I Don't Know How the Story Ends (7 page)

Ranger smuggled almost everything in a guitar case, but the broom wouldn't fit. I had to carry it, and endure the inquisitive stares of transit patrons. “Next time wear a cap and apron,” Ranger suggested. He was bouncing with anticipation at trying out our new “studio”—his name for the tumbledown shack.

When we had struggled up the path to Daisy Dell, Sam was already there with his own tools, plus camera and tripod. His first words were, “Got a story yet?”

“I'm working on it,” Ranger breezily replied.

“You can work
on
it all you want, as long as it's in your head. But we don't have that much film to play around with, and I don't want to get stuck with fifteen beginnings and no end.”

“All right, all right—by the end of the week. I promise.”

We set about making the shack presentable, and with no little sister to get charmingly underfoot, we made quite a bit of progress. In just a couple of hours, the floorboards were pounded down and the window frames repaired, and a crude table had been thrown together to go with a rickety chair. The boys did most of that, while I swept and hung curtains.

By then the sun was at a decent angle for camera work. The scenes we shot were of the kind Ranger called “establishing”—meaning to set a mood or location. So there was the girl in her miserable home, searching in vain for something to cook for dinner. Then a scene where the hero came to call and I made the best of our poor hospitality. Wanting comic relief (which would have been easy with Sylvie around), Ranger hit upon some business where he finds a cockroach in his soup and I am mortified.

Sam would have to get a close-up of an actual roach in a bowl sometime, but he said their house had no shortage of them.

On the way back to the streetcar stop, we paused to shoot a scene beside the little white house. There wasn't much to it. I merely stood beside the picket fence looking sad. Then I stood beside the picket fence weeping into a handkerchief, and as usual, Ranger couldn't tell me why. “It doesn't matter—could be anything. Pop's on a bender or Little Sister's lost or you're sad to see the hero go—say, let's get one of me going.”

To my mind, none of it amounted to much, but Ranger seemed pleased. Sam took a different route home, and on the streetcar Ranger told me tales of “the business.” Such as Mr. Griffith's methods of direction: “I heard that when he met Lillian and Dorothy Gish—they're sisters and two of his favorite actresses now—at first he couldn't make 'em understand what kind of emotion he wanted. So, unbeknownst to them, he loaded a pistol with blanks and invited them into his office, and started chasing them around the room firing shots into the air. He got his response, all right.”

“You'd better not try that with us!”

“Whatever works. And another time, I heard…” Though I was not convinced his stories were completely true, I had to admit they made the time speed merrily by all the way to the hacienda.

At the end of the drive, Ranger took my broom and suggested we separate. He would circle around to the back so the grown-ups wouldn't wonder about our domestic implements. “I'll meet you in the kitchen.”

I had expected the ladies to be back from the Red Cross, but the house seemed eerily empty when I walked into the entrance hall. Wondering if they'd had to take a little girl to the hospital to get stitched up (with Sylvie, one never knew), my eye fell upon the mail tray. Dead center on the palm leaf was an envelope stamped with a U.S. Army postmark. I pounced.
Yes!
It was from Captain Robert Ransom, our first letter in over a month!

Back in Seattle, Mother would have perused it first, then gathered me and Sylvie to read it out loud. But here… After a slight hesitation, I slit open the envelope, shook out the contents, and scanned the date: June 2, when we were still in Seattle.

His handwriting shocked me: sprawled like a drunken sailor, with many unfinished words and cross-outs. Some lines were blacked over completely. It was as if Father himself, always so neat and well-groomed, had wandered through the door in a bathrobe with his hair in his eyes. I made out the meaning slowly:

Dear ones,

By this time I expect you are enjoying the sunshine. I don't get much, seems the sky is always full of smoke. Sleep is a distant memory, but I am in good health thank God. Much to do here. [a sentence blacked out] Ambulance brings in stacks of wounded. I have never [more crossed out] Sorry to be making such a mess. I would start this letter over but no time. The food here leaves much to be desired. I've shed all that extra wait Rosetta's cooking put on me. Once I've served my time you will not recognize the
scarecrow
trim figure who bounds off the train to swoop you all up in his arms. One good thing about the work here I have so little time to miss you.

Love to Buzzy and best to all her house—

Your devoted, etc.

By the Beautiful Sea

The ladies arrived within minutes, and I was partly right in guessing where they'd been—not to the hospital, but to the cleaners to try to salvage Sylvie's dress after she'd spilled half a bottle of ink on it. The other half, I gathered, went on the hair of her new little friend Agnes—whose hair was already black, thank goodness, Aunt Buzzy observed cheerfully. Though Agnes's mother did not take such a philosophical view.

Cheer abruptly fled after Mother snatched up the letter and read it, first to herself and then out loud. A moment of silence followed. “Poor Bobby,” sighed Aunt Buzzy. “Such a shame he had to go.”

“He did
not
have to go,” Mother snapped. “He was poked and prodded into it by—” She stopped abruptly, remembering little pitchers with big ears nearby: namely me, gazing at her with my mouth open.

Prodded by whom? Could she mean Grandfather Ransom, who spoke of his own war service in the Philippines as his noblest hour? Memories of certain strained moments around my grandparents' dinner table came back to me, making me wonder if the whole business of Father's enlistment was more complicated than I had thought. And if he didn't
have
to go, why did he, and leave us with all this worry and unsettlement?

I didn't sleep well that night. The old nightmare of the battlefield returned with the blasted landscape of splintered trees and mucky ridges. Father kept telling us he was in no immediate danger.

What if he wasn't telling us the entire truth?

• • •

The next morning we met at Griffith Park (no relation to the great D. W.), where Sylvie found three little boys who almost matched her for rowdiness. While they played variations of hide-and-seek, Ranger read his scenario to Sam and me. It was only three pages long, or less if one didn't count the cross-outs. But it took him a while to explain because of interruptions. For instance, after he began with, “There are these two girls, see, and we'll call them Matchless and Little Sister,” Sam responded with an impatient
humph
.

“Those aren't names,” he pointed out, while trying to roll a cigarette in a gusty breeze.

“No, they're qualities. Mr. Griffith does that because—”

“I know he does that, and I think it's stupid. If they're supposed to be real people, give 'em names.”

“They're more than real people. They're ideas too.”

“All right—if Matchless is an
idea
, better make that clear at the beginning. Somebody wants to beg a match off her and she doesn't have any. Get it?”

That's why it took so long for Ranger to get through his scenario, but finally the story was laid out for our inspection:

“Matchless and Little Sister live in a rundown shack with their worthless father who's cruel to them when he's down on his luck, which is—”

“I don't like that,” I interrupted. “Most fathers are upstanding gentlemen” (like mine, I didn't say) “who work hard for their families.”

“It's just part of the story, Isobel,” Ranger explained patiently. “Every story needs some problem to solve, right? In this story, Dad's the problem.”

“But—”

“To continue: while the two girls are on an outing at the beach—we'll go down to Santa Monica—Little Sister falls off the pier and is saved from drowning by a dauntless youth.”

“Is that his name?” Sam smirkily asked. “
Dauntless
Youth
?”

“—who becomes friendly with the girls. He calls on them at their home when their father is away, and Matchless falls in love with him.”

“But I'm only twelve!” I protested.

“In the picture, you're closer to sixteen, and I—the youth, I mean—is eighteen. He has to be that old because he's just enlisted.”

“Wait a minute,” Sam interrupted again. “I already toldja we can't make a war picture. We don't have the money or the—”

“No, listen.” Ranger's dark eyes crackled as he sat eagerly forward. “Thursday after next, there's going to be a huge bond rally during the Lasky Home Guard drill. If you set up right next to the street with a good angle, it'll look like the boys are marching off to war.”

“I'm not gonna risk—” Sam began.

Ranger raced on: “I know a prop man at Lasky who just enlisted for real. He said he'd lend me his Home Guard uniform. So we get a shot of Isobel and Sylvie waving like mad, and I can run over to them in my uniform, and it'll look like I just stepped out of the ranks to say good-bye.”

Sam was shaking his head. “Too risky. All those people.”

“What's the Lasky Home Guard?” I wondered aloud, meanwhile wondering silently what Sam was afraid to risk around “all those people.”

“It's the Famous Players Studio volunteers,” Ranger told me. “They drill every Thursday night with wooden rifles and uniforms from the wardrobe department. Mr. DeMille is the captain because he has military experience.”

Sam
humphed
again. “He went to military
school
. As a kid.”

“So what? The point is, with a bond rally going on at the same time, there'll be a big crowd and lots of cheering and flag-waving. It's too good to miss, so don't be a stick-in-the-mud, Sam.”

Sam clearly looked stuck. He opened his mouth to speak a couple of times, then stopped himself after a glance at me.

“But back to the story,” continued Ranger. “The Youth has already enlisted when he meets the girls, so he has to go, but there'll be a touching farewell scene where Matchless gives him a seashell from the beach where they met. Then a scene of him in France, scouting for the Allies. That's how we'll use the horse footage—how's that for an idea?” He punched Sam on the shoulder. “And what would you think if we got some newsreel film of the actual war and cut it in. Wouldn't that be bully?” Sam's expression softened a little, as though the idea was worth considering.

“Meanwhile, back home, the father loses his job and that puts him in a worse temper than before. There's a scene where he knocks Little Sister around and accidentally kills her—”

“
What
?
” I exclaimed, as Sam groaned.

“It'll be terrific,” Ranger insisted. “Here's the Youth fighting for his country in Europe, and it's the dear little tot back home who gets killed. Real pathos.”

“No,” I said quite firmly.

“But wait'll you hear. Next scene, she'll appear as an angel to the Youth on the battlefield, like at the end of
Intolerance
—”

Sam stopped him. “Wait a minute; let me guess. You want to hang her from a tree with piano wire?” At Ranger's nod, he put his own foot down. “No piano wire. If you don't know what you're doing, you could cut somebody's head off.”

That was enough for me. Trying as she could be, I preferred Sylvie
with
her head rather than without. And the notion of a tyrannical father made me queasy. Ranger put up a spirited defense, but faced with our united opposition, he had to back down. “All right, so the father doesn't
kill
her. He can still knock her around.”

I was going to object again, but Sam spoke first. “And who plays dear old dad?” he asked. Ranger looked at him with beseeching eyes, but to no avail. “I already told you I'm not going to be in this thing. I'm a cameraman, not an actor. And who would man the camera? Matchless?”

“Why not?” I asked. “Just for a minute.”

“Nobody touches it but me.”

I decided to make a point of touching the camera the next time we went shooting.

Ranger mused, “Maybe I could put on a beard and lifts. But there's one scene where Dad and the Youth appear together.”

“Put one of the girls in a beard and lifts.”

I sputtered, not entirely sure that Sam was joking. “Do you mean to tell me, Ranger Bell, that you don't have any other friends you can twist the arms of?” Unlike most boys, Ranger never had to meet the fellows for a baseball game, and his schoolmates were more inclined to run him down on sight, as I knew from experience.

He waved aside the question. “We'll work it out later. The Youth gets an honorable discharge after some heroic deed and hurries home because he's been going all moony over that seashell so we know he's in love. He gets off the train, but she isn't there to meet him. I was going to have the station agent tell him that there's been trouble at home… You wouldn't mind being a station agent, would you?” Sam just looked stony.

“Anyway, the youth rushes down to the shack and discovers… Well, I'm not sure what he discovers
now
. It was going to be the old man on a rampage, and the Youth could lay him out flat. At any rate, the girls are in peril and he rescues them, and he and Matchless declare their love and live happily ever after. How's that?”

“Can't the girls just be orphans?” Sam asked. “You could still cook up all kinds of peril to rescue 'em from.”

“But there has to be a villain,” Ranger insisted. “Somebody for the audience to hate.”

“What audience?” I gasped in alarm. I had forgotten that my “acting” might actually be seen by anyone.

Ranger looked flustered. “You never know.”

Sam's eyelids lowered farther. “We know who your audience is.”

“
I
don't,” I said—usually not so eager to admit ignorance, but I was getting lonely out there in the dark all the time.

“The great D. W.,” muttered Sam. “That's who.”

Ranger flared. “
You
wouldn't mind if he saw your work.”

“No, but you haven't told me how you're going to get his attention.”

“I thought your father and Mr. Griffith were friends,” I said.

No answer, and after a brief silence, Ranger awkwardly changed the subject. “We'll figure out the villain problem later. In the meantime, when can we go to Santa Monica?”

Not any time soon, as it turned out. The first two mornings we set, Sam was “busy.” That probably meant that the camera was busy.

The delay gave me an opportunity to write two letters to Father and meet the local librarian and wile away the lazy afternoons with
Ivanhoe
and
The Scottish Chiefs
, while Sylvie became very tight with Bone the sheepdog. Ranger went out “on business,” which I gathered had much to do with the war bond rally he hoped to shoot the following week. Or he worked on his scenario, wadding up page after page of notepaper—attempts, he told me, to either get by without a villain or suggest one without showing him. By the looks of things, it wasn't going well.

But he seemed downright cheerful the morning we finally made it to Santa Monica. The beach was a lively place, with a long arcade at the water's edge and a calliope jauntily wheezing out tunes. We found Sam on a bench near the boardwalk, the tripod behind him and the carpetbag, as always, firmly clasped between his feet.

“I've only got an hour,” he told us without preamble. “Already took some shots of the ocean in case we need 'em. There's a fishing pier up north a little ways. Tide's going out—we'd better move quick, while there's enough water for a little girl to drown in.”

We were all breathless by the time we hiked down to the fishing pier, burdened with equipment and extra clothes. A grandfatherly gentleman with a pole took one look at us and decided to quit the premises.

Sam set the tripod and mounted the camera while the rest of us made each other up. For Sylvie and me, this was a matter of lip color and eye paints, which Ranger had purchased from the local five and dime. Here on the beach, we could forego the flour and lard, but Ranger plastered himself with a free hand, after which he outlined the scene: “We have to get a few shots of the girls walking along the beach while Sylvie's clothes are still dry. So you two go up that way and wait for my signal. Act happy. Matchless got a few pennies from somewhere, and you've decided to take Little Sis to the arcade. Maybe we can get some arcade shots—”

“No arcade shots.” Sam's voice held a warning tone, again making me wonder why he was so shy about crowds.

“Okay, never mind. Sylvie—you see the fishing pier and run out on it. Isobel yells for you to come back and you don't, because you're feeling naughty. So she starts for you, and you do a little dance right on the edge of the pier.” Ranger raised his hands and pirouetted to show what he meant. I hoped nobody was watching. “Then you slip and fall in. Remember all that?”

Sylvie not only remembered all that, but threw in some business of her own. When we started our walk with the camera cranking, she plopped down in the sand, to my consternation, and started peeling off her shoes and stockings.

“Good!” Ranger yelled through his cupped hands. “Iz, unbend a little. Remember you're on a holiday—take your shoes off too!”

So I did, unbending enough that Ranger shouted, “Bully! Don't forget to pick up the shoes. Sylvie, look this way:
Oh joy! Let's run away from Big Sister!
” He acted this out with pattering baby steps. “Isobel, yell at her to come back.”

Sylvie ran exuberantly toward the pier, and Sam managed to follow her onto it, turning both the film and the panning crank. When Ranger shouted, “
Cut
!
” he closed the shutter and cranked one full turn to create space between takes.

For the next shot, Sam positioned the tripod right on the pier for a direct view of Sylvie dancing like a little maniac on the edge. At Ranger's signal, she slipped off—and landed on her bottom in a mere six inches of water. The tide was going out faster than we expected.

“Criminy,” Ranger fumed. “Sam, move the camera down the pier. Sylvie! Go out a little farther and start flailing around.”