The Book of Illusions (27 page)

All right, forget about everyone else. What about you? When did you first hear the name Hector Mann? You knew him as Hector Spelling. How old were you when you realized that Hector Spelling and Hector Mann were the same person?

I always knew that. We had a complete set of the Kaleidoscope films at the ranch, and I must have seen them fifty times when I was a child. The moment I learned how to read, I noticed that Hector was Mann, not Spelling. I asked my father about it, and he said that Hector had acted under a stage name when he was young, but now that he wasn’t acting anymore, he’d stopped using it. It felt like a perfectly plausible explanation to me.

I thought those films were lost.

They almost were. By all rights, they should have been. But just when Hunt was about to declare bankruptcy, a day or two before the marshals came to seize his goods and padlock the door, Hector and my father broke into the Kaleidoscope offices and stole the films. The negatives weren’t there, but they marched off with prints of all twelve comedies. Hector gave them to my father for safekeeping, and two months later Hector was gone. When my father moved to the ranch in 1940, he brought the the films with him.

How did Hector feel about that?

I don’t understand. How should he have felt?

That’s what I’m asking you. Was he pleased or displeased?

Pleased. Of course he was pleased. He was proud of those little films, and he was glad to have them back.

Then why did he wait so long before sending them out into the world again?

What makes you think he did that?

I don’t know, I assumed …

I thought you understood. It was me. I was the one who did it.

I suspected as much.

Then why didn’t you say something?

I didn’t think I had the right to. In case it was supposed to be a secret.

I don’t have any secrets from you, David. Whatever I know, I want you to know, too. Don’t you get it? I sent out those films blind, and you were the one who found them. You’re the only person in the world who found them all. That makes us old friends, doesn’t it? We might not have met until yesterday, but we’ve been working together for years.

It was an incredible stunt you pulled. I talked to curators everywhere I went, and not one of them had any idea who you were. When I was in California, I had lunch with Tom Luddy, the head of the Pacific Film Archive. They were the last place to receive one of the Hector Mann mystery boxes. By the time theirs came, you’d already been at it for a few years, and the word was out. Tom said that he didn’t even bother to open the package. He took it straight to the FBI to have it checked for fingerprints, but they couldn’t find any in the box—not a single one. You didn’t leave a trace.

I wore gloves. If I was going to go to the trouble of keeping a secret, I certainly wasn’t going to slip up on a detail like that.

You’re a clever girl, Alma.

You bet I’m clever. I’m the cleverest girl in this car, and I dare you to prove I’m not.

But how could you justify going behind Hector’s back? It was his decision to make, not yours.

I talked to him about it first. It was my idea, but I didn’t go ahead with it until he gave me the green light.

What did he say?

He shrugged. And then he gave me a little smile. It doesn’t matter, he said. Do whatever you want, Alma.

So he didn’t stop you, but he didn’t help you, either. He didn’t do anything.

It was November eighty-one, almost seven years ago. I’d just come back to the ranch for my mother’s funeral, and it was a bad time for all of us, the beginning of the end, somehow. I didn’t take it well. I admit that. She was only fifty-nine when we put her in the ground, and I hadn’t been prepared for it. Pulverizing. That’s the only word I can think of: a pulverizing sorrow. As if everything inside me had turned to dust. The others were so old by then. I looked up and suddenly realized that they were finished, that the great experiment was over. My father was eighty, Hector was eighty-one, and the next time I looked up, they’d all be gone. It had a tremendous effect on me. Every morning, I went into the screening room to watch my mother in her old films, and by the time I came out again, it would be dark outside and I’d be sobbing my guts out. After two weeks of that, I decided to go home. I was living in L. A. then. I had a job with an independent production company, and they needed me back at work. I was all set to go. I’d already called the airline and booked my ticket, but at the last minute—literally, on my last night at the ranch—Hector asked me to stay.

Did he give a reason?

He said he was ready to talk, and he needed someone to help him. He couldn’t do it on his own.

You mean the book was his idea?

It all came from him. I never would have thought of it myself. And even if I had, I wouldn’t have talked to him about it. I wouldn’t have dared.

He lost his courage. That’s the only explanation. Either he lost his courage or he went senile.

That’s what I thought, too. But I was wrong, and you’re wrong now. Hector changed his mind because of me. He told me I had a right to know the truth, and if I was willing to stay there and listen to him, he promised to tell me the whole story.

Okay, I’ll accept that. You’re part of the family, and now that you’re an adult, you deserve to know the family secrets. But how does a private confession turn into a book? It’s one thing for him to unburden himself to you, but a book is for the world, and as soon as he tells his story to the world, his life becomes meaningless.

Only if he’s still alive when it’s published. But he won’t be. I’ve promised not to show it to anyone until after he’s dead. He promised me the truth, and I promised him that.

And it’s never occurred to you that he might be using you? You get to write your book, yes, and if all goes well, it’s acknowledged as an important book, but at the same time Hector gets to live on through you. Not because of his films—which won’t even exist anymore—but because of what you’ve written about him.

It’s possible, anything is possible. But his motives don’t really concern me. He could be acting out of fear, out of vanity, out of some last-minute surge of regret, but he’s told me the truth. That’s the only thing that counts. Telling the truth is hard, David, and Hector and I have lived through a lot together these past seven years. He’s made everything available to me—all his journals, all his letters, every document he’s been able to lay his hands on. At this point, I’m not even thinking about publication. Whether it comes out or not, writing this book has been the biggest experience of my life.

Where does Frieda fit into all this? Has she been helping the two of you or not?

It’s been rough on her, but she’s done her best to go along with us. I don’t think she agrees with Hector, but she doesn’t want to stand in his way. It’s complicated. Everything with Frieda is complicated.

How long did it take before you decided to send out Hector’s old films?

That happened right at the beginning. I still didn’t know if I could trust him, and I proposed it as a test, to see if he was being honest with me. If he’d turned me down, I don’t think I would have stayed. I needed him to sacrifice something, to give me a sign of good faith. He understood that. We never talked about it in so many words, but he understood. That’s why he didn’t do anything to stop it.

That still doesn’t prove he’s been honest with you. You put his old films back in circulation. Where’s the harm in that? People remember him now. A crazy professor from Vermont even wrote a book about him. But none of that changes the story.

Every time he’s told me something, I’ve gone and checked it out. I’ve been to Buenos Aires, I’ve followed the trail of Brigid O’Fallon’s bones, I’ve dug up the old newspaper articles about the Sandusky bank shooting, I’ve talked to more than a dozen actors who worked at the ranch in the forties and fifties. There aren’t any discrepancies. Some people couldn’t be found, of course, and others turned out to be dead. Jules Blaustein, for example. And I still don’t have anything on Sylvia Meers. But I did go to Spokane and talk to Nora.

She’s still alive?

Very much so. At least she was three years ago.

And?

She married a man named Faraday in 1933 and had four children. Those children produced eleven grandchildren, and right around the time of my visit, one of those grandchildren was about to make them great-grandparents.

Good. I don’t know why I say that, but I’m glad to hear it.

She taught the fourth grade for fifteen years, and then they made her principal of the school. She went on doing that until she retired in 1976.

In other words, Nora went on being Nora.

She was seventy-something years old when I went out there, but she still felt like the same person Hector had described to me.

And what about Herman Loesser? Did she remember him?

She cried when I mentioned his name.

What do you mean
cried
?

I mean her eyes filled up with tears, and the tears rolled down her cheeks. She cried. In the same way you and I cry. In the same way every person cries.

Good Lord.

She was so startled and embarrassed, she had to get up and leave the room. When she came back, she took hold of my hand and said that she was sorry. She’d known him a long time ago, she said, but she’d never been able to stop thinking about him. He’d been in her thoughts every day for the past fifty-four years.

You’re making this up.

I don’t make things up. If I hadn’t been there, I wouldn’t have believed it myself. But it happened. It all happened, just as Hector said it did. Every time I think he’s lied to me, it turns out that he’s been telling the truth. That’s what makes his story so impossible, David. Because he’s told me the truth.

7

THERE WAS NO
moon in the sky that night. When I stepped out of the car and put my feet on the ground, I remember saying to myself: Alma is wearing red lipstick, the car is yellow, and there is no moon in the sky tonight. In the darkness behind the main house, I could dimly make out the contours of Hector’s trees—great hulks of shadow stirring in the wind.

Memoirs of a Dead Man
opens with a passage about trees. I found myself thinking about that as we approached the front door, trying to remember my translation of the third paragraph of Chateaubriand’s two-thousand-page book, the one that begins with the words
Ce lieu me plaît; il a remplacé pour moi
les champs paternels
and concludes with the following sentences:
I am attached to my trees. I have addressed elegies
,
sonnets, and odes to them. There is not one amongst them that
I have not tended with my own hands, that I have not freed from
the worm that had attacked its root or the caterpillar that had
clung to its leaves. I know them all by their names, as if they
were my children. They are my family. I have no other, and I
hope to be near them when I die
.

I wasn’t expecting to see him that night. When Alma called from the airport, Frieda had told her that Hector would probably be asleep by the time we made it to the ranch. He was still hanging on, she said, but she didn’t think he’d be up to talking to me until tomorrow morning—assuming he managed to last that long.

Eleven years later, I still wonder what would have happened if I had stopped and turned around before we reached the door. What if, instead of putting my arm around Alma’s shoulder and walking straight toward the house, I had stopped for a moment, looked at the other half of the sky, and discovered a large round moon shining down on us? Would it still be true to say that there was no moon in the sky that night? If I didn’t take the trouble to turn around and look behind me, then yes, it would still be true. If I never saw the moon, then the moon was never there.

I’m not suggesting that I didn’t take the trouble. I kept my eyes open, I tried to absorb everything that was happening around me, but no doubt there was much that I missed as well. Like it or not, I can only write about what I saw and heard—not about what I didn’t. This is not an admission of failure so much as a declaration of methodology, a statement of principles. If I never saw the moon, then the moon was never there.

Less than a minute after we entered the house, Frieda was taking me up to Hector’s room on the second floor. There was no time for anything but the most cursory look around, the briefest of first impressions—her close-cropped white hair, the firmness of her grip when she shook my hand, the weariness in her eyes—and before I could say any of the things I was supposed to say (thank you for having me, I hope he’s feeling better), she informed me that Hector was awake. He’d like to see you now, she said, and suddenly I was looking at her back as she led me up the stairs. No time to make any observations about the house, then—except to note that it was large and simply furnished, with many drawings and paintings hanging on the walls (perhaps Frieda’s, perhaps not)—nor to think about the unlikely person who had opened the door, a man so diminutive that I didn’t even notice him until Alma bent down and kissed him on the cheek. Frieda entered the room an instant later, and although I remember that the two women hugged, I can’t recall if Alma was beside me when I walked up the stairs. I always seem to lose track of her at that point. I look for her in my mind, but I never manage to locate her. By the time I get to the top of the stairs, Frieda is inevitably gone as well. It couldn’t have happened that way, but that’s how I remember it. Whenever I see myself walking into Hector’s room, I always go in alone.

What astonished me most, I think, was the simple fact that he had a body. Until I saw him lying there in the bed, I’m not sure that I ever fully believed in him. Not as an authentic person, at any rate, not in the way I believed in Alma or myself, not in the way I believed in Helen or even Chateaubriand. It stunned me to acknowledge that Hector had hands and eyes, fingernails and shoulders, a neck and a left ear—that he was tangible, that he wasn’t an imaginary being. He had been inside my head for so long, it seemed doubtful that he could exist anywhere else.