In 1968, when I was thirteen, I became more or less obsessed with the events of the decade between 1918 and 1928. I think this was precipitated, mainly, from reading all F. Scott Fitzgerald's books over the course of a single long, hot summer. Also I had acquired a huge black and white poster of a silent movie star frozen in a bizarre pose in which she held the tips of her own long black hair at arms' length over her head, staring into the camera, chin down, eyes emphasized with kohl, like a venomous spider about to attack. I did research at the public library to learn who this actress was (Theda Bara, a name chosen because it's an anagram of "Arab death") and in doing so, became infatuated with all the movie stars of the 1920's. I loved their radical makeup, their white, white powdered faces, their eyes outlined in black, the blue eyes which photographed eerily white, their rouged lips that photographed black, the marcelled flapper hair-dos, the oiled, slicked-back black hair of the men. For several years I spent much of my free time at the library researching the people of the early cinema. I had the distinction of being one of the only teen-age girls in the world who knew all about the movie stars of a half century before. And I knew not only the names of the big movie stars, but also the names of bit players, girls not much older than myself then, who, light-headed with hunger, were sometimes forced to trade their bodies for work as extras. I loved the faces of these girls, who, if they were fortunate, got to make a couple of one-reelers before they were forced to return, crushed, to their home towns and settle down to the important business of living the rest of their days without being in the movies.
Because I loved the 1920's I spent the weekends of my teenage years nosing around in junk shops for artifacts of those days like an archaeologist. The awe I felt upon finding a local high school year book from 1926 was equal to the joy an Egyptologist must feel upon uncovering the face of a three thousand-year old mummy. A dirty celluloid collar, a tortoise hair pin, a compact with a broken mirror, if manufactured in the Twenties, filled me with bliss. I thought my heart would burst the day I discovered an Art Deco bottle at the bottom of a trunk, unscrewed its cap and inhaled the top-heavy-with-alcohol scent of sour fifty year-old perfume. I spent my allowance on scratchy old Victrola records, the fox trot and jazz hits of someone else's youth instead of the rock and roll anthems of my own. I liked to ride my bicycle through the oldest part of town and identify the buildings that were standing in those days. I searched for vestiges of painted advertisements on the sides of old brick buildings, for pressed tin ceilings, for Art Deco-tiled restrooms. This loading dock is where he would have stopped the car. Here they wrote their initials in the wet cement of the newly poured sidewalk. This department store window displayed her coquettish cloche. Once I had the joy of taking an elevator ride up to the top of the only 1920's hotel still standing in our town and being shown the penthouse ballroom, long closed and filled with dusty stored furniture, by the elderly elevator attendant who threw the switch that turned on the thrilling dance floor lights.
Sometimes at night I dreamed of Paris, of sharing a sidewalk table with Scott and Zelda until Isadora Duncan arrived and Zelda caused an ugly scene. I dreamed of being Louise Brooks' best friend and shopping with her for silk stockings and lingerie. Sometimes I even dared dream of replacing Charlie Chaplin's leading ladies -- of becoming the dance hall girl in The Gold Rush, the blind girl in City Lights, of being the one who would finally cherish the precious love of the pathetic little vagabond.
One spring day I was able to convince my friends at school to play hooky with me and drive out to a country cemetery for a picnic. We lolled on hundred-year-old graves with garlands of weeds and wildflowers wrapped about our heads, laughing, eating peaches and grapes, passing around a jug of cheap wine. We strolled through the cemetery reading tombstone inscriptions aloud, and one of the boys trailed behind us, softly strumming his guitar. We made up stories about the occupants of the graves from the information we gleaned from their markers. Most of the stories we told were giddy, melodramatic tragedies. Then we stumbled upon the overgrown grave of a child, a little boy, buried during the Depression. An iron bed frame had been dismantled and wired together to form a crude fence. Ancient toy cars and tractors and a small toy telephone rusted on top of the little grave. The bleached remains of artificial flowers in dirty, up-ended Mason jars were arranged around the marker, which bore a faded photographic plaque picturing the face of the little boy buried there. Time and brutal Texas weather had erased the letters which had once spelled out his name. Someone had arranged seashells, although the cemetery was land-locked, hundreds of miles from the ocean, to hold the sandy dirt down close to the grave, like a lacy coverlet. Sobered, we gathered Indian paintbrush and clover and wild black-eyed susan to leave there by the beloved child's tombstone.
We were all quiet on the drive back into town, watching shadows of clouds cross the asphalt road that stretched out ahead of us. The afternoon sky suddenly turned purple with approaching rain clouds, but we got back to school just before the shower started. None of us got into trouble for skipping school, and I don't think any of our parents ever learned where we'd been that day. What happened to that group of teenagers? The same old stories, no surprises. One didn't come back from Viet Nam. One died in the first round of the AIDS outbreak in San Francisco. The rest of us just grew up, grew older and drifted apart.
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My two best friends -- Karen and Jane -- and I liked to locate old houses which appeared to be deserted, case them for weeks to make sure no one ever came in or went out, and then, break into them if we could do so gently. While playing hooky and driving around in the country, we once came upon an old shotgun farmhouse which was being used to store hay. Braving snakes, we went inside and found dishes still on the kitchen table and a 1931 drug store calendar flapping in the wind. In what looked to have been a bedroom we found one faded pink satin shoe lying on top of an open book of Shakespeare's plays. On another drive out in the country we discovered a deserted music conservatory with a harp and broken-down pianos. Next to the conservatory was a midget house, a perfect miniature three-room house with low windows and door frames, a tiny fireplace and low, built-in kitchen counters.
Our most ambitious break-in was a three-story Victorian beauty, once a local show place, which had been unoccupied for at least the two prior decades. It was surrounded by a menacing hedge of trees and brambles and thorny rose buses as tall as the house itself, like in the story of Sleeping Beauty. Descendants of the house's original owners had the lights wired electronically to come on at twilight and go off at dawn, and these automatic lights had us confused as to the mansion's status as a truly deserted house for most of a school year. After snooping around the house repeatedly and keeping detailed notes about when the lights came on for several weeks, Karen and Jane and I set the date on which we would enter the house -- the next Friday night. Once we finally made the decision to enter, it was easy. One window in the kitchen had been left unlocked and slid up easily from the sheltered back porch. Holding our breath as if we were diving into icy water, we crawled through the window into the mansion.
The house was completely emptied of furniture; only the paint, carpets, light fixtures and wallpaper were left to tell the tale of the house's days of glory. The entryway and front parlor floors were carpeted in a pattern of roses, each rose fully a foot in diameter. There was opulent brocade wallpaper in the grand staircase that led to the higher floors. We raced upstairs to explore the bedrooms; each had a different color scheme, fancy woodwork, window seats. I was ecstatic to discover the exquisitely tiled, mirrored Art Deco master bathroom. I flung myself into the lion's foot tub and tried to hear what the bathtub could tell me about the bodies of those who had lain in it. We ran up the staircase to the highest floor to discover more rooms and the entrance to the attic.
The attic was like striking gold for a young girl like me, infatuated with the past. It was crammed to the rafters with dusty steamer trunks full of clothes, piles of movie magazines, fashion magazines, theater programs, taxidermied deer head hunting trophies shrouded with cobwebs, ancient, deteriorating fur coats and wraps, hat boxes from New York with hats still in them, candy boxes full of letters and postcards, huge, rolled-up magic Turkish carpets, leather suitcases, stately vases, floor lamps. We were in Paradise, stumbling upon this repository, this reliquary, of someone's life in the 1920's.
We made a pact with each other to always come to the attic together and to take things out of the treasure trove gratefully, lovingly and judiciously, only as needed. From that first night I remember taking only some movie magazines, an elaborate paper candy box and a marvelous silver mesh evening shawl. Jane and Karen took hats and gloves and dresses. I remember swinging on a swing in the schoolyard later that night, jubilant about having entered the mansion. We returned there many times, sometimes not to take anything out at all, but just to lie on our backs on the carpeted floor of one of the rooms, staring up at the ceiling, trying to hear echoes of the life the house had once known. I remember the view of town from the high attic windows, the railroad tracks just visible over treetops and the mansion's hedge of thorns.
The next year I went away to college and Jane wrote me a sad letter to let me know that the mansion had been blown up, then carted away piece by piece, to make room for a new car dealership. When she and Karen learned it was to be brought down, they made a final trip together and hauled one of the magic carpets down two flights of stairs to the car.
Our most ambitious break-in was a three-story Victorian beauty, once a local show place, which had been unoccupied for at least the two prior decades. It was surrounded by a menacing hedge of trees and brambles and thorny rose buses as tall as the house itself, like in the story of Sleeping Beauty. Descendants of the house's original owners had the lights wired electronically to come on at twilight and go off at dawn, and these automatic lights had us confused as to the mansion's status as a truly deserted house for most of a school year. After snooping around the house repeatedly and keeping detailed notes about when the lights came on for several weeks, Karen and Jane and I set the date on which we would enter the house -- the next Friday night. Once we finally made the decision to enter, it was easy. One window in the kitchen had been left unlocked and slid up easily from the sheltered back porch. Holding our breath as if we were diving into icy water, we crawled through the window into the mansion.
The house was completely emptied of furniture; only the paint, carpets, light fixtures and wallpaper were left to tell the tale of the house's days of glory. The entryway and front parlor floors were carpeted in a pattern of roses, each rose fully a foot in diameter. There was opulent brocade wallpaper in the grand staircase that led to the higher floors. We raced upstairs to explore the bedrooms; each had a different color scheme, fancy woodwork, window seats. I was ecstatic to discover the exquisitely tiled, mirrored Art Deco master bathroom. I flung myself into the lion's foot tub and tried to hear what the bathtub could tell me about the bodies of those who had lain in it. We ran up the staircase to the highest floor to discover more rooms and the entrance to the attic.
The attic was like striking gold for a young girl like me, infatuated with the past. It was crammed to the rafters with dusty steamer trunks full of clothes, piles of movie magazines, fashion magazines, theater programs, taxidermied deer head hunting trophies shrouded with cobwebs, ancient, deteriorating fur coats and wraps, hat boxes from New York with hats still in them, candy boxes full of letters and postcards, huge, rolled-up magic Turkish carpets, leather suitcases, stately vases, floor lamps. We were in Paradise, stumbling upon this repository, this reliquary, of someone's life in the 1920's.
We made a pact with each other to always come to the attic together and to take things out of the treasure trove gratefully, lovingly and judiciously, only as needed. From that first night I remember taking only some movie magazines, an elaborate paper candy box and a marvelous silver mesh evening shawl. Jane and Karen took hats and gloves and dresses. I remember swinging on a swing in the schoolyard later that night, jubilant about having entered the mansion. We returned there many times, sometimes not to take anything out at all, but just to lie on our backs on the carpeted floor of one of the rooms, staring up at the ceiling, trying to hear echoes of the life the house had once known. I remember the view of town from the high attic windows, the railroad tracks just visible over treetops and the mansion's hedge of thorns.
The next year I went away to college and Jane wrote me a sad letter to let me know that the mansion had been blown up, then carted away piece by piece, to make room for a new car dealership. When she and Karen learned it was to be brought down, they made a final trip together and hauled one of the magic carpets down two flights of stairs to the car.
