The Throat (101 page)

"It could
still have been an accident," I said, seeing John barreling along
through the storm in the middle of the night, clamping a
three-hundred-dollar bottle of vodka between his thighs. The image was
of endless night, almost demonic in its despair.

"Do you
really think so?"

"No," I said.
"I think he killed himself."

"So do I,"
Tom said. "The poor bastard."

That would
have been the last word on John Ransom, but for a letter that I found
in my mailbox, by the sort of ironic coincidence forbidden to fiction
but in which the real world revels, late that same afternoon.

To get my
mail, I have to leave my loft and go downstairs to the rank of boxes in
the entry, one door away from the entrance to Saigon. The mail
generally comes around four in the afternoon, and sometimes I get to
the boxes before the mailman. Like all writers, I am obsessive about
the mail, which brings money, contracts, reviews, royalty statements,
letters from fans, and
Publishers
Weekly
, where I can check on the
relative progress of myself and my myriad colleagues. On the day I
heard from Tom, I went down late because I wanted to finish up my
revisions, and when I finally got downstairs I saw that the box was
stuffed with envelopes. I immediately pitched into the big garbage can
we had installed beneath the boxes all envelopes covered with printing,
all appeals for funds, all offers to subscribe to esoteric literary
journals published by universities. Two were left, one from my foreign
agent, the other from some foreign country that liked exotic stamps. My
name was hand-printed on the second envelope in clear, rounded letters.

I went back
upstairs, sat at my desk, and peered at the stamps on the second
envelope. A tiger, a huge fleshy flower, a man in a white robe up to
his knees in a brown river. With a small shock, I realized that the
letter was from India. I tore open the envelope and removed a single
sheet of filmy paper, tinted rose.

Dear Timothy
Underhill,

I am late in
responding because your letter took an extra time to reach us here. The
address you used was rather vague. But as you see, it did arrive! You
ask about your friend John Ransom. It is difficult to know what to say.
You will understand that I cannot go into details, but I feel that I
may inform you that we at the ashram were moved by your friend's plight
at the time he came to us. He was suffering. He required our help.
Ultimately, however, we were forced to ask him to leave—a painful
affair for all concerned. John Ransom was a disruptive influence here.
He could not open himself, he could not find his true being, he was
lost and blind in an eternal violence. There would have been no
question of his being allowed to return. I am sorry to write these
things to you about your friend, but I do hope that his spiritual
search has after so many years finally brought him peace. Perhaps it
has.

Yours
sincerely,
Mina

Two days
after receiving Mina's letter and faxing a copy to Tom, my revisions
delivered to Ann Folger, I walked past the video store again, the same
video store I had been passing on my walks nearly every day since my
return, and this time, with literally nothing in the world to do, I
remembered that during my period of insomnia I had seen something in
the window that interested me. I went back and looked over the posters
of movie stars. The movie stars were not very interesting. Maybe I had
just been thinking about
Babette's
Feast
again.

Then I saw
the announcement about the old noir films and remembered.

I went into
the shop and rented
From Dangerous
Depths
, the movie Fee Bandolier and
I had both seen at the Beldame Oriental, the movie that had seen us at
the moment of our greatest vulnerability.

As soon as I
got home, I pushed it into the VCR and turned on the television set. I
sat on my couch and unbuttoned my jacket and watched the advertisements
for other films in the series spool across the screen. The titles came
up, and the movie began. Half an hour later, jolted, engrossed, I
remembered to take off my jacket.

From
Dangerous Depths
was like a
Hitchcock version of Fritz Lang's M, simultaneously roughed up and
domesticated for an American audience. I had remembered nothing of this
story; I had blanked it out entirely. But Fee Bandolier had not blocked
it out. Fee had carried the story with him wherever he went, to
Vietnam, to Florida and Ohio and Millhaven.

A banker
played by William Bendix abducted a child from a playground, carried
him into a basement, and slit his throat. Over his corpse, he crooned
the dead boy's name. The next day, he went to his bank and charmed his
employees, presided over meetings about loans and mortgages. At six
o'clock, he went home to his wife, Grace, played by Ida Lupino. An old
school friend of the banker's, a detective played by Robert Ryan, came
for dinner and wound up talking about a case he found disturbing. The
case involved the disappearance of several children. Over dessert,
Robert Ryan blurted out his fear that the children had been killed.
Didn't they know a certain family? William Bendix and Ida Lupino looked
across the table at their friend, their faces dull with anticipatory
horror. Yes, they did know the family. Their son, Ryan said, was the
last child to have vanished. "No!" cried Ida Lupino. "Their only
child?" Dinner came to an end. Forty-five minutes later in real time,
in movie time three days after the dinner, William Bendix offered a
ride home to another small boy and took him into the same basement.
After murdering the boy, he lovingly sang the boy's name over his
corpse. The next day, Robert Ryan visited the child's parents, who wept
as they showed him photographs. The movie ended with Ida Lupino turning
away to call Robert Ryan after shooting her husband in the heart.

Tingling, I
watched the cast list roll the already known names toward the top of
the screen:

Lenny
Valentine-Robert Ryan
    Franklin Bachelor-William Bendix
    Grace Bachelor-Ida Lupino

And
then, after the names of various detectives, bank employees, and
townspeople, the names of the two murdered boys:

Felix
Hart-Bobby Driscoll
    Mike Hogan-Dean Stockwell

4

I ejected the
tape from the VCR and slid the cassette back into its box. I walked
three times around my loft, torn between laughter and tears. I thought
of Fee Bandolier, a child staring at a movie screen from a seat in the
wide central aisle of the Beldame Oriental; probably it had always been
Robert Ryan, not Clark Gable, of whom Michael Hogan had reminded me. At
last I sat at my desk and dialed Tom Pasmore's telephone number. His
answering machine cut in after two rings. At the end of a
twenty-four-hour day, Tom had finally gone to bed. I waited through his
message and said to the tape, "This is the John Galsworthy of Grand
Street. If you want to learn the only thing you don't already know,
call me as soon as you get up."

I took the
tape out of the box and watched it again, thinking of Fee Bandolier,
the man I had known and the first Fee, the child Fee, my other self,
delivered to me at so many times and in so many places by imagination.
There he was, and I was there too, beside him, crying and laughing at
the same time, waiting for the telephone to ring.