THAT AFTERNOON, ON my walk, I bought a couple of books on Stage Magic and Victorian Illusions in the “almost all-nite” bookshop. A story, or the seed of it anyway, was there in my head, and I wanted to explore it. I sat on the bench in the courtyard and browsed through the books. There was, I decided, a specific atmosphere that I was after.
I was reading about the Pockets Men, who had pockets filled with every small object you could imagine and would produce whatever you asked on request. No illusion—just remarkable feats of organization and memory. A shadow fell across the page. I looked up.
“Hullo again,” I said to the old black man.
“Suh,” he said.
“Please don’t call me that. It makes me feel like I ought to be wearing a suit or something.” I told him my name.
He told me his: “Pious Dundas.”
“Pious?” I wasn’t sure that I’d heard him correctly. He nodded proudly.
“Sometimes I am, and sometimes I ain’t. It’s what my mamma called me, and it’s a good name.”
“Yes.”
“So what are you doing here, suh?”
“I’m not sure. I’m meant to be writing a film, I think. Or at least, I’m waiting for them to tell me to start writing a film.”
He scratched his nose. “All the film people stayed here, if I started to tell you them all now, I could talk till a week next Wednesday and I wouldn’t have told you the half of them.”
“Who were your favorites?”
“Harry Langdon. He was a gentleman. George Sanders. He was English, like you. He’d say, ‘Ah, Pious. You must pray for my soul.’ And I’d say, ‘Your soul’s your own affair, Mister Sanders,” but I prayed for him just the same. And June Lincoln.”
“June Lincoln?”
His eyes sparkled, and he smiled. “She was the queen of the silver screen. She was finer than any of them: Mary Pickford or Lillian Gish or Theda Bara or Louise Brooks. . . . She was the finest. She had ‘it.’ You know what ‘it’ was?”
“Sex appeal.”
“More than that. She was everything you ever dreamed of. You’d see a June Lincoln picture, you wanted to . . .” he broke off, waved one hand in small circles, as if he were trying to catch the missing words. “I don’t know. Go down on one knee, maybe, like a knight in shinin’ armor to the queen. June Lincoln, she was the best of them. I told my grandson about her, he tried to find something for the VCR, but no go. Nothing out there anymore. She only lives in the heads of old men like me.” He tapped his forehead.
“She must have been quite something.”
He nodded.
“What happened to her?”
“She hung herself. Some folks said it was because she wouldn’t have been able to cut the mustard in the talkies, but that ain’t true: she had a voice you’d remember if you heard it just once. Smooth and dark, her voice was, like an Irish coffee. Some say she got her heart broken by a man, or by a woman, or that it was gambling, or gangsters, or booze. Who knows? They were wild days.”
“I take it that you must have heard her talk.”
He grinned. “She said, ‘Boy, can you find what they did with my wrap?’ and when I come back with it, then she said, ‘You’re a fine one, boy.’ And the man who was with her, he said, ‘June, don’t tease the help’ and she smiled at me and gave me five dollars and said ‘He don’t mind, do you, boy?’ and I just shook my head. Then she made the thing with her lips, you know?”
“A moue?”
“Something like that. I felt it here.” He tapped his chest. “Those lips. They could take a man apart.”
He bit his lower lip for a moment, and focused on forever. I wondered where he was, and when. Then he looked at me once more.
“You want to see her lips?”
“How do you mean?”
“You come over here. Follow me.”
“What are we . . . ? ” I had visions of a lip print in cement, like the handprints outside Grauman’s Chinese Theatre.
He shook his head, and raised an old finger to his mouth. Silence.
I closed the books. We walked across the courtyard. When he reached the little fish-pool, he stopped.
“Look at the Princess,” he told me.
“The one with the red splotch, yes?”
He nodded. The fish reminded me of a Chinese dragon: wise and pale. A ghost fish, white as old bone, save for the blotch of scarlet on its back—an inch-long double-bow shape. It hung in the pool, drifting, thinking.
“That’s it,” he said. “On her back. See?”
“I don’t quite follow you.”
He paused and stared at the fish.
“Would you like to sit down?” I found myself very conscious of Mr. Dundas’s age.
“They don’t pay me to sit down,” he said, very seriously. Then he said, as if he were explaining something to a small child, “It was like there were gods in those days. Today, it’s all television: small heroes. Little people in the boxes. I see some of them here. Little people.
“The stars of the old times: They was giants, painted in silver light, big as houses . . . and when you met them, they were still huge. People believed in them.
“They’d have parties here. You worked here, you saw what went on. There was liquor, and weed, and goings-on you’d hardly credit. There was this one party . . . the film was called Hearts of the Desert. You ever heard of it?”
I shook my head.
“One of the biggest movies of 1926, up there with What Price Glory with Victor McLaglen and Dolores del Río and Ella Cinders starring Colleen Moore. You heard of them?” I shook my head again.
“You ever heard of Warner Baxter? Belle Bennett?”
“Who were they?”
“Big, big stars in 1926.” He paused for a moment. “Hearts of the Desert. They had the party for it here, in the hotel, when it wrapped. There was wine and beer
