What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (3 page)

Jane’s moods were nothing new, nor were they a cause for alarm. Jane was simply in the first phase of one of her periodical “spells.” They always started the same way, with the abrupt withdrawal into sullen silence, the dark, furtive glances and the sudden bright stares of angry defiance. There would be, perhaps, an emotional outburst and then, toward the end, the drinking. Blanche had, years before, accurately catalogued, in her own mind, the pattern of Jane’s spells; they contained no surprises for her now. She understood them. She knew their root. She was used to them.

But then why did she seem to detect in Jane’s present lapse some special character that set it apart from the others and made it, even in its beginnings, somehow more disturbing? Blanche again lifted
her hand to the neck of her robe, this time pulling the opening more tightly closed. Before, she thought, there had always been that marked edge of wary defiance in Jane’s behavior, but this time it was lacking and in its place was something more measured, a kind of purposefulness, it seemed, as if… Blanche brought her hand down flatly onto the arm of her chair. She had to stop this sort of thinking instantly. She was simply using her imagination to dodge the real truth of the matter; Jane’s upset this time was nobody’s fault but Blanche’s own.

She should have been stronger. She should have resisted the desire—the compulsion, really—to see herself again on the screen. Somewhere at the back of her mind she had known all along that the old films could only bring trouble. She should never have watched them herself and most certainly she should never have let Jane watch them.

Still she couldn’t help wondering what thoughts stirred behind Jane’s level, hooded eyes. The old jealousy was there no doubt, the old smoldering envy that, through the years, had only slumbered and never, never really died.

Once, during one of Jane’s drinking bouts, Blanche had seen clearly the face of Jane’s jealousy, and it had been ugly beyond forgetting. Even now it came back to her at times, the dark vision of Jane standing there in the doorway clutching the frame for support, making the air between them alive and hideous with her slurred words of anger.

“Oh, you were so great, huh? So glamorous?” She had stood there, chewing the words over, spitting them out at Blanche like venom. “Oh, I know—they all said it; they told you how wonderful you were because they thought you were important. They
used
to say it. But who says it now? What are you now, you old—you cripple. Let’s see you dance around and—and show off how pretty you are. Let’s see you do it now!” She had paused, staring at Blanche for a long time, her eyes bright with malevolence. “Oh, yes,” she went on, “you got the looks all right. But that’s all you
got! I got the talent! Even if nobody cared… And I’ve still got it. And you, you’re—you’re nothing! You’re not any damn thing at all! So don’t go trying to act so—so big with me you—you—nothing—nothing-at-all! Don’t try to make out you’re better than me!…”

Blanche shuddered against the memory, wondering if these same thoughts were echoing through Jane’s mind now as she sat watching the picture. Get rid of the past, she told herself with sudden force; wipe it from your mind. And Jane’s, too. Banish these foolish shadow images to the darkness and oblivion they deserve. Her eyes fast upon Jane, she moistened her lips to speak, awaiting the sound of her own voice as if it would herald the beginning of some impending disaster.

“Jane?…”

Before she could go on, Jane rose from her chair, crossed to the television set and summarily turned it off. On the screen the girl with the sooty eyes, smiling with false rapture, fell away into a fretful, wriggling band of light and then vanished altogether. The light from the desk lamp seemed suddenly to grow brighter, spreading its yellowish stain in a wider arc upon the rich fabric of the rug. Conversely, the shadows beyond the bed and in the far corners of the room appeared to deepen and creep forward. Blanche stared in surprise and then, as Jane turned back in her direction, managed a quick smile.

“I—I was just going to ask you to turn it off.” Jane’s gaze glittered toward her through the dimness. There was a moment of silence, and then Blanche laughed nervously. “I really don’t think we should waste our time on any more of those old things. They’re so awful.…”

With a slight, noncommittal shrug, Jane moved off toward the door. Reaching down to the wheel of her chair, Blanche swung herself around.

“Will you come back?” she asked anxiously. “To help me into bed?”

At the doorway Jane stopped, her squat, fleshy figure outlined dimly against the deeper darkness of the hallway. Again her eyes seemed alight with some painfully withheld emotion. When she spoke, however, her voice was flat and unrevealing.

“All right… if you want…”

Turning even as she spoke, she disappeared into the hallway.

Blanche sat perfectly still, hunched slightly forward, staring after her. A wash of silence seemed to break over the house, causing the shadows to stir and pulse around her. Slowly she reached out a hand to the wheel of her chair, thinking that if she went to the window and pulled back the drapes she would be able to see the night and the stars. And then, suddenly, she stopped, her body gripped with shock as the silence was shattered by the thunderous slam of Jane’s door at the end of the hall. The whole house seemed to shout back in anger.

For a long moment Blanche was perfectly motionless, listening tensely for the silence to come back into the house, waiting for the thunderous slam of the door to stop reverberating against her strained and frightened nerves.

W
hen they had first brought her home from the hospital and carried her upstairs to this room she had decided that the heavy exterior grillwork over the window would have to be removed. Almost immediately after the accident the big gates at the front drive, made from the same design, had been taken away and sold for scrap, and she wanted no further reminders here in the house. Her mind at that time, though, had been more concentrated on other matters, filled with the shock of the absolute certainty that she would never walk again, and so, through procrastination, the grillwork had remained. Now, with the passing years, her eye had become so trained at looking around and beyond the grille’s flamboyant iron tracings that she barely knew it was there at all.

This morning the window was open, and Blanche had wheeled her chair close to it, seeking the touch of the cool breeze from the spring day outside. As she strained forward her profile was illumined by a reflected shaft of sunlight and for just a moment she was again the silver-haired girl of thirty years before. Actually this was not entirely illusion, for Blanche had never really lost her beauty. Her near-perfect features, refined and sharpened by pain had successfully resisted the dulling influence of the encroaching years. Indeed there were times when it seemed that Blanche’s invalidism had given her a kind of delicate, waxen loveliness that, in its own way, transcended the bright prettiness of her youth.

Unaware, she directed her gaze thoughtfully down the hillside to the ragged patchwork of yards and red tile roofs that marked the other thirty-year-old Mediterranean extravagances like her own. So much of what she saw, like the grillwork, had become dimmed by familiarity. But now she made herself look at it more closely, more analytically, and in so doing she saw that the neighborhood, as if while she had dozed, had turned old and shabby. Seeing it this way, she was suddenly assailed by a nearly overwhelming desire to be away from it. All at once she wanted only to be free of this house, this room, this feeling of being buried alive in the past.

Her reasons for clinging to the old house all these years had been purely emotional ones. She had known this, really, from the very beginning. After the accident she had needed badly some tangible confirmation of the time before when she had been something more—much, much more—than the drab, useless cripple she was now. And so, in clinging to the house, she had clung to the past. The same past that she now felt so urgent a need to escape. Blanche nodded her head in solemn resolution: she would do it; she would call Bert Hanley and ask him to put the house up for sale.

Bert was one of Blanche’s few remaining contacts with the outside world. He was one of three partners in the business management firm that handled her financial affairs. It was Bert who had shrewdly and carefully invested her studio earnings so as to provide the income that had supported her and Jane through the intervening years.

After the accident Bert had taken it for granted that Blanche would sell the house. And so his astonishment had been acute when she had refused. He had pointed out to her, volubly and at length, all the obvious reasons for selling; the house was too big, too costly to maintain, too inconvenient, and it would depreciate in value too swiftly. And, he argued, it was almost insanely dangerous for an invalid to live, as she did, in an upper story room.
However, in the face of her continued refusal, he had been forced, finally, to give up.

“Someday,” Bert had shouted at her in exasperation, “you’ll be sorry! You’ll see!”

Since then Blanche’s affairs had become a matter of minor routine for Bert, and he had given up ever mentioning the house. Actually it had been two years now since Bert had come to Hillside Terrace for a visit; their relationship, with the passage of time, had formalized itself into a matter of periodical letters and business statements, these interspersed with an occasional phone conversation.

Outside the breeze touched the tall eucalyptus beside the window. A branch leaped forward, its leaves tapping at the edge of the sill like quick, brittle fingers. Blanche smiled at her present mood of decision; tomorrow—or the next day at the latest—she would call Bert and tell him to sell the house to the first taker for whatever price he could get. Meanwhile, she must think about a new place to live, so she could discuss that with Bert too. Something away from the hills would be best, something smaller and more convenient. After all, it was only fair to Jane; despite the continuation of her astonishing vigor, it was time she be allowed to take things easier. Something newly built, Blanche thought pleasantly, something modern and bright with sunlight. Something, in short, quite different from this gloomy old place.

Blanche saw suddenly that her disillusionment with the past, the disillusionment engendered by the old movies, had its constructive side, too. In death there could also be rebirth. And then, her eye caught by the sight of a movement from the house directly below, she leaned forward again to the window. As she did so, one of the French doors at the side of the house swung fully open, and the new owner stepped out into the bright sunlight, dressed, as usual, for gardening, in a smock and a wide-brimmed straw hat. Mrs. Bates. That was the woman’s name, though Blanche couldn’t remember just at the moment where she had learned it. Mrs. Bates from Iowa.

Almost daily for close to three months now Blanche had watched her new neighbor as she moved about down below, weeding, raking, turning the sun-warmed soil, putting in the new bulbs and plants, taking out the old. There was something almost dedicated in the way the woman went about her work, and Blanche had vicariously enjoyed sharing this labor of love with her. Indeed, she had come to feel a kind of kinship with this woman, this Mrs. Bates, though she had never exchanged a glance or a word with her and probably never would. As the woman moved farther out into the garden, Blanche reached out to the grillwork to pull herself up for a better view. But then, hearing a sound behind her, she dropped her hand and looked back into the room.

“Excuse me, Miss Blanche…”

As Blanche’s eyes adjusted to the inner dimness of the room, the angular, raw-boned figure in the doorway swam into view. Today was Friday. Mrs. Stitt’s cleaning day. Blanche had forgotten.

“Come on in, Edna,” she said cheerfully. “You want to start in here?”

And then, looking more closely into Mrs. Stitt’s florid, practical face, she saw couched in the level eyes the glint of some extraordinary consternation. Reaching out, she pulled her chair away from the window and out farther into the room.

“Is there something the matter?”

It was a needless question. For three years now Mrs. Stitt had arrived faithfully every Friday morning to clean, change the linens and help Jane with the week’s heavy cooking. In that time Blanche had learned that it was a point of professional pride with Edna Stitt to maintain, in the face of even the worst sort of adversity, a calm and unruffled exterior; it took a considerable provocation to excite from her any open demonstration of annoyance. It was for this reason, then, that Blanche now regarded Mrs. Stitt with a sharp sense of apprehension as she stood there in the doorway pressing her hands down flatly over her heavy-duty cleaning apron in an unmistakable gesture of restrained agitation.

“What is it, Edna?”

With a final flush of indignation Mrs. Stitt came forward into the room. Offering no word of explanation she removed something from her apron pocket and thrust it forward. In bewilderment Blanche saw before her a thick packet of letters bound together with a heavy rubber band.

“Here!” said Mrs. Stitt.

Taking the letters, Blanche looked up, her eyes wide with questioning. “But what——?”

Mrs. Stitt had now gone quite pale but she determinedly stood her ground. “I could be wrong,” she said with trembling bravado, “and I may be way out of line.… Miss Blanche, if there’s anything in this world I don’t want to do it’s to cause you any kind of trouble, but—you just look at those—if you don’t mind—and you tell me if you ever saw them before. I—I just want to know, that’s all.…”

Looking down at the letters, Blanche saw, with a slight touch of surprise, that the one on top was addressed to her. Stripping away the band, she spread them out on her lap. They had all been written to her. One of them, she saw, was marked
Personal.
She saw, too, that the one on top had been opened.

Blanche looked up at Mrs. Stitt again in enquiry, but the woman’s face, deliberately closed against her gaze, told her nothing. Turning back to the letters, she picked up the first and drew out a sheet of cheap, ruled tablet paper. She opened it to a scrawled message in pencil:

Dear Blanche Hudson: Last night I and my husband watched that picture of yours Hasty Honeymoon. While we were watching it I said to my husband that seeing you again after all these years was just like seeing an old time girlhood chum. Back in those days I was a real fan of yours and when Hasty Honeymoon first came out I was just starting to go with this boy…

Blanche’s gaze blurred, and she put a hand to her eyes, unable to read any further. It was silly… silly… but something deep inside her had been touched so suddenly and so by surprise she
couldn’t help herself. Her hand fell to the letters in her lap. Fan letters! After all these years! To think there were still those who remembered—who cared enough to write.… It was incredible… incredible.…

“You didn’t see them before, did you?”

Taking her hand from her eyes, Blanche looked up in confusion; for a moment she had quite forgotten about Mrs. Stitt. Still unable to speak, she shook her head.

“I didn’t think so.”

But Blanche had already returned to the letters. Taking up the one marked
Personal,
she looked for the return address and found the name
William Carroll.

Her hand was seized with such a trembling she could hardly get the letter open. Bill Carroll had been her leading man in four of her most successful films. The romance the studio had contrived for them had never quite jelled, but they had been the closest of close friends. For a while, that is, until the accident. Afterwards, Bill had tried repeatedly to visit her, both at the hospital and, later, at home, but she had refused to see him, just as she had refused to see the others. And, like the others, he had finally drifted away. But how wonderful it was to hear from him now. Particularly now, this morning, when she had made her decision to leave this house and make a new life for herself outside. If they could be friends again… In her anxiety to get the letter out of the envelope she nearly tore it.

Dear Blanche
(she read),
I know the odds are against this ever reaching you, but after seeing “Blonde Byline” on TV the other night I just had to write. If by some miracle you should happen to read this, you will notice that I have included my present address and telephone number. Of course I must warn you that I am an old married man now—and I do not use the word old figuratively—but then…

The letter, falling from her hand, joined the others in her lap. She started to pick it up again, but a sharp clearing of the throat reminded her that Mrs. Stitt was still waiting for her reaction.
Forcing herself, as nearly as she could, into a state of composure, she looked up.

“Where—where did you find these? I thought the morning mail——”

Mrs. Stitt drew her mouth down into a thin line of disapproval. “Those weren’t in the morning mail,” she said flatly, “they were in the trash. I took some papers out to the barrel and if I hadn’t just happened to look down——”

“In the trash?” Blanche stared at the woman. “But—are you sure?”

Mrs. Stitt nodded portentously, then jerked a thumb back over her shoulder. “I guess she just—tossed them out!” As a means of expressing her controlled but active dislike for Jane, Mrs. Stitt, from the first days of her employment, had refused ever to call her by name. “I don’t claim I actually saw her doing it, I don’t say that.”

“But where——?”

“They came from the TV station that’s showing your pictures. The big envelope they came in was there, too.”

Blanche made a gesture of limp confusion. “Jane must have thrown them out by mistake. If the studio insignia was on the envelope she probably thought it was some sort of advertisement——”

Mrs. Stitt shook her head in stubborn denial. “It was already opened up—and that letter on top, too. And besides——” Hesitating she glanced back, almost furtively, toward the open doorway.

“Besides——?” Blanche prompted.

Reaching again into the wide pocket of her apron, Mrs. Stitt produced a large brown Manila envelope. After a moment’s hesitation, she held it out.

“You—you might as well see this, I guess…”

Blanche took the envelope. In the upper left hand corner was the insignia and name of the television station. At the center was a white sticker upon which had been typed her name and address. Other than that it seemed entirely unremarkable.

“The other side,” Mrs. Stitt said thinly, looking away. “Over.”

With a faint chill of apprehension, Blanche turned the envelope.

The word seemed to leap up at her like a shouted epithet, angry, ugly, obscene, scrawled in strokes so vicious that in several places the point of the pencil had bitten into the thick stuff of the envelope and torn it. Turning the envelope back, Blanche pressed it quickly down into her lap as if in an attempt to crush the word out of existence. Looking down at her, Mrs. Stitt drew her hands stiffly across the front of her apron.

“I’m sorry.” Her voice was contrite now, but still unsteady. “I guess I shouldn’t have shown you. Lord knows I hate to be a trouble maker, but——”

Blanche raised a hand. “It’s all right.” Her gaze slid inadvertently toward the open doorway. “I don’t really think——”

Abruptly, Mrs. Stitt held out her hand. “Here, I’ll take that and get rid of it.” Retrieving the envelope from Blanche’s lap, she folded it deftly over upon itself and jammed it into her pocket. “Miss Blanche,” she said, her voice quiet with concern, “I know this isn’t anything much to get worked up about. But it’s not a normal thing for someone to do—not for a person her age—and with her starting to act up again.…”