Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury (26 page)

—Ramsey Campbell

LIGHT

Mort Castle

B
ecause you know the story, you might

see in the photograph an element of drama,

perhaps even pathos.

That is only your thought, your

projection onto this banal image.

A washed-out snapshot.

Hard to judge the light. You cannot tell if it is a sunny day.

She seems a sunny child.

She is three years old.

She wears a striped bathing suit.

Her eyes do not squint.

It is you she sees.

Her mouth is as wide as the blade of a toy shovel. Unattrac-tive really.

She holds out her arms.

Does she want you to pick her up, embrace her, take her away?

Is she asking, Will you love me?

—Will you love me?

—Will you love me?

Because you know the story . . .

“Nobody really liked her much back then. She was always pretending to be a movie star, even though she had a face like a white tomato. She used to skip school a lot and go to the movies.

“I said to her once she acted like the movies were real life and that was stupid, and she told me the movies were more real than real life and that I was stupid, so I hit her.”

—Vera Potts, Marilyn Monroe’s classmate

at Vine Street Elementary School

August 4, 1962

Marilyn Monroe’s bedroom

Los Angeles

Marilyn Monroe lies naked and dying.

Respiration: Shallow and irregular.

Blue-fade-to-black above the half-moons of her fingernails.

Eyelids seem to thicken as you watch.

Pasty white drool at the left corner of her mouth.

But if you look very hard, there is an almost imperceptible shimmering. Faint, like a trick of weary eyes.

Not rising from her but settling about her.

Light.

June 6, 1930

Los Angeles

Norma Jeane walks into the theater.

Gladys is taking her to the movies.

Gladys is crazy.

But there are times when the mouse-hole voices whisper softly, softly without threat, almost lulling.

Times when staircase men (they can appear
just like that
!) do not seek to punish her for badthinkings.

Times like now. Hey, Sport, maybe Gladys seems a bit dingy but in a cute kind of way. No danger to herself or others.

Gracie Allen, not Lizzie Borden.

Today, Gladys and Norma Jeane go to the New Electric Theater. One o’clock show. The New Electric was new back when
Tillie’s Romance
got punctured. It’s a ten-cent, third-run, stale-popcorn movie house.

Fair number of people at the show.

No late checks here. A dime can buy shelter for a good part of the day. Gladys and Norma Jeane sit as far as possible from everyone else.

You have to be careful. Not just careful, but
extra
careful when you are crazy.

Gladys offers popcorn to Norma Jeane.

No butter. Too easy for them to put secret chemicals in melted butter.

Norma Jeane does not want popcorn.

Gladys leans toward her. Her eyes glitter. —You should take the popcorn. I want you to be happy.

Norma Jeane smells the lie and craziness on her mother’s breath. She takes popcorn. She wishes she were away from here. Wishes she were safe.

She will wish this many more times in her life.

On the screen . . . Cartoon. Dancing hippos, elephants, bears. Dots inside circles for belly buttons. Screechy chorus and xylophone.

Norma Jeane cranes her neck way back. Presses the crown of her head into the seat.

Above, projector beams. Columns and cones and fingers of light, yellow-white-clear, crisscrossing, splitting and uniting.

Pathways in the darkness.

Light.

It is beautiful.

On-screen: man with stiff arm out. Looks silly. Silly name: Doo-chee. DOO-Chee.

Makes Norma Jeane think of poop.

Norma Jeane laughs.

Gladys sinks fingernails into Norma Jeane’s neck. —You must not laugh so loud. They will hear you. Learn to laugh a secret laugh. Inside.

On the screen: a beautiful woman. She is a radiance. She is a luminosity.

Oh! Norma Jeane can hardly breathe, she is so beautiful.

The radiance of the beautiful woman fills her eyes.

She wants to laugh and to cry.

—Laugh on the inside. Cry on the inside.

Gladys tells her: —That is Jean Harlow.

Gladys tells her: —She is the most beautiful woman in the world.

Norma Jeane thinks:
Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful . . .

Gladys whispers: —
Her
name is
Jean
Harlow.
Your
name is Norma
Jeane.

Gladys whispers: —Jean Harlow, Norma Jeane. Your momma knows what she’s doing. Your momma has a
plan
.

Norma Jeane hears crazy. Looks at Jean Harlow, the most beautiful woman in the world. Looks only at Jean Harlow.

—Look at her.

Gladys says it crazy.

Gladys takes her ear and twists it.

Norma Jeane says a secret Ow! inside herself.

—Look at her! A command and threat.

Norma Jeane cranks back her neck.

—You can be her. You will be her.

Pain.

Stares upward.

Above, edge-melding beams of light. Of light.

The light goes to the screen.

The light becomes Jean Harlow.

N
orma Jeane did not know her father. Gladys did not know him, either. Not for certain.

Growing up, Norma Jeane fantasized: Clark Gable was her father. Later, Howard Hughes. Later, Ernest Hemingway. Papa.

(When she became Marilyn Monroe, a world-renowned psychiatrist told her many of her problems stemmed from a lifelong search for a father.

(—Well, she said, I was wondering. Guess that takes care of that.)

N
orma Jeane had a dog. Tippy. Tippy barked. A neighbor did not like the noise. He was a round-faced man with a tattoo. He chopped Tippy in half with a hoe.

N
orma Jeane is staying with Aunt Grace. (Gladys is . . .
sick
. Your mother is in the hospital because she is sick . . . Cuu-koo! Cuu-koo!)

Aunt Grace has a boarder. A man.

He gives Norma Jeane a Sen-Sen. She does not like Sen-Sen but she takes it.

The man says he likes her.

She likes it when people like her. She wants everyone to like her.

—Come here. You are beautiful.

She likes being called beautiful.

The man touches her.

—Beautiful little girl.

Norma Jeane does not like his touching.

The man frightens her.

—Beautiful, the man tells her.

—I will tell, Norma Jeane says.

—Who will you tell? the man says.

—A policeman.

—Aunt Grace.

—Jesus in the sky.

The man laughs.

—Then give me some more Sen-Sen, she says.

—And a nickel.

N
orma Jeane Baker: To the Los Angeles Orphans Home Society she was Orphan 3463.

—Be good, Aunt Grace told her, and abandoned her.

Norma Jeane could not stop crying. Not inside crying. She told them and she told them . . .
She was
not
an orphan
. She had a mother!

(Her mother was in the crazy house. Her mother was smelling bad smells and listening to the radio without a radio and making plans. And if
she
did not stop crying, they would think she was crazy like her mother and guess what happens then . . .)

—Stop crying.

—Now!

She began to change.

She smiled.

She became a good girl.

They would like that. They would like her.

She was acting.

Years later, when she was Marilyn Monroe, she would meet Katharine Hepburn. It was a brief, public meeting. The press was there. She was a starlet becoming a star. She was expected to say something sexy.

She said, —Sex is part of nature. I go along with nature.

Katharine Hepburn said, —Acting is a nice childish profession—pretending you’re someone else and, at the same time, selling yourself.

She decided she did not like Katharine Hepburn.

Katharine Hepburn understood her.

N
orma Jeane hated Vine Street Elementary School. Had to march there with all the children from the Home on El Centro. It was Orphans on Parade. Everyone looked at you.

Reading was hard then. She mixed up words. She stuttered.

(Muh-muh my nn-name is Nuh-nn-NormaJeane!)

Norma Jeane was in the low reading group. Bluebirds were best. Yellowbirds were next. Then you had Blackbirds. Blackbirds were stupid. Norma Jeane was the only girl Blackbird. The rest were boys. Boys did not mind being Blackbirds. They would not have minded being Buzzards or Turkeys.

(Later, Marilyn Monroe would love reading. She would read Sartre and Joyce and Shaw and Fitzgerald. She would read Hemingway and want very much to meet him. She would read American poets. Carl Sandburg—she did meet him—and Edgar Lee Masters were her favorites.)

Norma Jeane skipped school one day. She went to the movies. She went even though she knew she would get in trouble.

She saw a Bosko cartoon and a Fox Movietone newsreel and a movie called
Sea of Dreams
and a Laurel and Hardy movie. Laurel was the skinny one. Hardy was the fat one. They had a piano to push up a long flight of stairs. The heavy piano made a painful noise on each step. Then the piano fell down all the stairs. They had to shove it all the way back up. Then they learned there was a road they could have used so . . . they carried it back down the stairs!

Laurel and Hardy were funny and sad. They reminded you of everybody.

Then the movies were finished.

Norma Jeane did not want to leave.

She knew she was in serious trouble.

So she stayed.

The movies started again.

That was how it worked.

She got tired.

She leaned way back in her seat and looked up.

Pathways of light.

Then Stan Laurel is in the seat alongside her. He takes off his derby and balances it on his knee.

She is not surprised. She is glad.

—I had a dream that I was awake and I woke up to find myself asleep, Stan Laurel says.

She knows what he means.

—I’m in trouble, Norma Jeane tells him.

—Neither do I, too, Stan Laurel says.

—That’s silly, Norma Jeane says. —That’s funny.

—Why yes, Stan Laurel says. —You can lead a horse to water, but a pencil must be led.

He smiles and slowly fades away, becoming glimmering dust motes that rise and swirl into the light streams above.

It is almost sunset when Norma Jeane returns to the Los Angeles Orphans Home.

—We were all quite concerned, Miss Daltrey, the assistant director, said, recalling the incident some years later.

—Once we knew she was all right, I was going to punish her . . .

—Then she started, well,
whimpering
, whimpering in a high-pitched voice. She scrunched up her little face, and her mouth stretched and turned down—really, it was like the mask of tragedy, a crescent, and she was scratching the top of her head and blinking both eyes in slow motion . . .

—This is another fine mm-meh—mess I’ve gotten myself into, is what she said.

—She was
just
like him, you know, the skinny one, and Norma Jeane stuttered, I mean, she really stuttered, and you certainly did not
want
to laugh at that, but it was just so funny. I let her off with two extra days drying dishes. There was a shine to our Norma Jeane. I remember thinking she was a natural talent and that she would become a comedienne like Carole Lombard or Jean Harlow.

F
unds were a problem. No Christmas tree in the Orphans Home. Norma Jeane decided a tree would be delivered by Santa Claus. She made up a song and sang it. (She did not stammer when she sang.)