The Best of Connie Willis (25 page)

“Yeah. He dated a lot of actresses. He had an affair with Anita Loos and nearly married Aileen Pringle. Why?”

“I’m impressed he wasn’t intimidated by the fact that they were movie stars, that’s all.”

I didn’t know if that was directed at me or not.

“Speaking of actresses,” I said, “what time is Ariaura’s seminar?”

“Two o’clock,” she said, glancing at her watch. “It’s a quarter till two right now. It should be over around four. Riata said she’d call as soon as the seminar was done.”

We went back to looking through Mencken’s books and his biographies, looking for details Ariaura was unlikely to have memorized. He’d loved baseball. He had stolen Gideon Bibles from hotel rooms and then given them to his friends, inscribed, “Compliments of the Author.” He’d been friends with lots of writers, including Theodore Dreiser and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who’d gotten so drunk at a dinner with Mencken he’d stood up at the dinner table and pulled his pants down.

The phone rang. I reached for it, but it was Kildy’s cell phone. “It’s Riata,” she told me, looking at the readout.

“Riata?” I glanced at my watch. It was only two-thirty. “Why isn’t she in the seminar?”

Kildy shrugged and put the phone to her ear. “Riata? What’s going on? … You’re kidding! … Did you get it? Great … no, meet me at Spago’s, like we agreed. I’ll be there in half an hour.”

She hit “end,” stood up, and took out her keys, all in one graceful motion. “Ariaura did it again, only this time as soon as she started, they stopped the seminar, yanked her offstage, and told everybody to leave. Riata got it on tape. I’m going to go pick it up. Will you be here?”

I nodded absently, trying to think of a way to ask about Mencken’s two-fingered typing, and Kildy waved good-bye and went out.

If I asked, “How do you write your stories?” I’d get an answer about the process of writing, but if I asked, “Do you touch-type?” Ariaura—

Kildy reappeared in the doorway, sat down, and picked up her notebook again. “What are you doing?” I asked, “I thought you were going—”

She put her finger to her lips. “She’s here,” she mouthed, and Ariaura came in.

She was still wearing her purple robes and her stage makeup, so she must have come here straight from her seminar, but she didn’t roar in angrily the way she had before. She looked frightened.

“What are you doing to me?” she asked, her voice trembling. “And don’t say you’re not doing anything. I saw the videotape. You’re—that’s what I want to know, too,” the gravelly voice demanded. “What the hell
have you been doing? I thought you ran a magazine that worked to put a stop to the kind of bilgewater this high priestess of blather spews out. She was at it again today, calling up spirits and rooking a bunch of mysticism-besotted fools out of their cold cash, and where the hell were you? I didn’t see you there, cracking heads.”

“We didn’t go because we didn’t want to encourage her if she was—” Kildy hesitated. “We’re not sure what … I mean, who we’re dealing with here …” she faltered.

“Ariaura,” I said firmly. “You pretend to channel spirits from the astral plane for a living. Why should we believe you’re not pretending to channel H. L. Mencken?”

“Pretending?” she said, sounding surprised. “You think I’m something that two-bit Jezebel’s confabulating?”

She sat down heavily in the chair in front of my desk and grinned wryly at me. “You’re absolutely right. I wouldn’t believe it, either. A skeptic after my own heart.”

“Yes,” I said. “And as a skeptic, I need to have some proof you’re who you say you are.”

“Fair enough. What kind of proof?”

“We want to ask you some questions,” Kildy said.

Ariaura slapped her knees. “Fire away.”

“All right,” I said. “Since you mentioned fires, when was the Baltimore fire?”

“Aught-four,” she said promptly. “February. Cold as hell.” She grinned. “Best time I ever had.”

Kildy glanced at me. “What did your father drink?” she asked.

“Rye.”

“What did
you
drink?” I asked.

“From 1919 on, whatever I could get.”

“Where are you from?” Kildy asked.

“The most beautiful city in the world.”

“Which is?” I said.

“Which
is
?” she roared, outraged. “Bawlmer!”

Kildy shot me a glance.

“What’s the Saturday Night Club?” I snapped out.

“A drinking society,” she said, “with musical accompaniment.”

“What instrument did you play?”

“Piano.”

“What’s the Mann Act?”

“Why?” she said, winking at Kildy. “You planning on taking her across state lines? Is she underage?”

I ignored that. “If you’re really Mencken, you hate charlatans, so why have you inhabited Ariaura’s body?”

“Why do people go to zoos?”

She was good, I had to give her that. And fast. She spat out answers as fast as I could ask her questions about the
Sun
and
The Smart Set
and William Jennings Bryan.

“Why did you go to Dayton?”

“To see a three-ring circus. And stir up the animals.”

“What did you take with you?”

“A typewriter and four quarts of Scotch. I should have taken a fan. It was hotter than the seventh circle of hell, with the same company.”

“What did you eat while you were there?” Kildy asked.

“Fried chicken and tomatoes. At every meal. Even breakfast.”

I handed him the bogus evangelist handbill Mencken had handed out at the Scopes trial. “What’s this?”

She looked at it, turned it over, looked at the other side. “It appears to be some sort of circular.”

And there’s all the proof we need, I thought smugly. Mencken would have recognized that instantly. “Do you know who wrote this handbill?” I started to ask and thought better of it. The question itself might give the answer away. And better not use the word “handbill.”

“Do you know the event this circular describes?” I asked instead.

“I’m afraid I can’t answer that,” she said.

Then you’re not Mencken, I thought. I shot a triumphant glance at Kildy.

“But I would be glad to,” Ariaura said, “if you would be so good as to read what is written on it to me.”

She handed the handbill back to me, and I stood there looking at it and then at her and then at it again.

“What is it, Rob?” Kildy said. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Never mind about the circular. What was your first published news story about?”

“A stolen horse and buggy,” she said, and proceeded to tell the whole story, but I wasn’t listening.

He didn’t know what the handbill was about, I thought, because he couldn’t read. Because he’d had an aphasic stroke in 1948 that had left him unable to read and write.

“It doesn’t prove anything,” I told Kildy after Ariaura was gone. She’d come out of her Mencken act abruptly after I’d asked her what street she lived on in Baltimore, looked bewilderedly at me and then Kildy, and bolted without a word. “Ariaura could have found out about Mencken’s stroke the same way I did,” I said, “by reading it in a book.”

“Then why did you go white like that?” Kildy said. “I thought you were going to pass out. And why wouldn’t she just answer the question? She knew the answers to all the others.”

“Probably she didn’t know that one and that was her fallback response,” I said. “It caught me off guard, that’s all. I was expecting her to have memorized pat answers, not—”

“Exactly,” Kildy cut in. “Somebody faking it would have said they had an aphasic stroke if you asked them a direct question about it, but they wouldn’t have … and that wasn’t the only instance. When you
asked him about the Baltimore fire, he said it was the best time he’d ever had. Someone faking it would have told you what buildings burned or how horrible it was.”

And he’d said, not “1904” or “oh-four,” but “aught-four.” Nobody talked like that nowadays, and it wasn’t something that would have been in Mencken’s writings. It was something people said, not wrote, and Ariaura couldn’t possibly—

“It doesn’t prove he’s Mencken,” I said and realized I was saying “he.” And shouting.

I lowered my voice. “It’s a very clever trick, that’s all. And just because we don’t know how the trick’s being done doesn’t mean it’s not a trick. She could have been coached in the part,
including
telling her how to pretend she can’t read if she’s confronted with anything written. Or she could be hooked up to somebody with a computer.”

“I looked. She wasn’t wearing an earpiece, and if somebody was looking up the answers and feeding them to her, she’d be slower answering them, wouldn’t she?”

“Not necessarily. She might have a photographic memory.”

“But then wouldn’t she be doing a mind-reading act instead of channeling?”

“Maybe she did. We don’t know what she was doing before Salem,” I said, but Kildy was right. Someone with a photographic memory could make a killing as a fortune-teller or a medium, and there were no signs of a photographic memory in Ariaura’s channeling act—she spoke only in generalities.

“Or she might be coming up with the answers some other way,” I said.

“What if she isn’t, Rob? What if she’s really channeling the spirit of Mencken?”

“Kildy, channels are fakes. There are no spirits, no sympathetic vibrations, there’s no astral plane.”

“I know,” she said, “but his answers were so—” She shook her head. “And there’s something about him, his voice and the way he moves—”

“It’s called acting.”

“But Ariaura’s a terrible actress. You saw her do Isus.”

“All right,” I said. “Let’s suppose for a minute it is Mencken, and that instead of being in the family plot in Loudon Park Cemetery, his spirit’s floating in the ether somewhere, why would he come back at this particular moment? Why didn’t he come back when Uri Geller was bending spoons all over the place, or when Shirley MacLaine was on every talk show in the universe? Why didn’t he come back in the fifties when Virginia Tighe was claiming to be Bridey Murphy?”

“I don’t know,” Kildy admitted.

“And why would he choose to make his appearance through the ‘channel’ of a third-rate mountebank like Ariaura? He
hated
charlatans like her.”

“Maybe that’s why he came back, because people like her are still around and he hadn’t finished what he set out to do. You heard him—he said he left too early.”

“He was talking about the Scopes trial.”

“Maybe not. You heard him, he said, ‘You let the quacks and the crooks take over.’ Or maybe—” she stopped.

“Maybe what?”

“Maybe he came back to help you, Rob. That time you were so frustrated over Charles Fred, I heard you say, ‘Where the hell is H. L. Mencken when we need him?’ Maybe he heard you.”

“And decided to come all the way back from an astral plane that doesn’t exist to help a skeptic nobody’s ever heard of.”

“It’s not
that
inconceivable that someone would be interested in you,” Kildy said. “I … I mean, the work you’re doing is really important, and Mencken—”

“Kildy,”
I said, “I don’t believe this.”

“I don’t, either—I just … you have to admit, it’s a very convincing illusion.”

“Yes, so was the Fox sisters’ table-rapping and Virginia Tighe’s past life as an Irish washerwoman in 1880s Dublin, but there was a logical
explanation for both of them, and it may not even be that complicated. The details Bridey Murphy knew all turned out to have come from Virginia Tighe’s Irish nanny. The Fox sisters were cracking their
toes
, for God’s sake.”

“You’re right,” Kildy said, but she didn’t sound completely convinced, and that worried me. If Ariaura’s Mencken imitation could fool Kildy, it could fool anybody, and “I’m sure it’s a trick. I just don’t know how she’s doing it” wasn’t going to cut it when the networks called me for a statement. I had to figure this out fast.

“Ariaura has to be getting her information about Mencken from someplace,” I said. “We need to find out where. We need to check with bookstores and the library. And the Internet,” I said, hoping that wasn’t what she was using. It would take forever to find out what sites she’d visited.

“What do you want me to do?” Kildy asked.

“I want you to go through the transcripts like you suggested and find out where the quotes came from so we’ll know the particular works we’re dealing with,” I told her. “And I want you to talk to your publicist and anybody else who’s been to the seminars and find out if any of them had a private enlightenment audience with Ariaura. I want to know what goes on in them. Is she using Mencken for some purpose we don’t know about? See if you can find out.”

“I could ask Riata to get an audience,” she suggested.

“That’s a good idea,” I said.

“What about questions? Do you want me to try to come up with some harder ones than the ones we asked him—I mean, her?”

I shook my head. “Asking harder questions won’t help. If she’s got a photographic memory, she’ll know anything we throw at her, and if she doesn’t, and we ask her some obscure question about one of the reporters Mencken worked with at the
Morning Herald
, or one of his
Smart Set
essays, she can say she doesn’t remember, and it won’t prove anything. If you asked me what was in articles I wrote for
The Jaundiced Eye
five years ago, I couldn’t remember, either.”

“I’m not talking about facts and figures, Rob,” Kildy said. “I’m talking
about the kinds of things people don’t forget, like the first time Mencken met Sara.”

I thought of the first time I met Kildy, looking up from my desk to see her standing there, with her honey-blond hair and that movie-star smile. “Unforgettable” was the word, all right.

“Or how his mother died,” Kildy was saying, “or how he found out about the Baltimore fire. The paper called him and woke him out of a sound sleep. There’s no way you could forget that, or the name of a dog you had as a kid, or the nickname the other kids called you in grade school.”

Nickname. That triggered something. Something Ariaura wouldn’t know. About a baby. Had Mencken had a nickname when he was a baby? No, that wasn’t it—