The Butterfly Plague Read Free

bounced in the seat as she chanted this, and the whole crowd took it up. “Pretty mouth! Pretty mouth! Pretty-mouth Myra!”
    “There! See?” said Myra triumphantly.
    “If you’d stop bouncing up and down like a pair of rubber balls, you’d see.”
    Myra burst into immediate tears.
    “Oh, God! Now what’s the matter?” said Dolly.
    “You called them rubber balls!” Myra wailed, clutching herself with both hands.
    The teen-age boys giggled. Dolly silenced them with a look.
    “Now, now, Myra.”
    “Don’t you now-now me, you…homo-feely—”
    Dolly blushed and stammered. “Myra. Please. He mo. He mo. Hee -mo-philiac!”
    Myra turned and gave Dolly one of her dazzling pouts.
    “I gotcha!” she said. “I got Dolly!”
    And she burst into marvelous, resounding, and infectious laughter.
    Dolly’s pale-blue suit was impeccable in cut and condition. His Panama hat had been dyed the same shade. Underneath these garments his stockings and underclothes—even the handkerchief in his pocket—were all pale-blue. He had chosen the color himself. It showed up blood.
    Adolphus Damarosch was a hemophiliac.
    He was also a film director employed by Niles Studios and his current film was Heirs Babies, still before the cameras. Its star, Myra Jacobs, now sat in the front seat of Dolly’s purple Franklin. Dolly did not drive. No hemophiliac does. They are accident-prone and die all too easily. So Myra had done the driving and that is why she had so much to complain of. Fifteen miles an hour.
    They had come to Culver City Railroad Station to meet Ruth Damarosch, Dolly’s sister, who was returning from Europe after a lengthy absence.
    Dolly was understandably nervous.
    “How long has it been, did you say?” said Myra.
    “Nineteen hundred and thirty-six.”
    “Yeah?”
    “Yes, Myra. ‘Yes.’ Please say ‘yes,’ not ‘yeah.’”
    “Yes, Dolly.”
    “She went away to swim in the Berlin Olympics. Don’t you remember that?”
    “Of course I remember that. Jeepers. It was only two years ago.”
    “Well, I wonder sometimes. Anyway, she went over there in 1936 and hasn’t been home since.”
    “Goodness.”
    “Yes. My older, older, older, older sister.” Dolly sighed.
    “Is she that old?” said Myra.
    “How old?”
    “Older, older, older, older.”
    “Four years older, to be exact. She was born in nineteen hundred and seven.”
    “Is that all?”
    “Yes. That’s all. And she was a bully to boot,” he reflected.
    “She kicked you?”
    Dolly closed his eyes. Really. Sometimes Myra was too much to bear, for all her loveliness.
    “A bully of the mind, Myra. An in-tel-lect-ual bully.”
    “Oh,” said Myra, dumbfounded. She turned away to think about it.
    Dolly desperately wanted the washroom and wondered if he dared to excuse himself. The washrooms were so far away, and all those dangerous people lingered between. He decided against it. He thought about the fate of Mickey Balloon. It was sad the way some things turn out. Now Ruth was coming home.

    Sunday, August 28th, 1938:
    Aboard the Santa Fe Super Chief
    1:30 p.m.

    Ruth Damarosch Haddon finished her lunch, set aside her utensils, and looked out of the windows. She was seated all alone at a table in the dining car. She had been seated alone for every meal since leaving New York but she did not know why.
    She was nervous.
    Ruth was a tall woman. Her figure was attenuated and spare; strong. It befitted an athlete. Her hair, cut extremely short, was pure white—a prematurity, for Ruth was now but thirty-one years of age. Her face was flat and wide and her eyes blue-gray, protruding slightly like the eyes of someone suffering from a thyroid condition. Her expression in repose mirrored the fact that she would not let go of innocence. She held onto it like a renegade child. Innocence was sanity. Just as silence was sanity.
    Ruth believed that she was living in a nightmare. Childlike, she insisted there was darkness when all around her the adults were