The Butterfly Plague (39 page)

Virginia Mary and the sisters filed decorously into the nearly complete chapel.

Nothing remained but the rotting Mexicans in the field.

America was safe.

THE END

12:30 p.m.

Everyone had gone to lunch. Letitia and Cooper were eating in her dressing room, which was located on one of the five mammoth sound stages so far erected by Cooper Carter at his new studios, Vir-Car Productions.

It was a gift to Letitia.

Cooper’s leather coat, full-length, hung from the back of the partly open door.

He poured champagne and ate another triangle of chicken sandwich.

There was a noise, a sort of clicking sound, which came, echoing itself, from the far side of the stage.

“What’s that?” said Letitia. “What is it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is Harold there, guarding the door?”

Cooper looked out.

“Yes. Although he appears to be asleep.”

“Botheration. If he wasn’t such a good driver, I’d fire him.”

“Harold!” Cooper Carter called.

The Negro body jerked and twisted. It came awake.

“Yessuh, Mr. Carter?”

“There’s a noise out there, Harold. See what it is.”

“I don’t hear nothin’. Where ‘bouts, Mr. Carter?”

“On the sound stage. Someone is there. Go and look.”

“Yessuh, but it’s awful dark out there.”

“I don’t care. Go and look.”

“Yessuh. I’s goin’ now.”

Carter stepped back into the dressing room.

“He’s gone to look now. I’m sure it isn’t anything.”

Letitia laid out a hand of solitaire. “I don’t like spies,” she said. “And I’ll bet you it is a spy.”

“Come, come, now. We’re perfectly safe.”

“I don’t like it,” she said. “Have you got your revolver?”

“Yes. Have you got yours?”

“Yes.”

“Then nothing can happen.”

“Pour me some more champagne, Cooper.”

“Of course.”

Harold stumbled and bumbled around in the dark. The stage was enormous, and it was quite empty, except for lights and camera dollies and cables, placed in strategic positions.

“Is you there, anyone?” he called. “Who is it?”

There was no reply. Only a contained clicking, as of…what?

Harold wandered to the far end.

As of revolved chambers.

“Oh, my,” said Harold. “Oh my! Feet, get me outa here!”

He fled into the light.

Cooper reached for his revolver.

“It wasn’t no one,” Harold lied.

“Well, keep your eyes open.”

“Yessuh.”

Letitia went on laying out cards.

Some leaders are calm, while others keep watch.

It was Cooper who ate his sandwich, revolver in hand.

“Do you think it was anyone?” Letitia asked.

“No,” said Cooper. “Probably not.”

“I do,” said Letitia. “I think it was George.”

“George?”

“Of course.” Letitia smiled. “Haven’t you guessed?”

“Guessed what, my dear?”

“George wants to kill us,” said Letitia.

And they laughed.

“Just think,” Letitia said, “for the rest of our lives, champagne and chicken sandwiches, bullet-proof glass and armored limousines.”

“Will you mind?” said Cooper Carter. “Always having to live behind a wall?”

“Not a bit,” said Letitia. “That’s our privilege. It’s what we’ve worked for. And, besides…I’ve been living that way an awfully long while. The difference will be that I don’t have to live that way alone any more. I’ve never cherished being alone. It’s just been the price, up to now. But, once we launch this picture—all that will be over forever.” She looked across at Cooper and gave him a rare smile. “We’ve done all the right things, haven’t we; made all the right moves; taken all the right steps. We’ve brought in all the right people. There isn’t anything we can’t accomplish, after this.”

Cooper was watching himself in the mirror—mindful of the open door behind him. Letitia couldn’t take her eyes off him. His wonderful profile—the strength of his bearing—the fervor of his vision: the way he looked at his own image.

“One day,” she said, “that glorious head of yours will adorn the coin of the realm. Do you realize that? The Presidency.”

Cooper Carter laughed and waved the idea aside.

“No,” said Letitia. “You mustn’t make light of it. That’s what we’re working for.”

“I’m not making light of it,” said Cooper. “I was only thinking: first things first. This is, after all, the beginning—and nothing more.”

“Yes,” said Letitia. “I know. This is just the beginning.

But what a beginning! Do you know—I’m just beginning, myself, to realize what it is we’re doing. This film is our personal declaration of freedom. This is what we’ve wanted—always: the money and the power to be free.”

“No, no, my love—it’s more than that,” said Cooper Carter. “A great deal more than that. What we have now is the money and the power to define our freedom—any way we like. With your image and my empire, what we have now is the freedom to seize power.”

“Oh,” said Letitia, “all our dreams…”

“Yes,” said Cooper. And he stood up behind her so they made one image in the mirror. He even dared to lay his hand upon her shoulder. And she let him.

“There,” said Cooper. “The two of us.”

Letitia narrowed her gaze. Her grip, on Cooper’s hand, tightened.

“What is it?” he said.

There were tears in her eyes.

“What is it?”

“It’s just—it’s just that I’ve suddenly realized exactly how the movie ends. I mean the music, Cooper—the music…”

“What, then? Tell me.”

“Why, ‘America the Beautiful,’ of course.”

“Of course,” said Cooper Carter. “‘America the Beautiful’…How else could it end?”

Reflected in the mirror, the Virgin seated—Cooper Carter standing behind her, they began to hum the anthem—very slightly out of tune. But that hardly mattered. The point was—they were singing it together.

9:30 p.m.

George Damarosch had wandered the streets all afternoon, seeking out bars where he would not be known, bartenders who would not take one look at him and say, “Get out!”

This part of the city was rarely visited by celebrities. Their haunts were in Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, and Hollywood. Los Angeles itself was a city of bums and businessmen, clerks and secretaries, salesladies and hardware salesmen, religious fanatics and writers.

The bars were for truck drivers and garbage men, resting prostitutes and people going to and fro from perfectly ordinary, everyday jobs. Their faces were plain and uncomplicated. Their minds were engaged in college football, the news from China, and how to pay back the bank. They paid no attention to George. George was only one of them.

He came out into the evening and found himself near Sherman Square. He went in.

He sat on a bench.

Nearby, a pervert was trying to attract the attention of a student who was reading a book under a lamp. Yesterday’s Santa Claus, now out of work, rested peacefully on another bench, feeding an occasional pigeon with stolen peanuts. A man and a woman, whose home was breaking up, argued about their possessions in low, unemotional monotones. A young girl was weeping. Two children climbed a palm tree. Or tried to.

George closed his eyes.

He knew that it was over. The long dream that had pushed and prodded him and kept him from total collapse—was over. Letitia was re-entering history without him and he didn’t know what to do.

He had vowed he would destroy her. But wasn’t it true already that she had destroyed him? And how could the destroyed destroy his destroyer?

How?

How could Letitia Virden be destroyed? The Little Virgin. The years had not destroyed her. Scandal had not. Age never would, so long as film could attest to her youthful presence. Society wouldn’t. History couldn’t. He could not.

How could he?

He’d loved her so. It seemed to George that he had always loved her, but of course he hadn’t. In his heart of hearts he knew that if he’d had her, had her when he first wanted her, she would now be long forgotten. But he hadn’t had her, and now he could never forget her.

He thought about death.

Naomi was dead. And now Adolphus. Would he die? George?

No. He was indestructible. There was no place for death in George’s life. He would drift, but not toward death.

He’d killed once.

He remembered it.

Again it was that fateful day.

The day of Ruth’s birthday party, 1922.

George, when he was George—the George Damarosch—had had a fearful temper. He spoke in tirades and he dreamed in broadsides.

“Motion pictures will die with the advent of sound. They will cease to be an art and become a mere industry, fulfilling the needs of the public, and never again the needs of the artists.”

“The history of ancient Rome, the history of Europe, the history of the British Empire—these all belong in books. The history of America will be told on film.”

And perhaps his most famous epithet: “Beware of a future that does not mirror the past.”

Attention. He had had a great deal of attention when, all those years ago, he had been the famous George D. Damarosch.

Now he was a derelict sitting in a park, regretting his memories.

His mind was full of shouts—his own voice raised against himself.

Why did I miss it? Why?

He sat on the steps with Letitia. He wooed her and he lost her to Bully Moxon.

How long ago it was he could not calculate—not in his heart. In his heart it seemed like yesterday. In his mind he knew that it was sixteen years ago, at least, but his mind was full of anger. The love was in his heart. George’s heart and mind had never met. They argued from a great distance. They were never reconciled. He was split—not down the middle, but in half.

He had been just so, that faraway afternoon. Letitia had rejected him in the heart—and when he fled from that scene, he was confronted by his wife and son—rejected in the mind.

He tore his life apart with words that afternoon, for it should not be forgotten that tantrums and tirades change the lives of their instigators as well as the lives of those they scream and yell at. Naomi was not the only loser. George also lost. Her. His children lost their father—but he also lost them. They were willfully misplaced, but still lost to him. His tantrum cost them all their futures. He broke them into individuals.

The park darkened.

The pervert left without the student.

The girl stopped crying and the children sat beneath, instead of high in, the tree.

George remembered that when he had left Naomi standing in the library at Falconridge, he had rushed out into the midst of his guests. He’d run (an unusual sight, George Damarosch running), tipping over friends and tables all the way to a private arbor at the rear of the house.

Three people were there already.

Letitia Virden. Bullford Moxon. And a Chinese-American gardener by the name of Ping Sam.

Ping Sam was unusually conscientious. Even on the day of the giant party, when he might have had every excuse not to work in the gardens, there he was, in his coolie hat and blue-denim uniform, weeding the flower beds and trimming the roses.

Letitia, a mere girl, it seemed (as George cast his eye back on the scene), dressed in blue, was seated on a wooden bench. Bully was standing. Ping Sam, about ten feet away, unaware of either film star, was fingering and hoeing out weeds in a bed of red and white carnations.

George, in the white heat of his brainstorm, arrived in the arbor gasping for breath. There was something desperately silent about him. He wanted to cry out in his anguish, but language rejected him. Voiceless, he remained undetected.

Bully had just said, “I love you,” to Letitia, and she, the nominal guardian of a nation’s virginity, had cast down her eyes in the secret admission that she, by some girlish miracle, loved him.

Bully, sensing his victory, rejoicing in it, and ecstatic with anticipation, danced out of the arbor over to the carnation bed. He clapped Ping Sam on the back and he said, “Today, my good fellow, I am loved. Give me one of those flowers.”

Ping Sam leaned against his hoe, pushed back his coolie hat and laughed. He often went to the pictures and, like all Americans, he knew and adored this odd little man before him, and the tiny sainted woman in the arbor. He watched approvingly as Bully plucked the fatal flower.

The dancing man returned to the Virgin.

He did a strange thing.

He did not present her with the flower.

Instead, he adorned his own lapel with it, and took her by the hands and danced away with her onto the lawns and among the guests and over the nasturtium beds and along the terrace past Ruth and under the windows from which Adolphus watched while the doctors stemmed the flow of his blood and down the Star Steps and into the parking lot and through the assembled motorcars and out among the trees and onto a bank of hybrid grass and into Letitia’s astounded arms and into the future of her unmasking—generating, flooding her with child and with his own rejoicing. And all of this was seen or known (in his rage, he mentally saw what he did not actually see) by George Damarosch, who turned, now, white and furious, to the Chinese-American gardener, Ping Sam.

“Why?” he said, his voice shaking with his sense of incalculable loss, “why did you let him do that?”

Ping Sam blinked and reached for the hoe and returned to his weeding. Mr. George was often angry. Work and silence were the answers.

But not this time.

George advanced over the flowers, marched like an army over the carnations and roses and lilies.

“Why did you allow it?” he screamed. “What have you done?” he roared. “Why did you stand there, hoeing your Jeedy weeds? Ping Sam? Why have you done this to me?”

In his mind, George had leaped far ahead of Bully. He saw the child, he saw the son he would not have of Letitia, saw it rising in the world of the healthy and the whole, running away from him. A son that was not Adolphus, who must die. An object, not a being.

Ping Sam began to retreat, with his wide black eyes on George’s face. He tripped over his hoe. He made his way, backward, to death.