The Throat

relative progress of myself and my myriad colleagues. On the day I heard from Tom, I went down late because I wanted to finish up my revisions, and when I finally got downstairs I saw that the box was stuffed with envelopes. I immediately pitched into the big garbage can we had installed beneath the boxes all envelopes covered with printing, all appeals for funds, all offers to subscribe to esoteric literary journals published by universities. Two were left, one from my foreign agent, the other from some foreign country that liked exotic stamps. My name was hand- printed on the second envelope in clear, rounded letters.

I went back upstairs, sat at my desk, and peered at the stamps on the second envelope. A tiger, a huge fleshy flower, a man in a white robe up to his knees in a brown river. With a small shock, I realized that the letter was from India. I tore open the envelope and removed a single sheet of filmy paper, tinted rose.

Dear Timothy Underhill,

I am late in responding because your letter took an extra time to reach us here. The address you used was rather vague. But as you see, it did arrive! You ask about your friend John Ransom. It is difficult to know what to say. You will understand that I cannot go into details, but I feel that I may inform you that we at the ashram were moved by your friend's plight at the time he came to us. He was suffering. He required our help. Ultimately, however, we were forced to ask him to leave—a painful affair for all concerned. John Ransom was a disruptive influence here. He could not open himself, he could not find his true being, he was lost and blind in an eternal violence. There would have been no question of his being allowed to return. I am sorry to write these things to you about your friend, but I do hope that his spiritual search has after so many years finally brought him peace. Perhaps it has.

Yours sincerely,

Mina

3

Two days after receiving Mina's letter and faxing a copy to Tom, my revisions delivered to Ann Folger, I walked past the video store again, the same video store I had been passing on my walks nearly every day since my return, and this time, with literally nothing in the world to do, I remembered that during my period of insomnia I had seen something in the window that interested me. I went back and looked over the posters of movie stars. The movie stars were not very interesting. Maybe I had just been thinking about Babette's Feast again.

Then I saw the announcement about the old noir films and remembered.

I went into the shop and rented From Dangerous Depths, the movie Fee Bandolier and I had both seen at the Beldame Oriental, the movie that had seen us at the moment of our greatest vulnerability.

As soon as I got home, I pushed it into the VCR and turned on the television set. I sat on my couch and unbuttoned my jacket and watched the advertisements for other films in the series spool across the screen. The titles came up, and the movie began. Half an hour later, jolted, engrossed, I remembered to take off my jacket.

From Dangerous Depths was like a Hitchcock version of Fritz Lang's M, simultaneously roughed up and domesticated for an American audience. I had remembered nothing of this story; I had blanked it out entirely. But Fee Bandolier had not blocked it out. Fee had carried the story with him wherever he went, to Vietnam, to Florida and Ohio and Millhaven.

A banker played by William Bendix abducted a child from a playground, carried him into a basement, and slit his throat. Over his corpse, he crooned the dead boy's name. The next day, he went to his bank and charmed his employees, presided over meetings about loans and mortgages. At six o'clock, he went home to his wife, Grace, played by Ida Lupino. An old school friend of the banker's, a detective played by Robert Ryan, came for dinner and wound up talking about a case he found disturbing. The case involved the disappearance of several children. Over dessert, Robert Ryan blurted out his fear that the children had been killed. Didn't they know a certain family? William Bendix and Ida Lupino looked across the table at their friend, their faces dull with anticipatory horror. Yes, they did know the family. Their son, Ryan said, was the last child to have vanished. 'No!' cried Ida Lupino. 'Their only child?' Dinner came to an end. Forty-five minutes later in real time, in movie time three days after the dinner, William Bendix offered a ride home to another small boy and took him into the same basement. After murdering the boy, he lovingly sang the boy's name over his corpse. The next day, Robert Ryan visited the child's parents, who wept as they showed him photographs. The movie ended with Ida Lupino turning away to call Robert Ryan after shooting her husband in the heart.

Tingling, I watched the cast list roll the already known names toward the top of the screen:

Lenny Valentine-Robert Ryan

    Franklin Bachelor-William Bendix

    Grace Bachelor-Ida Lupino

And then, after the names of various detectives, bank employees, and townspeople, the names of the two murdered boys:

Felix Hart-Bobby Driscoll

    Mike Hogan-Dean Stockwell

4

I ejected the tape from the VCR and slid the cassette back into its box. I walked three times around my loft, torn between laughter and tears. I thought of Fee Bandolier, a child staring at a movie screen from a seat in the wide central aisle of the Beldame Oriental; probably it had always been Robert Ryan, not Clark Gable, of whom Michael Hogan had reminded me. At last I sat at my desk and dialed Tom Pasmore's telephone number. His answering machine cut in after two rings. At the end of a twenty-four-hour day, Tom had finally gone to bed. I waited through his message and said to the tape, 'This is the John Galsworthy of Grand Street. If you want to learn the only thing you don't already know, call me as soon as you get up.'

I took the tape out of the box and watched it again, thinking of Fee Bandolier, the man I had known and the first Fee, the child Fee, my other self, delivered to me at so many times and in so many places by imagination. There he was, and I was there too, beside him, crying and laughing at the same time, waiting for the telephone to ring.