The bride wore black (2 page)

woman of the most sypathetic sort. In La Mari'ee Etait en Noir (1968) Truffaut pulled off one of the neatest feats in the history of Woolrich adaptations. He moved the action to France and Switzerland, completely eliminated the character of Wanger and the detective element, scrapped virtually everything in part five of the novel, including the wild coincidences revealed at the climax and yet made a picture that remains true to the spirit and structure of much of the book. Truffaut even found room for a number of tiny details from Woolrich's novel, filming the bit about the maid adding water to Target Number Two's gin bottle, for instance, and changing most of the victims' names either not at all or just enough to make them pronounceable in French, so Ferguson becomes Fergus, with the accent on the second syllable, as in Camus. Life-loving optimist in the tradition of Jean Renoir, Truffaut dropped the novel's bleak metaphysical overtones (and the bizarre plot twists Woolrich employed to portray his world-view) and transformed the insights about how Julie in ruining others has ruined her own life into a completely naturalistic aspect of his film, communicated through characterization, camerawork, color, music (by Bernard Herrmann, Hitchcock's favorite composer), and nuance.

In The Cinema of Francois Truffaut (1970) Graham Petrie writes eloquently of this movie's power. He describes how Truffaut obtains the effect "almost literally ... of a dance in which music and camera combine, the one adapting and suiting itself to the needs of the other." He discusses the made-for-each-other relationship between the bride and her victims, with Juhe "using [the men] coldly and deliberately for her own purposes" while they in turn ironically "attempt to manipulate her for their own satisfaction." He praises Truffaut for pulling our sympathies in several directions at once so that "we find ourselves drawn into complicity with [Julie], into shar-

ing her sense of her victims as pure objects to be manipulated and disposed of at the same time as we are made uncomfortably aware of their reality and humanity. One side of us wishes her to succeed . . . while another keeps reminding us that not only as these people like ourselves who are being killed but their elimination is fanatically wrong-headed."

While preparing his book on Truffaut, Petrie read The Bride Wore Black and disliked it intensely. He found Woolrich's milieu and characters "uniformly unsympathetic," the language and motivation "crude and coarse," and criticized Woolrich for making "no attempt to humanise or give complexity to any of the victims," who are all "one-dimensional figures put up simply to be knocked down as ingeniously as possible. . . . The sordid and mechanical 'naturalism' of the book fails to bring any of the characters or events to life in any very challenging way, while Truffaut's romanticism and the mysterious and dreamlike atmosphere which he creates combine with his typical attention to the details of human experience to produce a work of complex and evocative beauty, for whose subtleties the original can take little credit." In short, Petrie seems blind to how much of the plot and the essence of the film originate in Woolrich's novel, and argues with a wrong-headedness comparable to Julie's that Truffaut made a silk purse out of a sow's ear when the more balanced view would seem to be that he made a silk purse out of a piece of silk.

What Woolrich thought of the movie will never be known. He was still alive when it opened in New York in July 1968 but was confined to a wheelchair and unable or unwilling to make the effort to go see it. Less than three months later he was dead.

In a fragment found among his papers after he was gone, Woolrich explained why he wrote as he did. "I was only trying to cheat death," he said. "I was only trying to

INTRODUCTION XVll

surmount for a little while the darkness that all my life I surely knew was going to come rolling in on me some day and obliterate me." In the end, of course, he had to die, as we all do. But as long as there are readers to be haunted by the fruit of his life, by the way he took his wretched psychological environment and his sense of entrapment and loneliness and turned them into poetry of the shadows, the world that Woolrich imagined lives.

Part One

BLISS

Blue moon, you saw me standing alone,

Without a dream in my heart, without a love of my own.

Blue moon, you knew just what I was there for....

Rodgers and Hart

THE WOMAN

J

ULIE, MY JULIE." IT followed the woman down the four flights of the stairwell. It was the softest whisper, the strongest claim, that human lips can utter. It did not make her falter, lose a step. Her face was white when she came out into the daylight, that was all.

The girl waiting by the valise at the street entrance turned and looked at her almost incredulously as she joined her, as though wondering where she had found the fortitude to go through with it. The woman seemed to read her thoughts; she answered the unspoken question, "it was just as hard for me to say goodbye as for them, only I was used to it, they weren't. I had so many long nights in which to steel myself. They only went through it once; I've had to go through it a thousand times." And without any change of tone, she went on, "I'd better take a taxi. There's one down there."

Tlie girl looked at her questioningly as it drew up.

"Yes, you can see me off if you want. To the Grand Central Station, driver."

She didn't look back at the house, at the street they were leaving. She didn't look out at the many other well-remembered streets that followed, that in their aggregate stood for her city, the place where she had always lived.

They had to wait a moment at the ticket window; there

was somebody else before them. The girl stood helplessly by at her elbow. "Where are you going?"

"I don't even know, even at this very moment. I haven't thought about it until now." She opened her handbag, separated the small roll of currency it contained into two unequal parts; retained the smaller in her hand. She moved up before the window, thrust it in.

"How far will this take me, at day-coach rates?"

"Chicago with ninety cents change."

"Then give me a one-way ticket." She turned to the girl beside her. "Now you can go back and tell them that much, at least."

"I won't if you don't want me to, Julie."

"It doesn't matter. What difference does the name of a place make when you're gone beyond recall?"

They sat for a while in the waiting room. Then presently they went below to the lower track level, stood for a moment by the coach doorway.

"Well kiss, as former childhood friends should." Their lips met briefly. "There."

"Julie, what can I say to you?"

"Just 'goodbye.' What else is there to say to anyone ever in this life?"

"Julie, I only hope I see you someday soon."

"You never will again."

The station platform fell behind. The train swept through the long tunnel. Then it emerged into daylight again, to ride an elevated trestle flush with the upper stories of tenements, while the crosswise streets ticked by like picket openings in a fence.

It started to slow again, almost before it had got fully under way. "Twanny-fith Street," droned a conductor into the car. The woman who had gone away forever seized her valise, stood up and walked down the aisle as though this were the end of the trip instead of the beginning.

She was standing in the vestibule, in readiness, when it drew up. She got off, walked along the platform to the exit, down the stairs to street level. She bought a paper at the waiting-room newsstand, sat down on one of the benches, opened the paper toward the back, to the classified ads. She furled it to a convenient width, traced a finger down the column under the heading Furnished Rooms.

The finger stopped almost at random, without much regard for the details offered by what it rested on. She dug her nail into the spongy paper, marking it. She tucked the newspaper under one arm, picked up her vahse once more, walked outside to a taxi. "Take me to this address, here," she said, and showed him the paper.

The landlady at the furnished rooming house stood back, waiting for her verdict, by the open room door.

The woman turned around. "Yes, this will do very nicely. Hi give you the amount for the first two weeks now."

The landlady counted it, began to scribble a receipt. "What name, please?" she asked, looking up.

The woman's eyes flicked past her own valise with the "J.B." once initialed in gilt still dimly visible midway between the two latches. "Josephine Bailey."

"Here's your receipt. Miss Bailey. Now I hope you're comfortable. The bathroom's just two doors down the hall on your "

"Thank you, thank you, 111 find out." She closed the door, locked it on the inside. She took off her hat and coat, opened her valise, so recently packed for a trip of fifty blocks or a lifetime.

There was a small rust-flaked tin medicine cabinet tacked up above the washbowl. She went over to it and opened it, rising on her toes as though in search of something. On the topmost shelf, as she had half hoped, there

was a rusted razor blade, left behind by some long-forgotten masculine roomer.

She went back to the valise with it, cut a little oblong around the initials on the Hd, peeled off the top layer of the papier-mache, thus removing them bodily. Then she prodded through the contents of the receptacle, gashing at the stitching of an undergarment, a night robe, a blouse; removing those same two letters that had once stood for her wherever they were to be found.

Her predecessor obliterated, she threw the razor blade into the wastebasket, fastidiously wiped the tips of her fingers.

She found the picture of a man in the flap under the lid of the valise. She took it out and held it before her eyes, gazing at it for a long time. Just a young man, nothing wonderful about him: Not so strikingly handsome; just eyes and mouth and nose as anyone has. She looked at it a long time.

Then she found a folder of matches in her handbag and took the picture over to the washbasin. She touched a lighted match to one comer of it and held it until there was nothing to hold anymore.

"Goodbye," she breathed low.

She ran a spurt of water down through the basin and went back to the valise. All that was left now, in the flap under the lid, was a scrap of paper with a penciled name on it. It had taken a long time to get it. The woman looked further, took out four similar scraps.

She brought them all out. She didn't bum them right away. She played around with them first, as if in idle disinterest. She put them all down on the dresser top, blank sides up. Then she milled them around under her rotating fingertips. Then she picked one up, glanced briefly at the underside of it. Then she gathered them all together once more, bumed all five of them alike over the washbowl.

Then she moved over toward the window, stood there looking out, a hand poised at each extremity of the slablike sill, gripping it. She seemed to lean toward the city visible outside, like something imminent, about to happen to it.

BLISS

T,

HE CAB DREW UP short at the entrance of Bliss's apartment house and threw him forward a little on the seat. The liquor in his stomach sloshed around with the jolt. Not because there was so much in him but because it was so recently absorbed.

He got out, and the top of the door frame knocked his hat askew. He straightened it, fumbled for change, dropped a dime to the sidewalk. He wasn't helplessly drunk; he never got that way. He knew everything that was said to him and everything he was saying, and he felt just right. Not too little, not too much. And then there was always the thought of Marge it looked like he was getting someplace there. You didn't want to drown out a thought like that in liquor.

Charlie, on night door duty, came out behind him while he was paying the driver. Charlie was just a little behind time with his reception ritual, because he'd stayed behind on his bench in the foyer to finish the last paragraph of a sports writeup in a tabloid before coming out. But it was two-thirty in the morning, after all, and no one's perfect.

Bliss turned and said, "'Lo, Charlie."

Charlie answered, "Morning, Mr. Bliss." He held the entrance door open for him, and Bliss went inside. Charlie followed, his duties more or less satisfactorily per-

formed. He yawned, and then Bliss caught it from him, without having seen him do it, and yawned, too a fact that would have interested a metaphysician.

There was a mirror panel on one side of the lobby, and Bliss stepped up, took one of his usual going-in looks at himself. There were two kinds. The "boy-I-feel-swell, I-wonder-what's-up-tonight" look. That was the going-out look. Then there was the "God-I-feel-terrible, be-glad-to-get-to-bed" look. That was the coming-back look.

Bliss saw a man of twenty-seven with close-cropped sandy hair, looking back at him. So close-cropped it looked silvery at the sides. Brown eyes, spare figure, good height without being too tall about it. A man who knew all about him Bliss. Not handsome, but then who wanted to be handsome? Even Marge Elliott didn't care if he was handsome or not. "As long," as she had put it, "as you're just Ken."

He sighed, snapped his thumbnail at the bedraggled white flower that still clung to his lapel button-hole, and it flew to pieces.

Bliss took out a crumpled package of cigarettes, helped himself to one, scanned the neat hole in the upper right-hand corner. He saw that there was one left, offered it to Charlie. "Greater love hath no man," he remarked.

Charlie took it, perhaps figuring there wasn't likely to be anyone else coming in after this.

Charlie was big and roundish at the middle. He wasn't so good at polishing all the way down toward the bottom of the brass stanchions that supported the door canopy, but the middle and upper parts always shone like jewels, and he could handle twice his weight in disorderly drunks. He'd been night doorman in the building ever since Bliss had first moved into it. Bliss liked him. Charlie liked Bliss, too. Bliss gave him two bucks on Christ-

mas and spread another two throughout the year in four-bit pieces. But that wasn't the reason; CharHe just liked him.