Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 48, No. 1, January 2003

It’s a sweet story. I’d almost forgotten. Bing Crosby loses his girl to Fred Astaire, and then he has a bad go of it as a farmer, then he tries show business again at Holiday Inn, a nightclub only open on holidays. Crosby meets Reynolds, and they fall in love, only to have Astaire come along and try to steal her, too. I waited for the 4th of July number. How would it play on the screen? Would anyone see that Astaire used thirty-eight takes to look like he’d made it up on the spot?

The scene approached. There’s an ensemble song and dance number before Astaire’s firecracker routine. I was watching, my eyes half closed. A line of girls comes onto the stage from one side, a line of guys from the other. They’re singing a patriotic tune about the Fourth. The guys group at the back of the stage singing the bass line. Half the girls split off into the audience; the other half, six girls, have formed three pairs, backs to the camera. The first pair faces the audience to sing, “Let’s salute our native land.” The next pair turns, “Roman candles in each hand.” Then the last pair sings, “While the Yankee doodle band.”

I don’t hear any more. I’m standing in the theater, pointing at the screen. The girl on the right is Lillian. She sings and dances through the rest of the scene. It’s Lillian. Astaire danced her right into the movie. He got her a part. Rent the video if you don’t believe me.

I never saw Fred Astaire again.

After Astaire died at eighty-eight, Mikhail Baryshnikov said, “It’s no secret we hate him. He gives us complexes because he’s too perfect. His perfection is an absurdity.”

They buried him at Oakwood Memorial Park not far from Ginger Rogers’s grave.

I wish they’d put him at Hollywood Memorial, where his real partner rests, the one who danced her way into Holiday Inn. The only one light enough on her feet to match him, step for step.

The Demon of E Staircase by Charles Sheffield

After the thunderstorm of the previous evening the skies had cleared. The passengers on the coach were riding aloft until the interior, which despite all efforts had admitted rivulets during last night’s torrent, dried out.

The two men provided an odd contrast. The thin one huddled inside a greatcoat and shivered slightly in spite of the warm June morning. The fat man by his side, also in his middle forties, bounced in his seat like a child and leaned forward as the coach approached the crest of each hill, seeking spires amid the gentle rise and fall of the East Anglian landscape.

“Close to twenty-five years since I first came here, Jacob,” he said. “A man changes a great deal in a quarter of a century. Yet would you believe it, I still feel the nervousness of a young lad within my belly? Though the feeling is, to be sure, a good deal less.”

“While the belly, Erasmus, is to be sure a good deal more.” Jacob Pole leaned forward a little, caught by his companion’s eagerness to see the town ahead. “Is it Cambridge that excites you, or is it the prospect of the exhibition and lecture?”

Erasmus Darwin smiled, revealing the absence of front teeth. “No doubt it is b-both.” As often when he was at ease, his voice had a slight stammer. “If rumors are correct, our good captain has returned a host of novel plant and animal forms from his voyage to the Pacific, and greater marvels yet from the vast terra incognita in the far south. Who would not be excited?”

“I perhaps less than you.” Pole, satisfied that their destination still lay some distance ahead, leaned back in his seat and nestled down again inside his thick coat. “I sailed the South Seas more than once, seeking my own variety of novelties, but what I brought back was less than marvelous.”

Darwin had at breakfast caught the slight tremor in the other man’s hands and read its meaning. He patted the wooden chest sitting at his side. “I have Jesuits’ bark here, should you feel the need for it.”

Jacob Pole shook his head. “This is no more than a minor fit, brought on by the cold and damp of last night’s storm. Give me time and warmth and I will be good as new. But what of your friend who waits for us? The storm delayed us, and we are already late. Are you not uneasy, imposing so on his time and hospitality?”

Darwin was pleased at the change of subject. There was no point in voicing his own fears, that his companion’s worldwide quest for treasure had permanently damaged his health and would doom him to an untimely death. “Be we late or be we early, you need have no worries about our reception by Collie Wentworth. Twenty-three years ago, when we were both undergraduates, he became convinced that I had saved his life.”

“And had you?”

“I doubt it. He had been drinking when I pulled him from the river, but others were about. Had it not been me, it would have been someone else.”

“And his gratitude continues yet?”