Are You in the House Alone? (9 page)

She was definitely fresh out of graduate school—somewhere in inner-city New York probably. No makeup, lank hair, yesterday’s blouse working up out of her belt. She kept running the side of her thumb down her cheek to get the hair out of her face. Unfolding a page, she began to read her prepared speech.

“Boys and girls, the principal has asked me to introduce this monthly Arts Assembly which I understand is one of Oldfield High’s most time-honored traditions. Today, in place of a live performance”—there came a series of sharp high shrieks from the back of the auditorium along sweathogs’ row; they were clearly LaVerne Shull’s, who must have been giving a live performance of her own—“we have a special treat of particular significance to our school.

“The film we are all about to enjoy, which has been obtained through the good offices of the Museum of Modern Art archives in New York, reaches well back into the annals of cinematographic history. It is the art form of an earlier era almost miraculously preserved. And so I invite you all to sit back—quietly—and enjoy a movie, filmed in 1926, which I feel sure needs no further introduction.”

Miss Venable tried for a quick but controlled exit off the stage. There was a tremendous burst of applause, but she missed the irony of it. A few penetrating whistles and a voice yelling, “Give the little lady a big hand,” sent her in full flight.

“Who is that woman and what is she talking about?” Steve said, making a steeple of his fingers in front of his nose and settling down in the seat.

The film broke a couple of times during the credits and seemed to catch fire once. The color went from grainy gray to muddy yellow bubbles. I think the title was
Roses in Ruin
, but I can’t be sure. The only sound was the whir of the projector, since it was obviously from the age of silent movies. Still, there were a few loud demands to turn up the volume, and Val said, “Oh dear, I guess it’s going to be historical.”

It was, in its way. The lighting was so bad that it took a while to see that this was a fancy-dress party scene with people moving like painted dolls all over a ballroom in a cheek-to-cheek dance. I suppose originally there was live musical accompaniment to add realism. An organ or something. But now they danced in silence and the whites of their eyes and their hands were deathly pale. The chandeliers tinkled without any noise over their heads, and a breeze blew the long lace curtains on French doors.

“I’m not getting the deeper meaning of this,” Steve muttered.

The party scene was interrupted by a printed card that read,

The natives in the auditorium were getting restless. But the ballroom scene returned, and the dancers separated. A
young girl was discovered standing under the chandelier, holding her mask well away from her face so the camera could zoom in on her.

In a way she was ridiculous. A flat-chested 1920s flapper dressed up in an eighteenth-century gown with a low neckline. She was the only one without a powdered wig, and her hair was lacquered glossy black and looped with pearls. And she was sensationally beautiful. Black lips and hair and a black beauty mark at her temple for the right period touch. She gazed around the crowded ballroom with her hand at her neck in a wonderfully graceful gesture. I realized I was trying to copy her, reaching up to the green heart I wore on the chain.

The film jumped off its sprockets or something and started fluttering. But the audience was half grabbed by then and started a clapping rhythm. When the picture came back, the girl was whirling around the room, first with one partner and then another. Fat ones, thin ones, one who must have been the king of France.

“I’m not sure,” Steve mumbled again, “but I don’t think they did the tango at the court of Louis the Sixteenth.”

But he was watching the girl too. The way her silver skirts swept over the floor. The tiny curved heels of her dancing slippers. The line of her neck as her head drew back to hear the compliments whispered into her ear. Her presence seemed to leap off the cracked old film and crackle with life.

There was a lot of nonsense acted out in mime. Something about a diamond bracelet lost and old ladies in stiff brocaded skirts screaming soundlessly and clutching at their dangling ear rings. And servants being accused.

Naturally there was a thief outside the palace, masked too, but for a different reason. He was climbing around on
the rose trellis and swinging from grapevines—with a diamond bracelet dangling out of his pocket. I think the reels got reversed because suddenly the beautiful girl was standing alone on the terrace with her back to the room full of dancers. She was gazing up at the moon, turning her almond-shaped face up to show that long white swan neck again. Instead of a mask, she was holding a fan. She worked it in an underwater motion, touching the hollow of her neck with it, closing it and running it down the white curve of her arm. She seemed to know all about charisma before there was a word for it.

Then the masked thief swung onto the terrace, and his very white teeth gleamed as he stood there, boots wide apart and hands on hips, devouring her with his masked eyes. When she saw him, she tried to hide behind her fan—another ridiculous, beautiful gesture. Her eyes got enormous as she looked into the camera, begging us to save her.

But there wasn’t anything we could do, though even Steve was almost up on the edge of his seat by then. There was a lot more business between the thief and the maiden, including her ripping off his mask which was supposed to reveal him as the illegitimate brother of some duke. Then he swept her up in his arms, and they flew away from the terrace on another convenient vine.

The scene jerked to a rose garden with the moonlight wet as water all around, and the camera concentrating on a statue of Cupid in the middle of a fountain. The girl resisted the thief, broke away from him, and began to run up and down the avenues of rose bushes. The camera cut from her running, stumbling, running again, to the thief standing perfectly still, laughing silently. Only then did I stop enjoying it. She could run and run, but she couldn’t escape.

The film blurred again, and she was in his arms, thrashing away at him with her fan until it shattered in a shower of sticks. The two of them fell in slow motion to the ground, and the rose bushes seemed to grow up around them.

This must have been before the days of censorship. The girl tore the thief’s white shirt off his shoulders and clawed long black gashes in his back. His head was buried in her breast, his hands wrenching away the ballooning sleeves from her arms.

The camera only caught the top of his curly head to reveal her face above it. The maiden being ravished. Terror gradually replaced by passion. Her eyes slowly closed, and her lashes lay fringed on her cheeks. A small secret smile played across her lips. The stone Cupid on the fountain above them came miraculously alive then and shot an arrow in the direction of the moon.

The auditorium lights went up, and the crowd went fairly wild. It wasn’t your usual Arts Assembly, and the seduction scene had overstimulated several people. We were all mystified about why they’d shown it. Thinking it was over, I reached down for my book bag, and reality rushed back when I remembered the note. Something clicked in my mind then, very gently. Some connection between the fantasy trip of the movie and the trapped feeling when it was over.

But it wasn’t over. Miss Venable jumped up and yelled for us to sit down and be quiet. A total hush fell over the crowd anyway, because Sonia Slanek walked out of the wings and across to center stage.

In some quarters, Sonia’s eternal camp was always good for a laugh. But this time she was having her moment of glory. Her clinging black gown and gaudy shawl carried
out the theme of the film perfectly. She must have planned it that way. And when she got up to the microphone, she turned big, over-made-up eyes on us, using them just like a silent movie star would. You could have heard a pin drop. Watching her was a major school pastime. But we were about to hear her too.

She tossed the fringes of her shawl over one shoulder and opened her Cupid’s-bow lips. “The film you’ve just seen,” she said in a perfectly ordinary voice, “broke all attendance records when it was premiered at the Roxy Theater in New York. My father was instrumental in discovering this print of it which has lain, mislabeled for a half century, in the museum archives. It’s characteristic of the films of that time, when the fashion for screen heroes was set by Douglas Fairbanks and Rudolph Valentino and then endlessly copied by other actors.

“In a way it describes an art lost when sound began to be added to movies in the following year. The performers of the silent era were called upon to devise an entire system of body language to express their emotions and to advance the fairly simple plots of the totally visual stories.”

“She’s good,” Steve said, on one side of me.

From the other Valerie whispered, “She sounds real normal, kind of like a teacher.”

“The female stars of the 1920s,” Sonia continued, “are often remembered as awkward flappers, doing the Charleston, with their stockings rolled below the knees and their hair chopped off and shingled up the back.

“A closer look at an original source reveals a very different kind of female ideal. And it suggests the considerable artistry required of the performer working in a silent medium.”

Then Sonia dropped her bombshell. “A distinction of
this school is that one of our teachers was the beautiful and talented actress of the movie we’ve just seen. Our drama teacher, Dovima Malevich.”

There was a weird rushing sound as a general gasp swept through the auditorium. The spotlight hit the front row where Madam Malevich was sitting. She was humped over in her seat, wedged in between two other teachers who didn’t have homerooms.

The teachers on either side of her stood then and began to applaud, looking down at the wide white part in her black hair and smiling kindly. Then we were all applauding and starting to stand up. Sweathogs and high-level heads. And bustasses and ninth-graders who hadn’t even discovered her yet. The cheer leaders cheered. And people who’d snickered at her were clapping instead. A star was born in our midst, never mind that it was a half century late. It was almost like discovering that the little old man who’d been teaching history was Woodrow Wilson in disguise.

The music teacher, Mr. Bryant, shouted “Brava!” and then everyone did. And somebody called for a speech. But Madam Malevich didn’t rise for a long time. She only sat there, looking very small and farther away than she had on the screen. And we all stared at the knot of black hair that rested on her rounded back.

But finally one of the teachers bent down, whispered something, and offered her an arm. She stood up, and the applause whipped into a frenzy. It seemed to charge through her. She stood taller and walked around the orchestra pit toward the stage, shrugging off all help on the steps.

As she walked across to the mike, she was her usual, beaky-nosed, pigeon-shaped self. She shuffled in her space
shoes. But we were all seeing her with different eyes now.

She stood in front of the mike until we were all as silent as her film. Her eyes were the eyes of the girl we’d just seen on the screen. “I vas silent screen actress,” she began, “so I better be silent now so as not to destroy the mood. Yes, I vas young once, as you see. I lived out my dreams and then I outlived them. It is what happens to everybody.

“But a moment like today? No. That don’t happen to everybody. I am grateful from my heart to Sonia Slanek and her father and to all those who bring back a moment or two from my youth to share wiz you who are young now. And so Dovima says no more, for she weeps.”

And she did. Dark stains formed in the pockets under her eyes as her mascara flowed down her face. She walked blinking across the stage and into the darkness of the wings. Her timing was right on as usual, but this time it wasn’t a performance.

Valerie strangled over a dry sob. I was trying to keep the tears back. And Steve took off his glasses and began giving them a vigorous polish.

The school buzzed all Thursday about Madam Malevich. Since it was Sonia Slanek who’d discovered her, people were buzzing about her too. When Sonia came to school, instead of watching her walk past them, people stopped her in the hall, congratulating her. But Sonia had retreated into her shell again, looking impatient at the attention. It was her moment to belong, but her brown lips just smiled, and her butterfly eyes fluttered away.

“Wouldn’t you think she’d want a little credit?” Alison was saying. “I mean who else would bother to dig around and find out who Malevich really is, or was? And then have the contacts to turn up that old film and all.”

“I doubt if she was doing it for our benefit. I expect she did it for Madam Malevich. Somehow I don’t think Sonia needs us.”

“Everybody needs somebody,” Alison said, very definite. “I mean, you never know when you’ll need a friend.”

That must have stuck in my mind. That business about friendship. I usually met up with Alison before third period
study hall. Our paths crossed outside the counseling wing door. It was propped open, and I looked inside. I’d never been in there. In a cubicle across the outer office, Miss Venable, the new guidance counselor, was at her desk.

And then Alison came bustling along. “Is there time to go to the john before the bell? My hair’s a—”

“Alison, I ought to talk to a counselor.”

“What about?” She kept looking over my head, searching for the hall clock.

“You know what about. The latest note.”

“You don’t still have it, do you?” she said, finally looking at me. “You’re not carrying it around, are you?”

“Yes. Come in with me.” She took a step back.

“What about study hall?” she said.

“What about it? I need to have somebody with me.” I knew the excuses were bubbling up in her brain, so I said, “You never know when you’ll need a friend.”