The Thunder of Giants, page 24
“There’s nothing you can do,” said the detective.
“I’m sure there’s some mistake,” said Jessica—to the detective or the old woman or both.
“There’s no mistake,” said the old woman.
“Oh, there’s a mistake all right,” said Grove.
“I told you to shut up,” said Jessica.
Jenny Tuck pointed at Elionor. “She told me to shut up, too!”
“Could everyone just stop?” begged Elionor. She had been sucked into an eddy. Everything spiraled.
“If I could just get one shot,” said the director.
“I think the shot’s the least of your concerns,” said the detective.
“Water,” said Elionor.
“You don’t look well,” said the old woman.
“I’m not,” said Elionor. She was red, and her chest had gone tight. The butterfly gown might have been a cage.
“Lord am I sick of this!” said Grove. “For weeks I’ve put up with gossip and rumors. Now you come in here, and for what? I didn’t kill that girl.”
“We know,” said the detective.
“If you know, then why are you here?”
“Because we found the girl’s grandmother,” said the detective. “We also found her son.”
“The girl had a son?” said Jessica. “She was sixteen.”
“That’s right,” said the detective. “She was sixteen. And he’s under arrest for statutory rape.”
At the word “rape,” Mrs. Tuck covered her daughter’s ears. There was little point: the world had exploded. The graying detective shouted at Grove. Grove shouted back. Jessica Simone shouted at everyone else. The ancient woman tottered on her silver cane. Elionor swayed. She lost control of her legs and reached out to catch herself against the walls of the set. She forgot how fragile they were. Never meant to support the weight of a regular actor, they could hardly withstand an actress like Elionor Nicholas. The wall tottered and fell back. Elionor fell with it.
Something caught her just in time. It was Rutherford Simone, making another dramatic arrival. He had come out of nowhere and, with some great mysterious strength, kept her from crashing down. The wall of the set, on the other hand, cracked as it hit the floor, and the sound caused everyone to turn toward them as every panicked conversation ground to a halt.
“Son of a bitch!” said the director.
“I’ve got you,” said Rutherford. “You’re all right.”
Leaning against Rutherford, her gaze turned up toward the grid of overhead lights, Elionor noticed that one light seemed closer than the rest. The others were static, but this one was dancing; the light seemed to swing from left to right.
“Now look what you’ve done!” said the director.
“Everyone shut up!” said Rutherford. “Give her some space.”
Because she was still looking up—because she was so much closer to the ceiling—Elionor saw what was happening an instant before everyone else. That light had not been dancing; it had been preparing to fall. The light was standard for a Hollywood set: a globular piece of metal, it was the size of a small bomb. With a clatter, it fell from the overhead grid and smacked against one of its neighbors before hurtling down—right toward Rutherford Simone. Elionor had always been lacking in speed; she was not exactly known for her grace. But she made up for everything in size. She flung herself over him. Her body was the perfect shield.
The falling light struck her squarely between the shoulder blades, yet when the pain came, it was in her chest; when the pain came, it was in her possibly weak heart. Down she went, pinning Rutherford beneath her. Her face was next to his. He was only a breath away. “Could one of you pass me a broom?” she whispered. It was the last thing Elionor the Actress would ever say—and it wasn’t even her line.
PART SIX
Afterlife
EIGHTEEN
Rutherford the Hero
Hollywood, 1937
SHE STOOD in the Great Lecture Hall of Barnum’s American Museum, trapped in a vast sea of New Yorkers, each as dirty and ripe as rotten flesh. As for the would-be actress, she was still in the costume she had been wearing on set; she was still dressed as the gigantic friend of a bombshell brunette.
Onstage, Anna Swan and her husband were in the midst of reenacting the courtship scene from The Life of Henry the Fifth. “Fair Katharine and most fair,” said the Captain. “Will you vouchsafe to teach a soldier terms, such as will enter a lady’s ear and plead his love-suit to her gentle heart?”
“Your majesty shall mock at me,” said Anna. “I cannot speak your England.”
“O fair Katharine!” said the Captain.
Just then, Anna glanced into the crowd. “Oh!” she exclaimed and tugged at her husband’s sleeve.
“Concentrate!” growled the Captain. “A true actor works with any distraction.”
Anna ignored him and glided from the stage as if on skates. The dirty crowd parted to create a path.
Anna Swan is dead, thought the would-be actress. If she’s here, then I must be dead, too.
She glanced around the lecture hall. Surely, if there was any justice in the afterlife, then Nicholas would have been sent to greet her. Unless he had been given the chance and turned it down. Unless he wanted nothing to do with her.
Anna Swan reached her, and the two women stood face-to-face. They were a mirror and a reflection—but who was which?
“How did you like being an actress?” asked Anna.
“I don’t know if I ever became one.”
“If you go back, try getting married. If they say you have no rank or profession, you probably became an actress.” Her gaze fell on something behind Andorra. “Well, he’s certainly got an actor’s blood. Look—he’s making a dramatic entrance.”
Andorra turned. Nicholas stood on the edge of the mezzanine, dressed in his costume from The Life of Henry the Fifth—and his Detroit Tigers ball cap. He held the end of a long rope and, with a Tarzan bellow, swung into the air and dropped into the audience. Those dirty New Yorkers swallowed him whole. Andorra tried to move in his direction, but the crowd closed in around her. They were viscous, like the thickest of soups. The crowd was like an ocean, and each time she thought she had broken through, another wave swelled. She tried to remember what Rutherford the Swimming Teacher had taught her. Rutherford! She had forgotten all about him. Poor Rutherford, pinned beneath her. Poor Rutherford, whom she had probably crushed to death.
Something heavy and rhythmic pounded the air. Footsteps? Her heart?
All at once, the crowd was gone; the Great Lecture Hall was gone, too. She was in her father’s room in the west wing of the house in her principality, that forbidden section where she had dared to look for Geoffrey so many years ago. Her family stood at the far end, framed by a large window. Rowena held Gabriella against her chest. Gabriel stood at Geoffrey’s side. The loyal Manuela sewed in the corner. And there was her mother, the real Elionor, as young and beautiful as she must have been before a fistula—before a daughter—changed the course of her life. Andorra stepped toward them, and then Nicholas appeared, blocking the way. He was still in costume, but his face was split. Nose broken, lips torn. Blue eyes shot with streaks of red. Andorra didn’t have to look down at him: somehow in this moment they were exactly the same height.
He kissed her with his battered mouth. It was the sort of kiss that would have enraged the Hollywood censors: lustful and excessive and oh-so bittersweet.
“There’s witchcraft in thy lips,” he said.
* * *
SHE SPRANG AWAKE with a gasp, holding her mouth as if to keep that last kiss from flying away. It took a moment for the delirium to disappear. Fade out on Nicholas. Fade in on a hospital room, where she lay splayed across two beds that had been pushed together. A window, its curtains a faded red, gave way to an unhappy night. The glass was rain-streaked, and beyond it was the faint howl of wind. Nearby, on the nightstand, she noticed a bouquet of yellow flowers was keeping watch. She knew them at once. Adonis vernalis. Pheasant’s-eyes, the official flower of the Principality of Andorra.
Rutherford Simone was keeping watch, too, though he was doing a lousy job: he had fallen asleep. Still in the clothes he had been wearing on set, his glasses were held together by tape while his left arm sat in both a cast and a sling. So that’s what she had done to him. She tried to sit up. Her head was heavy with fog. She couldn’t feel the bed against her body; she couldn’t feel her body either. Everything should have been screaming in pain, but it was all a distant hum.
“Rutherford,” she muttered. “Rutherford, wake up.”
“Mmm-blurg,” said Rutherford, and he opened his eyes. “You’re up.”
“I can’t feel anything.”
“They gave you something for the pain.”
Drugs. She yawned. It was a struggle to stay awake. “The flowers…”
“What do you think?” he smiled. “I had to find a specialist.”
“They’re poison,” she mumbled.
“What?”
“They’re poisonous…” She trailed off, barely aware of the embarrassed look that had crossed his face. She wanted to take his hand. She wanted to tell him how pleased she was by the gesture. I’ll tell him, she thought. I just need to shut my eyes first. Then things went licorice-black as she spiraled into the well of sleep. There were no more dreams; it was nothing but a void.
The next day, she woke to find the poisonous flowers were gone. She wondered if she had dreamed them until Rutherford appeared in her room. “Why would the official flower of your country be poisonous?” he asked.
“Why did you learn the official flower of my country?” she countered.
“A man’s gotta do something. You’ve been asleep for two days.”
With the help of mirrors, he was able to show her the damage done to her back: a great yellow bruise stretched from her neck down to the middle of her spine. Anyone else might have woken with a few vertebrae knocked out of place, but Elionor Nicholas’s incredible network of sinews and muscles had borne the burden with surprising skill. Nothing was broken; the bruises would heal. Her collapse had nothing to do with that falling light. It had been her possibly weak heart, which had proved weak after all, at least under the strain of heat and stress. By the time the medics had reached her, that twenty-ounce muscle had practically stopped. Rutherford had been pinned beneath her for almost half an hour but had not let anyone move her. “If she’s hurt her back, you’ll make it worse!” he had warned. And so, with glasses snapped and a ruined arm, he had willingly stayed trapped beneath her, a breath away from her unconscious face.
“We sent a telegram to Detroit,” he told her. “No one’s replied.”
“How long do I have to stay here?”
“Until the end of the week. The insurance is paying for everything. You just take it easy.”
“What about the movie?”
“Under the circumstances, it’s been indefinitely postponed.”
She thought she knew what those “circumstances” were. They had arrested Grove Wilson. The dead girl—her name had been Ethel Faye—had been survived by a grandmother who recalled Grove Wilson making several appearances at her house. “And they weren’t cameos, if you get my meaning,” Rutherford said. “Those reporters are suffering from an embarrassment of riches. Ethel Faye wasn’t just sixteen, you know. She was sixteen and black and a mother. It isn’t one scandal—it’s three.”
“And they think the child is his?”
“That’s for the courts to decide.”
“But what does he say?”
“He’s talking through his lawyers now,” said Rutherford. “They swear he knows nothing about it. But that’s not the craziest part. That light you saved me from didn’t fall by mistake. Someone did something to the rigging. And one of the riggers who worked that day was Thomas Faye, Ethel’s brother. Who has since disappeared.”
Her response was a great and powerful yawn—the drugs were muting both the pain and any ability she had to be surprised.
“I’ll let you rest,” said Rutherford.
“Wait. That old woman, the one with the silver cane. Who was she?”
He gave a small smile. “That was just another mother back from the dead.”
Rutherford had never met Miss Rebecca Eaton, but he had known the name. Chester Smith had mentioned her, but always as a minor character, a bit player in the drama of how his parents had met. Rutherford was only now starting to realize how important she really was. While waiting for Elionor to wake, he had learned the official flower of her country; he had also taken time to learn how Miss Rebecca Eaton had gone from a giant house in Seville to a Hollywood soundstage in fifty years.
With her pockets filled with Anna Swan’s gold, Miss Eaton had gone to San Francisco, where she had hired detectives to help her find the Clarkes. She was working a string of odd jobs when the detectives told her Gavin had gone into mining and settled his family in the Cahuenga Valley, not far from a ranch that bore what was then considered a peculiar name: Hollywood. Miss Eaton moved there and found work raising the children of the Danforth family, a clan of bankers who invested her remaining money with such skill that she could afford to spend the next few years paying more detectives to keep track of the Clarkes. The peculiar Susannah Clarke had been hidden in a sanitarium, where she eventually died; as for Gavin, he was taken by pneumonia during the first year of the Great War. With the Clarkes dead, Miss Eaton finally decided it was time to tell Jessica the truth. She travelled to the funeral only to arrive too late: by the time she reached the cemetery, the mourners—including Jessica—were gone.
Rutherford and Jessica eloped not long after. With Jessica’s name changed, Miss Eaton lost track of where her daughter had gone. Still, Miss Eaton stayed in California, searching for a Clarke instead of a Simone. The Danforths became the Pierces; the Pierces became the Blackmores. Had she ever followed the new world of motion pictures, Miss Eaton might have noticed Chester Smith’s name flash across the screen. But so what? It would have meant nothing to her, for how was she to know that this Smith was really another Clarke? So she did not find him until after his death. She had missed the headline about the arrival of a woman who was seven-eleven (and three hundred and twenty-two pounds), but she had easily found the story that had been buried on page 8 of the Los Angeles Times of the dead producer. Why not? She was ninety-five years old. Obituaries were the only thing that interested her anymore. The notice had mentioned Chester Smith’s real name; in the end, despite all the detectives and private investigations, Rebecca Eaton had found her daughter because some nameless reporter had done his job.
Thanks to the wise council of the Danforth family, she had survived the Depression with a portfolio that provided a healthy annuity, and, upon her arrival, she had taken a room at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. Rutherford had visited her in her stylish room on the eleventh floor, but Jessica had refused to come along. “I don’t care how rich she is,” Jessica said. “She left me in a puddle of shit. They should bury her in one when she dies.”
“I don’t want to lie to this woman,” Rutherford said to Elionor. “But I feel like I need tell her something. Technically, she’s my mother-in-law.”
Elionor, whose Aunt Manuela had lied to her about her mother so many years ago, thought she understood the value of stretching the truth. There is a danger in lying to children about their mothers. But lying to old women about their daughters is different. One is cruel, thought Elionor. The other is charity.
“Tell her Jessica is very busy,” she said. “Tell her Jessica is one of the most important people in town.”
* * *
THE NEXT DAY, a telegram came from Detroit. For a writer, Rowena had been all too terse:
ARE YOU OKAY? WHAT DO YOU NEED?
Elionor did not write back; she did not know how. Was she okay? What did she need? The telegram also didn’t tell her what she really wanted to know: it didn’t tell her whether Rowena—or anyone—knew the truth about the 1934 World Series.
Discharged a few days later, the would-be actress returned to New Annan just in time for Halloween. She celebrated the day by wandering the mansion like the resurrected dead, caught in a daze that was mistaken for a drug-induced fog. She had little choice but to obey her doctor’s orders and convalesce. Movie studios are accustomed to a wide range of problems, but when an actor is charged with both miscegenation and statutory rape, even the most seasoned producer is forced to take a pause. Bombshell Brunette had been mentioned in the press, and what should have been a frothy comedy of errors was now linked in the public mind with scandal. Yes, they could always recast. But it seemed easier to scrap the film and move on. Only Jessica hoped to save it; only Jessica hoped to save Grove Wilson, too.
“He’s been framed,” she proclaimed. “I’d bet my life on it.”
But Jessica, like Elionor, had no talent for placing bets. A week after Elionor returned to New Annan, Grove Wilson pled guilty to the charge of a sexual misdemeanor; in exchange, prosecutors agreed to overlook the rest. Not that it mattered. Grove Wilson should have cut a deal with Hollywood; Hollywood hadn’t agreed to overlook a thing. And they never would. Grove Wilson was ruined; Rutherford predicted it would be a snowy day in California before the handsome actor ever worked again.
Jessica Simone had bet her life and lost. At long last, something inside her cracked. She had lost her brother, found a mother she didn’t want, and publicly defended an actor who was now a disgrace. She began wandering New Annan, muttering to herself and swaying into walls. They suspected alcohol or drugs but found no evidence of either. Rutherford tried to summon a doctor, only to have Jessica lock herself in her room.
“People are telling me I need to put her in a sanitarium,” Rutherford told Elionor Nicholas. “I laughed at them. Who am I to put her anywhere? She left me long ago.” He shook his head. For months—maybe years—he had been Rutherford the Divorced. And he was only realizing it now.
They were sitting by the pool, bare legs dangling in the water. The pool was littered with debris. No one had cleaned it; Jessica had frightened many of the servants away.
