People began to wonder about little Alycia’s home life. That summer there was a nasty mayoral primary and a racial killing in Brooklyn, the Mets arose from the dead and ran for the pennant, someone named Louis Raphael came out of nowhere and took the art world by storm. Rumors circulated that Alycia had been seen in various places. But no new leads appeared. The Crann kidnapping story quietly died.
That summer also, Norah Classon and I both started going out with other people. Somehow, it didn’t make me as happy as I thought it was going to. And it didn’t give her more time for her career as she thought it would. I heard that she was having booze troubles. Probably the same stories were going around about me. A couple, friends of us both, invited me out to the Hamptons for the weekend because Norah was staying nearby. But when I dropped around to see her, she had left for Fire Island. When I took the ferry over there, she was gone.
There is no tale where we see the huntsman get his rewards. Believe me, I’ve looked and I know. But that Sunday evening I took the late train back to Penn Station. Walking underground along the platform of the Long Island Railway, I wasn’t paying much attention to what went on. In the gloom and humidity, I saw a figure of light. And when I looked your way, you pointed at the window of a car on the train I’d just gotten off.
Inside was a commotion, a bunch of conductors and nosy citizens standing over a sleeping woman. She looked vulnerable, beautiful, her hair long and loose. I got right onto the car, told them I knew her. They seemed doubtful. So I bent over Norah and kissed her. She woke up, put her arms around my neck and said, “Prince!” And I picked her up and carried her off the train, up all the stairs, and back home.
Who’s to say that the huntsman didn’t get to marry above his station and have three beautiful kids? What tale says he didn’t form a nice, discreet little security business, or that his wife hasn’t had a good career showing her work, teaching.
When our oldest kid was little. I told her that story with certain things edited out. But I did mentioned the lady in the moonlight dress. When my daughter asked me who you were, I said to ask her mother.
My wife also was raised on fairy tales. Maybe that’s what the marriage has going for it. But the book she had as a kid is different. French. There aren’t a whole lot of fairies in Grimm, in spite of the title. The French stories are choked with them. Fairy godmothers especially. Even when they’re not mentioned, you figure they’re operating behind the scene.
For a long while Norah wouldn’t tell me much about her fairy godmother. Lately, though, she’s said a couple of things about you. She loved Louis, like I say, and this film has bothered the hell out of her. Which brings us to the matter at hand. People are stirring. Victor Sparger is about to make his entrance.
4
Louis Raphael got a lot of money very fast. It’s too bad. He was basically a sweet kid at the start. His stuff grows on me, like that life size picture in the movie still on the wall. The staring face is almost familiar, the words are like slogans you heard in dreams. He came out of nowhere and caught the attention of the world. Everyone wanted to be his friend. Then something else caught their attention and he was left strung out, crazy and deep in the hole. Nobody wanted to know him. Then he was dead, way shy of thirty. Now everyone wants to be his friend again.
That particular scene is now history. The boat has sailed, the balloons have gone up, the reputations have all been made. And anyone in the future who wants to set a movie in New York in 1980 will make it look like a Louis Raphael painting. Like they use Gershwin tunes when they want to say it’s 1930.
The downtown ethic is that if you’re not moving, you’re meat. Enter Victor Sparger. Victor was the artist who had made all the right choices, been in the right places, said the right things, donated to the right charity, bought property at the right moment. In life he had been no friend to Raphael. As a rival, he was nowhere.
But with Louis dead, Victor saw his chance to swallow him whole. He could make sure that anyone interested in Louis Raphael would have to go through Victor Sparger.
That’s when his real talents came into play. He tied up all the rights to Louis’ life. He enlisted the help of Rinaldo Baupre and Edith Crann. He oversaw Rinaldo’s script. And in it he is Louis best friend, his big brother, his mentor in bad times. The fact that back then Victor was busy jumping on the fingers of everybody who tried to crawl out of the hole, disappears from history.
Rumplestiltskin, after they guess his name, stamps so hard he puts his foot through the floor and rips himself in two trying to pull himself free. Watching Rinaldo Baupre tonight, I remember his mother telling me how Marvin Splevetsky went to New York to become a poet, a famous writer. Instead he’s a supporting player the story of others’ lives. And it’s tearing him apart.
Owning Louis Raphael’s work has given Edith Crann a certain claim to existence. She is the sum of her possessions. She accumulates because she can’t help herself. In that same way she once tried to collect the soul of a child.
A short time after Alycia disappeared, Mrs. Crann started sporting a nasty little smile. It reminded me of poison apples and long comas. I worried about the kid. Tonight, though, Edith seems nervous. In the story, the queen’s spell is broken, Snow White wakes up and falls in love. The Wicked Queen is invited to her wedding and can’t refuse to go. For the wedding, iron slippers get heated over a fire. When the queen sees them, she can’t help herself. She puts them on and dances until her heart bursts. Did today’s mail bring Edith her invitation to Alycia’s wedding? Norah and I just got ours.
Like I said, my wife grew up with a different book. Sometimes the stories are different versions of the ones I know. I’ve been reading them to my kids. As much of an education for me as for them. The other night, I sat down with the four-year-old and read him one I’d never looked at before, the French “Little Red Riding Hood.” In the story I remember, she was Little Red Cap.
I’d already been asked to do this gig and certain things about it bothered me. But I couldn’t have told you what. As I read, though, I began to understand exactly what was wrong. Then I got to the end of the story and there was no huntsman who happens to be passing by. He’s the one who rushes in, cuts open the belly of the wolf and saves the kid and her grandmother. In my wife’s book, they get eaten and stay eaten.
It’s one of the big hunter parts in the stories and it’s not in the French book. All they have is some piece of smart-ass poetry telling us not to talk to strangers.
That bothered me until I remembered that no fairy godmother appeared dropping clues in “Rumplestiltskin.” But you were there. You’re not in “Little Red Riding Hood” either. So I figure since you showed up today it may mean there’s a place for me in this version of the story.