part0005

“SURE BEATS DRIVING, DOESN’T IT?” said Dad as we stood on the edge of the ferry. I had my feet on the lower rail and my arms folded over the upper one, leaning out to watch the sea go by.

I think I missed her in those days, then for a while I resented her, but before long it was what it was. Life has a funny way of doing that. Something that crashes your world down one year is a scar you don’t think about the next, and something you pass without a second glance today, you realize tomorrow it meant the world.

I’m an old man now, and my mother’s story and mine never again crossed paths. No one ever told me details and I can’t remember precisely how she left or why, though I do know that when I got older and tried my first beer, it smelled like her, and considering she left in 1933 when Prohibition was still in swing, I suspect her departure and her smell may have been in some way related.

We didn’t take many photographs back then, and I don’t have one of Mom. To tell the truth, I have no idea what my mother looked like. That pleasant but troublesome smell is all I have left of her.

I looked up from my perch on the rail and he looked down, grinning a playful smile, having caught me in a lie, his teeth yellowed by a lifetime of smoking. There was wind blowing his hair back, his skin was slightly sunburned, and the collar of his shirt had blown up on one side.

I don’t know what triggers our young brains to take those early snapshots for our memories, or why I remember Dad laughing at me that day but I don’t remember Mom walking out. I just know that my earliest visual memory is that image of Dad, looking down at me with that yellow smoker’s smile in the summer wind.

Dragging our suitcases across the boardwalk with the beach at our side and salty air in our noses, it was a matter of minutes before Dad spotted the Cecil House—a freshly-painted and colorful building, extravagant and out-of-place amidst the unfinished adobe that made up most of the island’s architecture. It was the island’s only movie house.

Ostentatious as it was, the Cecil House didn’t need to stand out to pull in Dad and me. Ever since I was born, the movies have a way of making themselves known at all my key moments. For instance, on October 26th , 1927, The Jazz Singer became the first movie released with pre-recorded sound, ushering in the era of the talkie and changing cinema forever. That was the day Mom and Dad held baby me in their arms for the first time.

I’d bet good money Dad knew that fact. He probably even told it to me, though I would have been too young to appreciate it at the time. If he’d been around longer, I’m sure he would have told it to me again and again, because something Dad and I ended up with in common, one of the few things I remember about him, is that Dad was a tried-and-true, card-carrying, dyed-in-the-wool movie-lover.

I was five going on six that summer. I was seeing a beach for my first time, excited out of my wits to swim in the ocean, build a sandcastle, and ride a merry-go-round, and there was Dad, pointing to a movie house and saying, “Ooh, should we see what’s playing?”

He always asked that question when we passed a movie house. It didn’t matter if we’d already passed it and checked an hour ago. He had to make sure nothing had changed. Most of the time, even if we’d already seen whatever was playing, we ended up inside. Even despite the sunny beaches and the summer air, this day was no different.

One man and one girl ran the Cecil House back then. The man must have been ninety years old, walking with a cane but still spry and chipper. The girl was about my age. It seemed the old man ran everything himself, except that once the movie started, he stayed in the projection booth and the girl held down the lobby.

“Summers with Annie ,” said the old man when my father asked what tonight’s show was. “There’s a matinee in fifteen minutes and tonight’s show is at seven-thirty.”

“I’ve never heard of Summers with Annie ,” said Dad. “What’s it about?”

“Couple of kids who fall in love a little more each summer,” said the old man. “It’s cornball stuff, you ask me. But they shot it here on the island, so I guess that draws people in.”

It sure drew Dad in. He said it was divine providence we happened by. Still hauling our bags from the ferry and only halfway to the hotel, he bought us each a ticket for the matinee. We checked our bags, which you could do in those days, and the old man helped the little girl count out change for a popcorn and a soft drink each.

As I said, movies have always popped their heads in on me for my key moments, but no movie ever got involved in my life in quite the way Summers with Annie did.

A thirteen-year-old boy named Colin goes to an island with his family against his will. He hates it until he meets a girl named Annie who lives there. They have fun for the summer, each feeling their first spark of romance, until summer ends, and Colin leaves.

Colin comes back the next year excited to see Annie, but discovers she found a new beau in the seasons that passed. He hangs around with her as a friend, but feels like he missed his chance.

Colin comes back a third year and this time he brings his new girlfriend, Betsy, thinking they’ll go on double dates. He finds out Annie broke up with her fella and she was hoping they’d get together this year .

I didn’t know the phrase “glossed-over” when I was five, but I knew it when I saw it. As the characters threw their big, swinging, fire-dancing party of a wedding, celebrating and smiling, I remember a sick feeling in my stomach. I thought, Betsy is dead. Isn’t anyone sad?

The wedding party scene went on forever. It seemed like an hour of dancing, singing, and celebrating until it was so boring I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I fell asleep and missed the ending. What I took out of it was that Betsy died and Colin and Annie celebrated forever. I never knew a happy ending could feel so cruel.

Like most movies of the era, the credits in Summers with Annie ran at the beginning rather than the end. When the movie was over, “The End” appeared on screen and the house lights came up. The audience stood and I roused from my sleep to find Dad wasn’t next to me. His empty popcorn bag and drink cup were sitting by his chair, but the chair was empty. I assumed he was in the men’s room and settled into my seat.

After a few minutes had gone by, the old man and the little girl came into the theater to clean up. I felt weird sitting there while they cleaned, so I got up to see if I could find Dad. He wasn’t in the men’s room, or the lobby, or outside.

Something happened that lasted less than a second and that I struggle to describe. It was as simple as a pause registering on the old man’s face. Maybe his eyes widened or his skin paled, maybe his breath changed, but in some barely significant way, I felt his fear.

Don’t misunderstand me. I am as old now as he was then, and I have children and grandchildren and I know the fear that tightens within you when a child tells you, “I am lost.” I can’t tell you how I knew, especially not back then, but the fear on the old man’s face was not that fear. It was deeper, more personal .

His cold, stiff hand gripping mine, the old man pulled me up and down stairs, through doors, down halls, calling out my father’s name, insisting I call out with him. The old man was more frantic even than I was.

As the sun went down, I sat on the boardwalk outside the Cecil House, crying softly and listening to the tide. The little girl, a sweetheart, sat beside me and held my hand until a policeman came and took me to the station. The policeman’s manner, with that too-friendly voice an adult puts on when they try to calm a child, only chilled me more.

During the Christmas season of 1933, this boy left the home of his foster parents and snuck into a movie house. He’d been feeling empty and lonely and struggling to cope. He missed his father, and every time he walked by a movie house, he’d say to his foster parents, “Ooh, should we see what’s playing?” the way his father used to say to him, but the foster parents always said no. So finally, the boy snuck in by himself and watched King Kong , and for the first time since his dad disappeared, he felt happy.

This became the boy’s tradition, waiting at the emergency exit to slide in when somebody left, and then hiding in the theater until the next show started. He did this until 1935, when an usher caught him waiting for Bride of Frankenstein and dragged him to the manager, who screamed at him and threatened to call his foster parents.

After that, the boy stole. Mostly he took candy from stores and sold it at school, using the money to buy tickets to the movies multiple times per week, seeing everything over and over and over. This continued until mid-1936 when the theater manager had a chance conversation with the boy’s foster father and mentioned how often the boy was at the theater. The foster father demanded the boy tell him where the money came from. Then he beat the boy so badly that the boy was removed from his care, a remarkable feat in 1936 when child-beating was the prevailing American pastime. Fittingly, the last movie the boy stole his way into was Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times , the last major release to use silent film conventions, considered to be the final movie of the silent film era. The boy was born on the day of the first talking picture, and on the day of the last silent film, he grew up.

At the orphanage they didn’t go to the movies, and for a few years depression set in for the boy. He got into fights, he stole and vandalized property, and was generally considered a troubled child until he left the orphanage in 1939 at the age of twelve. He left of his own volition and with little protest from the adults, who were as tired of him as he was of them.

He presented himself politely to Mr. Anniston, the manager of the movie theater, who agreed to feed him and let him sleep on a mattress in the projection booth in exchange for helping to sell tickets and concessions. Moreover, he would be allowed to watch all the movies he wanted for free.

The boy took to the work with pleasure. He watched the regulars come and go. More than the rest, he watched Ruthie van Aken who went to the movies every Friday with her boyfriend and ordered a Cherry Coke and a popcorn with a smile he found himself looking forward to, right from his first week working, when she came to see The Wizard of Oz (contrary to what some people tell you, not the first color film, but oh was it like seeing in color for the first time when the boy laid eyes on Ruthie).

There were no multiplexes back then, and new films weren’t being released every week the way they are today. The people who came every week were that certain breed of people who love to watch a movie, even a bad movie, more than they love to do anything else. The boy was one of those people and so, it seemed, was Ruthie.

When Ruthie began coming in without her boyfriend and—after being prodded in an attemptedly offhanded tone—admitted that they had broken up, it was with the second-most fear the boy had ever felt in a theater that he asked her if he could sit next to her and if they could watch the movie together. Mr. Anniston, by now viewing the formerly troubled boy’s transformation as the great deed of his life, was more than happy to cover at the concession stand while the boy watched Citizen Kane on his first date .

This is what I mean when I say the movies have always made themselves known for my big moments. I saw plenty of bad ones too, of course, plenty of movies that today are lost to history and have no reason to be rediscovered. But for some reason, me and the movies, we always had our big moments together.

Ruthie and I were only fifteen, young even for the time, the day I got down on one knee in the theater and asked her to marry me. She said yes, and we were overheard by enough nearby patrons who were in the process of exiting that a round of cheers broke out when we kissed.

You guessed it. Casablanca .

Ruthie and I grew up in a quiet coastal town where vacation was one of three things. If you were well-off, you took a plane to any number of exciting places the world had to offer for the people it favored. If you were dirt poor, you pitched a tent on the beach a few miles out of town where no one would pester you and you could cook on a fire and make love in the open air. If you were in the middle, you went to the island.

Ruthie and I were dirt poor, so when we went off to be together, we usually pitched a tent. But Mr. Anniston and I had come to develop one of those not-really-a-father, not-really-a-son, but-close-enough-strangers-might-miss-it relationships. He wasn’t rich, but he wasn’t poor either, and when I married Ruthie, he wanted us to have a proper honeymoon. That’s how, ten years after Dad’s disappearance, almost to the day, I found myself in the familiar position of standing on a ferry with my favorite person in the world.

I put my elbows on the railing and looked down at the water, hoping the moment would pass without us having to talk about it. We’d had the conversation in depth once, a few months ago, or at least what little depth there was to be had. You can’t talk about something like that without people pouring pity all over you and making you feel worse about it than you want to. Most of the time it’s easier to keep it as your own.

Come to think of it, as I tell this story now, I don’t know if that image of Dad was always burned into my memory, or if it came back to me as déjà vu in that moment I looked at Ruthie.

I remembered the Cecil House being on the main road facing the beach, so I said, “You’ve seen one beach, you’ve seen them all. Let’s walk a street or two back and take in the island.”

It wasn’t that I hoped to avoid the Cecil House altogether. I just wasn’t ready yet. The ferry ride, the island, the walk to the hotel. There was a heaviness to each step that brought me closer, and I thought, even if it was stupid, that I’d feel a little better looking at the place if we didn’t have our bags with us the way Dad and I did. I didn’t want us to be fresh off the boat and with the whole trip ahead of us. I wanted us settled and comfortable.

The truth is, I actually looked forward to revisiting the Cecil House on this trip, just not right away. Sitting with my bride in the same theater where I last sat with my father was a bittersweet idea I looked forward to cherishing as a memory, but it had to be done on my terms.

So we checked into the hotel. We drank at cabana bars that broke liquor laws for newlyweds. We rented a tandem bicycle, which on the mainland was a fad that had passed us by, but here on the island was a novelty catering to tourists like us who’d missed it when it was popular.

It didn’t ride well. It was awkward and uncomfortable and we each put panicked feet on the ground every few minutes and eventually crashed it in the dirt before walking it back to the rental shop. At sundown we stumbled on sore and scraped legs, wobbly from the booze, barefoot in the sand. We held each other up and watched artists fire dance for the tourists and I thought I’d never be this happy again.

She was looking up at a marquee above the Cecil House. And even though I’d been looking forward to watching a movie there with my arm around Ruthie, I felt my stomach twist itself in a knot when I saw that, all these years later, they were still playing Summers with Annie .

How could I say no? How could I kill her bright and exciting moment by bringing my long-gone father into this up-until-recently-perfect night? And in the same way I thought it bittersweet the idea of sitting with my bride in the theater where I sat with Dad, wouldn’t it be that much more bittersweet if we watched the same movie? I had no logical reason to protest, and yet something in my chest was objecting. Something said, Don’t go back in that movie house .

Some people say you haven’t seen a movie until you’ve seen it twice. The second viewing often casts things in a new light that you didn’t appreciate during the first. It’s also true that perspectives shift as time goes on. The five-year-old boy and the sixteen-year-old man who watched Summers with Annie at the Cecil House were two different people and they saw it through two different sets of eyes. We’ve all read a book or seen a movie or heard a song, and then have come back to it ten years later with a new perspective. We’ve all thought, “I can’t believe this is the same movie.”

But when it came to Summers with Annie , it wasn’t the same.

Most of it I could have attributed to faulty memory. I was barely old enough to even have memories the last time I watched it, although the traumatic night made it stick out a little more than it might have otherwise. I could have looked past how the actors were older than I remembered, or how the island setting, lost in time and difficult to pin down, seemed to echo fashions closer to now than to ten years ago when I first saw it, and I certainly could have easily written off the eerie coincidence of the tandem bike scene of which I had no recollection.

I could have let a million things go. Maybe I even could have let the overall production value go—the fact that, whatever it was, the film processing, or the cameras—whatever separated the look of a 1933 film from a 1944 one, this one looked distinctly more like the latter.

But I clearly remembered sitting in that theater at the age of five and thinking, Betsy is dead. Isn’t anyone sad?

I held my wife’s hand as tight as I could without hurting her, that fear in my chest building with each frame of the movie until her death scene, only finally settling down a little when the death was over and Ruthie was still holding my hand.

As the movie neared its end, my memories of that day from ten years ago pushed harder to the forefront of my mind. The wedding scene once again made me drowsy. Whether it was the booze, the bellyful of popcorn, or the drawn-out film editing, as the islanders threw their party and danced in the streets, I struggled to keep my eyes open.

Not happening, I thought. I refuse to fall asleep in this movie again. I don’t care if this reception scene lasts another hour. I will sit here and watch the ending I never saw as a child and then Ruthie and I will get up and leave and go back to the hotel.

Even though I never saw this part as a child, I knew it changed. It had to have changed. Because what was on screen was impossible. It was impossible even today, but it was twice as impossible ten years ago.

I woke up in the theater. One of those falling sensations that brings you back from a nightmare. I jerked forward and almost fell out of the seat onto the floor with the spilled popcorn and the shoe prints.

Take it easy. She’s just in the bathroom. You were drunk, you fell asleep during the movie, and you had a nightmare. Of course you did, given your history with the movie. What else would happen? You fell asleep thinking about Dad .

I ran full sprint out of the auditorium, past the ushers who were coming. I burst straight through the door to the ladies’ room without knocking, pushing open stall doors. I wasn’t thinking. Even with that voice in my head trying to calm me down, trying to reason with me, I was out of control.

I looked up from where I was sitting and a woman about sixteen years old was looking down at me, a fear on her face that was probably just rubbing off from my own fear. She looked familiar. It took me a moment to remember the old man and the little girl who had let us in last time I was here. That old man who’d seemed to know, even before I did, that Dad was gone and he wasn’t coming back. And the little girl who held my hand while I waited for a new life.

She hugged me and I sobbed into her shoulder. A few minutes later, she walked me out of the building and sat with me on the boardwalk, looking out at the ocean with me, and holding my hand in that all too familiar way.

Annie’s mother died when she was a baby, probably in childbirth, though Annie was spared the details. Much like me, when she was barely old enough to form memories, her father disappeared. She was left under the care of an old man she called Pawpaw, who was her grandfather or maybe even her great-grandfather, though Annie never thought to ask and Pawpaw never thought to say.

Back then the theater was called the Bannister House, which Pawpaw’s pawpaw claimed was because the famous playwright Nathaniel Bannister had visited the island on the summer vacations of his childhood years and had staged some of his earliest work here. Pawpaw had always been skeptical of his pawpaw’s claims, and when they repurposed the theater for film instead of plays, it was a happy coincidence that a child who used to act in community theater had grown up to be Cecil B. DeMille, so Pawpaw changed the name to the Cecil House.

That was the legend, though Annie doubted there was any more truth to the DeMille story than to the Bannister one. Annie was skeptical about a lot of Pawpaw’s stories. And though she would have liked to write Pawpaw off as an eccentric kook, and for the most part was able to do so, there was one story Pawpaw told that did not fit the mold of the other tall tales with which he so loved to regale her. This other story was not a story dreamed up by a man wanting attention. It was a story by a man haunted with anguish and despair.

As Pawpaw told it, in 1916, when film was still new to the Bannister House, a film had been brought to the theater which had supposedly been shot on the island, though no one on the island remembered it having happened. The movie was called Summers with Annie , and it was about a boy and a girl falling in love over the summers of their childhood.

Pawpaw watched it with his wife, Mawmaw, who disappeared during the screening. He mourned her loss, eventually letting go, and each summer when the theater played the movie again, he declined to revisit the painful memory of the first time he watched it, calling it cornball stuff for the tourists.

In 1930, when sound on film was a new concept, a print of Summers with Annie arrived for the summer season with sound. Bruce ventured that it was simply a new film of the same title, or the same film remade for sound. But it bothered Pawpaw. And it bothered him even more when the film began playing for audiences, and through glimpses of the film, Pawpaw could confirm that it was indeed the same movie, shot right there on the island.

Film with sound was a new concept in 1930. A film shot with sound here on the island would have drawn attention; it would have been a novelty. It hadn’t happened. Furthermore, he remembered specific shots, specific compositions, specific actors, and he was positive this was not a film remade for sound. This was the same film, only different.

Bruce said, “Let’s watch it. If you’re going to let it occupy this much of your mind, I’ll run the projector and you sit in the theater, or you run the projector and I’ll sit in the theater, and we’ll watch the movie and put it behind us.”

Pawpaw agreed. Bruce ran the projector and Pawpaw sat in the theater, and he watched four reels of Summers with Annie , trying to understand how this silent film had become a talkie.

Pawpaw closed the theater for what he believed was the first time ever. But everywhere he went, he felt he was in the movie. Wedding parties, events, people who looked like the actors or the extras. They were always in his periphery, there for an instant and gone when he looked again. He was driven mad.

Giving in to what he saw as the movie’s threats against him, he reopened the theater and his feelings of paranoia went away. He continued to show Summers with Annie to audiences, but refused to watch for more than the few seconds required of him to make the reel changes. He forbade Annie to enter the auditorium or the projection booth when the movie was playing, so she stayed in the lobby while he ran the projector.

One night in 1933 a little boy came into the auditorium while Pawpaw and Annie were cleaning, crying that his father had disappeared. Pawpaw took the boy to look, and even that five-year-old boy could see that Pawpaw was the more frightened of the two of them.

Drunk and crying, a few hours after the police took the boy away, that was the night Pawpaw finally told all this to Annie, sitting on the boardwalk outside the Cecil House, in the same place Annie would tell it to me years later.

Annie went home and slept. The next morning she couldn’t find Pawpaw, but in the projection booth of the Cecil House, four reels of Summers with Annie had been played and the fifth was still queued.

Annie and I had an island wedding with fire dancers and a cabana bar. I kept looking around, hoping to spot Dad bartending, or Ruthie smiling in approval, or Pawpaw giving me a look that said I better take good care of her, but I didn’t see any of that. It was just a wedding.

For over seventy years since, Annie and I have made each other happy. While friends around us have married and divorced, fallen in and out of love, ridden roller coasters of moods, we’ve remained calmly and comfortably in love. Neither of us has ever once raised our voice, there have been no arguments to speak of, and friends have called our relationship supernatural.

Annie and I have three children. Their birthdays are Miracle on 34 th Street, Singin’ in the Rain, and Rebel Without a Cause . Annie’s, by the way, is the same as mine.

Sometimes I catch myself feeling like I was given the incredible blessing of a perfect marriage, and I have to stop myself. I have to wonder how happy I might or might not have been with Ruthie. I have to remember the little boy who, at five years old, sat in a theater thinking, Betsy is dead. Isn’t anyone sad?

Life has a way of doing that. Something that crashes your world down one year is a scar you don’t think about the next, and something you pass without a second glance today, you realize tomorrow it meant the world.

Annie and I go to the movies every week. Once in a while, in a crowd scene, I’ll see Dad back there having dinner, or tending bar, or sitting in traffic. Once in a while I’ll see Ruthie too, answering a phone, or pushing a stroller, or crossing the street.

She’ll tell you her husband is imaginative, quirky, and crazy as a loon but that’s why she loves him. She’ll tell you she’s far less superstitious. She’ll tell you the movies don’t control our lives, and a movie certainly didn’t take people away just so she and I could fall in love. She’ll tell you she’d rather not talk about these things, or think about what happened to Pawpaw, or to our fathers, or to Ruthie, because the world is a scary place and it’s probably not happy things that took those people away from us. But no. It wasn’t the movies.