I Don't Know How the Story Ends (15 page)

Miss Blanche

The price Ranger paid for getting out of bed the next day was a licking from his father for the Sundance incident. Oddly, this seemed to clear the air between them so they were on speaking terms again, even if the speech was not especially warm.

We couldn't meet Sam at Echo Park until the following morning. Ranger was so glad to be out that he turned a cartwheel on our way to the streetcar stop—though he had to limit himself to one because his head still hurt.

But Sam quashed some of those high spirits after hearing the revised scenario. “Way too complicated. Where do we get a field hospital, not to mention a field surgeon? Not to also mention an invalid grandmother—which we don't even need.”

“We have to show that the girls have a good father,” Ranger insisted. “A good father wouldn't leave them behind unless he knew they were in safe hands. And it wouldn't be his fault if the grandmother got sick after he left and ended up in the hospital so the no-good brother has to take over. Of course, we can explain all that in a title card, but pictures are for showing.”

“A hospital is a public place,” Sam pointed out. “What did I tell you about public places?”

“Only semipublic,” I put in—obliged to support Ranger, since he'd accepted my scenario. “A place where most of the people are in bed couldn't exactly be public, could it? If we found a hospital or sanitarium where there's a porch or courtyard, and if we got there at the right time of day and explained to the nurses what we were doing…”

“Explain what we're doing,” Sam repeated flatly. “What
are
we doing?”

“We'll tell 'em we're making a photographic record of the healing profession,” Ranger said confidently. “It's true enough, and who wouldn't want to be in a photographic record?”

“I can think of a few,” Sam muttered. “Besides, you've stuck in twice as many war scenes—before, we just had you marching in a parade and scouting on horseback. Now, we've got that, plus you getting wounded and toted to the field hospital—with Sylvie as the ambulance driver maybe?”

“All that might need a little more thought,” Ranger admitted. “But Grandma in the hospital—that's easy, and it'll add pathos to the picture.”

Sam made a very brief remark about pathos, and Ranger tried to change his mind with no evident success, and it ended up a most unsatisfactory meeting.

And I felt it more than Ranger did! On our way home, with Sylvie darting from one empty seat to another while the streetcar driver kept an edgy eye on her, I couldn't help fretting out loud.

“What if Sam backs out of the project?” I asked. “Is there any way we could get another camera?”

“Not that I know of,” Ranger told me, disgustingly cheerful. “Sam gets foot-draggy every now and then. I'm used to it. He won't back out, believe me. But how come you care so much all of a sudden?”

“Who says I care that much?” The words came out snappish, and Ranger grinned at me. Because I did care, of course—a string of images on film had come to mean the world to me.

“I'll talk to him tomorrow,” Ranger said. “He'll see the light.”

Surpassing strange for Ranger to be the calm one, since he rarely was, but that state of affairs didn't last long. For when his father joined us for dinner that night, he brought news of particular interest.

After some random chitchat about Mack Sennett's latest run-in with the Santa Monica police (when Mr. Sennett ran a Keystone Cop car off the pier and caused a panic among church picnickers who thought it was for real), and some good-natured teasing about Mother's motion-picture career (“Don't make a federal case of this, Titus,” she said warningly while I felt my ears getting hot)—after all that, and while the table was being cleared for dessert, Mr. Bell turned to his son and said, “By the way, I had lunch with D. W. this afternoon.”

Ranger nearly choked on an éclair.

“Congratulated him on
Hearts of the World
. Glad to see he's back into solid, clean entertainment—though I didn't tell him that, of course.”

“I should hope not,” Aunt Buzzy said, laughing. “Let's not get started on the merits of
Intolerance
.”

“Water under the bridge,” Titus Bell agreed. “He has some interesting projects in mind. We agreed to talk further. Suppose we invite him over to dinner sometime in the next couple of weeks.”

While he and Aunt Buzzy discussed dates, Ranger was struggling to force down his éclair, his eyes behind the glasses as round as nickels. “Say, Pa…”

“Yes, my son?”

“Would you… Could I…”

“Join us for dinner? I don't see why not.”

• • •

Unable to sleep, Ranger slipped into our room after eleven. “I've changed my mind about fathers. Mine's not all bad.”

“I thought he was a tight-fisted stuffed shirt,” Sylvie murmured sleepily from her bed.

“Who said that?”

“You did.”

“Perish the thought.” Ranger waved away all previous opinions. “Know what I'm thinking? If we can have the picture finished by then, I'm going to ask him to see it. Mr. Griffith, I mean.”

“Well, of course,” I said. “That was the plan all along, wasn't it?”

“Yeah, but I wasn't sure how it would really happen. Now that I know when and where, well… We
have
to finish it, Iz. Soon as possible, so we have plenty of time for cutting. Better forget the war scenes: no time.”

I grabbed my father's picture from the nightstand and held it up. “Can we still use this?”

“Sure. We'll make the Youth a member of the Home Guard who stands ready to defend his country, but in the meantime he vows to defend Matchless and Little Sister. I'll talk to Sam tomorrow and come to a meeting of minds. While I'm gone, see what you can do with the scenario.”

Ranger left on his bicycle as soon as he could get away the next morning, after promising Aunt Buzzy he would pick up two pairs of high-top boots and a button hook at the shoe repair on Hollywood and Vine. Shortly after, I was trying to work up a scenario minus war scenes when Esperanza came to the drawing-room door to tell me I had a telephone call.

“For me?” This was unheard-of. “Who is it?”

“The young man who calls for Mr. Ranger sometime. I tell him he's not home, he say he'll speak to you.”

Full of wonder, I followed her to the front hall where the telephone was. “Hello?”

I heard the operator's voice crackle, “Go ahead, Edendale.”

“Isobel.” Sam's voice sounded flatter than usual, or maybe that was just the wire. “Got a message for Ranger.” I didn't tell him Ranger was on the way, but waited until he got some delicate throat-clearing taken care of. “For you too,” he continued. “Forest Grove Sanitarium on Thursday. Meet me by nine.”

“What?”

“Be sure to bring Sylvie.”

“Of course we'll bring Sylvie. But, Sam, what made you—”

“See ya. 'Bye.”

What made you change your mind?
The question echoed long after he hung up so abruptly, and Ranger had no answers when he returned much later than Aunt Buzzy thought he should. At least he'd remembered the shoes.

“It's a mystery,” he said, once we'd retreated to the rose arbor. “Sam just told me it's all set up, so we hashed out the shots. One of her and you and Sylvie, and a close-up of her and Sylvie, and one of you introducing me to her and she gives me her blessing.”

“But what
her
? Who is she?”

“Search me. He knows somebody at the sanitarium, I'll bet. If she looks grandmotherly and takes direction, that's enough for me.”

• • •

Forest Grove Sanitarium had a genteel but rundown air, like a French aristocrat reduced to washing dishes after the Revolution. An aristocrat, I might add, who did not bathe enough. It was a three-story brick building facing an ill-kept lawn with forlorn patches of grass spearing up unevenly. As we walked up the path, I noticed two wounded soldiers sitting under an alder tree, dressed in odd ensembles of uniform parts and pajamas. They made me feel a bit guilty, as though I should be visiting hospitals instead of making pictures.

Sam met us in the front hallway. “The camera's all set up. Light's only good for thirty more minutes, so we'd better hoof it. You can call the lady ‘Miss Blanche.'”

He led us to the second-floor gallery, where “Miss Blanche” reposed in the very last chair. She looked elderly enough to be a grandmother, but the eager gray eyes she turned our way had none of that faded, rheumy look you see in the aged.

Sam introduced the three of us, and Ranger snapped to it, assuming his most winsome manner to explain to Miss Blanche what we were up to. Meanwhile, the lady's eyes fastened on Sylvie. They never left Sylvie for long during the shooting, even when I took her hand or Ranger knelt down before the chair as though asking for her blessing. At one point, she got in her head that I was the maid and kept asking me for a needle and thread so she could sew up a tear in Sylvie's dress. She nearly drove Ranger to distraction, but he persevered with various angles and sequences until Sam told him the film was almost gone. Sylvie had climbed up in the old lady's lap by then, and the two of them were getting along famously.

A fluttering sound in the camera like a frantic moth in a box signaled the end of the film. Sam straightened up, turned his cap around, removed the crank, and loosened the mounting bolts on the tripod in his usual efficient way. I noticed his eyes seemed brighter.

“Come on, Sylvie,” I told her. “Say good-bye to Miss Blanche.”

My sister kissed the lady on the cheek and began to ease off her lap, and that's when the trouble started. Miss Blanche tightened her grip, and our efforts to break it only made her frantic. “No, you can't have her. You can't take my pet away. Hold tight, Trudy. No!”

Sam let some pretty strong language slip just before he joined us. As he worked Sylvie loose, he told us to clear out. “Now! I'll wrap it up here—just go!”

With a last firm tug, he removed the lady's hands from my sister, who was crying by now (Sylvie I mean). Miss Blanche was crying too, and as we made our escape, her sorrowful wail followed us: “
Truuuudy
!
”

“What was that all about?” Ranger exclaimed in the hallway. He paused to swing the sobbing Sylvie up in his arms.

Two nurses, alerted by the hubbub, marched past us with starchy disapproval.

“Fudge!” I stopped abruptly. “I left my pocketbook.”

“Let it go. Sam'll bring it.”

“But it has our streetcar passes! Of all the… I remember exactly where I put it, on the coatrack near the door. Go on. I'll meet you outside.”

On the porch, Miss Blanche had caused quite a scene and the patients were buzzing with curiosity. I slipped behind them to get to the rack. I thought Sam had slipped away until one of the nurses around Miss Blanche turned aside with a hypodermic needle. There he was in a wicker chair, holding Miss Blanche's hand.

“I'd have thought you'd know better,” another nurse was scolding him. “Any more pranks like this—”

I reached out and secured my pocketbook as the nurse with the needle bustled away. Miss Blanche, already much quieter, was moaning for Trudy as Sam hiked his chair closer and put an arm around her. Stroking her hair, he said, “It's all right now, Mama. It's all right.”

I didn't think he had noticed me, but before I could slip away he raised his voice a little. “It don't work, Isobel. Some film can't be cut.”

I stammered out something—I don't know what—but he never looked my way.

• • •

Ranger was pleased with the shots we got. Much to my relief, he entertained Sylvie in the streetcar so I could piece together what just happened. Rumor was that Mrs. Service had deserted the family after their tragedy. Maybe Jimmy Service himself had put out that story, once it was clear that a change in climate and scenery had done the missus no good. Not very noble, perhaps, but no worse than Mr. Rochester, who had shut his own wife in an attic and pretended she didn't exist.

The one I couldn't understand was Sam. Knowing the state of his mother's mind, what had possessed him to expose her to another little girl, only to tear her away again? The more I thought about it, the angrier I got. I was almost simmering when Sylvie bounced across the aisle and asked, “Who's Trudy?”

“She was Sam's… She was Miss Blanche's little girl, I think.”

“Did she die?”

“Probably.”

“Then,” Sylvie declared, “I'm glad I could be her little girl for a while. She was glad too, don't you think?”

“Yes,” I said. “For a while.” The lady's face came to me unbidden, gazing at her little girl. If I were Sam, wouldn't I want to see her like that just one more time? On film forever?

But
some film can't be cut
. In life, some of it had to stay, no matter how desperately you wished it away.

By the time we reached our stop, the sun was at high noon and we were hot and starving. Halfway up the drive, Ranger caught sight of his father's long, blue touring car in front of the house. It was supposed to be on its way to San Francisco with Titus Bell inside.

“Maybe he's been delayed for an urgent meeting with D. W.!” Ranger cried and galloped toward the house. Sylvie was right behind him, but I took my time. If Ranger's life revolved around Mr. Griffith, I was pretty sure his father's life did not.

And I was right. What delayed him had more to do with us.

News

The screen door banged behind me as I crossed the hall and entered the great room. There I found this tableau: Mother, pale-faced in the wing chair with a paper in her lap and Titus Bell by her side; Ranger near the door, biting his lip while Sylvie clung to his hand. Aunt Buzzy stood by the sideboard, a whiskey tumbler in one hand and a bottle of spirits in the other. Every eye, whether teary, shocked, or anxious, was on me.

It was my worst dream come true. I could almost feel the shuddery ground of that nightmare battlefield under my feet. “Has something happened to Father?”

“Dear Belladonna.” Aunt Buzzy set down the bottle and glass and hurried over, putting her arm around me. “It's not so bad, and if we all pull together like troopers and put our chins up—”

“What is it?” I demanded, pulling away from her. Whereupon Sylvie let loose a wail and bolted across the room to dive into Mother's lap. I half noticed that Titus Bell rescued the paper just in time.

Aunt Buzzy reached out a hand, then dropped it. “We got a letter from your father today. He wrote it himself, so we know it can't be too bad—”

“
What
can't be bad?” I burst out again. “Someone tell me what happened!”

“He's been hurt.” Mother spoke up suddenly. “On the front. It seems he's been going on ambulance runs instead of staying at the field hospital, but of
course
he would never tell us that, so we wouldn't be worried.” She tossed her head in exasperation, as I recalled her doing when Father would come home late from a call without the pins or the half-dozen eggs she'd asked him to pick up for her.

“How bad is it?” My voice sounded echoey in my ears.

“Apparently his ambulance hit a mine.” Mr. Titus Bell took charge, and I was never so glad for his resoluteness as I was then. “The problem is, this letter is dated a month ago, and he writes as if there was one earlier that explained everything. He hurt his right arm. That's all we can tell for sure. He says something about the bandages being taken off tomorrow, and… Well, here, Isobel. You're old enough to read it for yourself.”

He crossed the room with his long stride and delivered the missive to me. Then he reached for his hat, informing Aunt Buzzy, “I'm going down to Western Union to send a telegram to the War Office. We'll raise a ruckus 'til we find out what's going on.”

I was staring at the paper, which was in my father's handwriting, but all the letters looked wobbly. Aunt Buzzy was talking, perhaps to me, and I could not concentrate with all the chatter.

“Excuse me,” I said and took my leave with the letter clutched in one hand.

“Gosh, Isobel,” Ranger said as I passed him, “I'm really sorry…”

“Let her go,” I heard Mother say, as I climbed the steps to the east wing and passed wraithlike through the doorway.

The letter was short:

Dear Ones,

Well I finally did it—figured out a way to come home. Sorry to get beat up in the process but I'm feeling better now. The old right shoulder still complains but I expect it always will. The left side is almost as good as new, which explains the disgraceful hand. Behold the script of a lefty. They took the bandages off last week and I suppose it could be worse. If everybody will just stay to the left of me from now on I'll get along famously. I hear through the grapevine that discharges are coming down soon, tho' not too soon for me. When it happens I'll fight off all obstacles and limp down to Bristol and camp out on the docks until some U.S.A.-bound vessel lets me aboard. God willing, when I finally see my lambs again, I'll be the gratefullest, happiest sack of bones in the world…

By then I was blinking constantly and feared making a soppy mess of the letter. There wasn't much more to it anyway. For the rest of the afternoon, Mother pulled herself together—though she hadn't fallen that much apart, as far as I could tell. When Titus Bell returned from Western Union, the two of them got busy raising a ruckus. It was the most sedate ruckus I'd ever seen: mostly letter-writing, with calls to the local selective service board for names and addresses. Whenever the telephone was free, Aunt Buzzy used it to cancel engagements for the week, and Ranger kindly undertook to keep Sylvie entertained. That left me with nothing to do but think, and after a quiet evening meal, I tracked down Ranger with the intention of sharing my thoughts.

He was playing croquet with Sylvie, but with only half a mind since she was way ahead of him. An apprehensive look crossed his face at my approach.

“We have something to discuss,” I said.

“Look, Isobel, I expect you want to drop the picture, and if you do, I understand, really. But all the same, if you'd just—”

“You
don't
understand, really,” I said. “I don't want to drop the picture.”

Clearly taken by surprise, he dropped his jaw instead.

“Ranger!” Sylvie called from the far end of the course. “It's your turn!” He knocked the ball absently and missed the wicket by a foot. “You're not even trying!” she complained.

“I want to finish it,” I went on, “only with a few changes. We need to reshoot those scenes at the house, with Father's picture included.”

“Uh-huh.” He nodded. “We were going to do that already.”

“And mention him more in the title cards.”

“Sure.”

“And when we shoot the war scenes in the field hospital—”

“We took the war scenes out, remember?”

“Oh.” My brain may have been more disordered than I thought. “Well, of course I remember.”

“Uh-huh.” Ranger shook his head pityingly as he hit the ball again, bypassing the wicket altogether. (“
Ranger
!
” Sylvie hollered in exasperation.) “If we even have a prayer of getting this thing done by the end of next week, one more day of shooting is all we can plan for.”

“Well…” I began, wondering how to suggest he might have to forget his date with Mr. Griffith.

“So,” Ranger went on, “we go back to the studio in Daisy Dell and we reshoot that scene where the Youth comes to call. You—Matchless—can show him your dad's picture. Sam can get a close-up on it, with flowers and a little flag. Sylvie can do something cute, and Matchless tells the Youth about her father and…uh…he's inspired then and there to take a vow on the old man's—I mean, on the noble dad's—picture to watch out for his girls until he comes home. That's all we have time to shoot, but I promise we'll do a bang-up job on it. Then we'll decide how to put it all together. What do you think?”

I didn't have to think long. “Get Sam on the phone.”

Two days later we were on the streetcar again, all four of us, headed for Daisy Dell and what we fondly supposed would be our last day of shooting. Besides our usual equipment, we brought a broom, a hammer, and a few extra nails in case something had blown over or fallen down in the two weeks since we'd visited our “studio.” In Ranger's Boy Scout knapsack I had carefully packed Father's picture, plus some silk flowers I'd borrowed from an old hat, and a small flag Sylvie had bought last Fourth of July.

The bag also held an old gray uniform coat and a conductor's cap. Ranger had an extra shot in mind: me standing beside the picket fence in front of the rundown house at the head of the path. The postman approaches (Ranger, wearing the conductor's cap and a handlebar mustache), tips his cap, and hands me a letter. Upon opening the letter, I first register surprise, then delirious joy. It imparts the news that Father is on his way home.

“But where does that go in the story?” I asked.

“I don't know,” Ranger admitted. “It just might be good to have, as long as we're there and the film holds out.”

Sam was quiet on the journey after telling me, “I hope your father's okay.” Being quiet was hardly out of the ordinary for him, but from the way he refused to meet my eyes, he seemed a bit rueful. I had to wonder if cutting his own mother into the picture was one of the things he rued.

Someday, if the talking fit ever seized him again in my presence, I would ask him. For now, we had work to do. Getting off at the Cahuenga Pass stop, we hauled our bulky baggage to the end of the road, where the dilapidated little house stood with its peeling picket fence. It looked as abandoned as ever, and just as well, for Sylvie's clattering on the porch in her hard-soled boots was enough to raise the most resolute invalid or corpse.

Sam set up quickly, and Ranger outlined the scene for us while attaching his handlebar mustache with a dab of spirit gum. I straightened it for him before taking my place.

With Sam rolling the film, Ranger approached along the path while I swept a walk that wasn't there. He smiled and touched his cap to me. Then he reached into his pouch and handed over an envelope. As he walked on, I ripped open the envelope and scanned the contents, showing surprise and then delight. I turned to Sylvie. “It's a letter—from Father!”

Taking her cue like a trooper, Sylvie ran over and joined me in a chorus of “He's coming home!” As we turned to run toward the house, Ranger yelled, “Cut!”

“That was fine,” Sam said, closing the shutter.

“Wait a minute.” Ranger hesitated. “Let's do it one more time. As a bad news scene.”

His statement was met by silence. “Why?” I finally asked.

“I don't know,” he said. “I just thought we might need one. What do you think, Sam?”

The cameraman merely shrugged. “It's your film.”

“What do you mean by ‘bad news'?” I pressed him.

“We just do the scene again, everything the same with the postman and all, only when you open the letter, you look sad instead of happy.”

“What if I don't want to? What if I just refuse?”

“Come on, Iz. It's just one scene. Probably won't even use it. You think it's bad luck, or what?”

That's exactly what I did think—or feel. It wasn't rational or reasonable, and I knew he'd make that point if I admitted it, so I didn't. Leaving me no choice but to do the scene again, and upon opening the envelope, my face registered shock and sorrow.

“Good!” Ranger shouted from the side. “Excellent—we'll leave it at that.”

We gathered up our stuff and pushed on.

Though it hadn't been that long since we'd visited Daisy Dell, the approach looked different. When we came closer, we saw why: tire tracks. The path had been widened by hacking brush and knocking down trees, and was now so ridgy that we struggled under the weight of our equipment.

“Sun's getting high,” remarked Sam, who was in the lead. “Better hurry.” We hurried, as sweat began to bead up on my forehead and trickle down my shoulder blades.

“I'm thirsty,” Sylvie piped up.

“Uh-oh,” said Sam.

He'd stopped on the edge of the clearing, and the rest of us pooled around him. What greeted our eyes was—nothing.

All the scrub cedar was cleared, the brush mowed. Most astonishing: the house was gone, erased, like it had been a figment of our fond imaginations. There was nothing left of it except scraps of curtain mashed into the ground. A
No Trespassing
sign fluttered from a post.

“Criminy!” Sylvie breathed at last. “Where did they put our house?”

Sam carefully set down the camera and tripod and crossed over to the sign. “‘Krotona Arts Alliance,'” he read. “‘Future site of concert venue.' That's nice.”

“Did they move it someplace?” Sylvie persisted. “Could we ask them?”

I stood at the edge of the clearing, clutching the knapsack to my chest, while my shaky faith in motion pictures' ability to change history gave up and burrowed right into the ground.

Ranger picked over the site in a desultory way, but there was nothing salvageable in it, and nothing to do eventually but traipse back downhill and wait for the streetcar, a most forlorn crew. Sylvie was reluctant to give up her notion that the house might still exist somewhere, but once I not-too-gently got it through her head that it was probably in pieces, she burst into despairing tears.

The only time available for a story conference was on the streetcar. Neither Sam nor I could work up much spirit. The project was back in Ranger's hands, and like a football player with the pigskin, he ran full-out.

“So,” he began, “here's what we have:

“Opening setup with the girls' sad plight and scenes of the no-good uncle carousing with his chums.

“Scene of the girls at the hospital visiting their aged grandmother, including close-up with Sylvie.” Sam shifted on his seat but said nothing.

“What about the father?” I asked. “Will he even be in it?”

“I was thinking about that,” Ranger said. “What if Sam gets a close-up of your dad's picture, and maybe a shot of you and Sylvie looking at it with devotion? We can follow that with the Home Guard marching. Then we'll cut in one of ocean shots Sam got at Santa Monica Beach to show your father has gone overseas!” Ranger was getting his spirits back, and I acknowledged his latest idea with a wan smile.

Next, the rescue on horseback, followed by Dauntless Youth visiting the girls in their house (making Ranger sigh
Alas!
for its loss); maybe another shot of Father's picture, too bad we couldn't show it in the proper surroundings, but
Alas!
again.

Then the Youth marching with the Home Guard—

“But I thought we wouldn't use those, since you're not going to war,” I objected.

“I can sign up, can't I? Every young man has to do his duty. Those scenes are too good to leave out.”

“Even,” Sam drawled, “if they don't add anything.”

“Who says they don't? They establish my—I mean, the Youth's—character and show he's no coward because at the end…” He paused for a whole city block.