"Oh, Frank always thinks that shows should be for free, and I agree. If folks can't pay for it now, they will someday. And a full house is always better, for everyone. So you'll always see Frank, giving tickets to people who might not otherwise go. Young boys, you know?"
A full house always seems better, thought Frances, because movies are silent. Only people can talk.
The movie ended. Applause. Not much. The first feature wasn't that good. Mama stood up from her piano, looking pretty, proud and plump in her delicate blue dress. Frank Gumm sprang up onto the stage and took her hand. They gazed lovingly into each other's eyes, for a perfectly timed beat, and broke apart.
Jinny tapped Frances on the arm, and the girls crowded around to the side of the stage.
"Hello, friends," said Frank Gumm. "Welcome to the Valley Theater, the only stage in the Antelope Valley providing the finest in kinematograph and vaudeville entertainment. Though I reckon some of you are here because it's cool."
A light scattering of chuckles. Janie adjusted Frances's collar.
"And so, on with the next part of the show. Ethel?"
Her mother smiled with love at Daddy.
"Girls?"
Frances crowded up behind Jinny, as they lined up in order of height on the narrow steps.
"Ladies and gentlemen, together, the Trio Unusual… the Gumm Sisters!"
They came dancing onto the stage as their mother played, into the lights as the theater darkened, and there were the faces in rows, there never seemed to be enough faces in enough rows, but the faces transformed into those of friends, watching with anticipation. And Janie was with her, and Jinny was with her, and Mama, and Daddy, standing by.
"When the red, red robin comes bob-bob-bobbing along, along…" in something like harmony, and Frances knew she was the loudest, waving her arms, and she could hear people chuckle, and she knew that they liked her, that everybody liked her, there in the lights, where everything worked, and where there was love.
Frances woke up in the night. She didn't remember being loaded into the car, or being carried up to the house in her father's arms. She thought she was back in the theater, and that she would have to talk to people.
It was dark and it was silent. Then there was a shout, and a forced whisper, a whisper of hatred that made something in Frances's chest prickle with horror. She heard the voices of her parents.
"It's starting again, isn't it? It's starting all over again!" her mother's voice was a whisper, but the whisper rose up with a keening wrench, like a bird taking wing from its nest.
Baby listened. The whispering was like a scratching on her eardrum or a record at the end when it goes round and round in the same groove.
"I'm the girls' father, Ethel, you can't do that."
In this dark world, without the lights, without music, Baby Frances began to sing, softly, to herself. It was like having to sit through a movie. All you could do was sit and watch and hope for a happy ending. Frances hated movies.
Somewhere there was a movie that sang. Daddy had told her about it. It already existed. Al Jolson began to sing, right at the end.
If movies sang, would people want to hear them, the Gumms? What would hold the Gumms together? Maybe the movies were talking now, and not her mother and father. Maybe movies flickered on walls at night, whispering, a new kind of ghost. Maybe it was not her mother and father who were talking at all. If sound could come from nowhere, spoken by no one.
"Don't touch me! Don't touch me!" Her mother's voice was high and breathy, panicked. "Keep away from me!"
Nothing is hidden. Frances knew she existed to hold her parents together. She was the still point around which all the others turned. She and the music. She and the music were the same thing. Both of them had to stay in the center of attention. The center bore the weight, and if it slipped there would be disaster.
Her sisters were going to go to school, Daddy was hiring other acts, and she was going to go to Los Angeles. Frances began to hear the unaccustomed sound of her father weeping. She sang louder, to cover the dissonance. The words of the songs were not important. The meaning behind them was, a meaning that could not be put into words. The meaning needed music. The meaning needed her, to sing it.
Manhattan, Kansas-Christmas 1875
Chapman's favourite film was The Wizard of Oz, in which Judy Garland travels continuously looking for the lost farm, the loved faces…
And here is Judy, Chapman's first love, who had the same name as Garland…
Vince Smith, the director of the YMCA camp where Chapman worked for seven years: "He was particularly good with children, like a pied piper. I didn't see a fault in Mark. His camp name was Nemo." He gave that name up when someone told him it meant Nothing. And Cindy, who was a sobbing child in pigtails when Chapman comforted her in his camp: "He truly cared for me and that is very odd for an adult." The last time she saw him she backed off. "His face looked different. He had shark eyes and no feeling in his face."
In Hawaii he tried to kill himself… "You could always read Mark's mind like a book," said a fellow worker. We know the book. Holden Caulfield found adults phoney and Chapman fixed on Lennon, now living as a rich recluse, as the ultimate phoney…
Nemo does not, of course, mean Nothing. It means a Nobody.
– Nancy Banks-Smith, reviewing a television documentary about Mark Chapman, The Guardian, February 3, 1988
Wilbur F. Jewell killed himself just before Christmas. No one seemed to know why. Some people blamed the weather.
It had been a strange December that year. Thermometers showed eighty-eight degrees if they were on a south wall out of the wind. It made the children restless, people said, to have summer in the middle of winter.
Then, as hard and sudden as a fist, winter slammed into them. The snow piled up in drifts, and schools were closed. Everything closed, even the sky which hung dark and low and heavy overhead. A few days before Christmas, Wilbur Jewell went missing. Uncle Henry and Will's father spent a day out in the snow looking for him. Dorothy was rather excited. Will had always talked of getting out of here. She thought he had done it. She thought he had run away and got on a train and become a steamboat pilot on the river or even gone out to the Territory, to join the Indians. She wished he had taken her with him.
Wilbur had walked clear to the other side of Manhattan to the telegraph poles.
Dorothy was in bed, listening, when she heard Uncle Henry's boots clunking up the stairs.
"The boy went and hanged himself," was all he said.
"What! God have mercy. Has his mother been told?"
There was silence for an answer.
"Well we just got to go there," said Aunty Em.
"She don't want nobody now, Em. She just sits in the corner rocking, and there's no comforting her. She don't want comfort. She just knocks it away."
"Oh! It just tears the heart! What does she say?"
Dorothy heard Uncle Henry slump down onto the chair. "She says he was a happy boy. She just says that over and over. He was a happy boy. And she says how she doesn't have anything to remember him by. Bob told me outside, he was going to get a photographer in. Photograph the remains."