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Humanophone » "Little Elegy for Flute"

Little Elegy for Flute

Everyone looks at the pregnant woman.
Whether she's moving or just standing there.
Let's say it's Sunday.
She's assessed, scrutinized, judged, weighed, et cetera.
Well, what do they expect?
1932.
There with her husband.
Let's take a little walk, et cetera.
Get her her fresh air.
She's just standing there when the producer.
Next to the Packard dealership.
Everyone looks.
In a huge dress, huge.
Twin-six sport phaeton in the window.
Impossible.
Or producer's assistant.
It's 1932.
For movie stars!
He asks her husband.
He says, "two weeks."
She's just standing there.
Huge.
The studio will pay, he says.
Get her some fresh air.
What?
Say yes.
For the Caesarian—
Let's take a little walk.
The child to be lifted into the arms of an actress.
It's Sunday.
Los Angeles.
Acting adoring.
Adorable.
The "It" girl, Clara Bow, at 27.
What?
For her movie.
Say yes!

It's Linda Marie's story: how her father was born. I'm remembering it today, having wanted children for many years, then thinking the feeling gone for some time, then having it return surreptitiously to its old place. There was one child that almost made it. A friend has just gone through in-vitro and given birth; another friend has become a father; new acquaintances have had their second child, all within a month. In years past, you had children or you didn't. Choice rarely entered in. If you yearned for a child until you could no longer take food or drink with your husband, until your hair grew wild and curled of its own will, until spots of blood appeared over your heart, it changed nothing.

. . . Nasa Springer (Clara Bow) is delivered of a premature baby, after which she moves to a cheap boarding house. The baby needs medicine. Nasa has no money: she finds a girl to sit with the child, and sets out for the streets to pick up a man. Returning with the prescription, she learns that a fire has broken out, and the baby has died of smoke inhalation . . .

—from the synopsis, Call Her Savage, 1932

She tells me, He's never seen that movie.
Where he was born.
Less trauma, Caesarian birth.
For the baby.
It's her father, that baby.
Family story.
It was the Depression.
1932.
She assesses, scrutinizes, weighs.
In the movie, she thinks, the baby was a girl.
The baby is not so wrinkled, born this way.
The family actually didn't approve of movies.
So he never saw.
In the movie, the baby dies in the fire, I tell her.
Oh no!
Really?
She's thinking: born then dies.
My father?

It was Clara Bow's second-to-last movie; she played a wild woman. Uncontrollable, headstrong. Irresistible. Call Her Savage was one of her three favorite films. There was It. There was Mantrap. There was this. A year later, she fell out of favor: a bad Brooklyn voice, they said, and too many naughty roles. How could she be a serious actress? She left the movies then, and had her children.

All that season, Farrell was dancing "Chaconne,” and at her most luminous. I wanted every performance—go, he said. Indulge yourself. Later I discovered that was the summer he learned his new life: picking men up, using them quickly, cabbing fast back to our place. And I, anon, coming in flushed from the walk uptown, oblivious. Well, you know the ballet: it's Orpheus and Eurydice. The adagio is a chestnut but contains that moment just before you find out you will not actually live in this world. The flute manages to tell you that much.

Read another poem from Humanophone:

"Partch Stations"

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