Marion's Wall Read online

  “Oh, my God,” he said softly, staring at the enormous red script on the wall.

  When I spoke my voice was suddenly tight; for an instant I was a boy again, afraid he’d gone too far with his father. “Did you know her, Dad?”

  A second or so passed, then he turned abruptly to the window, standing with his back to us. “Did I know her,” he repeated flatly. “Did I know Marion Marsh. Oh, yes. Oh, yes, indeed.” He turned back into the room to stare at the writing on the wall again. Then he walked toward it, his hand coming up as though he were going to touch it, but he didn’t. He stopped before it, stood for a moment, then without turning to look at us he said, “When she wrote that I was here in the room with her.” His head shook wonderingly. “I was twenty years old.” For a moment longer he stood staring. “You know how she reached the top lines?” He turned to look at us, smiling now. “Walking along the back of the davenport. In high heels. She knew I was afraid she’d fall. I stood ready to catch her if she did, and she all but turned somersaults up there. Three-quarters drunk probably, though maybe not; it was never easy to tell. You’d think she was, and she wasn’t. Then you’d think she was sober, and she’d be blind.” He turned to look at the wall again, his head slowly shaking in awe and astonishment. “And it’s still there. Still there! I can’t believe it.”

  Jan said, “I have to go out to the kitchen; there are things cooking. Come on along, will you? Both of you. I don’t want to miss a word.”

  The kitchen was large enough to hold a big round wooden table, covered now with a linen cloth checked in a pastel-blue-and-white pattern, and set for three with the good china and blue tumblers. Around it stood four old-style wooden chairs, each of which Jan had enameled in a different color, the four slats in the back being all four colors. There was an old black gas stove with a white-enamel oven door labeled WEDGEWOOD in blue letters. The sink was old, with a splintering wooden drainboard; I’d have to do something about that. The refrigerator was new, and so were two Formica-covered work counters with cupboards underneath, and there was a big walk-in pantry. Jan stood at the stove, a large wooden spoon in one hand, an old-fashioned in the other, her apron longer than her skirt—she has good, good legs, which still interest me enormously. I’d put Al out in the back yard with his dinner, and Dad and I were at the table lounging back in our tipped-up chairs, sipping our drinks.

  “Why did she write it?” he was saying to Jan. “I don’t know; impulse. The way she did everything. She’d suddenly decided to move to Hollywood; she’d been in two, three pictures down there. The first as part of a crowd scene that didn’t even survive the cutting room. But after the second and third she thought she had a career in pictures.” He shrugged. “As she damn well may have; she was an actress. This was a good theater town then, and I saw her a number of times. At the old Alcazar.” He nodded once or twice. “She was good all right.” He took a swallow of his drink.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t ask this,” Jan said, and stopped, her face flushing.

  He smiled. “And maybe I shouldn’t answer it.” He lifted his glass to the light. “But what with two stiff drinks, the pleasure of being here, and the shock of seeing Marion’s writing still on that wall—I will. The answer is that I thought I was. In love with her. That’s what you meant, isn’t it?” Jan nodded, her face flushing a little more, and she pushed her hair nervously back off one shoulder. “Well, I thought I was, and she thought she was. We’d been talking about getting married, in fact.” He turned to grin at me. “If we had, you wouldn’t be here, would you? Serve you right, too, for springing that stunt in the living room.”

  “Oh, I’d still be here,” I said. “You couldn’t have kept me out. But I suppose I’d look a little more like Jean Harlow than I do now; that’s how I picture Marion Marsh, anyway.” Like a lot of people, I’m interested in old movies; I collect films, in a small way. So this fascinated me.

  “No, she wasn’t even particularly good-looking. Pretty enough, I suppose; I don’t know really. You just didn’t think about that when she was around. She was a year older than I was, you know.” Jan had begun to spoon things into serving dishes, and he and I got up to help her bring them to the table.

  We began dinner. Jan told me to plug in the coffee maker, which stood at one edge of the table, and I did. Then I poured wine; Dad sipped it and smiled at me, nodding appreciatively, then tasted his food and complimented Jan on her cooking. And when these things had been done, Jan leaned across the table edge toward him and with the bluntness of a shy person who’s momentarily overcome it, said, “Why? Why didn’t you? Marry her, I mean.”

  “I wouldn’t just throw up everything, pack, and move down to Hollywood with her.” His face flushed suddenly, the old quarrel momentarily alive again. “What would I have done there? The movies weren’t after me, and I didn’t expect them to be! It made no sense. Then or now.” He was frowning, and he glanced uneasily at me, picked up his wine-glass, and drank. “And of course I’m glad. Very glad,” he said to me sternly, as though I might be thinking of denying it, “or I’d never have met your mother.” He began cutting his meat, eyes on his plate. “We argued about it. I could see her point, though I didn’t want her to go. She had a small part in her second picture that brought her some attention. Before the picture was even released, it got her a pretty good part in still a third. She’d kept working up here, see; it’s where the money was, and her real career. She’d go to Hollywood for a couple days’ work, maybe, then home again. But this was a bigger, longer part, she had to stay down there, and she suddenly decided that pictures was her career, and came up one weekend to get me. But I wouldn’t go. After a while she cried. Then she began cursing me, and you can believe she knew how to do that. Then she jumped up suddenly, ran to the front windows”—he looked up, grinning—“and yanked the middle one up. I was supposed to be scared she was going to jump out. But I knew better. She was the last person in the world to do that. I just sat there, grinning at her. So she knelt on the window seat, leaned out, and looked over the city as though that’s what she’d meant to do all the time. It was a fine, cool, sunny San Francisco day, I remember; the kind we ought to import to Chicago. And she said she loved the view. Loved San Francisco. Loved this apartment. And loved me. But she was blankety-blank well going to Hollywood! I didn’t say anything, and she pulled her head in, turned around, and looked at me for a minute. ‘Some day you’ll brag that you knew me, you bastard,’ she said. And she was right about that, wasn’t she? Then she yelled, ‘And this’ll be known as the house I lived in!’—all excited in a fraction of a second, the way she could be. She jumped up off the window seat, ran across the room, and climbed right up on the back of the davenport. Still trying to punish me by threatening herself, you see. And demonstrating to herself, I suppose, that I still cared for her. Well, I did. And this time I jumped up and ran over to the davenport, because she could easily have fallen. Then she walked along the back, writing on the wall with her lipstick. Wearing a short skirt, knowing I was standing there watching her.” Dad was smiling, looking past us off across the kitchen, fork motionless in his hand. ” ‘Marion Marsh lived here,’ she wrote, and looked back over her shoulder at me. Then—she was a crazy girl, all right—she said, just murmuring it, really, ‘Catch, Nick,’ and without any other warning she let herself fall straight back.”

  He looked at Jan, then at me, still smiling. “Well, I caught her. Damn near broke my back, but you can be sure I caught her. I’m sixty-seven years old now, and this may sound strange to your young ears, but I can still remember exactly and precisely how that nutty girl felt, there in my arms. Meaning no disrespect whatever, son, to the memory of your mother. She smiled at me, all sweetness and light, lifted her head to kiss me, then hopped down to the floor, saying, ‘Pull that blanking davenport out from the wall, you blank,’ only she didn’t say ‘blank’ and she didn’t say ‘blanking.’ Then she wrote the rest of what you saw in there.”

  I was staring across the table at him wonderin
gly. This was a new look at a father ten years younger than I was now. “If she’d stayed in San Francisco,” I said, “you’d have married her, wouldn’t you.” It was hardly a question.

  “I don’t know. How can I say. I hadn’t met your mother then. I don’t want to discuss it.” He was silent for a moment, then he added, “But I will say that most women would have had mighty tough competition against Marion Marsh.”

  Jan said, “I’m delighted, fascinated, that she lived here. Right here in our house. Oh, I’m so glad you told us!” She shoved her chair back, jumping up. “I’ve just got to look at her wall again!” Carrying her coffee, Jan walked to the living room, and my father and I followed with ours.

  In the living room we stood sipping our coffee under the hardness of the overhead bulbs, staring again at the huge lipsticked message from across the years. My voice hollow in the empty room, I said, “I’ve never heard her name before. She ever make it in Hollywood?”

  “She never got back.” He took a sip of his coffee, then looked at us. “In nearly every book or movie about the Twenties there’s an obligatory scene: a bunch of people tearing down a country road in an open car, bottles waving, singing, yelling, having a fine drunken time. Well, it did happen. I’ve done it myself. And that’s what Marion did the night before she was to go back to Hollywood. I wasn’t along; she was mad at me, and I wasn’t invited. The car turned over, injuring several of them and killing her.” Jan winced, making an involuntary sound of protest in her throat, and I was frowning. “That was over in Marin County. On a back road near Ross. They had to refilm a couple parts of the picture she was working in. With another actress unknown then, but who turned out to be Joan Crawford. Marion never even saw the one complete picture she did appear in. It was released a month after she died.”

  After a moment Jan said gently, “But you saw it, didn’t you?”

  “Of course. It was called Flaming Flappers.” He smiled at her. “I’m sorry, but that’s what it was called. I saw it more than once, I can promise you, and felt as bad as I’ve ever felt, almost. Because when I saw it I knew Marion had been right. I was certain then that she’d had a career ahead of her, maybe even a great one. She wasn’t especially good-looking, but she had more vitality and … sheer animal magnetism, I guess you’d call it, than anyone else I ever knew. When she was in a room, anywhere at all, you knew it. Not just me, everyone felt it. And when she left a room you felt it, too, almost as though the light had dimmed. Well, that came through in the picture. Except for a last little glimpse of her at the very end, so short it didn’t count, she was in only one scene. A party scene: you saw her talking to a group of admiring men. That’s all; it only lasted half a minute, maybe less. But it got her a real part in the next picture, the part Joan Crawford ended up having and which began her career. I’ve often thought that that should have been Marion’s career. Because she had that same direct personal appeal and power over you that only a handful of the really great stars ever have; the ones you never forget, like Garbo; Crawford; Bette Davis. She had a career coming to her, all right.” Taking a sip of his coffee, he looked back at the wall. ” ‘Read it and weep!’ ” he murmured, and nodded. “She was right about everything that day, wasn’t she?”

  2

  A couple weeks later we had the apartment looking pretty good; we’d painted nights and weekends till it was done. We had a housewarming then, and Marion’s wall was the life of the party. There were nineteen guests, a lot of them friends from college days at the University of California at Berkeley, which is where Jan and I met. There were others from my office at the Crown Zellerbach company, on Market Street. And the couple from downstairs, the Platts; Jan had gotten acquainted with Myrtle Platt in meetings at the porch mailboxes. She was a cheerful overweight housewife, and when they arrived and had the wall explained—the first thing every guest had to know, naturally—she went back downstairs and came up again with a big, shiny coffee-table book, an illustrated history of the movies, which I knew about but couldn’t afford. Everyone gathered around it, spread open on the cloth-covered table Jan had arranged against one wall on which liquor and drink-making stuff was spread. And Myrtle turned the pages hunting for a still from Flaming Flappers. But there wasn’t any; the picture wasn’t even mentioned.

  Ellis Pascoe said, “There never was such a picture.” He was a former instructor of mine at the University, a thin, bearded man who used to tell me he wished he were a don at Oxford. “Don’t you recognize Nick’s disguised handwriting, Jan? Lord knows I do from all the semiliterate papers of his I had to read. He’s putting you on; he wrote that so he wouldn’t have to peel off the rest of the wallpaper.”

  Drinks in hand, staring at Marion’s wall again, the group rang changes on what might appear on further layers of the Cheyneys’ wallpaper: a huge X covering the largest wall, which would be King Kong’s autograph; Walt Disney’s denunciation of Mickey Mouse’s sexual extravagances. But the actuality of the great red scrawl couldn’t be joked away, it retained its mystery, and there wasn’t one of us, including Jan and me, who at some moment of the evening didn’t find himself standing and staring at Marion’s wall. After the party, doing the dishes, letting Al in for a little midnight snack before throwing him out again to his backyard dog-house, we decided there was no question now of removing Marion’s message; it had become the showpiece of the house.

  Spring arrived; we had our last skiing weekend of the season at Sugar Bowl in March, and the next weekend a college friend of Jan’s invited us to her parents’ place on Tahoe, and we went water-skiing. There’s a marvelous old-time-jazz nightclub in San Francisco called Earthquake McGoon’s, and a couple times a year they run a film festival in a tiny California town, Volcano. They invite friends and customers, including us, and short of a hundred-and-five fever I wouldn’t miss it: great old films from Dr. James Causey’s collection, of which I wish I owned even the discards. We went to that; and we saw some new movies, read some books, went to an A.C.T. play. We visited friends and were visited by them. Six of us went bike riding in Golden Gate Park one weekend. And on my birthday in May, Jan gave me a full-length feature on 8-millimeter film, Doug Fairbanks’ The Mark of Zorro. That costs $55.98 from Blackhawk Films, a lot more money than she was supposed to spend on my birthday present, but I was glad to have it.

  Summer arrived, and we began talking about what to do on my three weeks of vacation in July, but couldn’t really think of anything that would be a hell of a lot of fun while costing practically nothing. We’d gone to Tahoe for ten days of my vacation last summer, and New York the one before that, so we didn’t mind not doing anything much this time. A couple weekends we went sailing on the Bay with friends and talked about buying a boat of our own, knowing we couldn’t. I finished some painting and put a new muffler on the Packard. And in between all this gaiety I went to work nine to five-fifteen, five days a week, Lincoln’s and Washington’s birthdays off.

  One night in the middle of June, coming home from work, I got off the bus as usual two blocks from home. The walk from there is nearly all uphill, and it had been fairly warm all day, in the high seventies, a great day, and I took off my suit coat; the temperature was only just now beginning to go down as the first fog slid onto the Bay. As I climbed Buena Vista hill, coat over my shoulder, my view of the city gradually expanded, and looking out over it I was pleased as on nearly every evening with its white-and-pastel look. And with the marvel of the Bay, the hills and mountains around it, and how much of an older San Francisco remained. The money-makers were destroying the city as fast as they could go, blocking off the old views with higher and higher buildings—praised by the Mayor, approved by the Supervisors—and the destruction of the Bay itself with fill and pollution continued. But there was still an awful lot of beauty to destroy before they finally Manhattanized or Milwaukeeized San Francisco, a lot still left that was good to look at meanwhile. As a Midwesterner, a flatlander, I appreciated this place, and had been here long enough to feel a part of i
t.

  On my front porch, winded a little from the climb from street level, I thought as always that I ought to start jogging. And I stopped to look out over the city once more, expecting a renewal of the way I’d been feeling. But, perversely now, without any reason I understood, a stab of depression killed the feeling. It had happened before, and I was used to it, and to the almost automatic sequence of thoughts that came with it. The very thought of these thoughts bored and depressed me in advance, and I skipped right past the big ones, the big national and international problems that you’re tired of too. Next in line came the thought that it would soon be five years that I’d worked at a job meant only to be a stopgap between college and whatever it was, when I discovered it, that I really wanted to do. But all I’d discovered so far was that I didn’t have anything I really wanted to do. And the unnerving idea had begun occurring to me that this job—which was pleasant enough, and at which I was fairly successful, but which had no relation to anything important in my personality—might be permanent. Someday, incredibly, I might be pensioned, having spent my entire working life at Crown Zellerbach. Next came the nagging feeling that it was time Jan and I had children. We wanted to, genuinely; I like kids, so does Jan, and we’re going to have them, but like a lot of people we’d decided to have a few carefree years first, and I didn’t quite seem to be ready to say I’d already had them. There were other equally dreary commonplace thoughts; the entire sequence had become mechanical, and I was just standing there, my mind barely ticking over, staring off across the city—hundreds of windows were a blank glittering orange from the lowering sun—when I heard a bay window open above the porch roof, rattling in its frame.