadows of deities beckoning from the trees; flowers that were heroes; stones that had souls. Ruth might have been a priestess then, since she could conjure so much from a plaster head, and such a potent lover from a stranger glimpsed beyond her shoulder.

“I don’t think about it,” she said to the satyr, and drew out the Dulac fairy tales, determined to alter the course of her thoughts before she left this place to go back to where they waited with Adolphus cleansed and mended, waited for her to clothe the dead.

She turned to the story of Cinderella.

“Once upon a time, etc., etc.,” Ruth read.

She turned the page.

“…There was a blond man whose eyes were perfectly blue.”

Ruth covered the words with her hand.

They weren’t there.

Rapidly, she turned more and more pages until, suddenly, something glossy and loose—a page that did not belong in the book—moved beneath her fingers.

She drew it out.

It was a photograph.

The fairy tales fell from her lap to the floor.

Two men…

Two men.

Two.

Men.

Ruth knelt down and tried to open the book, but the pages behaved like spiteful enemies. They refused her fingers entry. She grabbed it up in both hands and fought it open. At last the covers spread and, in beside the portrait of Rapunzel, Ruth jammed and crammed and threw the photograph. She pressed the covers tight. It wasn’t there. It was gone. It didn’t exist.

What was it?

What were they doing?

Who were they?

Why was it there?

Why must it exist? This terrible photograph. What did it mean?

She rose and carried the book, devoid forever, now, of loveliness and innocence, back to its place. Sadly, she lifted it up and slid it onto the shelf.

She stared with apprehension at the other titles there.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
.

The Tale of Peter Rabbit
.

The Wizard of Oz
.

Horrible. Horrible. Forever horrible.

So many children’s books, for Dolly had always loved his bedtime stories, and had loved (Ruth shuddered) particularly the illustrations, the simple make-believe. He’d kept them in good condition.

Slowly, determined to know what the pictures portended, Ruth reached the other books down.

One by one.

The photographs fell from every page. Like rain. They were not in envelopes, not pasted, and not protected in any way from the chance inspection of a guest.

The faces of the models were odd. Neither handsome nor ugly, they seemed like the faces of automatons. Their eyes held no expression whatsoever. Occasionally, one appeared to be smiling, but, studied more closely, it could be seen that the smile was superimposed, not conjured the way an actor might conjure an expression contrary to his own emotion, but literally laid on, as though, just before the photo was taken, the photographer had rearranged the facial features with his fingers.

They were tragic.

Ruth wept for them.

Life was a posture, forever.

8:30 a.m.

At length, Ruth replaced the paper people gently, one by one, pair by pair, and, closing the books, she replaced these, too, one by one, pair by pair, back up on the shelves.

She turned the satyr’s face to the wall.

Dolly had lived here.

He was gone.

There was blood on the road.

He had dreamed here and looked at pictures.

Nothing, anywhere, was real.

She reached into her purse for the car keys. She wanted to go.

She looked around her, standing in the center of the room.

Myra stared at her from the top of the piano.

Naomi stared from the wall.

Adolphus himself, his arm around an actress’s shoulder, smiled raucously, as though a joke had been told.

George glared.

Ruth, dripping wet, looked down, twenty-two years old, from the beach at Catalina. Victorious.

There, too, was Bruno. Smiling.

She couldn’t leave it like this. All these faces, the faces, too, inside the books. It was horrible.

No. She could not leave it.

She removed her matches. She strode to the sofa. She emptied the gin onto a pillow.

She struck a match, applied it, nearly scorched her hands, stepped back, looked for forgiveness into Dolly’s face, picked up his clothes, went to the door, looked back at the rapidly spreading holocaust, opened the door, stepped out, murmured, “He is gone,” and shut the door behind her.

She got to the car.

She threw in the clothes and shoes, ran back to the house, ran in, found Dolly’s canes (there were five of them), grabbed them up, saw the flames, and finally departed. Driving along, she began to weep. He was all gone, now. All gone. Forever. With Naomi and Myra. And his blood was on the road. And his flames were everywhere. Ruth knew that. She could hear the sirens, and prayed they would be late.

The Chronicle of
the Little Virgin

Monday, December 26th, 1938:

Somewhere in Culver City

10:00 a.m.

Her chin tied in place with black chiffon, her forehead swathed in Spanish lace, her cheeks taut with egg white, her eyes blazing with ambition, and her fingers drumming, Letitia Virden sat in the mottled dark of the theater watching herself “up there.”

Cooper Carter sat beside her—not right beside her, but beside her, one seat removed. For the past few weeks, Letitia had not tolerated the presence of anyone within three feet of her person. No one was allowed to touch her. Not even Cooper. She applied her own makeup, adjusted her own clothing, brushed her own hair, and the kisses of allegiance touched only the very tips of her extended and gloved fingers. In her handbag she carried a revolver which ensured adherence to the rules laid down by herself and enforced by Cooper Carter.

“We will have to reshoot that,” said the Virgin. “My mole is showing.”

“Hold it,” Cooper Carter roared. “Roll it back!”

The film shuddered to a stop, blinked at them, faded, and went out. It jabbered its sound track in a reasonable facsimile of Swedish as it sped backward, spewing numbers on the footage counter below the screen.

“What mole?” said Cooper Carter. “Where?”

This was tactful. He knew, of course, the mole was on her neck.

“My neck mole,” Letitia said. The words were pushed through her all but frozen lips, like letters through a mail slot. Her face had recently been lifted and the effects were strenuous. However, they would pass. They always did.

“Roll forward,” Cooper called.

The screen shimmered with lights. The color was magnificent. Photographed through tinted gauze, Letitia seemed all of twenty—and at the worst moments, twenty-five. She was dressed, in this sequence, as a Western woman of the 1870s.

“There,” said Letitia.

“Freeze it!” Cooper yelled.

The frame froze before them. The Virgin’s features were in profile, looking up. The hero’s chin obtruded three feet into the frame, screen left, but it was Letitia’s neck that loomed largest.

“You see it,” said Letitia. “Just there, about a foot below my ear. The edge is visible at scarfline.”

A tiny black or brown mark, like a half-moon—a mark that might only have been a shadow, were it not for the Virgin’s keen, professional eye—lurked for exactly five frames (they were counted over) as she tilted her head upward. On the screen, it could not have been more than six or seven square inches in acreage, but it might as well have been Texas, according to Letitia.

“You’re sure it matters, my dear,” said Cooper.

Letitia mangled a few syllables of protest, and Cooper then said, “Very well, we will add it to our list.”

Madonna ha sempre ragione
.

Mussolini is always right.

The reshoot would require a half-day’s work, full lighting crew, one actor at minimum wage, camera crews, producer, director, etc., etc. The total cost would be twelve hundred dollars. But Letitia must and would be satisfied.

“Let’s go on,” she said. “We’re nearly to the end.”

They were viewing what is known as a rough-cut, a loosely edited but complete version of the film, prior to the addition of sound effects and music. It was a critical stage, because the performances and direction stood alone, without the benefit of editorial taste and censorship.

Letitia’s performance, of course, was impeccable—the supporting performances suitably less effective, but adequately professional. The direction, credited to one Leslie R. Whitegown, was actually Letitia’s own, and it sparkled with invention and daring.

The script, written under the tutelage of the Virgin, had been dictated to Paul Tarrogon, Mercy Harper, and someone cryptically known (and credited) as Madame Rivi. This latter name could easily be traced to the Virgin, if you wanted to apply a little memory and much desire to know such things. For exactly one week, in 1923, Letitia had been secretly married to Prince Ottavio de Luca-Rivi. The Prince had died. He had been found at the bottom of a ravine in the Pyrenees, two weeks after the annulment of the marriage had been granted to the Little Virgin by the Vatican.

Now Letitia watched with mounting anticipation as her film drew to its close.

The composer, sitting three rows back, was in tears. The projectionist had similarly lost control of his emotions, and Cooper Carter was fighting back with intellectual vigor.

Letitia was beginning to hum over the tunes she would later dictate to the composer. They were sad tunes, noble and resigned, with religious overtones drawn from the works of Wagner.

However, one did not acknowledge debts. One simply spent one’s plagiarisms with a firm gesture of ownership. “These properties come out of my purse,” Letitia seemed to say, “and there you are.” It simply did not matter who filled the purse in the first place.

She tightened her grip on the padded arms of her leather chair. Here was the last scene of all.

“Up there,” the Virgin stood in the light of a wide orange sunset. The setting was Texas, with California’s mountains unaccountably visible in the distance.

There had been a terrible battle. Dirty little Mexicans littered the field with a wide variety of postures. Dead.

This was not the Alamo. (“The Alamo be damned,” Letitia had said. “I want something where we win and I want it big.” The Alamo was merely a sort of mote in her eye.) No. This battle had seemed forever a victory over the dirty little Mexicans and now there were only the Indians left to conquer.

Letitia portrayed Virginia Mary Washington, defiled by Mexicans and consequently unfit for marriage to her lifelong hero (played by Peter St. Paul). Unable to become a bride, Virginia Mary had nobly devoted her life to the founding of a convent, which even now was being raised on the field of battle. And all this before the last Mexican had twitched into eternity.

In this final scene, Peter St. Paul was being sent away by Letitia to kill the Indians and found America.

It was heart-rending, their saying good-bye, because, of course, the Virgin would turn back into her convent and close its doors forever on her love and on the world.

But: “Go in peace,” the Virgin said, “as I shall.”

There was a shot of waiting, nunlike figures, their gaze averted from the sexual implications of this man who was talking to their mistress.

Bells began to chime (and here the music would swell, pregnant with heaven’s promises) and the sunset altered its orange to red.

“May I not even kiss your hand?” said Peter St. Paul.

“No,” said Letitia. “No. It would be wrong. It would be wrong.” There were tears in her eyes.

Peter St. Paul leapt athletically and gracefully onto the back of his blue-tinted pony.

“Good-bye, Virginia Mary,” he said.

“Good-bye, my darling,” said Letitia.

“Good-bye.”

The hero raised his hat, the heroine her shining face.

(Letitia’s mole shone forth once more at this point, but no one noticed this time, least of all the Virgin. The tears were flowing in universal concord.)

The hero kicked his pony with his spurs and fled away into history.