What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? by Henry Farrell Read Free Book Online Page B

of such a vivid blue that even there in the dimness it seemed to generate a radiance all its own. Posing her hands close to her face, almost in an attitude of prayer, she assumed an expression of mawkish sweetness.
    “Now, when I’m very good,” she recited, “An’ I do jus’ as I’m told…”
    Across the room, her reflection, captured with merciful softness in the wall-length mirror, postured just as sweetly and mouthed the words back at her:
    “I’m Mama’s li’l angel, Pa says I’m good as gold.”
    The room, when it was built, had been intended as a rehearsalroom for Blanche, a room in which she could practice the scenes, the songs and dances she would be required to perform in her pictures. Blanche had been intent upon her career; the room had been her own idea.
    After Blanche’s accident, the room had, of course, lost its reason for being and as a consequence had remained, through the years, almost totally untouched. The hardwood floor had never been carpeted, the baby grand piano remained angled carefully into the corner next to the windows where the keyboard would catch the light. The iron sconces on the walls still contained, at the ends of short mock candles, orange-tinted bulbs shaped to resemble fat, pointed flames. The mirrored wall, through the years, had reflected little but dim emptiness and silently settling dust.
    Jane, however, had found a use of her own for the room. Here it was that she came at intervals to seek the lost moments of her childhood and to escape the harsh disillusionment of the gathering years. Often at twilight she came into the room to sit, not on the piano bench which was the only seat in the room, but on the floor. Narrowing her eyes to abet the deception of the lowering light, she would gaze deeply and steadily into the mirror across the room until she had summoned from its false depths that fragment of the past which she sought. Most often, as she sat there, the mirror was transformed slowly into the ocean, and the floor upon which she sat, cross-legged, as a child would sit playing a child’s game, was the beach. Suddenly, then it was summer. It was vacation time. There was the sound of the rolling surf. And her father was nearby.
    Don’t stay in the sun too long, sweetheart! We can’t have the star of the family down with sunburn!
    He called out to her from the porch of the cottage, his face anxious, as always for her safety and well-being.
    Don’t go out too far out, Janie! A big wave might come up and carry you off!
    That was her favorite daydream, the one about the beach and the ocean. Sometimes she could sit there on the floor for a solid hour, just listening to the breaking of the waves and the sound of her father’s voice. Lately, though, she found herself more forcefully drawn to another part of the past. She had brought out all the old scrapbooks, full of her pictures and clippings, and the music and recitations that she had performed on the stage.
    “But when I’m very bad…”
    Suddenly remembering the line that had escaped her, she placed her hands flatly on her hips, spread her feet wide apart to achieve a stance of aggressive tomboy belligerence. Her voice was lowered to a strained and unconvincing bass.
    “An’ I answer back and sass…”
    Her sagging, child’s face took on an expression of frowning, contracted evil. She wagged her head back and forth in a show of pert defiance, and the twin wattles of her jowls loosely echoed the absurd motion, as did the preposterous bow nested in her garish curls.
    “Then Ma says I’m a devil…”
    Holding out one blunt, pointing finger, she shook it in a demonstration of a child’s impression of stern parental remonstrance.
    “Pa says I’ve got my brass…”
    Dropping her hands and folding them before her in a gesture of angelic composure, she took a precise step forward, as to a row of footlights, and addressed her mirrored self with a look of round-eyed enquiry.
    “Now I wish you’d please to tell