The Butterfly Plague

  He crouched, contracted, over the dry grass at the edge of the cement and let his hands dangle almost obscenely between his knees.

  The salesman, by now, was apparently having to eat his fists in order to contain himself. He gave this strange figure (which to him looked like an elegant Neanderthal squatting at the mouth of its cave) an even wider stare than he had thought himself physically capable of. His eyes ached with the urgency of messages, all of which tried to form the word “do.” “Do something,” he finally managed with his mouth. But it came out flat against his knuckles, which were inserted so far that they bled at the application of the lettered”.

  Octavius called, just as though darkness surrounded them, just as though his whereabouts was a precious secret to his safety, and he was a sentry, crying in the dark for the gentle reply of a familiar name. “What is your name?” he whispered. But the prostrate figure did not reply.

  The salesman now stood up in his car, about to step out over the door like a trembling conqueror.

  Octavius signaled him to wait.

  “But…but…” the salesman stammered.

  “No,” said Octavius. “Wait.”

  And then again he said, “What is your name?” to the senseless sprawl of limbs upon the road.

  From the beach, about twenty feet below them, came the faraway cry of voices. Children in a game. Chasing butterflies.

  “I’ll go and get help,” said the salesman, looking off at the sand and its people.

  “No. Not there,” said Octavius. “Drive back down the road until you come to a turnoff on the left. Topanga Beach.” He thought. “It’s about three miles.”

  The man sat down.

  “When you come to the turnoff, drive to the first house you’ll see. Ring bells. Knock. Whatever. I’ve never been. I don’t know. But get them to come. It should be this man’s sister.”

  “His sister.”

  “Yes. His sister.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know anybody’s name. But hurry and go.”

  “I don’t want to. Why don’t you go? You’re his friend. You know him. I’m nervous. I’ve killed a man.”

  “No,” said Octavius. “I don’t know anyone and I can’t drive.”

  The salesman sat still.

  “Why can’t we get those children? Why do we have to go away back there?” he said.

  “Because at the house they’ll know what to do. Go on. Now. Go.”

  The salesman put his hand out toward the dashboard of his car. He shot a look at Octavius and another look of wearied horror at the figure on the road.

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll go because you’re stupid.”

  He started fiddling with the paraphernalia arranged on the dashboard.

  Octavius stared at the widening blood bath, some of which was beginning to trickle in his own direction. Three large butterflies had settled by the scarlet patch, attracted by its wetness.

  The salesman was madly running his many fingers (too many) all over the face and latches of the machine before him.

  Octavius waited for the motor to start. “What’s the matter?” he said.

  “I’ve forgotten what to do,” the salesman replied in his whimper. “I don’t know how to start the car.”

  (Dolly could have told him.)

  Octavius thought for a moment, concentrated very hard on the apparent logic of machines.

  “Turn the key,” he said. “Don’t think. Turn the key. Maybe the next thing will come to you.”

  The salesman turned the key.

  He closed his eyes. His hands paused in the air, desperate for information. He attempted a severe expression, which slowly failed and became concentration. At last his fingers reached for the choke and then for the gearshift and then his feet did a precise little dance—perhaps a tango—over the pedals and at last the engine roared and the car shot away, scudding up sand and dust, which settled as he turned the car and drove off.

  The butterflies were blasted up into the air, and they settled with the dust over the map of staling blood and over the crouched white Buddha by the road.

  Down on the beach the children had been joined by adults. Vaguely, in an inner ear, Octavius was aware of their music. Someone had brought a gramophone and records to form a background for butterfly-chasing. Octavius heard the familiar strains of Artie Shaw’s record, “Begin the Beguine.” (Mother in ruffles, dancing with Fred Astaire. But not any more.) The music arched up, borne on waves of heat, mingled with orange-and-brown wings, against and then over the edge of the runted, stunted short-legged cliff behind him. The sea sang also, sibilant and sandythroated. While he waited, watching by the fallen friend he would never know, the fingers on the road moved and stirred in Morse-like spasms of life.

  Within ten minutes it became so hot that Octavius was forced to remove his jacket and place it, cowl-like, over his head. He peered out now, unblinking, from between the white lapels, while down the beach they began the beguine, for the seventh time in a row. He wanted to go to the man on the road, but, catatonically, his will was locked in waiting.

  And then the people came.

  There were two cars. One belonged to B.J. and Noah, and was driven by Ruth Damarosch. The other was the salesman’s. There was also a motorcycle driven by a figure in white. Miss Bonkers on call. Octavius shaded his eyes and stared. Ruth got down and went immediately to the prostrate Adolphus, whose eyes were open.

  His voice said, “I’ve been watching a butterfly up there.

  I’m afraid to close my eyes.”

  Ruth said, “Miss Bonkers is here. She’ll help you. You’re going to be all right.”

  Adolphus said, “I met him, Ruth. I finally met him. My dream.”

  Ruth said, “Yes. You’ll be all right. We’re here.”

  Then there was silence; a great deal of stooping near the body; much waiting.

  From far away (perhaps at first it was only another instrument in the band, caught in that vicious circle down on the beach) they heard the approaching identification of an ambulance.

  “Good,” said Ruth. “They’re coming with the blood.”

  They waited as the wail got nearer.

  4:10 p.m.

  When Ruth had explained Adolphus to the doctors (there were two of them) she stood back, folding her arms into a neat package of flesh, and watched their expressions.

  One said, whitely, “Impossible. He cannot be moved yet.” His eyes were just two balls of wooden color removed from some Chinese abacus.

  The other one, suited, and carrying a black bag, said, “We must at least remove him to the side of the road, Charles.”

  “Very well,” said the abacus-eyed Charles. “Put him on the stretcher and we’ll bring him over here.”

  Ruth turned away. Frozen.

  Somehow, however long you are prepared for such a mischance—somehow, even knowing (as they always had) that violence could not forever be avoided—it was still so modified by aversion that she could not cope at all with the event as a piece of realism. She decided instead to go and look at the sea.

  Standing at the cliff edge (if you could call it that; the drop was so shallow and such a stint on grandeur), she tried to take one last look at the scene by the road. It must serve as indelible strength against giving up the birth of any child who must die this way.

  The greatest impact, like a bruise on her brain, was the presence of strangers. That so many people who cluster (like the butterflies around wet ground) over the dead and dying are unknown people. People who crop up for deaths and dyings.

  Hearing Adolphus cry out as he was lifted onto the stretcher, Ruth ran, in her mind, to go back. Thinking that she had moved, she was shocked to find that she hadn’t.

  A police car at last approached, and one or two people, drawn by the familiar whine, had drifted, hand over hand, up the cliff from the sand. They wore bathing costumes, ludicrously nude-appearing, and Ruth thought how Adolphus wou
ld have loved to gaze at them and dream.

  Then she saw Octavius, who still sat helplessly by the side of the road.

  He had folded his jacket now, and it lay like a worn-out flag across his knee.

  The policemen were questioning the San Francisco salesman. In his attempt to be coherent, he was making it seem, somehow, that he had struck Adolphus on purpose.

  Ruth thought, Why can’t I think about Dolly? He’s going to die.

  This was so different from the death of their mother. That seemed like death. This was more like a crisis that would pass.

  Octavius was assisted to his feet by a youth in a black bathing suit. He found his way to the stretcher.

  “What is happening?” he said.

  Miss Bonkers said, “He is going to die. Go away.”

  Octavius stared. He looked down into the face of his friend (his almost-friend; his nearly) and their eyes caught for the briefest of seconds.

  “Hullo,” said Octavius. And then he remembered. “Adolphus Damarosch.”

  Their eyes parted company and Octavius could not retrieve the contact he had made. He fiddled with his jacket, trying to put it on, and just as he got it halfway up his arms, with his shoulders thrown back and his head forward, he heard Adolphus die.

  Something wet happened and he was covered with blood.

  The two doctors, Miss Bonkers, and the ambulance drivers all fell back, bespattered.

  “Cover him up,” someone said.

  A sheet fluttered, glided, and sighed itself down over the gentle breakers of Dolly’s blood that tided up over the walls of his life and seeped away into the grass, looking for a place to hide.

  There was a long, deep hissing silence.

  Ruth tightened her arms upon themselves, and around what was inside her, and tried with every ounce of her years of training to reduce the size of her mind so that it would hold only that one taut precious (to an athlete) admonition.

  Pull.

  Pull, pull, pull. Pull, and pull, and pull, and…Pull, pull, pull, one two three.

  One-and-two-and. One-and-two-and. One-and-two-and. One.

  Two.

  And.

  But wasn’t it wonderful?

  The very last thing the dying man had heard had been his own name.

  On the lips of his dream.

  “Adolphus Damarosch.”

  Saturday, December 17th, 1938:

  Bel Air

  7:30 a.m.

  Ruth sat in the Franklin, which was parked in front of Dolly’s house. She had to go in. They wanted something to dress him in, and Ruth had said that she would find it. The last time she had been here, Myra had been here, too, and the three of them had sat up late at night, laughing at jokes and drinking and making fun of one another—of how serious they all were.

  Now the house stood empty.

  Ruth turned the motor off. Like an unwilling messenger, she got out of the car and stood before the house, mutely communicating the absence of its owner. The house was condemned now, probably to the ownership of someone who would say, “That Dolly Damarosch lived here. The strange one, you know? Who got killed by a car.”

  Ruth went to the door.

  The last time I was here…

  She unlocked it and pushed it open.

  There was Dolly’s house. All white. With its smashed-up window.

  Dolly had not told her about that. It was a shock. The violence of the act was still present in the jagged edge of the broken glass. Ruth gave a cry, just like someone who had been struck.

  Instinctively she listened and then looked for an intruder, but there was none. Nor were there any signs of robbery or violence beyond the shattered window itself.

  Well. It had been done. It was senseless now to conjecture why or by whom. All of these things could be discovered in time.

  She went into the bedroom.

  His suits, pale-blue or white, hung in faultless rows in a cupboard. She selected one of the blue ones and, from a drawer, a blue shirt, some underwear, a pair of socks, and a handkerchief. Then she found a tie and a pair of shoes and turned out of the bedroom to go.

  The sun rose into sight.

  The whole white room was filled with light.

  Ruth sighed.

  She stood there, central, holding her brother’s clothes, engulfed in a sun-flood, dazzled and dazed.

  He was gone.

  From all around her the photograph eyes of film stars stared. From the walls, from shelves, from table tops, from the piano. Glossy eyes, pretending to smile, pretending to brood, pretending to hypnotize, pretending to live.

  Adolphus was gone.

  Ruth had never before been in these rooms alone. She had never gone to the bookcase or listened to the swimmers next door, or fallen asleep in one of the big white chairs. The place was antiseptic—arranged and bloodless. A borrowed place. Nervous. Brooding. Empty.

  Why had he lived like this? Did fear, as Dolly knew fear, predetermine absolutely such an apprehensive arrangement of ornaments and furniture? There were pathways everywhere—routes of escape. Nothing sat freely in its place, but had been set there, probably according to a diagram. It was faultless and cold.

  Ruth set the clothes down and gazed more widely about her.

  It was a lonely place, but not by Dolly’s absence. Ruth sensed the planned loneliness of a recluse. Whether he had given parties, whether he had been much visited by friends, she did not know. She suspected not. People who are permanently ill tend to be solitary. Their homes become dens and caves, like the dens and caves of wounded or stricken animals. They themselves are seen only from a distance, the way, essentially, Ruth had seen Dolly. Remote. Aloof, with an aura of loneliness that, in the mind, was unbearable to contemplate.

  He was gone, now.

  Ruth poured herself a drink. She had not slept all night. The continuity of drinks was not surprising. It did not shock her to find herself with gin in her mouth at 7:30 a.m.

  She walked around the room.

  The one-legged Greek stared at her from his little carved horse. The whiteness of everything exaggerated every shadow and every patch of sunlight. The milky room was sterile. Pasteurized. Weird. There was the white telephone and, beside it, the whitely covered telephone directory.

  Everything was astonishingly neat; even the placing of pens and pencils seemed exact. It was a room so completely without clutter that it seemed that the ashes in the ashtrays were ordered and sparse, like a prized collection. “This is my ash collection, and over here, my Renoir on the wall.”

  Ruth had to smile.

  But he was gone.

  There was blood on the road.

  The books provided the only color there was in the room, with the exception of the view through the broken window, and the green of some rose leaves in a bowl on the piano. The roses themselves were white. But the books, the books were vibrant—even gaudy.

  The selection was classical. There was Moby Dick, there was Anna Karenina, there was the poetry of T.S. Eliot. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (only recently published and already a classic) and Don Quixote sat side by side. A book of French fairy tales, illustrated by Edmond Dulac, leaned affectionately up against the Bible, and the plays of Oscar Wilde played wife to a large, masculine volume of the poems of Catullus. The Brothers Karamazov sat in lonely splendor, extremely red and stamped with gold, up on a shelf with a satyr’s head.

  This satyr’s head was made of plaster and bore an expression of evil so repulsive that Ruth shuddered. Some un-forgotten, unremembered image reached out from it—handless—and touched the back of her neck.

  She brought her face slowly around to regard the grinning visage once more. The light was strange. Ruth wanted to take the head down, in order to see it more plainly, but she could not contrive to overcome her revulsion. Instead, she drew a wooden chair from its place and stood up on that, face to face, eye to eye with the old demigod.

  Alvarez.

  The satyr’s tongue was laid lasciviously ag
ainst his lower lip.

  “Dear God,” Ruth nearly fell right off the chair, and she stood there for at least a minute, gripping the edge of the shelf with her fingers, spilling her gin, unavoidably, relentlessly down the front of her suit. She heard it touch the floor, drop by drop.

  “Is everything only in my mind?”

  At last, shutting her eyes, she was able to climb down blind and turn her back on what she had seen. But she could not turn her mind away from it.

  She placed her free hand on her stomach and pressed her fingers against the new life.

  “It is there,” she said out loud. “It’s there. It’s there. It is there.”

  She was praying, but she did not know she was praying.

  She slow-marched her way back to the gin bottle, and this time poured herself a good four ounces. Dolly’s clothes lay placidly, like a straw figure emptied of straw, on their chair.

  Ruth fumbled in her bag for her cigarettes and, lighting up, she heard herself moan—heard it so distinctly and was so divorced from the sound that she turned, thinking momentarily that someone else had entered the room.

  She sat down.

  There, beyond the shattered window, there was sunshine and a garden. Flowers. Trees. Birds. The curiously large influx of butterflies—so large that some called it a plague. There were the bees. The dragonflies. Avocado leaves. Pale grass and blue sky. A row of boxed Chinese elm.

  It was nothing, this madness. Nothing but madness.

  She was a notorious liar. A gross exaggerator. People said so. It must be true. She lied even to herself. They said that, too.

  But her fingers pressed against her womb, and it had to be true.

  It was.

  It had to be.

  She rose.

  She went back, Alvarezing, to the bookcase and looked deliberately right up into the satyr’s face.

  “Are you real?” she said.

  For a brief moment she dwelt all the way back to the ancient mysteries: the dancing satyrs in the groves of Arcady; the lonely seduction of Panpipes in the moonlight; the shadows of deities beckoning from the trees; flowers that were heroes; stones that had souls. Ruth might have been a priestess then, since she could conjure so much from a plaster head, and such a potent lover from a stranger glimpsed beyond her shoulder.