Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (68 page)

M
ilty, have I got a story for you!

No, sit down. Enjoy the cream cheese and bagel. I guarantee this one will make a first-class TV movie; I’m working on it already. Small cast, cheap production—it’s a natural. See, we start with this crazy chick, maybe about seventeen, but she’s a waif, she’s withdrawn from the world, see? She’s had some kind of terrible shock. And she’s fixed up this old apartment in a slum, really weird, like a fantasy world—long blonde hair, maybe goes around barefoot in tie-dyed dresses she makes out of old sheets, and there’s this account executive who meets her in Central Park and falls in love with her on account of she’s like a dryad or a nature spirit—

All right. So it stinks. I’ll pay for my lunch. We’ll pretend you’re not my agent, okay? And you don’t have to tell me it’s been done; I know it’s been done. The truth is—

Milty, I have to talk to someone. No, it’s a lousy idea, I know, and I’m not working on it and I haven’t been working on it, but what are you going to do Memorial Day weekend if you’re alone and everybody’s out of town?

I have to talk to someone.

Yes, I’ll get off the Yiddische shtick. Hell, I don’t think about it; I just fall into it sometimes when I get upset, you know how it is. You do it yourself. But I want to tell you a story and it’s not a story for a script. It’s something that happened to me in high school in 1952, and
I just want to tell someone
. I don’t care if no station from here to Indonesia can use it; you just tell me whether I’m nuts or not, that’s all.

Okay.

It was 1952, like I said. I was a senior in a high school out on the Island, a public high school but very fancy, a big drama program. They
were just beginning to integrate, you know, the early fifties, very liberal neighborhood; everybody’s patting everybody else on the back because they let five black kids into our school. Five out of eight hundred! You’d think they expected God to come down from Flatbush and give everybody a big fat golden halo.

Anyway, our drama class got integrated, too—one little black girl aged fifteen named Cissie Jackson, some kind of genius. All I remember the first day of the spring term, she was the only black I’d ever seen with a natural, only we didn’t know what the hell it was, then; it made her look as weird as if she’d just come out of a hospital or something.

Which, by the way, she just had. You know Malcolm X saw his father killed by white men when he was four and that made him a militant for life? Well, Cissie’s father had been shot down in front of her eyes when she was a little kid—we learned that later on—only it didn’t make her militant; it just made her so scared of everybody and everything that she’d withdraw into herself and wouldn’t speak to anybody for weeks on end. Sometimes she’d withdraw right out of this world and then they’d send her to the loony bin; believe me, it was all over school in two days. And she looked it; she’d sit up there in the school theater—oh, Milty, the Island high schools had
money
, you better believe it!—and try to disappear into the last seat like some little scared rabbit. She was only four-eleven anyhow, and maybe eighty-five pounds sopping wet. So maybe that’s why she didn’t become a militant. Hell, that had nothing to do with it. She was scared of
everybody
. It wasn’t just the white-black thing, either; I once saw her in a corner with one of the other black students: real uptight, respectable boy, you know, suit and white shirt and tie and carrying a new briefcase, too, and he was talking to her about something as if his life depended on it. He was actually crying and pleading with her. And all she did was shrink back into the corner as if she’d like to disappear and shake her head No No No. She always talked in a whisper unless she was onstage and sometimes then, too. The first week she forgot her cues four times—just stood there, glazed over, ready to fall through the floor—and a couple of times she just wandered off the set as if the play was over, right in the middle of a scene.

So Al Coppolino and I went to the principal. I’d always thought Alan was pretty much a fruitcake himself—remember, Milty, this is 1952—because he used to read all that crazy stuff,
The Cult of Cthulhu, Dagon Calls, The Horror Men of Leng
— yeah, I remember that H. P. Lovecraft flick you got ten percent on for Hollywood
and
TV
and
reruns—but what did we know? Those days you went to parties, you got excited from dancing cheek to cheek, girls wore ankle socks and petticoats to stick their skirts out, and if you wore a sport shirt to school that was okay because Central High was liberal, but it better
not have a pattern on it. Even so, I knew Al was a bright kid and I let him do most of the talking; I just nodded a lot. I was a big nothing in those days.

Al said, “Sir, Jim and I are all for integration and we think it’s great that this is a really liberal place, but—uh—”

The principal got that look. Uh-oh.

“But?” he said, cold as ice.

“Well, sir,” said Al, “it’s Cissie Jackson. We think she’s—um—sick. I mean wouldn’t it be better if … I mean everybody says she’s just come out of the hospital and it’s a strain for all of us and it must be a lot worse strain for her and maybe it’s just a little soon for her to—”

“Sir,” I said, “what Coppolino means is, we don’t mind integrating blacks with whites, but this isn’t racial integration, sir; this is integrating normal people with a filbert. I mean—”

He said, “Gentlemen, it might interest you to know that Miss Cecilia Jackson has higher scores on her IQ tests than the two of you put together. And I am told by the drama department that she has also more talent than the two of you put together. And considering the grades both of you have managed to achieve in the fall term, I’m not at all surprised.”

Al said under his breath, “Yeah, and fifty times as many problems.”

Well, the principal went on and told us about how we should welcome this chance to work with her because she was so brilliant she was positively a genius, and that as soon as we stopped spreading idiotic rumors, the better chance Miss Jackson would have to adjust to Central, and if he heard anything about our bothering her again or spreading stories about her, both of us were going to get it but good, and maybe we would even be expelled.

And then his voice lost the ice, and he told us about some white cop shooting her pa for no reason at all when she was five, right in front of her, and her pa bleeding into the gutter and dying in little Cissie’s lap, and how poor her mother was, and a couple of other awful things that had happened to her, and if
that
wasn’t enough to drive anybody crazy—though he said, “cause problems,” you know—anyhow, by the time he’d finished, I felt like a rat and Coppolino went outside the principal’s office, put his face down against the tiles—they always had tiles up as high as you could reach, so they could wash off the graffiti, though we didn’t use the word “graffiti” in those days—and he blubbered like a baby.

So we started a Help Cecilia Jackson campaign.

And by God, Milty, could that girl
act!
She wasn’t reliable, that was the trouble; one week she’d be in there, working like a dog, voice exercises, gym, fencing, reading Stanislavsky in the cafeteria, gorgeous performances, the next week: nothing. Oh, she was there in the flesh,
all right, all eighty-five pounds of her, but she would walk through everything as if her mind was someplace else: technically perfect, emotionally nowhere. I heard later those were also the times when she’d refuse to answer questions in history or geography classes, just fade out and not talk. But when she was concentrating, she could walk onto that stage and take it over as if she owned it. I never saw such a natural. At fifteen! And tiny. I mean not a particularly good voice—though I guess just getting older would’ve helped that—and a figure that, frankly, Milt, it was the old W. C. Fields joke, two aspirins on an ironing board. And tiny, no real good looks, but my God, you know and I know that doesn’t matter if you’ve got the presence. And she had it to burn. She played the Queen of Sheba once, in a one-act play we put on before a live audience—all right, our parents and the other kids, who else?—and she
was
the role. And another time I saw her do things from Shakespeare. And once, of all things, a lioness in a mime class. She had it all. Real, absolute, pure concentration. And she was smart, too; by then she and Al had become pretty good friends; I once heard her explain to him (that was in the green room the afternoon of the Queen of Sheba thing when she was taking off her makeup with cold cream) just how she’d figured out each bit of business for the character. Then she stuck her whole arm out at me, pointing straight at me as if her arm was a machine gun, and said:

“For you, Mister Jim, let me tell you: the main thing is
belief
!”

It was a funny thing, Milt. She got better and better friends with Al, and when they let me tag along, I felt privileged. He loaned her some of those crazy books of his and I overheard things about her life, bits and pieces. That girl had a mother who was so uptight and so God-fearing and so respectable it was a wonder Cissie could even breathe without asking permission. Her mother wouldn’t even let her straighten her hair—not ideological reasons, you understand, not then, but because—get this—
Cissie was too young
. I think her mamma must’ve been crazier than she was. Course I was a damn stupid kid (who wasn’t?) and I really thought all blacks were real loose; they went around snapping their fingers and hanging from chandeliers, you know, all that stuff, dancing and singing. But here was this genius from a family where they wouldn’t let her out at night; she wasn’t allowed to go to parties or dance or play cards; she couldn’t wear makeup or even jewelry. Believe me, I think if anything drove her batty it was being socked over the head so often with a Bible. I guess her imagination just had to find some way out. Her mother, by the way, would’ve dragged her out of Central High by the hair if she’d found out about the drama classes; we all had to swear to keep that strictly on the q.t. The theater was more sinful and wicked than dancing, I guess.

You know, I think it shocked me. It really did. Al’s family was sort-of-nothing-really
Catholic and mine was sort-of-nothing Jewish. I’d never met anybody with a mamma like that. I mean she would’ve beaten Cissie up if Cissie had ever come home with a gold circle pin on that white blouse she wore day in and day out; you remember the kind all the girls wore. And of course there were no horsehair petticoats for Miss Jackson; Miss Jackson wore pleated skirts that were much too short, even for her, and straight skirts that looked faded and all bunched up. For a while I had some vague idea that the short skirts meant she was daring, you know, sexy, but it wasn’t that; they were from a much younger cousin, let down. She just couldn’t afford her own clothes. I think it was the mamma and the Bible business that finally made me stop seeing Cissie as the Integration Prize Nut we had to be nice to because of the principal or the scared little rabbit who still, by the way, whispered everyplace but in drama class. I just saw Cecilia Jackson plain, I guess, not that it lasted for more than a few minutes, but I knew she was something special. So one day in the hall, going from one class to another, I met her and Al and I said, “Cissie, your name is going to be up there in lights someday. I think you’re the best actress I ever met and I just want to say it’s a privilege knowing you.” And then I swept her a big corny bow, like Errol Flynn.

She looked at Al and Al looked at her, sort of sly. Then she let down her head over her books and giggled. She was so tiny you sometimes wondered how she could drag those books around all day; they hunched her over so.

Al said, “Aw, come on. Let’s tell him.”

So they told me their big secret. Cissie had a girl cousin named Gloriette, and Gloriette and Cissie together owned an honest-to-God slip for a boat in the marina out in Silverhampton. Each of them paid half the slip fee—which was about two bucks a month then, Milt—you have to remember that a marina then just meant a long wooden dock you could tie your rowboat up to.

“Gloriette’s away,” said Cissie, in that whisper. “She had to go visit auntie, in Carolina. And mamma’s goin’ to follow her next week on Sunday.”

“So we’re going to go out in the boat!” Al finished it for her. “You wanna come?”

“Sunday?”

“Sure, mamma will go to the bus station after church,” said Cissie. “That’s about one o’clock. Aunt Evelyn comes to take care of me at nine. So we have eight hours.”

“And it takes two hours to get there,” said Al. “First you take the subway; then you take a bus—”

“Unless we use your car, Jim!” said Cissie, laughing so hard she dropped her books.

“Well, thanks very much!” I said. She scooped them up again and smiled at me. “No, Jim,” she said. “We want you to come, anyway. Al never saw the boat yet. Gloriette and me, we call it
My Boat
.” Fifteen years old and she knew how to smile at you so’s to twist your heart like a pretzel. Or maybe I just thought: what a wicked secret to have! A big sin, I guess, according to her family.