Minnie Flynn/Chapter 22
DEANE was packed and ready to leave for California when he heard of Minnie's contract to make two pictures for Beauregard. He knew. The letter he had just written telling her he was coming to help and guide her lay on the desk before him, a vain tribute to his friendship. He was conscious of angry resentment that she had not called upon him, that she had wantonly brushed him aside for a man like Beauregard whose evil intent was as obvious to the world as to himself. Futile and terrible sacrifice! The thought of her having fallen so low sickened him, and for weeks he walked abroad in a fever of spiritual rebellion. Why did so many of the women about him lose their balance and throw away their birthright for the evanescent things of life? Why did their instincts trick them, couldn't they realize that indiscrimination would only mar, and eventually destroy them? Lying, cheap returns for their sacrifices. He was haunted by the Minnie Flynns who passed each day, like wraiths of thin vapor before him.
"I'm becoming a damned moralist," he wrote in his letter to Sam Binns, "but sometimes I feel as if I were moving through a dead city, surrounded as we are by so many ghosts of women, who have bartered their very souls. Minnie isn't the only one whose short-sightedness has tricked her into seeing a mirage. Hell, Sam, I'm getting maudlin. Immorality of others never troubles a man until it is focused down to some individual he cares for. Then he becomes unbalanced, and wants to start out reforming the world!
"A last favor—keep your eye on the little girl and help her when she needs it. You and I can settle the accounts, material and spiritual, when we meet again. I've changed my plans about going West. An Italian company has offered me a picture to make in Rome. Write me there, care of the American Express. I'll want to know. Can't help it, Sam. Life plays ironical tricks on us, doesn't it?"
It was several months before Deane heard from Sam Binns. The letter had followed him through Spain and into Morocco, where he had been taking scenes at Tangiers. "Hal," the letter ran, "I've just left Mineola, and the poor girl's had a tough time of it. We discussed a possible out for her, but I'm afraid there isn't much hope. You probably know by now that the pictures Beauregard made with her were only fair, not good enough to help her. He gave her no contract, and lied about starring her. Jack Marvin had been her leading man in her first picture. Just before it was released, they launched 'The Iron Man,' that ten reel knock-out of the new independent company. Marvin made one of those over-night triumphs in the leading rôle. Beauregard took advantage of the advertising the other company had given Marvin, and starred him in the picture instead of Mineola. She was only mentioned as one of the supporting cast. This was the last blow, and she was powerless to protest. No contract, and everybody knowing her relationship with Beauregard. That ménage didn't last four months. She began to dissipate like the devil, blind drunk to shut out the sight of old Beauregard, I guess; wild parties, the scum of Hollywood there, and one night a raid. Her brother, Pete, was arrested. They landed him, dead to rights, as a bootlegger. It was a filthy mess. I know the trial cost her plenty, she had the best defense she could buy for him, but he was sent up. Got a heavy sentence for assaulting the officers who arrested him. I assure you, Hal, I did the best I could to help her. But she wouldn't take much, accepted only a small loan, which she returned a few months later. The last time I saw her she was taking care of Pete's wife, Elsie, who collapsed after the sentence. Horrible sick thing, this woman. I begged Mlnela to send her to a county hospital. Couldn't see why she should carry this burden, but was told to mind my own business.
"Come home, Hal, if you want to help her. She needs it now. I really don't know which way she is going to turn. She won't listen to me. It would take someone of your driving strength to set her on her feet again. You can't use any far-distanced influence with the producers to find work for her. They won't pay much attention to it. They give her all the opportunities they can, but her pathetic, arrogant vanity alone remains unperturbed. In spite of all she has been through, Hal, she can't see—but goes on blindly struggling. Is ready now to grasp at any straw—her resistance weakened beyond all hope of control."
The letter was written in November. It was already February. Deane had just begun a new picture which would take him to Egypt. He was obligated to finish it. Ten weeks before the final scene would be shot, three weeks longer before the picture was ready for the market. Frantically he cabled Binns, "Cabling money Hollywood Trust provide Minnie sufficient funds returning late summer writing."
The money remained untouched in the bank, slowly accumulating interest.
Sam Binns' company moved to New York, and the last link between Minnie and Deane was broken. Others wrote to him but no word from her. What had become of her? Why had she refused his help? Could it possibly be that she had at last saved herself? No, not possible, the timbre of her being was too frail. Where was the divine justice of piling too many temptations upon shoulders too weak to carry them? Why all this mawkish cant on his part, why not action? Had he failed her, too?
For months Deane lay ill of a fever in Marseilles; typhoid, contracted on the Mediterranean boat that he had taken from Egypt. Terrible weeks that dragged by bringing him no word of Minnie. He tore at his mail searching eagerly for news of her, but no one answered his feverish queries. Minnie was forgotten. He found an occasional paragraph in the Los Angeles paper he had ordered sent to him; her name infrequently mentioned as one of the cast supporting some star. A report of her broken engagement with an assistant director. Her broken engagement with a character actor. A reputed engagement to a man known in the studios as Harry LeVere. Deane remembered him, a rat-eyed, loose-jowled dancing man. He had used him in pictures. LeVere, one of the men employed by cheap cafés as professional dancer to amuse the mentally sick women who spent their afternoons in aimless search for pleasure. Men had a nasty word to describe him. Deane stared at the paper. A reported engagement to Harry LeVere! Some mistake, no doubt. He was certain that Minnie wasn't going around with that class of man. He searched through the magazines for further news. He wrote to her again and again. He tried to visualize what she looked like. What she was doing.
Then a pitiful note came from her. "I was all broken up when your letter reached me telling me about your terrible illness. I can't write to you, Hal. Try to understand. Don't come to California, but for God's sake, don't forget me. You are all I have left. Mama is with Nettie and Al in Chicago, where he's got a pretty good job in a stock company. I don't know where Jimmy is, I haven't heard from him for a year. He went off to Paris with some woman lots older than him. You know how I loved that kid; oh, Hal, my heart is simply broken. Elsie died in the county hospital when Pete got five years added for trying to break jail. Kind of a rotten exit for the Flynns, isn't it? But it's all in a lifetime, I guess. I won't write again. I'm not much of a hand at writing. You know I will never forget you. God bless you, Hal, and make you well again."
"Minnie, Minnie!" he cried, his voice echoing through the vaulted room of the old château where he had lain for weeks, slowly recuperating from his long illness.
"You call for me to come?" asked the French nurse. "Yes?"
"Yes! Help me get dressed! I'm well enough to get out now. I'm going to leave for America!"
"Ah, I am suspicion. Monsieur loves someone American. Yes?"
"Yes, I do! And she needs me."
While he was packing, the strip of newspaper fell to the floor: "Reported engagement ex-star to Harry LeVere, dancer." He must hurry. What was Minnie doing? Where was she now?
It was well he could not see her, standing outside of a Los Angeles dance hall waiting for Harry LeVere.
When the doors opened to admit a pushing group, Minnie could hear above the shuffling of feet the arpeggios of nasal voiced instruments; the lugubrious whining of the saxophones and the persistent emphases of drums. Stirred within her a spirit of the old Minnie Flynn. She longed for a carefree moment when she could again know the lethe of the dance, nor care whose arms held her, whose body swayed in synchronism with hers. Only to dance. One, two, three; one, two, three. Lights winking and blinking as she whirled toward them and was swirled away from them. Jazz music. Girls whose painted white faces were ghastly blue in the mantled light. Warm, moist men.
When the doors pounded together and the music became a muted echo, Minnie was conscious of physical loss, as if a warm cloak had been suddenly whipped from off her shoulders. She shuddered and leaned against the ornate post. No one passing could perceive her now.
A brisk wind blowing across the ocean sent its long streamers of mist over the city. They hung like light banners of chiffon upon the tall sycamores and the uneven skyline of the buildings hemming in the dusky square. They softened the cruel outlines and filmed the deep blue-black shadows. Lights twinkled under them like sharp, peering eyes through a gray silk veil. Jagged corners so sharp and sinister only a few moments before now merged into the misty pall. So low and far-flung these ribbons of chiffon that faces emerging into the bright cones of light seemed softened and ephemeral. The eddies of wind whirling into the gaping doorway of the Cinderella Dance Hall caught and moored these fleeting mist gauzes and festooned them along her portals. They enfolded Minnie and she found their visible but elusive contacts stark cold and strangely terrifying. With a shudder she put her bare hands into the pockets of her coat. Her hands clammy with cold felt the pawn ticket and the twenty dollar bill. Twenty dollars. It made her sick all over. After that—what?
A little man, gray and round-shouldered, stopped under the portico to light a cigarette. His coat was shabby and he wore no gloves. His hands had large gnarled veins in them. The nails were torn to their quicks and badly stained. A man who labored. Perhaps a plumber. Above a shabby collar protruded his neck, red grooved, with sparse, mouse-colored hair growing unkempt upon it. So like Michael Flynn. His shoes were shabby, too. Under one arm he carried an umbrella. It was grotesquely bright and shiny against the frayed coat. "Oh, papa!" Minnie cried aloud, lifted by swift emotion out of her surroundings into the past, which this stranger made so terrifyingly incarnate.
The voice startled him. The match fell from his hands. He peered around through watery blue eyes, red-rimmed, his head cocked on one side in a timid, querulous attitude.
"Papa!" but the cry was choked this time in Minnie's heart and the blinding tears that sprang to her eyes distorted the form before her out of all semblance to her haunting memory. The man saw coming from the shadows the swaying figure of a woman. It was she who had spoken, no doubt, because her hands were outstretched. And when a shaft of light slanted across her face, he saw a smile. He saw her eyes, blurred, but focused intently upon him. And the same voice, less sharp, was mumbling to him, "Say, I bet I gave you a start, but I took you for somebody I used to know."
A high, staccato laugh broke suddenly from the little man. All his energy seemed merged into the shrill jabs of this quixotic laughter. He took one step toward her and leered into her face, now frozen with horror at what she had read in the man's eyes. And he said, "Not tonight, Josephine!" in a flat, nasal voice that physically struck her. As he hurried to mingle with the passersby, Minnie stood staring after him, his laughter prisoned in her ears, like the voice of the sea in a shell.
It was as if her own father had hurt her, as if his arms that had been her only haven, had struck her away from him. And she found herself crying with bitter reproach, "Oh, papa, how could you!" and then, "Oh, papa, where are you? I want you—I need you so!"
The night was full of ghosts and there rose before Minnie the white sepulcher where Michael Flynn rested upon a pillow of carved onyx.
During these last years no one had thought of this holding, all that was left of Minnie's transient fortune. The mausoleum was still there. Her father slept undisturbed under the weight of glittering marble, in a white house at the end of the long line of drooping pepper trees. Stillness and peace, in a quiet corner against the warm shoulder of a mountain.
Minnie thought of this and a new vision came to wipe out and destroy the ugliness of the live thing's face. She saw her father lying there, timidly important in death, he alone of all the Flynns to repose in state, secure and protected against the ill winds of life. Dreamless, uncomplaining dust.
And there rested lightly upon Minnie, as lightly as the mist chiffons upon the waving plumes of the eucalyptus trees, the lulling, singing thought of death. All its mysteries. Silence and everlasting peace. Life was turbulent, cruel, uncompromising.
How terrible the night was. When the doors opened and closed, the yawning mouth breathed its cold, sharp breath upon her. It made her draw her coat around her. Her blue ungloved hands fumbled with the buttons. They sought the refuge of those gaping pockets. The twenty dollar bill and the pawn ticket.
Harry LeVere came swinging around the corner with the quick, springing step, which so characterized him. "Hello, hon," he cried when he caught sight of her, standing there looking up at the interlacing mist streamers, "Star gazin'?"
"Oh, Harry!" and when she felt the quick pressure of his arm as it linked hers, "I don't want to go in and dance tonight—really, I don't."
"Don't be an egg, hon. Come on, now, remember what you promised me."
"Harry, I don't want to go—really, I don't."
His hand groping for hers in the wide pocket found the twenty dollar bill. He pulled it out and with an eager gesture held it up to the electric light. A long shrill whistle followed, "Boy!" he cried, slapping her a resounding whack between the shoulder blades, "We'll knock 'em for a goal tonight. Come on in, hon, we'll knock 'em dead!"
The doors yawned like a huge mouth when they opened and closed again.
"Yeh, we'll knock 'em for a loop tonight, honey girl, feel my hip pocket!"
"Gee, Harry!"
"The real stuff too! How I got it is goin' to hand you a million laughs. Swiped a bottle of Scotch off your ex. Was up to his place this afternoon. I mentioned you and he says"
He leaned over and whispered in Minnie's ear. And then both laughed, but Minnie's laughter was hollow. It echoed through her own ears. It made a sound that was strangely familiar to her. As she walked up the stairs into the dance hall, she remembered what it was. When she was a little girl her father had run a rosined string through an empty can and showed her how to make hollow sounds rise out of it. "Ghost laughter," he had called it then.