Tell-All

Memorial Bridge . At the Tennessee assembly plant for Skyline Microcellular, Inc .
    On the television in the kitchen, Miss Kathie lies on a blanket next to Cornel Wilde . As Wilde rolls on top of her, the camera pans to a nearby spitting, crackling campfire.
    Filling the shelves are skeleton keys so heavy they require both hands to lift. Tin treated to shine bright as platinum. Presented by the Omaha Business Fathers and the Topeka Chamber of Commerce . The key to Spokane, Washington , presented to Miss Kathie by his honor, the right esteemed Mayor Nelson Redding . The engraved keys to Jackson Hole , Wyoming , and Jacksonville, Florida . The keys to Iowa City and Sioux Falls .
    On the dining room television, my Miss Kathie shares a train compartment with Nigel Bruce . As he throws himself on top of her the train slips into a tunnel.
    In the drawing room, Burt Lancaster lowers himself onto Miss Kathie as ocean waves roll onto a sandy beach. On the television in the den, Richard Todd throws himself onto Miss Kathie as July Fourth fireworks explode in a night sky.
    Throughout this montage, the actual Miss Kathie is absent. Here and there, the camera might linger on a discarded newspaper page, a half-tone photograph of Miss Kathie exiting a limousine assisted by Webster Carlton Westward III . Her name in boldface type linked to his in the gossip columns of Sheilah Graham or Elsa Maxwell . Another photograph, the two of them dancing at a nightclub. Otherwise, the town house is empty.
    My hand lifts still another trophy, a heroic statuette, the muscle of each arm and leg as small and naked as a child Miss Kathie never had, and I massage its face, without pressing, to make such thin gold, that faint shine, last as long as possible.

ACT I, SCENE NINE
    “The most cunning compliments,” playwright William Inge once wrote, “seem to flatter the person who bestows them even more than they do the person who receives them.”
    Once more we dissolve into flashback. Begin with a swish pan, fast enough to blur everything, then gradually slow to a long crane shot, swooping above round tables, each dinner table circled with seated guests. The gleam of every eye turns toward a distant stage; the sparkle of diamond necklaces and beaming, boiled-white tuxedo shirts reflect that far-off spotlight. We move through this vast field of white tablecloths and silverware as the shot advances toward the stage. Every shoulder turns, twisted to watch a man standing at a podium. As the shot comes into deep focus, we see the speaker, Senator Phelps Russell Warner , standing behind the microphone.
    A screen fills the upstage wall, flashing with gray imagesof a motion picture. For a few words, the figure of Katherine Kenton appears on-screen, wearing a corseted silk ball gown as Mrs. Ludwig van Beethoven . As her husband, Spencer Tracy , snores in the background, she hunches over a roll of parchment, quill pen squeezed between her blue fingers, finishing the score to his Moonlight Sonata . Her enormous face glowing, blindingly bright, from the silver-nitrate film stock. Her eyes flashing. Her teeth blazing white.
    In the audience, every face is cast in chiaroscuro, half lost in the darkness, half lost in the glare of that distant light. Forgetting themselves outside of this moment, the audience sits aware only of the man onstage and his voice. Over all, we hear the rolling thunder of the senator’s voice boosted through microphones, amplifiers, loudspeakers; this booming voice says, “She serves as our brilliant light, forever guiding forward the rest of us mortals.…”
    Across the surface of the screen, we see my Miss Kathie in the role of Mrs. Alexander Graham Bell , elbowing her husband, James Stewart , aside so she can listen covertly to Mickey Rooney on their party line, wasp-waisted in a high-collar dress. Her Gibson-girl hair crowned with a picture hat of drooping egret plumes.
    This, the year when every other song on the radio was Doris Day singing “Happiness Is Just a Thing Called Joe” backed by the Bunny Berigan Orchestra . In the audience, no single face draws our focus. Despite their pearls and bow ties, everyone looks plain as old character players, dress extras, happy to shoot a scene sitting down.
    At the microphone, the senator continues, “Her sense of noble purpose and steadfast course of action sets the pattern for our highest aspirations.…” His voice sounds deep and steady as a Harry Houdini or a Franz Anton Mesmer