What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? by Henry Farrell Page B

and pulled herself slowly to her feet.
    Bracing her right leg against the post for support, she pulled herself around and away from the steps. Leaning forward, she reached out quickly to the outer side of the balustrade and began to draw herself forward, moving her hands with great care from one support to the other. At the point where the balustrade rose beyond her reach she stopped. The chair was still a little more than a yard away.
    After an interval, putting one hand flat against the wall, she inched forward as far as she could and fixed her sights firmly upon the chair. Then, taking one last deep breath, she shoved herself forward and let go. Her right leg buckled instantly, pitching her to the floor.
    She landed abruptly but not painfully on her side and lay still for a moment, panting. When she was able, she boosted herself up again and looked around. The chair, now, was within easy reach. Pulling herself forward and into a sitting position, she turned so that her back was resting firmly against the front of the chair.
    Straightening in preparation, she reached up and placed her hands firmly on the seat. Slowly, painfully, she boosted herself up, first to the edge of the seat and then back onto it. Collapsing at last into the chair, she went limp before a sudden attack of dizziness.
    When the world had finally steadied again, she looked aroundat the table. After another moment, she reached out to it, gripped the edge and pulled. Beneath her the legs of the chair moved easily if noisily across the waxed surface of the floor.
    At the end of the table, she faced directly into the open doorway of the hall. From this point forward the chair would be useless since the hall floor was covered from wall to wall with thick carpeting. Her gaze reached out past the open door of the rehearsal room to the small arched niche that contained the telephone. It was not more than eight or ten feet away, but for the moment she could think of no possible way to reach it.
    Jane, hugging her coat around her, stood staring into the bright, cluttered window of the Nu-Mode Dress Shoppe with a concentrated rapture that bordered on a state of transfixion. The dress to which her gaze was so magnetically drawn was of a deep wine-colored satin, gathered elaborately at the bodice and hip, the draperies held in place, or seeming to be held there, by two large red rhinestone clips. The mannequin upon which the dress was pinned, an impossibly svelte creature with a wig of shimmering platinum nylon, returned Jane’s gaze with lofty disdain.
    A cocktail dress.
Jane savored the phrase and all it implied, and for her it implied a great deal. Sophistication. Fun. Glamour. For the moment she was transported; she stood upon a balcony overlooking moon-dappled waters. In the background there was music, dulcet and foreign. A man with no particular dimensions or face toasted her gallantly with a glass of bubbling champagne. Staring at the model in the window, Jane was mercifully unaware of her own reflection just inches away in the glass, of the ghostly duplicate of the ridiculous red beret with its winking pin, of the huddled coat made shapeless by the spreading shapelessness of her own body beneath. Neither was she aware that the scene of her imagination was one of drab triteness, nor that just such a scene had been religiously included in every one of Blanche’s pictures.
    A passer-by brushed against Jane, and she was jostled back into reality. Traffic sounded again behind her, footsteps pounded dully along the sidewalk. Jane sighed. The dress would never be hers. Blanche was too tightfisted ever to let a person have something pretty once in a while.
    That was why she was always nagging at Jane to stop dyeing her hair, hinting around that she was too old for it. And trying to get her to stop wearing jewelry when she went out. Just to save money. And if Jane ever wanted anything, anything nice like the dress in the window or the gold-mesh belt with the colored