The Year's Best Science Fiction 9

237 TALKING STATUES, ETC. Fritz Leiber

During the last five years of his life, when his theatrical career was largely over, the famous actor Francis Legrande spent considerable time making portraits of himself: plaster heads and busts, some larger statues, oil paintings, sketches in various media, and photographic self-studies. Most of them showed him in roles in which he had starred on the stage and screen. Legrande had always been a versatile craftsman and the results were artistically adequate.

After his death, his wife devoted herself to caring for the self-portraits along with other tangible and intangible memories of the great man. Keeping them alive, as it were, or at least dusted and cleaned and even pampered with an occasional change of air and prospect. There were 237 of them on view, distributed throughout Legrande’s studio, the living room and halls and bedrooms of the house, and in the garden.

Legrande had a son, Francis Legrande II, who had no more self-content or success in life than most sons of prominent and widely admired men. After the collapse of his third marriage and his eleventh job, young Francis—who was well over forty—retreated for a time to his father’s house.

His relations with his mother were amicable but limited: they said loud cheery things to each other when they met, but after a bit they began to keep their daily orbits separate —by accident, as it were.

Young Francis was drinking rather too heavily and trying hard to control it, yet without any definite program for the future—a poor formula for quiet nerves.

After six weeks his father’s self-portraits began to talk to him. It came as no great surprise, since they had been following him with their eyes for at least a week, and for the past two days they had been frowning and smiling at him—critically, he was certain—glaring and smirking—and this morning the air was full of ominous hangoverish noises on the verge of intelligibility.

He was alone in the studio. In fact he was alone in the whole house, since his mother was calling on a neighbor. There came a tiny but nerve-rasping dry grating sound, exactly as if chalk were coughing or plaster had cleared its throat. He quickly glanced at a white bust of his father as Julius Caesar and he distinctly saw the plaster lips part a little and the tip of a plaster tongue come out and quickly run around them. Then—

FATHER: I irritate you, don’t I? Or perhaps I should say we irritate you?

SON (startled but quickly accepting the situation and deciding to speak frankly): Well, yes, you do. Most sons are bugged by their fathers—any psychologist who knows his stuff will tell you that. By the actual father or by his memory. If the father happens to be a famous man, the son is that much more intimidated and inhibited and overawed. And if, in addition, the father leaves behind dozens of faces of himself, created by himself, if he insists on going on living after death . . . (He shrugs.)

FATHER (smiling compassionately from a painting of himself as Jesus of Nazareth): In short, you hate me.

SON: Oh, I wouldn’t go as far as that. It’s more that you weary me. Seeing you around everywhere, all the time, I get bored.

FATHER (in dark colors, as Strindberg’s Captain): You get bored? You’ve only been here six weeks. Think of me having nothing to look at for ten whole years but your mother.

SON (with a certain satisfaction): I always thought your affection and devotion to Mother were overdone.

FATHER (as Romeo, a pastel sketch): No, son, they weren’t, but . . .

FATHER (a head of Don Juan, interrupting): But it has been a dull time. There have been exactly three beautiful girls inside this house during the last decade, and one of those was collecting for Community Chest and only stayed five minutes. And none of them got undressed.

FATHER (as Socrates): And then there are so many of me to be bored and just one of you. I’ve sometimes wished I hadn’t been quite so enthusiastic about multiplying myself.

SON (wincing from a crick in the neck got from swiveling his head rapidly from portrait to portrait): Serves you right! Two hundred and thirty-seven self-portraits!

FATHER: Actually there are about 450, but the others are put away.

SON: Good Lord! Are they alive too?

FATHER: Well, yes, in an imprisoned drugged sort of way . . . (From various cabinets and drawers comes a low but tumultuous groaning and muttering.)

SON (rushing out of the studio into the living room in a sudden spasm of terror which he tries to conceal by speaking loudly and contemptuously): What colossal vanity! Four hundred and fifty self-portraits! What narcissism!

FATHER (from a full-length painting of King Lear over the fireplace): I don’t think it was vanity, son, not chiefly. All my life I was used to making up my face and getting into costume. Spending half an hour at it, or if there were something special like a beard (portrait touches its long white one with wrinkle-painted fingers) an hour or more. When I retired from the stage, I still had the make-up habit, the itch to work my face over. I took it out in doing self-portraits. It was as simple as that.

SON: I might have known you’d have an innocent fine-sounding explanation. You always did.

FATHER: In an average acting year I made myself up at least 250 times. So even 237 self-portraits are less than a year at the dressing-room table, and 450 less than two years.

SON: You’d never have been able to do so many portraits except you cheated. You worked from photographs and life-masks of yourself.

FATHER (self-painted as Leonardo da Vinci): Son, great artists have been cheating that way for five thousand years.

SON: All right, all right!

FATHER (being very fair about it): I’ll admit that in addition the self-portraits let me relive my triumphs and keep up the illusion I was still acting.

SON (cruelly): You never stopped! On the stage or off you were always acting.

FATHER (as Moses): That’s hardly just. I never talked a great deal. I was never domineering and (pointedly) I never ranted.

SON (stung): That’s right—offstage you preferred the quiet starring roles to the windy ones. Your favorite was a sickeningly noble, serene, infallible, pipe-smoking older hero—a modern Brutus, a worldly Christ, a less folksy Will Rogers. But no matter how restrained your offstage characterizations, you managed to stay stage center.

FATHER (shrugging pen-and-ink shoulders): Laymen always accuse actors of acting. Because we can portray genuine emotion, we’re supposed to be unable to feel it. It’s the oldest charge made against us.

SON: And it’s true!

FATHER (very kindly, from a jaunty portrait of Cyrano de Bergerac): My child, I do believe you’re jealous of me.

SON (pacing and waving his arms): Certainly I am! What son wouldn’t be?—surrounded, stifled, suffocated by a father disguised as all the great men who ever were or are or will be! All the great sages! All the great adventurers! All the great lovers!

FATHER (gently, from the gape-mouth of a gaunt plaster head of Lazarus lifting from a plaster grave-hole): But there’s no reason to be jealous of me any longer, son. I’m dead.

SON: You don’t act as if you were! You’re alive 237 times—450, if we count four reserve battalions. You’re all over the place!

FATHER (as Peer Gynt): Oh son, these are only poor phantoms, roused for a moment from the nightmarish waking-sleep of Hell. Only powerless ghosts ... (All the portraits cry out softly and confusedly and there comes again the muttering and groaning of the ones shut away in darkness.)

SON (overcome by another gust of terror and banging the door as he rushes out into the garden): They are not! They’re all facets of your perfection, damn you! Your miserable perfection, which you spent a lifetime polishing.

FATHER (from a gaunt-cheeked bas-relief of Don Quixote on the patio wall): Every human being believes he is perfect in his way, even the most miserable scoundrel or dreamer.

SON: Not to the degree you believed you were perfect. You practiced perfection in front of the mirror. You rehearsed it. You watched your least word and gesture and you never made a slip.

FATHER (incredulous): Did I actually seem like that to you?

SON: Seem? My God, if you knew how I prayed for you to make a mistake. Just one, just once. Make it and own up to it. But you never did.

FATHER (shaking a green-tarnished bronze head across a screen of leaves): I never suspected you felt that way. Naturally a parent pretends to his child to be a little more perfect than he actually is. To admit any of his real weaknesses would be too much like encouraging vice. He wants to be sure his child is law-abiding during the formative years—later he may be able to stand the truth. Children can’t distinguish between black and the palest shade of gray. It’s the parent’s duty to set as good an example as he can, even if he has to cover up some things and cheat a bit, until the child has mature judgment.

SON: And as a result the child is utterly crushed by this great white marble image of perfection!

FATHER: I suppose that conceivably could happen. Do you mean to tell me, son, that you didn’t know your father was as other men?—that he had every last one of their weaknesses?

SON (a hope dawning): You really mean that? You’re honestly saying . . . (Then, recovering himself.) Oh, oh, I smell another of your lily-white, high-sounding explanations coming.

FATHER (still from bronze head, which is that of Hamlet): No, son! I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me. I was very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offenses at my beck than I had thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. I itched to excel at everything. Because my life depended on being the best actor, I was bitterly jealous of everyone’s least accomplishments, even your own. I hid my scorn of all mankind under a mask of tolerant serenity—which I had trouble keeping in place, believe me. I lived for applause. During my last years I was bitterly resentful that ill-advised friends and greedy managers did not force me to come out of retirement and make farewell tours. I wronged your mother by lusting after other women, and myself by never having the nerve to yield to temptation—

SON: What, never?

FATHER: Well, hardly ever.

SON: Dad, that’s terrific!

FATHER (modestly): Well, inspired by the great characters I portray, I sometimes get carried away. A little of them rubs off on me.

SON (rather breathless): This puts a different complexion on everything. What a relief! Dad, I feel wonderful. (He laughs, a touch hysterically.)

FATHER: Wait, son, I did worse than that. I watched your mother’s personality fade, I watched her change into a mere adjunct of myself, and I let it happen, merely because life was a trifle easier for me that way. I watched you blunder along under a load of anxiety and guilt and I never tried to get close to you or tell you the truth about myself, which might have helped you, simply because it would have been difficult and uncomfortable for me to have done so and because I—

SON (concerned): Now you are going too far, Dad. You mustn’t blame yourself for—

FATHER (ignoring the sympathy): —and because I actually enjoyed your awed embittered admiration. You were such a gullible audience! And then during the last years, instead of turning outward, I lost interest in almost everything except the self-portraits. I poured all of myself into them, finally the life-force itself, so that now I live on in them—a solitary self-created Hell. A human being’s punishment for his misdeeds is having to watch and sometimes suffer their consequences . . . but to have to watch them minute after minute from 237 vantage points, unable to take the slightest action, unable even to comment, without the boon of a moment’s forgetfulness, a moment’s nirvana . . . (His voice grows ghostly.) Ten years! Thirty-six hundred interminable twilights. Thirty-six hundred empty dawns. To have to watch this house and garden die. To watch your mother mooning about day after day, wasting herself on memories and sentimental bric-a-brac. To watch you narrow your life down as I did mine, but before you’ve even lived it, and all your sodden drinking. To have to observe in all its loathsome detail the soul-rotting, snail-slow creep of inanition . . .

SON (angry again, in spite of himself, and once more quite frightened): Well, don’t bellyache to me about it. It’s your own fault that there are 237 of you, all corroding with life-force—another man would have been satisfied with being damned just once. There’s nothing I can do for you.

FATHER (grinning evilly from the head of Mephistopheles peering from between bushes opposite Hamlet): But there is. Break us, burn us, melt us down. Give us oblivion. Smash us!

SON (rushing back into house, partly to grab up poker from fireplace and partly because, all in all, the talking portraits in the house are less eerie than those hidden about the garden): By God, I’d like to! I don’t know how often I’ve thought of this house as a musty old museum, the lumber room of one man’s vanity.

FATHER (a chorus): Strike!

SON (hesitating with poker lifted above his head): But they’d think I was crazy. They’d believe that envy of you pushed me over the line into psychosis. They’d probably put me away.

FATHER (as Leonardo again): Nonsense! They’d merely say that you were ridding the world of some amateurish daubs and thumb-scoopings. Smash us!

SON (veering into argument): Amateurish is too strong a word. They’re not that bad, certainly.

FATHER (pleased): You think my work has enduring professional quality?

SON (frowns): No, that would be going too far in the opposite direction.

FATHER: Smash us!

SON (raises the poker, but again hesitates): There’s another thing: Mother would never forgive me.

FATHER: Don’t bring your mother into this!

SON: Why not? For that matter, if you’ve really been wanting oblivion for ten years, why didn’t you ask Mother to smash you? Or at least to put you all away, where you’d have something nearer oblivion, I gather. Or give you all away to people who would either destroy you or provide you with more diverse environments and a more interesting shadow-life.

FATHER: Son, I’ve never been able to make things like that clear to your mother. Somehow the more she fitted herself to me, the less she was really in touch with me. She was as close to me and yet as far beyond my ken as . . . my gall bladder. I’ve tried to talk to her, but she doesn’t hear. I don’t think she even sees my self-portraits any more, but only the image of me—her own creation —which she carries in her mind. But you, at long last, hear me. And I tell you: smash us!

FATHER (as plaster head of Don Juan, calling from studio): Think of the fiery impetuous philanderer imprisoned in the icy rigid statue he invites for dinner. Three girls glimpsed in ten year! Smash us!

FATHER (as the painted Leonardo): You were always scared to take action. I wasn’t!—I expressed myself, even in these miserable self-portraits. Now it’s your turn—and your opportunity. Smash us!

FATHER (as Peer Gynt): Plunge me back in the crucible. Melt me down.

FATHER (as Beethoven): Strike a great healing discord!

FATHER (as Jean Valjean): Explode the prison!

FATHER (as St. John the Divine): Unleash the apocalypse!

FATHER (a muffled chorus of photographs): Break our glass, shred us, touch a match to us. Destroy us!

FATHER (all 237 with the dark undertones of the imprisoned ones): smash us!

SON (swings up the poker a third time, then lowers its tip to the floor with a smile, his manner suddenly easy): No. Why should I let myself be agitated by a bunch of old pictures and sculptures, even if they do talk? How would destroying them change me? And why should I be intimidated by a dead father, even if he lives on in various obscure ways? It’s ridiculous.

FATHER (once more King Lear): Have you lost your respect for us? Are you not at least filled with supernatural terror at this morning’s events?

SON (shaking his head): No. I think it’s just my hangover talking with a strong psychotic accent—or 237 accents. And if it really is you, Dad, somehow talking from somewhere, I think you mean me well and so I’m not frightened. And finally, to be very honest with you, I don’t think you really want to be destroyed, Dad, even in effigy—or effigies. I think you’ve just been getting your feelings off your chest, especially your boredom.

FATHER (as Peer Gynt, smiling an inscrutable smile, perhaps of relief, perhaps of triumph, perhaps of resignation): Well, if you can’t bring yourself to destroy us, at least stir up this old house, stir up your own life.

SON (nodding): There’s something to that, all right, Dad.

FATHER: If you don’t take the initiative—and moderate your drinking, too—we’ll probably start talking again some morning or night, and not nearly as pleasantly, or even sanely. So stir things up.

SON (seriously): I’ll remember that, Dad.

FATHER (calling as Don Juan, from studio): Invite some— (The voice breaks off abruptly.)

SON looks around at the portraits. They have suddenly all gone mum. He can detect no movement in any of them, or changes in their features. The front door opens and his mother comes in excitedly with an opened letter in her hand.

MOTHER: Francis, I’ve just received the most interesting request. The Merrivale Young Ladies’ Academy wants a bust of your father for their library or lounge room. I think we should grant their request—that is, if you agree.

SON (poking elaborately at the ashes in the fireplace, to account for the poker): Why not? (Then getting an inspiration and growing wily.) How about the Hamlet head?

MOTHER: Out of the question—that’s his masterpiece. Besides, it’s riveted to its pillar in the garden.

SON: Well, then the Lear.

MOTHER: Certainly not, it’s my favorite. Besides, it’s a painting, not a bust.

SON (baiting his trap): Well, I suppose you could give them . . . No, it’s not good enough.

MOTHER (instantly contentious): What’s not good enough?

SON (as if reluctantly): I was going to say the bust of Don Juan, but—

MOTHER: I think that’s a very fine piece of work— and an excellent choice in this instance.

SON: Perhaps you’re right about that, Mother. In any case, I bow to your judgment.

MOTHER: Thank you, Francis. I’ve never given any of the statues away before, but I think I should begin to. I’ll write Merrivale Young Ladies’ Academy they may have the bust of Don Juan. (Starts out.)

SON: I think you’ll feel happier when you’ve done this, Mother. And I think Father will feel happier too.

MOTHER (pausing in doorway): What’s happened to you, Francis? You’re usually so cynical about these matters.

SON (shrugs): I don’t know. Maybe I’m growing. (As his mother leaves, he begins to smile. Suddenly he whirls toward the portrait of Peer Gynt. It had seemed to wink, but now it presents only its fixed painted expression. Francis Legrande Il continues to smile as he hears someone in the studio begin faintly to hum an air from Don Giovanni.)