The train pulled out of the station, and the red brick apartment buildings, the flyblown variety stores already giving way to Kmarts and then Walmarts moved out to the horizon as if they were on conveyor belts, parts of changing sets.
In Washington in a cheap, hastily rented studio apartment I put my tiny aunt’s picture in a frame made in China and set out to learn the art of conserving film.
This kind of resuscitation required a steady hand and a life in dark rooms. When beads from a sweater bought in a thrift shop, for example, fell onto an editing table, jamming a reel, it was, for the actors, akin to an avalanche of glass. Every thread, hair, drop of coffee had to be kept out of the danger zone. In my position as assistant to a film archivist at the Library of Congress I wasn’t paid much, but I soon became a skilled surgeon of lost performances, an ambulance driver for long-dead actors.
What about my own ghosts? They lived and died in a town I never saw; they drank coffee in bare provincial cafés, had lives circumscribed by rituals and holidays whose meanings organized each year like shifting but predictable constellations. Yet when I watched movies and cartoons made before 1939 I couldn’t help but pretend to inhabit those faces known only through photographs, wondering if they had watched these too, and in that projection back, the ghostly clusters took on a mixture of strange and familiar features. Also, and this makes their summoning even more troublesome, they appeared horrifyingly modern, not part of someone’s acute but aged set of memories. The murdered live next door, or almost. You can’t say: look at their clothes, they belong in another time, because with their fairly well-cut suits and dresses in geometric prints they look as if they could live in the same cities I have lived in, travel in what are essentially the same kinds of cars, respond to the same news of elections and atrocities, although this is impossible. What I mean is they have become personalities I’m capable of trying on although I never met a single one of them. They died before I was born. If this sounds arrogant it’s only because they’ve been at my door persistently, despite my family’s need to look the other way.
The new city engulfed me, and I plunged into my job with intensity. Taking on the role of the animating but anonymous power that revitalized Buster Keaton as his eyes grew sadder and (I thought) more disillusioned, or pumping up a flimsy, short-haired Myrna Loy revealed an odd kind of romance I sometimes had with these images. Or maybe it was a case of antiromance, the romance of solitary, imaginary pleasures. I used to notice old men and sullen boys in movie houses and wonder how far removed I really was from them. What kinds of illusions did I labor under? It’s a job, I kept telling myself, one I felt fortunate to have.
“Hello, this is Alphabet Films, please hold.”
I pushed hair out of my eye. I had worked overtime and so was sleeping late. The call not only disrupted my sleep but the edgy equilibrium of a life lived in dark rooms.
“Hello, is this Frances L. Baum?” A man’s voice, respectful but authoritative boomed in my ear.
“Yes.”
“This is Julius Shute, director of Alphabet Film Conservation. You were recommended to me by . . .” Groping for my eye patch in the dark while he searched for the name of my current boss, a displaced Iowan who, though he had no complaints about my work, saw me as a rootless cosmopolitan who would soon move on, the phone slipped from my shoulder and fell into the space between the bed and the wall. I was alone, I didn’t need the eye patch, but felt as if a public event were taking place, as if this Shute were watching me sit up in the middle of a twist of bedsheets. “I’d like to ask you to consider working for me at Alphabet.” His muffled voice came from somewhere under the bed. In the silence while I felt for the phone, Shute continued to speak, filling the void. “Occasionally people are reluctant to leave the Library of Congress for West 22nd Street. Arbergast, that was who recommended you.”
“Yes, that’s my boss.”
Apparently, unbeknownst to me, Arbergast, a faultless technician with a phenomenal memory for film trivia which he regaled us with constantly, was greasing the rails of my move which, he believed, was inevitable. I managed to tell Shute I was interested in West 22nd Street, wherever that was.
“I’m traveling to Washington in a week to testify at congressional hearings on film colorization, and thought I could set up an interview with you while I’m in town.”
We agreed on a time and place, then I hung up as if nothing unusual had happened, but in my excitement I was completely unable to find matching socks. Mentally I began to prepare my answers to his questions, believing when we met he would back out of his offer as instantly as he’d extended it.
How did you lose an eye? Does it impair your ability to do painstaking work?
Am I wearing glasses?
No.
I see perfectly well with my left eye.
Responding to the usual second question and avoiding the first, I had learned how to be a master at evasive answers when they were needed. It’s difficult to say: a letter bomb and let it go at that. People want to know more. These kinds of bombs have been delivered in Rome, Istanbul, Argentina to scientists and governors but rarely to isolated high school students. I didn’t want to explain the arrests, the trial, senders not convicted. I knew Shute’s name had originally been Shulevitz, but his mother had changed it. In the name Shulevitz there might have been sympathy, but I was no longer looking for it.
Despite Julius’s eagerness to meet and his effusiveness about my work, I felt unprepared, a one-eyed amateur, a fraud who should back out of the interview, but lulled by the man’s voice, I was prepared to go ahead and make a fool of myself. Alphabet had an international reputation, and I wanted to move to New York.
One week later we met at a Greek diner. Julius disliked expensive restaurants. They made him uncomfortable. Any place with a maître d’ was like a hair salon with a perfumed atmosphere, as far as he was concerned. He needed to walk in and find his own place to sit. From a distance he looked like a young Frank Sinatra in thick glasses: angular face; calm blue eyes that drew you in, meaning no harm, interested in only you absolutely, but when one walked closer, sat across from him at a small table, one could see the fraying around the edges, and he was much older than a young anybody. You could still smoke in restaurants back then, and he did, with the kind of assurance that came from years of practice. But Julius was not overly confident either. Despite his accomplishments, his expense account must have been limited, or so his choice of the diner signaled to me. A man who meant business, who didn’t bother with the language of extravagant lunches, meals that stretched into the afternoon were of little interest to him. I was too nervous to eat anyway. My spanakopita remained a square brick on my plate, and although I tried to concentrate on Julius’s questions, as well as his descriptions of his business, my eye wandered to the revolving display of heavily frosted cakes ringed with glazed cherries, mountainous meringue pies, and other desserts positioned just behind Julius’s head
He was a man without a niche so he used expressions that would appear to give him one, to make him seem to be in the swim and a heavy hitter, sounding me out from the get go. He knew all about the films I’d worked on. I wondered if English was his first language. I asked him how his testimony went.
“Colorization is like tossing a ball into a cocked hat.”
The hearings had been somewhat controversial. Many celebrities and film stars had appeared. Julius enjoyed rubbing shoulders with them and denounced the colorization of old black-and-white films, a process he viewed with disgust and refused to undertake, no matter how lucrative coloring might be.
“Painting
