Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 35, No. 10, October 1990

Her searching gaze seems to weigh his potential as an actor. “Yes, I see you as Tom in Menagerie. Remember? ‘I didn’t go to the moon, I went much further, for time is the longest distance between two places.’ Give me that line, darling.”

Ruefully amused, Eric straightens, clears his throat, and speaks the words.

Miss Beaujean claps her hands. “Yes! Yes! You’ve got that quality. Oh, how I envy you, darling, just starting out. I’m resting, you know. The parts simply aren’t there any more. We have no Inge, no Williams. The contemporary theater is all—” she flutters her hands, searching for the word “—all vibration now. No resonance.”

Eric nods agreement, with no idea what she means by this. She crosses to a velvet-covered sofa between two columns, picks up a copy of the Times, gives it a restless glance, flings it down and moves toward the elevator, tossing Eric a smile over her shoulder. “Sweet dreams, darling. I must tell my friend about you when he returns from his trip. Mr. Swann is a V.I.P., you know, and I do not mean Very Important Person.”

With this enigmatic remark she vanishes behind the sliding doors. An even deeper silence settles upon the deserted lobby, as if the faintest noise from the world outside is muffled by the fat white butterfly flakes of snow that fall soundlessly against the windows.

“ ‘They told me to take the streetcar named Desire.’ ”

With this or some other line from one of her favorite dramatist’s plays Leda would appear after midnight, rescuing Eric from the dragging monotony of seemingly endless nights by doing bits and pieces of scenes from these plays. Leda’s southern accent was a shade too ripe, but her performance was flawless, at least to Eric’s still untutored ears; he could only assume that her career might have suffered from her limitations, of her being inescapably typecast in the lost lady roles of those mid-century plays of a certain character which she held in such high esteem. Infatuated as he was by the theater and its glittering promises, Eric could not believe anyone would give it up for love, and he was eager for his first glimpse of the mysterious gentleman friend for whom Leda had exchanged such an exciting life, for what seemed to him a narrow and confined existence. He wondered if she had any social life whatsoever, as she never went out while he was on duty and presumably slept away most of the daylight hours. “Our resident Garbo,” Jimmy had called her.

One night, when she seemed in too restless a mood to venture a Blanche or an Alma or a Mrs. Venable and drifted about the lobby in an especially pungent cloud of eau de cognac, Leda suddenly interrupted one of her rambling excursions into the past to cry, “But it’s all in my trunk of memories, darling. I say, do let’s sneak upstairs and I’ll show you. No one will know you’re playing hooky from the morgue.”

True enough, yet Eric hesitated, not out of any fear of impropriety but from some vague reluctance to share in closer quarters that air of secret desperation Leda’s determined gaiety failed to conceal.

“Humor me, darling,” she entreated, and he hadn’t the heart to refuse.

The decor was not at all what he would associate with a “love nest,” unless it was in the boudoir lamps with their twining cupids and frilly pink shades that cast a romantic rosy glow over the cluttered room. The impression was of a permanent disarray, a carefree untidiness, of a tarnished revelry suggesting some ancient party with its debris uncollected. There was a profusion of photographs and theater posters and colored bottles. It reminded Eric of an oversized dressing room in some once opulent theater. Only the rows of books on unpainted shelves seemed out of place: theatrical memoirs, collections of plays, romantic novels.

Leda darted across the room to a big colorfully labeled trunk, motioning Eric to join her on the floor as she began hauling out stacks of playbills, more photographs, scrapbooks, wigs, and odds and ends of costumes.

After everything had been displayed and commented upon, Leda made a sweeping gesture as if the room were as spacious as all Manhattan. “This is my world now, darling. Safer, less hurtful than the world out there.”

That she could be satisfied, even happy, in such a world, a world apparently made possible by Mr. Swann, seemed terribly sad to Eric as he rose to leave, eager to escape that claustrophobic atmosphere. “I’d better get back to my post,” he said.

“Stay for a brandy,” she urged. “It’s the very best. Mr. Swann is a connoisseur.”

“Another time,” he promised, edging toward the door.

A sudden depression seemed to dampen her gaiety. “Do you know that beastly man hasn’t sent me a single postcard. I sometimes think he must be getting a trifle absentminded. When he comes on Friday I shall be very severe with him.”