Authors: Thomas Tryon
Claire was too busy displaying her sensitivity. “Simply enchanting,” she breathed with an ecstatic tremor as I joined her at the ship’s rail. “How I adore it. New York’s the heart of the world, it always was.” She preempted my arm and put it around her shoulder, then snuggled up against me intimately, clinging to my wrist with both hands as we walked along the deck, a little as if she were trying to wear me. “I’m
so
glad I came,” she crooned huskily. “I’m just awfully glad I said I’d do it. It was worth it, every bit. And you were so kind to ask me. You really are a nice friend and I’m terribly proud to see the way you’ve developed over the years. I know I can depend on you. I can—can’t I?” She all but threw her eyes at me.
After a while she released her hold on me, then looked up; I could see those long long Hollywood lashes, the exaggerated Max Factored mouth, and I knew that seventy-year-old ladies were capable of longing. When she shivered, I took the opportunity to suggest that she must be getting cold and we’d best join the others. (I also knew Belinda would be wondering where I was.) As I took her arm, Claire came tiptoe to press her lips to mine.
“That’s for being so nice,” she whispered. As we went through the doorway, I blotted my lips with my handkerchief. “Wait, let me,” she said, taking over the job. “Later,” she added, “when we get home, we’ll talk some more.” Subtlety was never Claire’s long suit and I got the picture. I was to pay the pound of flesh, the blood as well.
When we docked, there must have been fifty to a hundred limousines jammed at crazy angles, waiting for their passengers. Amid the noisy pandemonium of farewells I glimpsed Claire coming off, escorted by our publicity man. He took her to her car, then came looking for me.
“She wants you to drive home with her.”
“I can’t. I promised to take Belinda back to her hotel.”
He shrugged. The ball was in my court. I went to Belinda and explained; she was understanding and said she could get home on her own hook. Belinda was a big girl. Not so Claire, whom I found curled up in the back of her limousine, one big throbbing pout cradled in all that plush.
“Boy, have you got some nerve,” she began as I got in beside her and we drove off. “And I tried so hard for you,” she sniffed. “You have to admit that. Don’t you? You thought I was going to get pissed, fall on my face, didn’t you? I told you I wouldn’t and I didn’t.”
“That’s right, you didn’t,” I replied, thinking “
Gott sei danke
.” I thanked her warmly and profusely for her efforts; she really had done a terrific job and I wanted her to realize it. “I know you didn’t and I thank you.”
She began to sob, like a little girl who’s been kept from going to the circus or something. She dug out a handkerchief and wept into it, her furred shoulders quivering.
I was desperate and saw the driver looking at us in the rear-view mirror. “I’m really sorry.”
“People always say they’re sorry, but it doesn’t help when you hurt people. Oh, what’s the use—I guess I should be used to being hurt by now. People are so thoughtless, so inconsiderate. This was a mistake, I shouldn’t have attempted it; much better if I’d stayed home by myself and you got Lana Turner or someone to do it. I’m no use to anyone anymore. I should just shut myself up like a witch in a castle and not bother.”
When we arrived at Central Park West, she was really a mess; her eyes were like a raccoon’s from smudged liner and mascara, and her face had gone pistachio; the lipstick was all bitten off. She wouldn’t get out until she’d made emergency repairs; then she wouldn’t let me go, but dragged me in, insisting I must see her to her door. As we stepped off the elevator and stood in the vestibule, she handed me her keys, suggesting that I open the door like the gentleman she knew me to be. She then insisted I come in “for a little nightcap.” I knew what a little nightcap with Claire was going to mean. We sat in the library, where she splashed vodka over ice and curled up in a chair while I checked my phone service. I gave her perhaps fifteen minutes, then said I had to get home, there were things I needed to take care of. When I bent over to peck her cheek and thanked her again, she pulled away.
“I didn’t do it for you, damn it, and I certainly didn’t do it for her. But I kept my part of the bargain. Now, my man, you can keep yours. You
do
intend
keeping
our bargain?” she added.
I hastened to assure her that I did and started on my getaway, but no. “I’ll pick you up for lunch tomorrow. Around noon. There’s something I want to show you, I think it will help you get a better perspective on me.”
When I said I couldn’t have lunch, her lips clenched. “I’ve got rehearsal,” I explained. “I can’t just not be on deck. It’s the first day.”
To get myself out of there I rashly agreed to lunch on Saturday. When I stepped into the elevator, she ordered me to wait, hurried inside, and reappeared with a manila envelope.
“The first ten chapters. Read them and we’ll speak.”
I nodded, the door closed, I sagged against the wall as the car began its descent. “Bless you, darling.” I heard the charm float down to me through the elevator shaft.
“She’s a real honey of a dame, isn’t she?” said the beaming elevator man.
“Yes,” I said, “a
real
honey of a dame.”
Next morning, when I went to bring the paper in, I found Claire’s material still on the hall table. I made coffee, then stepped out on the terrace and, eschewing the
Times
, I opened the manila envelope and took out what amounted to about seventy pages, cleanly typed on expensive paper. I thumbed through it, glimpsed words like “enchanting” and “divine” and “very, very” all over the place. But I tackled the job.
I read slowly to begin with, to “get the flow,” then when I’d got it I read faster, then faster, then skimmed, then threw the pile of pages down in a heap. Even while I was lying there wondering what kind of ass I was to have got involved in such a thing, the phone rang: Vi.
“She says she gave you the chapters. Have you read them yet? What do you think?” I told her what I thought. “But that’s exactly what I’ve been telling you, sweetie, she needs you to straighten her out.”
“Sweetie, it’s the biggest carload of bullshit I ever read. And in her own words, ‘
Just whom is kidding whom
?’ That’s not writing, that’s barbarism.” Viola made pigeon coos and said there never was a word put on paper that couldn’t be fixed. I was inclined to disagree; nothing could fix what I’d been reading.
But I was committed, not only to the book but to a mysterious excursion. Therefore, on Saturday morning, when they rang from downstairs to say Miss Regrett’s car was waiting, I slung on a jacket and went down. She was lounging in that negligent, modelly way of hers (I’ll say one thing for Claire: she always knew how to sit a limousine), wearing one of her jumpsuits and her fur coat, though the day was fair and warmish. We drove east to Second Avenue and then downtown. She asked me how rehearsals were going, was interested to hear my comments about her rival’s performance.
“I hear tell you’re not happy with my work,” she began, having lighted her prop cigarette. From the corner of my eye I could see the Fabulous Profile inviting my attention; obviously she didn’t care to look straight at me. “Now, before you start in, let me say this. I
know
what you’re going to say, I
know
it’s not what we’re after, but it’s a
start,
isn’t it? I knew you weren’t going to like it anyway, so I’m glad we’re through that. But I think I have a new approach on things. Is that fair?”
I said yes, it seemed so; but where were we going? She gave me a cryptic look, and when I saw us turn onto the approach to the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge, I became more puzzled than ever. Pretty soon we were winding through the mazes of Astoria, and eventually we found ourselves in Brooklyn. Then I got the idea: she was making a sentimental pilgrimage.
“We wouldn’t be going to the ancestral homestead, would we?”
She darted me a frown. “Very clever of you. That’s exactly where we’re going. You are about to gaze upon one of the rare sights of the world, the birthplace of Cora Sue Brodsky.”
When we’d traveled another dozen blocks into the teeming warrens of Brooklyn, giving crisp directions to her driver, she eventually ordered him to pull over and we got out.
Here we stood on a corner, staring up at a grimy windowed, tired-looking building of some six stories, every inch of which looked its century of age. We crossed the street and came up on the near corner, close to a red brick tenement building. An old woman sat on the stoop eating an apple while she addressed another woman leaning on a pillow over a windowsill.
“She could be Ma,” Claire said in an emotionless voice. “Look. Up there,” she said, pointing to a window. “That’s the one, right there.”
“That was your room?”
“Uh uh, that was the front room. Come on.” She guided me to the alley that ran beside the building, separating it from its neighbor. “
That’s
my room, up there. Hasn’t changed a bit. Some things never do, I guess.”
The solitary window at the rear was small and begrimed with soot; I wondered what light could come through those forlorn-looking panes to light the life of a five-year-old child who slept there with her sister.
“See the fire escape?” she asked. “That’s where I used to keep my flowers and plants. In the summer I used to sleep out there. Or up on the roof. Some nights you could hardly find a spot to put your bedding: it was so hot the whole building would empty out. Like people sleeping in air-raid shelters.”
I saw the woman on the steps giving us the eye and taking in every word. As she munched on her apple she inspected the core after every bite.
Claire stepped back to the curb, gave the doleful sight a long look, then turned on her heel and stalked off. As we passed her, the woman on the steps said to her companion at the window, “Why would she wanta come back here?”
“Just taking a walk down Memory Lane, Mrs. Beller,” said Claire over her shoulder. Her car appeared and as we got in the woman pitched her apple core after us.
I knew she’d lured me to Brooklyn to demonstrate in a visual and hence dramatic manner the deprived background she’d come from and how hard she’d had to struggle to climb the ladder. To show up almost sixty years later in a mink coat and diamonds outside the door of her old tenement house was the sort of theatrical gesture she doted on.
When we were on our way again, her mood brightened. “Well, darling, now that you’ve looked over the family manse, you certainly ought to have a better idea of where I’m coming from. Of course, I’ve changed three hundred and eighty degrees since that little girl used to sit on that fire escape watering her geraniums, but there’s a lot of me that’s still her. You get what I mean, don’t you? No matter how hard I may have tried to get rid of Bensonhurst, it’s still there, it’s inside, deep, deep. Now, here’s what I want you to do, Charles. Take these—” She handed me a plastic cosmetics bag inside which I glimpsed half a dozen cassette tapes. “I’ve been talking into my machine,” she went on. “I just let it come, sort of stream of consciousness, with no order at all. You know, what did I really think of so and so, that kind of thing. There’s lots of stuff there about Perry, bless him, the poor lost darling—and there’s good stuff about Frank—another lost darling—and I talk some about Yves, that creep, just to give you some of the real lowdown. And for sure there’s Sam, dear Sammy, who gave me my start, and Vi. There’s one smart cookie, Vi; I don’t understand why at her age the brain hasn’t warped, but she just seems to go on, doesn’t she? It’s us Jews, we age like old oaks.”
I got out, clutching the bag of tapes, and she put her cheek up, demanding a peck. We arranged to meet again next week, and I drew a healthy breath as I went up.
The tapes, for which I held high hopes, were a total washout. It was nothing but a lot more bullshit. The first cassette dealt with her feelings of rejection after Frank Adonis had left her—“dumped me” was her phrase—and her sister, Bella, had taken her to recuperate in Florida, where they stayed with relatives in Clearwater. This was followed by a sentimental anecdote dealing with a bunch of cute Boy Scouts she’d chanced across on the train that had first taken her west, and I recalled her having divested herself of this item in her first book. Then there was the same old tripe about how Viola had found her and brought her to her brother, Sam, who’d made her a star, presumably overnight. Ho hum! The next tape dealt with her love affair with Perry Antrim, and it sounded like something out of
Ladies’ Home Journal.
Then how Perry had swept her off her feet, how she’d been at loggerheads with the Antrim tribe, how she and Perry had eloped and been married by the captain of a sailing vessel. Yawn. And there were the little dinner parties she and Perry used to give (I remembered how Dore used to laugh at her setting out place cards for only four guests and calling the napkins “serviettes”). And on and on about Perry, how tender and loving he was on their first night, that he rocked her to sleep in his arms without exercising a bridegroom’s privileges. And then the many vicissitudes of the doomed production of
Three Women
, to which her fourth mate, the eminent playwright Natchez Calhoun, had given of his heart’s blood. Zzzzzz…
After a while her voice became as monotonous as a dial tone. I could tell she was half-crocked and pumping out the treacle as if she’d cut her veins; talking about her favorite recipe for grouse, which Carole (Lombard, one supposed) had given her, and saying that Skylar McCord, hubby number two, loved having her cook
Sauerbraten mit Spaetzle
; what a nifty sportsman Sky was, how he could bring down a whole bag of doves at a shot, racketing on about how she used to rub Absorbine Jr. on his polo injuries and sing him to sleep with “By a Waterfall.” Yoo hoo-hoo-hoo. Then back to the “boy genius,” Quentin “Natchez” Calhoun, that son of the Old South, how she had labored to make a happy home for him while he ground out one masterpiece after another, until everything had “futzed.”
The longer I listened, the madder I got, until I called Vi up and laid it on her. Unless Claire was really going to loosen up and get over her case of the cutes, the whole deal was off. I was sick to death of being jerked around by her bullshit, was tired of playing court jester, was too old to be a typist or even a stenographer, and besides, I had too many other fish to fry, not the least of which was my play. And furthermore, I couldn’t possibly dump this stuff on my publisher and convince him we were going to make any kind of decent book out of it.