The Odd Lot by Claude Chabot

Lesser actresses had triumphed on screen and would be remembered, but for Eliza DeLys, cobwebs of time and mortality had spun a web of oblivion about her name and career.

La Lysey, as she was known to the cognoscenti, had lingered to over 100, living in dusty splendor in her Hudson Valley manse. Active until the end, she expressed no outward astonishment that she would not be remembered, though secretly this fact bitterly gnawed at her pride. Her aversion to Hollywood guaranteed that her performances were forever lost to all except students of the theater, and their teachers were even now too young to have more than a passing familiarity with her name.

It seemed the whole world knew her at one time: they thronged to see her with an admiration and interest that never exceeded what she brought to the play and the audience, and she did bring far more than her looks, as any admirer would have told you.

The papers chronicled her triumphs: DeLys as Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth; deliriously wry as Lady Windermere in Wilde’s confection. She was a star embodying everything that anyone wanted her to be. Heroic, self-sacrificing, generous, tempestuous, kindly, unassuming, grand and petulant all in a stunning figure: she was at the top of the world in her profession, in her aerie at the Pierre and in her Victorian mansion on a mountain above the Hudson Valley.

Offstage she supplicated herself to the wooings of senators and industrialists of the Eastern aristocracy. In her own quiet fashion, she took them as lovers. Yet to a public ignorant of her personal affairs, she was above reproach, well known for her volunteer work for numerous charities of impeccable repute. She was frequently on the verge of marriage, needing the confidence these confident men could provide. Despite her talent and the accolades she gathered to herself like opening night bouquets, there were always lingering doubts, well past the flowering of her beauty, that she simply cut a dainty figure on the stage and in life. “Merely a pretty!” she worried to herself. Though acclaim continued into middle age and beyond, she was convinced that her success was fading because her youth had passed. By the time Hollywood had the wherewithal to beckon, she believed she was past her prime. The thought of a close-up horrified her.

Her mansion was her pride, and she spent more and more time there as the years passed until she finally became a recluse in her house and garden. At her death, the front park still commanded a proud and seemingly unending estate of open meadows, framed by a rolling mountain range frequently obscured by mist and low-lying clouds.

Her gardener found her one morning slumped over the old secretary which she used as a desk, grasping a crystal vial. He pried the vial from her still-warm hands, thrust it in the secretary’s desk without thinking, carried her to the coroner’s ambulance in a wheelbarrow, and apologized in a silent prayer for this inelegant final exit.

***

For the auctioneers who gathered almost one year later to dispose of much of her estate, the result was less than surprising. The Manhattan auction houses had refused to hold the sale. It was an odd lot; a mixture of some valuable pieces and some noteworthy artwork, but nothing so distinctive or extraordinary that would justify a city auction. Alas, DeLys was no longer a name that would fetch much for ordinary household objects, as her antique fame had now waned to almost nothing. Most everyone thought she had died many years ago, so removed from show business she had been in the last thirty years. Thus, a local auctioneer in Kingston had been engaged by the deceased’s great-grandniece to manage the affair.

The auction did excite local attention, however, in a locality and a population so starved for events, though few had been to the city to see her, even during her last years on Broadway. Students from the local branch of the state college’s drama department were the most eager attendants.

“What will we have for this fine secretary where the late Miss DeLys corresponded with Katherine Cornell, the Barrymores, Richard Bennett? The drawers are locked but reputed to contain letters received from the aforementioned luminaries, as well as correspondence written by the late star herself.”

A bespectacled boy impertinently inquired, “How can you know what’s in the drawers if they’re locked?”

The auctioneer, a proud descendant of an old Dutch family of ancient repute, sniffed at the question.

“Indeed! Miss DeLys’ family stated to us unequivocally that the secretary contains rare correspondence. The drawers are locked to ensure that the valuable contents are not removed before it has found a buyer.” The proud Dutch descendant thumped the old piece with his knuckles, and then reddened, having bruised himself.

The bidding commenced and the fine old secretary, of delicately inlaid woods fragrant with time, was sold to a young actor living in New York City’s West Village. Eric had decided to visit the auction on a whim, wanting a memento of a theatrical career that was indeed as legendary, past and dead as Miss DeLys herself.

He was doing rather well playing the character “Buzz” on a network soap opera. In fact, he had had numerous callbacks that week: the baked bean spot; a TV ad for knives that they planned to air for years (The French Chef’s knife: It cuts!); an industrial show, but nowhere in his amalgamation of well-paying work following his daily labors on the soap was the offer of a decent part in a play. He knew he had the talent for the great classical and modern roles that he was longing to tackle; Shakespeare, Chekhov, Beckett, Pirandello: he had trained and toured in his teens and twenties and now he wanted the opportunity on the New York stage. His career was so distant from what the secretary’s previous owner represented; commercial in its strictest sense. His closest friends had moved to the coast, with their network series and endorsement contracts, their houses and pools, and, of course, their money. Eric himself had recently read and obtained a major role in a late-night horror series which required him to spend a few months on and off in Los Angeles. The role really only required him to sound menacing, but certainly, the money was very, very good. Yet there was no adventure, no Art. All his work was shallow satisfaction to one who had aspired to the stage and still found his merit there. He had to admit to himself that his ambitions were frustrated and he was despondent over his lack of success in achieving a stage career in New York. He wished that the theater of the past he so wanted to enter was still possible, the heyday of Eliza DeLys.

The secretary was, if not a rebuke, then a challenge to what he was doing with his life and career. It also looked absurdly out of the ordinary in his shabby apartment. Rather than enhancing it with its beauty, it simply made clear how tawdry it was in comparison. He made up his mind to clean up his place and have the rooms painted.

Her letters still lay in the secretary’s drawers. Eric had been given their small bronze keys wrapped in a velvet purse and sealed in a small manila envelope.

He opened the drawers one day and started going through her letters, feeling guilty as he did so. Yet he could not locate any letters received, merely unmailed letters from DeLys addressed to others. There was nothing from the Barrymores, simply stacks of yellowed, unmailed correspondence, but certainly interesting in and of itself. So frank and current they seemed, except for references to Warren G. Harding or Mayor Jimmy Walker, they appeared to have been written yesterday rather than yesteryear. All were composed in her spidery, left-sloping hand that grew more flamboyant and unclear as time passed. There were bundles and bundles of them, shoved in the capacious desk, addressed to friends, fellow performers, agents and lovers. Why were these letters unmailed, he wondered? Were they first drafts? It was impossible to tell. But what was most curious was the final drawer within a drawer that the key would not open: puzzling yet so easily solved. He could simply pry it open, but perhaps damaging the secretary in his pursuit of the answer to this final mystery.

One evening he passed a fortuneteller’s storefront in the Village on his way to catch the subway uptown. The red neon sign “Spiritualist” beckoned, emblazoning its ruby glow in his consciousness. He never thought much of these places, thinking them a blight on his neighborhood. What chicanery must pass inside! But this one on West Fourth Street advertising a medium aroused his interest. He entered the curtain-shrouded storefront floridly perfumed with cheap incense. It was empty and untidy and stifling with stale cigarette smoke.

“Hello?” he called.

Slowly, from behind a tattered and balding faux velvet curtain, a double-chinned, wrinkled, wizened face popped out. She smiled a smile bereft of many teeth and hurriedly slurred, “One moment, dearie,” then popped back behind the curtain, only to re-emerge a second later with no explanation for the interruption.

“Can I be of assistance, sir?” she asked in an oily manner, brushing back her filthy, unkempt gray hair with chipped nails and dirty fingers.

Eric steeled himself against his initial repulsion. “I need help with some letters, some…letters written by someone who died recently. You see, I want…”

“What do you want?” she asked, as if she already knew.

“I want…I’ve sensed her around me.”

“You want to speak with her beyond the pale, is that it?”

“Yes. I would give anything to…”

“Who is this? A departed loved one?”

“An actress, famous many years ago, Eliza DeLys. You probably know nothing of her.”

“An act-tress,” she repeated unpleasantly. She seemed to anticipate his questions and the very situation before he asked. But he reminded himself, this is her stock in trade, appearing to know before knowing. This was what she was selling, and she was good at it; unsavory in appearance and personality perhaps, but good at it.

Eric confided to the medium, “She reputedly died writing a letter to one of her old Broadway pals. She felt unwell and put it away, crumpling it a bit as if she had changed her mind, or was too weak to write. She must have felt so sickened by that point that she simply shoved it in her desk, collapsed, and died. I think that letter is the reason for my wanting or needing to contact her. And there’s a locked drawer that may contain other secrets that will help me understand why I think she wants to speak with me.”

She stared out beyond him somewhere and insisted, “We must find out what is in that last drawer. I have an idea of what is happening, what secrets have been withheld, but I don’t know why you think she wants to return. Have you spoken with her? I think you’ve spoken with her?” she asked, sitting down.

“Of course not. That’s why I came to you. I sense her presence. I really am surprised at myself. I’ve never believed in ghosts.”

“They’re all around us, you know, at all times. I have the ability to reach them, don’t you see?” the medium declared, followed by a shrill, if ugly little laugh that set her fat body quivering in her chair. Then she leaned in to Eric and wagged a finger in his face, “And for such a strong personality as DeLys, she would have the ability to reach across that slight void that divides the here from the hereafter.”

“You know of her then?”

“Mama was an actress and spoke of her.”

“I think she wants to reach me, but I don’t know why. After all, she seemed to have lived the life that she wanted. She was the best…like Duse or Cornell.”

“You must be attractive to her.”

“I don’t know. Why would she want anything of me?”

“She wants more, is that it?” the devilish little woman sputtered out, saliva glistening on her lips.

“I know it!” Eric shouted, brimming with certainty, but actually confused by her question. More of what?

There might be something that she wished to do in life, and she died without it being complete. That was always the reason he had read about: spirits who linger in the median world of the afterlife, past living, but between whatever true rest or life exists far beyond the natural world. She was not a restless spirit of the howling moan and clanking chain variety, but she was present in his mind in a way that made him think she was trying to get through to him, but for what reason he was unable to fathom.

“There are things we can do, my lovely, that will make it more attractive for her to respond.”

“Anything as long as I can speak with her!”

She locked Eric’s eyes with her own. “You are willing to pay, then?”

“What do you charge?”

“For reaching the departed? Fifty, dearie.”

“So much?”

“To raise the dead?”

Eric laughed. “I suppose you’re right.”

“Of course, I am. Let’s arrange a meeting.”

“I was supposed to go uptown now, but…”

“Now? Why not? I’ll do it now. Nothing is keeping me here. We can try to inspire her to speak with us, but I think it is more likely that she would want to reach us in a place where she has some connection. And that place is your apartment. That secretary is the very emblem of contact! Think of all the time she spent writing, hunched over that desk. She would feel drawn to its aura because that aura is her own.”

He decided without hesitation to walk the few blocks to his apartment with her immediately. He wasn’t sure if she could be of much help, though there was an air of a bizarre authority about her, of someone who brokers beyond the physical realm. She acted as if she were used to this other realm and carried it with her in her dealings with mortals.

They walked rapidly through the quiet Village streets as the sun slid behind a cloud to the rather tawdry little block near the waterfront that embraced his building, a Victorian tenement whose slow decay was creeping around its cornices and stoop. There was a distinct odor of roach spray in the stairwells. Turning his keys in the many locks of his door in the dim hallway, he pushed open the petrified door, which groaned, resisted, but then yielded with a damp and vibrating wooden thwack!

The medium walked in heavily and gracelessly behind him, thumping her feet on the unpainted floor, and automatically sat down at a table that sat in the small central room, an amalgamation of kitchen, dining room, and part bathroom which held a stove, sink, and shower. She glimpsed the secretary in his bedroom. Immediately she gave him instructions. They would try to confront her now. She sensed the vibrations, the energy! The spirit was almost palpable!

She practically swept the remnants of breakfast off of the kitchen table and tossed books and papers onto the floor. She was mad with enthusiasm, energy, and a faintly bizarre assurance that made her seem like a novice at a game rather than an expert authority. Eric wondered if she had ever done this before. But he wondered little, because the whole enterprise was fantastic.

The medium, whom Eric suddenly realized had never told him her name, sank down low into a chair and began to breathe heavily. She started to close her eyes and chant some gibberish that sounded as if she had learned it from a movie. She sat there with her filthy hands folded, then outstretched as if in supplication to someone or something. It was at this moment that he really felt that the whole enterprise was ridiculous.

Then something happened.

A movement of the omnipresent shadows of his bedroom, whose windows faced a brick wall. Then a pale figure stepped slightly forward, becoming gradually more distinct, bowing her head and lowering her eyes, as if she were a shy young girl entering the room, or an experienced actress calculating simplicity for a final bow at an extraordinary performance.

Eric froze, staring at her when she finally raised her head. He was amazed by the clarity of those blue eyes and how vivid and lively they were. She wore a gown sweeping to the floor: faded brocade with lace in shades of cream and white. She was bent with the evidence of her final years, a wisp of a woman as if she were a ghost.

Then, a barely audible wheezing: light, arthritic, trembling, and frail, the sound of breath, or rather the memory of it. It was not coming from the medium who had fainted dead away. He stared at the wraith of this bygone star before him, leaning heavily on her cane, as heavy as a spirit can lean, and she looked at him intently without surprise or curiosity but with plain interest that she was summoned back.

“Did someone call?” she queried quite clearly. Eric thought she sounded pleased.

He could hardly speak and didn’t, only mouthing the words, “Yes. Me.”

“I’ll come back when she’s gone.” The spirit beckoned with one slowly outstretched finger at the prostrate medium.

“No, please, I….” Then he was distracted by her charming and cunningly youthful smile, and then there was nothing before him.

Eric had to sit there a moment and remind himself where he was. This was quite extraordinary. After Eliza vanished, Eric gently tapped the medium. When she didn’t respond, he insistently shook her. She started suddenly and looked at him.

“What’s your name?”

“Eric. You know, I never asked yours.”

“Sibyl.”

“Is that your real name?”

“Certainly, dearie,” she almost snapped, now suddenly hostile and wide awake. “What happened? I think I drifted off. Who are you? Where am I? You’re not one of my customers; I think that’s fair to say.”

Eric smiled at this lapse. She was overcome, and now she didn’t remember. Or maybe couldn’t remember.

“I’ll walk you back and explain.”

“You needn’t explain anything…or hope to. Take your hands off of me. How did I get here? The police might want to know that. Some cash might make me keep my trap shut. They don’t cozy too well to rape—or attempted rape. I can scream. I will scream.”

“You mustn’t. You came here because you said you could help me.”

“I don’t know anything of the sort. Find me some cash.”

He was eventually able to calm her down, gave her a $20 bill (thinking he had gotten a bargain from her asking price), and sent her back to her tawdry little storefront in a cab. Eric was almost unable to take the time to hail a cab for the little shrew, so impatient he was to get back upstairs to talk to his dream.

When he opened the door, she was there, sitting in the corner of the room, turning a corner of her lace shawl over and over again in her hands.

He wanted to confide in her, and it all came out. She listened without expression.

“You played the roles when there was a grand audience for the stage. I wish I were back in the ’50s or before, when there was an interest, an audience. Now it’s all TV and movies, TV really. There isn’t the veneration there used to be for stage actors, though that isn’t the only thing I’ve been looking for; it’s the reason to be venerated. The theater, with all its regional outlets, seems to be shrinking. Who cares if you’re in a play anymore? Who cares about plays? Except me, perhaps, when I was playing those dim theaters or bright auditoriums in all parts of the country. That was a life; an actor’s life! It didn’t pay, but I had the work, the experience, the imagination to pursue all my dreams no matter how small the stage or how limited the budget. There was a time when I thought that’s all I wanted to do. The audiences were usually ignorant, but mostly also wonderful, because they hadn’t had much exposure to theater, trained stage actors, or any of the repertory we were doing. They didn’t even have dinner theater or any kind of touring company. We gave them the classics and Broadway hits out in Weed, California, or Caribou, Maine. But when I came to New York to pursue my stage career, I found a kind of success that I didn’t want.”

Her response, after a pause, disappointed him. She seemed not to have heard him.

“I still linger here. For what purpose? It is unknown to me: I cannot rest, but there is no one to tell me why. I know that others have gone on, but I am forced to tarry. Some wait due to a violent death or suicide, but that is not my case. They remain behind because of an incomplete action they fruitlessly seek to complete, or wait to see it completed in your realm by others. They are the lucky ones; they are close to life. There is nothing in my memory that explains what I left behind that was unfinished that would cause me to linger so. My performances and my memory amongst the living are forgotten. But I stay, as the world, though present, grows ever more foreign to me in every way except for visits to my familiar and charming old mansion that is sadly now falling into decay. One day they will raze it, I am sure. Then where will this poor spirit have to go?”

He looked at her for a while. She seemed to be evaluating him in some way. There was sympathy in those eyes, but something else.

Suddenly heavy with fatigue, he lay down on the bed, and she leaned over him. The touch of vague lips manifested itself on his cheek; a sweetness. In his flat, the traffic seemed inaudible, and the usual intrusive sounds that he had learned to live with were absent while she was in the room.

“The shadows are people. We are all around you. They call us shades because the souls of the dead are leaning on the living, always at the underside of the sun, constantly fleeing from the light, always absent, the unknown, the unknowable ones. We are the escaped and the lost, the forgotten, wanting to be found without the means. You are now as we once were; you will be as we are.

“But it is better in my realm. The world is bothersome. I don’t know how I tolerated the theater now that I’m here. Here…here there is peace, beauty as you won’t find anywhere else…it’s a quiet, drifting kind of place. No need to deal with all those tiresome people and the noise and bother of Life.”

Again, he could feel the brush of lips on his cheek. He agreed, thinking all his struggles were such a bother. He suddenly so much wanted to join her. She stood up with apparent difficulty and smiled at him encouragingly. Go ahead, she seemed to say without saying.

He lay there watching her carefully, slowly turning over the idea of leaving his own veil behind him. He found it comforting that her mortal success paled beside the sweetness of her life beyond death. He was reassured. He was convinced.

“Yes, take me to you.”

“Open that final drawer in the secretary! Open it and join me!”

He went at it with a pair of scissors, prying and forcing it open until the small vault yielded to his eagerness. In it was a vial, an empty crystal vial.

“Open it and breathe!”

He did so. It smelled vaguely sweet and stale: breath or the memory of it. “I know what is incomplete! Her career! Her fame!” Eric realized, suddenly frightened, but it was too late.

“You’ve breathed my past, my dear, a discarded life you’ve embraced,” she stated flatly, the expression on her face now seized by a cold satisfaction. Then she stood up straight and erect, odd for one who had so long struggled with the abomination of aging. She took a long, profound breath in, filling her lungs with the quickly recalled pleasures of respiration.

She stared at herself in the mirror above the sink. The face looking back was Eric’s, not hers; the body supporting her was male and different. She would have preferred to have snared an actress, but there were so many alternatives today. She knew surgical accommodations could be made if his masculinity proved uncomfortable. And Eric? He said he wanted the peace of death, and now he had it. She smiled savagely at such weakness in an artist.

There was so much to do. She had had her fling with the stage. She wanted to be remembered precisely in the way Eric had wanted to avoid. She needed fame, a grandiose fame that would last forever, stretching her name around the globe.

Eliza DeLys was ready for her comeback, the strangest and most ruthless of all time.