The Sixteen Burdens (5 page)

“I assume the home will still receive your regular donations for the length of the agreement,” Farrell said, itching his arm nervously.

Pickford looked Farrell up and down.

“The agreement was with Emory Partridge, not
you
. You’re a shadow of the man he was.”

Pickford spoke as if Mr. Partridge were dead, but he was merely in a home for the old and ailing.

Out of one home and into another.

“But we need the funding!” Farrell said.

“
You
need the funding,” she said, looking at his silk robe and the gold chain around his neck. “I suggest you adopt less expensive tastes.”

She took Gray by the arm again and led him out. Farrell grabbed at his other hand and clutched it like a man drowning.

“Wait! Don’t trust her! She’s dangerous. She’s…not what you think.”

Farrell ran his fingers along each scar on Gray’s forearm, as if reminiscing with an old photo album.

“I’m the one who has taken care of you all these years,” Farrell said. “I’m the reason you’re still alive.”

“You’re the reason I look like a pin cushion.”

Gray pulled his hand free from Farrell’s grip. He turned, and followed Pickford out the front door. The heads of two dozen boys popped up in the front windows like prairie dogs.

In the distance he heard a siren.

“We need to hurry,” she said.

Gray ground his heels into the dirt.

“Wait. How do you know my name?”

Pickford said nothing for a moment. The warm winter sky outside was clear in a way unlike any of the other seasons. Stars above poked out with amazing clarity.

“I know your name because I gave it to you. Because I am your mother.”

C
HAPTER
S
IX

“I
F
IT
MAKES
you feel better, my mothering would have been disastrous.”

“Worse than your driving?” Gray asked.

Mary Pickford was at the wheel, driving like roads were suggestions.

He was trying to listen, but was too busy grasping the door handle and trying to remember the Lord’s Prayer.

They had dragged her driver into the back seat; he had been hit over the head and was unconscious but breathing.

“Shouldn’t we take him to the hospital?” Gray asked.

“Edward will have to wait,” she said. “I’ll get him medical attention as soon as there’s time.”

Gray looked back at the older man; he had distinguished, star-quality features.

“You’re right about one thing,” Gray said. “You’ve got about as much maternal instinct as General MacArthur.”

Pickford obviously couldn’t see well through her thick veil, and more than once she swerved at just the last moment to avoid hitting another car. At Temple Street they took a right too sharply and clipped the curb, bouncing as if in a bumper car at a carnival. She just kept driving.

“You have to understand,” she said. “I couldn’t keep you.”

“Busy schedule?”

“It was too dangerous. Someone has been after me.”

“Probably a traffic cop.”

Two pedestrians stepped out onto the street and Pickford slammed on her brakes, but not before they scattered like pigeons in a park. Pickford resumed driving as if nothing had happened.

“If you’re my mother, then who’s my father?”

“He’s dead now.”

“Who was he?”

Pickford drove for a while.

“Harry,” was all she said.

Gray couldn’t figure out this woman’s angle. If she was lying, why? What did she want from him? Maybe she was just as crazy as everyone said.

“I should have planned better for this moment,” she said. “It was bound to come. I knew he’d never give up.”

She fumbled around in her purse near Gray’s feet and removed a flask. She uncapped it with one hand and took a swig from under the veil. Gray stared at her wide-eyed and doubled his grip on the door handle.

“Listen to what I have to say,” she said. “It’s very important. Do you know why I was such a successful actress back in the Twenties?”

Pickford ignored a traffic light and ran through the stop signal.

“You mowed down your critics?”

“I was the most beautiful actress of my day. I couldn’t act, not at first, but people loved to look at me. They used to call me America’s Sweetheart. The Girl With the Curls. That was before.”

“Before what?”

“Before you.”

Now it made sense. Pickford was delusional and she wanted someone to blame for the decline in her career. Gray wasn’t about to be a scapegoat, real or imagined.

“From what I hear you lost a lot of business after some doctor put your face through a meat grinder.”

“It’s not like that,” she said. “My beauty, it was special. I wasn’t just the most beautiful actress of my day—I was the most beautiful person on Earth.”

Pickford was so earnest that Gray nearly laughed.

This lady is nuttier than a Peanut Chew.

“I’m part of a special group of people,” she said. “Call it a club—or better yet, a secret society, like in a mystery novel. This group, very few people know we exist. We don’t even know who all of the members are.”

“I’m sure that makes your Christmas card list difficult.”

Gray flinched as Pickford crossed suddenly in front of an oncoming truck.

“It’s not something you can choose to join,” she said. “It’s something you’re born into. Like, say, a royal family. Listen to me!”

“I’m listening!”

“We all have talents, unique to the group. Talents better than anyone else in the world. These make us powerful, but also dangerous.”

Pickford ran right through another intersection, nearly clipping a taxi. She kept driving.

“All of those kidnapped women, it’s my fault. The man abducting them, he’s looking for me. He doesn’t know my identity, only that I am an actress in Hollywood. But when those dwarves fail to return in the next half hour or so, he’ll know for sure.”

“What does he want from you?”

“Something I have. Something I should have destroyed but didn’t. Something we can never let him get possession of.”

Pickford made a sharp turn east and pulled into the newly finished Union Station. She screeched up along a curb reserved for fire trucks.

“Aren’t we going to your house?” Gray asked, checking the cut on his brow to see if the bleeding had stopped. It hadn’t.

“No. I have other plans.”

She looked at the gash.

“Do you have anything to hide that?”

Gray picked up his fedora and, with some reservation, put it on. It was his first time wearing it.

He was aware that Pickford hadn’t once flinched at the sight of his blood or asked him about it, though she did notice a couple of drops that had hit the ceiling of her car.

“It’s diseased,” Gray said. “I’m not supposed to touch anyone.”

“Diseased!” Pickford said. “Who told you that? You have the most special blood in the world.”

“Farrell says I can’t touch people, for their safety.”

Pickford huffed beneath her veil.

“You should stay away from people,” Pickford said. “But not for their safety. For
yours
.”

C
HAPTER
S
EVEN

“H
URRY
NOW
,”
SHE
said. “The next train leaves in ten minutes.”

Gray had not yet been inside the new Los Angeles Union Passenger Terminal. It was built in a Spanish style with a red-tiled roof and enormous arching windows. They walked inside through a grand archway into a bright, expansive waiting room that was mostly empty of people.

Pickford kept a brisk pace, and Gray found himself following her.

“I got more questions,” he said.

If you’re really my mother, why did you leave me?

“How did you meet my father?”

“He came out to Los Angeles for a job of sorts.”

“Were you two married?”

“Yes. To different people.”

Oh.

They walked by walls decorated with colorful Spanish tiles, below a pitched wood-beam ceiling lined with chandeliers.

“You said he was dead. How did he die?”

“He was murdered. Punched in the stomach by the man now chasing us.”

“Punched?”

That sounded unlikely.

“Yes, just punched once.”

Gray stopped. Pickford walked another dozen steps before she realized it.

“Where are we going?”

“New York,” she said. “I have an acquaintance out there who can provide protection.”

“Why do I need protection?”

She grabbed his arm and guided him toward the ticket booth. After paying, they walked into a large, well-lit tunnel that sloped downward, under the tracks. A train must have just arrived, because it was crowded with people walking the opposite direction. Dressed as she was, people gave Pickford a wide berth, but everyone knocked into Gray.

They walked up some stairs on the platform for Track 4. Pickford led them to a bench obscured in an alcove, the perfect meeting place for secret lovers or Nazi spies or paranoid women in black.

“I told you that I was part of a special group.”

Gray nodded.

“This group has sixteen members. Always just sixteen, since the beginning of time. And each one unique.”

Pickford pulled out her flask and took a swig. She offered some to Gray, who declined. He had once stolen a gulp of Farrell’s Four Roses and upchucked twice that same night. Not a good return on investment.

“Name some of the most influential people in history,” she said. “Anyone who comes to mind.”

Gray flushed. The schooling at the home was at the whim of a nun who volunteered her time and was only concerned with how many saints they could rattle off.

“Don’t you recall any important historical figures?”

He thought through the partial encyclopedia he owned. Although he had only flipped through parts of “R” and “T,” he had read the entire “S” volume.

“Solomon,” Gray said. “That rich king of ancient Israel.”

“Good,” Pickford said. “What was he like?”

“He was smart,” Gray said.

“Smart is too broad of a word,” Pickford said. “People can be smart in lots of different ways. He acquired both knowledge and experience, and then applied it with good judgment. What do we call such a person?”

Gray thought about Solomon, the king who was said to have settled two women’s dispute over a baby by offering to cut the child down the middle and give half to each. Distraught over that prospect, one woman gave up her claim on the baby, revealing herself as the true mother.

“He was wise,” Gray said.

“Yes!” Pickford said. “He was the wisest person of his time. Rather, he held the essence of wisdom itself. Can you think of anyone else who was wise?”

Gray thought of the type of people who should be wise. Sages. Gurus. Thinkers.

“Socrates?” Gray ventured. He wasn’t sure who that was, but he remembered reading something about him.

“Good!” Pickford said. “Socrates was a Greek philosopher. And there was Machiavelli, an Italian diplomat of some sort. I don’t recall. And also Elizabeth the First, the famous queen of England whose prudent decisions provided stability for the kingdom during her rule. A chain of wisdom throughout history.”

A train pulled into the station on Track 4.

“This will be our train.”

People began to disembark. Gray noticed a lot of pretty young women getting off the train, giddy with wonder and excitement. Their eyes were glossy like the wax job on a new car, but Gray knew what cars looked like after a few months bumping around Hollywood Boulevard.

Pickford removed a tiny book from her purse, no larger than a deck of cards.

“I had this made years ago,” she said. “It’s my family album of sorts.”

She flipped through pages of sketches and photographs, stopping on a photo of a sculpted piece of marble, sitting atop a pedestal in a museum. It was the bust of a female with a long, slender neck and graceful features.

“Now, what about, say, Nefertiti?”

Gray looked at the drawing.

“She looks like one of the carvings outside the Egyptian Theater.”

She flipped through some more pages. Pickford found a drawing of a soft-featured woman in Greek robes persuading a man to lay down his sword.

“What about, say, Helen of Troy?”

That was a story Gray knew because he had read about Sparta in his encyclopedia.

“She was a dish. Fellas fought over her ’cause she was so beautiful.”

“Very good!” Pickford said. “Both Nefertiti and Helen of Troy had a role in history or lore that is directly linked to their physical appearance. It’s the same with Bathsheba, and a Persian queen named Vashti. There’s even a man named Pan Yue, an ancient Chinese poet renowned for his strikingly handsome looks.”

“Yeah, so?”

Whatever angle Pickford was working, she appeared to buy into her own baloney.

“Throughout history, certain people have risen up to lead and inspire humanity,” she said. “And they usually had a defining characteristic. Sampson was strong. Joan of Arc was courageous. Napoleon Bonaparte was charismatic. These are the Burdens of Mankind.”

A train conductor called out to people on the platform. The train was about ready to board. People began lining up at the train cars.

“They are the sixteen traits that influence humanity,” Pickford said. “Sixteen abilities that shape who we are as a people, and as individuals. They are the qualities that separate man from beast. And at any given time, one person in the world is the bearer of each trait. Every human being may possess a little bit of each talent, but only one person has the true, unadulterated essence of that ability.”

Gray stared at the drawing of Helen of Troy. If Pickford considered this a family album, it meant—

“That’s why you said you’d been the most beautiful woman on Earth. You actually meant it.”

She nodded. If that were the case, she’d stick out like a sore thumb. That was good if you wanted to be an actress, but bad if someone was hunting you down.

A thought struck him.

“Did you get your face chopped up on purpose?”

Pickford stood. Gray followed as she walked toward the train.

“All sixteen of these people are powerful, each in his or her own way. And they can all be dangerous. Some are friends, some are enemies, and some are a bit of both. But all of them will use you.”

“Use me how? I ain’t got nothing to use.”

“But you do.”

Pickford led them to a first-class train car and they climbed the stairs. Inside were private compartments with sliding glass doors. She glanced at a ticket in her hand and opened one of the doors halfway down. They stepped inside and slid the door shut.

“You’re the one they’ve been waiting for,” Pickford said. “That’s why I’ve had to keep you safe.”

“Safe from what?”

“From the rest of us,” she said.

The train conductor blew his whistle. Pickford handed Gray a ticket and a piece of paper.

“This is your ticket and the address of where you’ll meet a woman named Bess,” she said.

“Wait, you’re not coming with me?”

“I have urgent business. Something I should have done sooner.” She stuffed some money into his hand. “There should be food on board for purchase. Lock the door and don’t let anyone in.”

“That’s it?” Gray said. “You’re just sending me away again?”

Why did you leave me?

Pickford said nothing for a long time. She removed his hat and was about to dab the blood with her handkerchief, but stopped short. Instead, she gave Gray the handkerchief for him to do it himself.

“I want you to know something. I love you. I always have.”

Gray said nothing, but held the handkerchief to his brow.

“It looks like I’ve abandoned you. Nothing could be further from the truth. I’ve been watching you all these years. Why do you think I drive by the Brown Derby every day? So I could see you. See you, but never have contact. Sometimes love requires sacrifice.”

Gray didn’t want Mary Pickford’s sacrifice or her money. He wadded it up and threw it out the window.

“I don’t know who you are, but you ain’t my mother.”

Pickford handed him back his hat. She stared at him another uncomfortable minute, then turned and left.

Whoever she was, she had answers about his past. He was suspicious of every word that had come out of Pickford’s mouth, but one thing he couldn’t deny: the familiarity of her voice. He was certain he had heard it before. Not from the movies, of course; her films were all silent. That voice, it echoed from some long-forgotten memory.

He watched through the window as Pickford exited the train and cut a path through the crowd, a bobbing dot of black in a sea of browns and grays.

The train began to move. He waited until he was out of Pickford’s view, then stood up and walked to the exit at the end of the car. He poked his head out tentatively, making sure no other trains were coming, then jumped off onto the tracks and climbed up onto Platform 5.

Gray had the feeling that if he let Pickford go now, he’d never see her again. There were answers underneath that veil, and he would get to them, even if he had to rip it off her head.

He pulled the fedora low and followed the bobbing black dot up ahead.

You’re not leaving me this time.