Dear Mr. Hemingway,
I loathe to write this, as I can feel you cringe at my words on the other side of this letter, but I must tell you that I’ve made a terrible mistake. At a dinner with Mort Clifton and the Downtown boys, I let it slip you were in Wyoming. Mr. Clifton seemed keen to find you, particularly to dig around about your novel-in-progress. Though I was able to keep mum regarding the novel itself, I’d had a bit of drink and mentioned I’d heard from you and that you were in Casper.
You may already know this; the man may already be calling you to nag about your writing, or to urge you to come back to New York for some god-awful meeting. Please, sir, I hope you will accept my deepest apologies for poking this great gaping hole in your privacy.
If you’ll indulge me, I wonder if I might ask a bit more about that very thing—your concerns about privacy—even though our formal interview has ended. I most regret that the boys didn’t let me keep the bits you told me about “the dullest men alive” listening to you and about your reasons for moving to Cuba. If it hadn’t been for that Mr. England at the Garden, asking you all his silly questions, I might’ve pressed you further on that point, sir.
Do you sincerely believe anyone is watching you? Do you believe there are ill-actors right here in publishing, perhaps in our own government, who would like to shut down our opinions, who would like us reading—writing—from a script? I’m not sure what to think anymore, and I’d be glad to hear your thoughts on the matter. That is, if you feel comfortable putting such thoughts down.
And, that is, if you forgive me for giving away your location.
With deepest regret,
Louise Leithauser
P.S. To answer your queries, yes, I am embracing trouble, I believe with clear eyes. At the moment I’m making a go of it alone, though I haven’t the faintest idea how I will survive with a child or where I will have to go. It may be—heaven help me—that eventually I return to my mother’s house. She has been asking for my company, as my brother was in fact killed in action at Pork Chop Hill.
P.P.S. At the very least, my manuscript is coming along. Through all of this, I haven’t gotten behind in the count.
For almost four weeks, I avoided all contact with Joe. I went to and from my job in the wet snow, keeping myself small and my voice quiet while in the office. Mr. Franklin limited himself to overly polite, minimal interactions. It was beginning to become difficult for me to kneel on the floor beside the filing cabinets, my back aching. I tried my best to work even harder than before, so that no one could complain about the job I was doing. Mercifully—or so I thought—Mr. Franklin hadn’t asked me to find the folder of résumés again, but one gray, slushy day in late February I realized that the file was no longer in its place in the Office Miscellany cabinet.
I came home from work that day feeling dejected, and more alone than I’d ever thought possible with another human taking up space inside my body. I couldn’t call my mother to ask for help—all she wanted to know was when my wedding would be, and when she’d finally get to meet Joe. I couldn’t tell her that he and I were on the outs. I was afraid the shame of my unwed state, coupled with her very raw grief over Paul, would crush her.
That left almost no one for me to lean on. Reaching out to Glenys felt risky, somehow. Her foremost loyalty would lie with Harry.
Besides all of that, I was convinced I’d squandered the best connection I’d ever made in my life. I’d been a waitress, and then I had become a girl who received letters from Ernest Hemingway. Then I’d blown it, in an effort to get into Mort Clifton’s good graces. Mort Clifton, who didn’t give a damn about me or my novel, who only wanted to know where he could track down his most important writer. I had no faith that I’d ever receive correspondence from Papa again.
I trudged up the stairs to my apartment, the smell of garlic as strong as ever in the hallway, planning to take off my shoes and reheat a bit of beef roast and carrots on my hot plate, when I noticed there was something pinned to my door, a pink slip of paper.
city of new york
EVICTION NOTICE
fourteen-day notice to vacate premises
My knees went warm and tingly, and for a second, I thought they’d give out. The baby responded with a hard kick against my right side. I put my fingers to the little foot, quieting it, as I read the rest. The reason the notice gave for my eviction was indecent behavior.
I yanked the paper off its thumbtack and marched upstairs, to Lena’s apartment, and pounded on her door. Dogs barked and yelped inside. I could hear her banging pots around in her kitchen. I’d never even met my landlord. They had me drop off each month’s rent in cash in a deli on the West Side, where a little box marked “Rent” sat beside the soda fountain with its forty-two flavors. I had no idea who owned the building, probably a slumlord. In any case, he’d never recognize me if he passed me on the street, nor I him. There was only one way he’d know if I was involved in anything indecent.
At last Lena came to the door, in her bathrobe, holding some kind of white terrier. The fur around its mouth looked wet, stringy, and brown. Her hair was up in a shower cap. “Oh, it’s you,” she said. “What do you want?”
I held up the pink piece of paper. “Mrs. Bunche, I’m being evicted.”
She shrugged. “So?”
“So…it says I’m to leave because of indecent behavior. How, might I ask, would they know that?”
“For starters, you come and go at odd hours.” She wrinkled her nose as if she had an itch. She wouldn’t look me in the eye. “You’ve got this fella, that fella, here late at night.” Her lip curled. Perhaps she wasn’t as hard of hearing as I’d thought.
“I only have the one fella,” I said through my teeth. Right now, I didn’t even have him.
“Oh, yeah? What about the blond one?”
I closed my eyes. “Harry? He’s only a friend.” Damn him for having come at night.
“Huh. And now look at you, bacon in the drawer. How can you even know whose it is, eh?”
I took a step toward her, and she held up the dog to shield herself. Another one yapped at her feet. She’d been keeping it back with her foot, but now she let it tumble into the hallway, where it yipped warning barks at the hem of my coat.
I held up the pink sheet of paper in front of her face, and tore it to shreds right there on her doormat. Then I turned on my heel to go back downstairs.
“What’s it matter, anyway?” she called after me. “With that fancy ring on your finger, I thought you were going to marry your fella!”
As I shoved my key into the lock, I could hear my telephone ringing, using my code for the party line. Another eviction notice, I figured. I came in and slid off my shoes, then let it ring out while I went into the kitchen and poured myself a glass of water. I stood in front of the counter for a minute, my hands flat in front of me, my head down. There was a jar of peanut butter inside the cupboard. I fished it out and found a spoon.
Life on Earth had grown more difficult for me by the day. No wonder I’d found myself writing about a girl with nowhere to go but the moon. What would I do if I lost my apartment, my job? I could move somewhere no one knew me, pretend to be a widow, I supposed.
Mouth full of peanut butter, I shook my head sadly. Then what would I do: Wait tables again? Bus empty cocktail glasses?
I put the sad little jar of peanut butter back into the cabinet, the spoon in the shallow sink. I missed Joe. Life with him had been simple, cozy, everything provided for. What had I been thinking, cutting him off like that? I could be interviewing Bernard Malamud right now, using all the baseball trivia I’d stuffed into my head in preparation, instead of plugging away at the surefire failure that was The Lunar Housewife. I wondered if they’d found another girl to meet with Malamud, if she was perhaps a girlfriend of Harry’s.
The telephone began ringing again. Two short rings, one long one. My code. Lena pounded on the floor with what sounded like an umbrella. “Answer it, will you?” she called.
The last thing I wanted was to satisfy her, but I went to the phone, taking off my coat and draping it over the sofa before I picked up the handset. “Hello?”
“Louise. Thank God you came to the phone. Oh, Louise, I have to tell you something.”
“Joe,” I said breathlessly. I hadn’t spoken to him since that night after the awards ceremony. It would have been good to hear his voice, except that he sounded frantic, as if he’d been crying. It reminded me of the day I’d come home to find him here with news about Paul. I sat down.
“What’s the matter?” I said in a low voice, and then, before he could answer, I remembered Lena upstairs. “Be careful. Someone could be listening in.” I tried to make out any breathing on the line.
“It’s Harry,” he said, his voice hoarse, and before he could go on, I knew. “He’s dead.”
My teeth began to chatter. I gathered my cold feet up onto the couch. Harry—dead? It was impossible. I thought of him at the dinner ceremony, full of life. Holding Glenys’s hand. It couldn’t be. “What happened?”
“I don’t know, I…” Joe stopped to get himself together. “He used some dope, some bad dope.”
“That can kill you?” I tried to remember exactly what Harry had looked like. Unfathomable, that I’d seen him in his tuxedo just weeks ago, and now he was gone.
“I guess. I guess so. If you’re a goddamn knucklehead like Harry.” Joe let out a small sob. I heard him blow his nose. “At least he didn’t have to die alone.”
“Let me guess.” My throat was beginning to hurt from the news. “Beverly was with him.”
“Yes,” Joe said. “It’s a funny thing—she’s been quite a help to Glenys in the last couple of days. She’s been helping plan the funeral.”
I swallowed, imagining Glenys and Beverly spending all that time together. Talking to each other. I felt as if I were swallowing glass. I forced myself to focus. “Joe,” I said, “he’s been dead a couple of days, and you’re just telling me now?”
“I wasn’t sure you’d want to speak to me, after the way we left things.”
“Of course I’d want to speak with you at a time like this.”
“Lou…” Joe began, his voice sounding young, wistful. “Would you mind if I came over? Or would you like to come here?”
I thought of the eviction notice, of Lena pounding on the ceiling upstairs. Of my cold radiators, which would rattle for hours after I finally let them have some steam. “I’ll come to you,” I said quickly, and in no time at all, I was back in my coat.
Henry Crawford “Harry” Billings’s funeral service took place at Madison Avenue Presbyterian, with a private burial to follow on Martha’s Vineyard a few days later. The reception after the service felt every bit like one of his parties, only better, because all the glitter he’d collected over the years had assembled itself into a final shimmering farewell. Truman Capote took up a prime spot on the sofa, chain-smoking Pall Malls with Peggy Guggenheim, he in a velvet bow tie, she in furs. From my vantage point beside a potted fern, I spotted Norman Mailer, one of the younger Rothschilds, and William Holden betting on a game of blackjack. A celebrated war photographer held forth by the bar cart, flanked by his chilly German wife.
The noise level felt no different from any other party, and the mood tended more toward festive than somber; nobody mentioned the cause of Harry’s death, but the consensus seemed to be he’d gone out on a happy, if irresponsible, note, so why not keep the party going.
At one point, Capote gave an impromptu speech in that pinched voice of his: “If ever a man could make terrible scarves look good—and he did have terrible taste in scarves—it was Harry Billings….”
The only solemn presence at the party took the form of Harry and Glenys’s children, who, despite being in their own home, seemed out of place as they stared, stunned, at the party guests when they were prompted to come forward and say goodbye. Then they were herded to their rooms by an aunt. The poor kids, I thought, looking at their tired freckled faces, their sagging bobby socks, the shadows that should not have been under their eyes. Maybe I shouldn’t have thought ill of the dead, but I wondered how well they’d even known their father.
Glenys, for her part, appeared dazed, probably drugged, almost grateful to be the center of attention for once; it was as if she knew that, for this one day, she’d be allowed to serve as a surrogate for her husband and collect all the admiration he’d cultivated without her. She sat on the davenport opposite Capote, between her mother and Gloria Grahame, who’d collected her Best Actress in a Supporting Role trophy last March and was already, rumor had it, a has-been. In her Broadway days, I’d heard, she had a thing with Harry.
As for everyone else, proving how well they’d known Harry personally had become a kind of sport. The rooms thundered with a sea of competing stories, the voices growing louder and more frantic as the afternoon wore on. Snippets leapt above the surface, like flying fish enjoying brief moments in the sun:
“…when he brought that girl Sheila from the Anchor back to Durfee!”
“…told him a thousand times it wouldn’t float, but, listen, we were half in the bag…”
“…asked me to marry him right then and there. Sorry, Glenys, it was all a joke….”
It was all making me sick. Besides, no one had offered me a chair, despite my aching belly. I kept pushing the baby’s feet away from the right side of my rib cage, which only made its bottom push back at me on the left. Still, I didn’t want to fight for a seat. Then I’d have to interact with people, and I wasn’t much in the mood to speak to anyone. Instead, I clung gratefully to the conveniently placed plant and watched Joe through the fern’s fronds.
Even he seemed more at ease now, after he’d spent most of the service gripping my hand, his face white as death. He’d found a circle of men with gray hair and mustaches, round bellies and tailored suits, and even though I wasn’t certain who they were, I had a feeling they were big wheels in publishing. They were talking animatedly in their tight group, gray and black petals on a closed-up flower. After a minute, Joe looked over his shoulder to find me. Our eyes locked, and he offered a little wave.
I’d spent two nights in a row at his apartment, then last night at my own place, so I’d be able to get ready. I knew he felt grateful, and relieved, to have me back by his side, and in general I felt relieved as well. But something about seeing him among all these men brought back an unsettled feeling in my stomach. In a minute I’d have to find a bathroom, just to get away from all this. I was about to make a break for it when one of the men broke from Joe’s pack, with a face that looked as serious as I felt.
He caught my eyes, and his thick, dark eyebrows went up. It was Eli.
My first instinct was to turn away. He’d spilled some very sensitive information to me, and what had I made of it? Still, when I glanced back in his direction, he was smiling. I smiled back, then subconsciously reached down to smooth my black pencil skirt. I’d paired it with a black Peter Pan–collar jacket with pearl buttons, and had a single pearl in each ear. Leaving the house, I’d felt pretty, but now, among the likes of Gloria Grahame, I felt like a tent you’d take camping.
Eli blinked a few times, then, with the slightest gesture, inclined his head twice toward the balcony. I looked to Joe, who was deep in conversation, then back to Eli.
A hand squeezed my elbow. “Louise.”
I jumped to see that it was Beverly. “What is it?” I hissed, recoiling.
“I need to speak with you.”
Beverly looked even worse than Glenys, gray-pale, in a subdued navy turtleneck sweater and long skirt. I’d seen her at the edges of the reception, whispering with the waitstaff and quietly collecting used napkins from beside the coffee service. It seemed Joe had been right, about Glenys and Beverly planning the funeral together, which would have struck me as oddly beautiful, even sort of European, if it all hadn’t also made me want to scream into a pillow.
I glanced back at Eli, who’d rejoined the conversation around Joe. “Whatever you have to say, you can say to me now,” I whispered to Beverly.
She shook her head. “What I have to tell you is best told in private. Would you come out onto the balcony with me for a moment? It’s cold, but you can have a seat.”
She took me outside and got me situated in a cushioned chair under the awning, gently fluffing the pillow behind me. I liked her more than I wanted to. She stood in front of me with her arms crossed against the chill, gazing out over the foggy city. Behind her, a cluster of pots held a depressing collection of dead plants. One wizened vine lay encrusted over the thick stone railing. Beverly nudged one of the nearer pots with the toe of her flat.
“Have you told Joe the truth yet? Does he know you and I worked together?” She glanced up at me with a patient face. Now I could admit it: I could see what Harry had seen in her. She was not only lovely in form, she was also intelligent, even refined. She’d helped Glenys and had kept my secret. For someone who’d seduced Harry, a married man, she somehow felt like the one with the moral authority here, rather than me.
“No,” I said.
“Why not?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted, tears springing to my eyes. “If I admit I was at that party working, a waitress, I’ll have to tell him about everything. About who my parents are…who I am…”
Beverly tilted her head to the side. Her eyes were stunning, light blue-gray, now shot through with red. “Who are you?”
I sniffed, looking back at my hands. “I’m the daughter of a housemaid. And a drunk.”
She snorted. “Aren’t we all.”
For a moment, we both watched traffic shear through puddles on the avenue, far below us. I gathered myself together. “What was it you wanted to tell me?”
Beverly took a deep breath, her rib cage rising and falling. “There’s no way to sugarcoat this, Louise. Harry was getting ready to throw you under.”
A cool blast of wind, shot through with mist, hit me in the face. “Me? What are you talking about? How could he throw me under?”
“You and Joe. Do you remember the Hemingway interview you did?”
“Of course I do.”
“Harry did all the edits to that story. Joe let him do it because he said he was too close to you to alter your work.” Beverly looked through the French doors for a second. “I can’t stay out here much longer. Harry had taken whatever it was he cut from your Hemingway piece and was going to publish it himself, as an exclusive. Just a week or two ago, he went and pitched the idea to Harper’s, or Harper’s Bazaar—I can’t remember which.”
A shiver passed through my body. “He was going to scoop me.”
She nodded. “The crux of it was that Hemingway is working on a secret novel that’ll be explosive, that he’s hiding out in Cuba and I guess Wyoming now. Harry was hoping it would be a big story for him, that it would come out this summer. That was going to give him enough time to part ways with Joe first.”
“Part ways with Joe?”
“Harry had been complaining a lot about Downtown. It isn’t fun anymore, he said. It’s turned into something else. ‘As unexciting as any other branch of government,’ he called it, whatever that means.” She shrugged. “As for the article, now that he’s dead, I don’t know what they’ll do. I’m handling some of his affairs, so I suppose I should dig up the name of the editor and find out.”
“Please do find out,” I said. “And get me a copy of that article, if you can.”
“All right.” Beverly shuffled her feet nervously, looking in through the glass doors again. “You can come get it at my apartment. He kept a file there of projects he was working on, things he didn’t want other people to see.”
“The goddamn crook,” I said aloud, then looked back at her. “Sorry.”
“He is dead, Louise,” she said simply. I couldn’t read the expression on her face. “Remember that.” She stalked over the wet paving stones toward the French doors.
“You don’t think…” I said, stopping her just as she reached for the handle. She didn’t look at me, and I guessed there were tears in her eyes. “You don’t think this had something to do with his death, do you?”
Beverly let out a sharp laugh, and when she finally did look over her shoulder, her cheeks were wet. “He had some bad dope. That’s all. I don’t see how it could be related.” She slipped back into the party.
I stayed out on the balcony, processing what she’d told me. What if Harry’s death hadn’t been an accident? What if someone in power had decided he’d been trying to say too much? I wished I could place a call to the afterlife and ask Harry what had happened. And then—wring his neck.
A click behind me, and the rise of voices and laughter. I turned, expecting to see Joe, but it was Eli who had come out to join me. My heartbeat quickened. “Eli,” I said, trying to stand up, but he stopped me with a finger over his lips, then pulled another chair close. It made a screeching nose, metal legs on slate.
“Forgive me, Harry,” he whispered, taking a sip of his martini.
“Screw him,” I said forcefully, and Eli’s brown eyes shot up in surprise. “Listen. Harry’s mistress just told me something interesting. I think you should know.”
He leaned toward me. “Go on.”
“Apparently, Harry was trying to run with a stolen story—stolen from me, by the way—about Hemingway writing a secret novel, something sympathetic to the Commies.” As I explained what Hemingway had told me about his new novel, what he’d said about Castro and Korea and all that had been cut from my interview, Eli listened thoughtfully, his gaze trained at my knee. “Beverly said he took it to either Harper’s or Harper’s Bazaar; she couldn’t remember which one. Bazaar is Hearst, isn’t it? Have you heard any rumblings about this?”
“I haven’t, but nobody tells me much of anything,” Eli sighed. “I can put an ear to the ground if you want, though.”
“Please do.” My heartbeat had gotten a little closer to normal. He reached for an afghan on one of the chaises and handed it to me. The expression on his face was tender, leading me to wonder if the guy wasn’t a bit sweet on me.
“How are you, Louise?” Eli asked, sitting with his hands interlaced between his legs and leaning his face, open as a book, toward me. With his chin he gestured back toward the funeral gathering. “This has to be pretty upsetting for you. And Joe.”
“Yes. Joe seems quite broken up. Almost—”
The doors swung open, both at once, and there was Joe, his cheeks aflame. He looked from me to Eli and back again. “Louise? Everything all right?”
Eli stood coolly, putting his hands in his pockets, as I scrambled to find the pocketbook I’d dropped on the slate. “Actually,” I replied, “I was just getting a headache. I think you should find me a taxi.”
“Good idea,” Joe said, and with a curt nod at Eli, he took me by the hand and led me back into the apartment.
The headache was a ruse, but I’d had enough of this damned party—I’d just learned that the deceased had been willing to cheat me, and still I felt I had more right to mourn him than half these hangers-on. I wanted to go home, put on some Pond’s, and go to bed. No one had moved since I’d been outside; in fact, the festivities seemed to have escalated. Capote was now lying across Peggy Guggenheim’s lap, blowing smoke rings onto her chin, while everyone laughed.
Under the din, Joe murmured, “I wasn’t aware you knew Eli Cohn.”
“I met him right here, as a matter of fact.”
We’d reached the little foyer. Joe turned me toward him, took both of my upper arms in his hands, and loosened his grip. “I’d like you to come home with me, Louise, all right? Please.”
“Joe…”
“Please, Lou. It’s been so good to spend this time with you, despite the circumstances. Don’t leave me alone tonight.” His eyes welled with tears. He looked exhausted. “Let’s all stay together.”
As he spoke the last sentence, he put his hands on the top of my belly. I closed my eyes. “I’ll have to go home again, to fetch some of my things.”
“Fetch your things. Fetch everything.”
“Joe, I…” I couldn’t help reaching out to cup his cheek. He leaned his face into my hand and kissed the side of my thumb. “All right, I’ll pack a bag and come over.”
“I’ll come with you,” he said in a hurry, then left to say his goodbyes.
I put on my coat, my mind swimming with what Beverly had just told me. Harry’s treachery and his sudden death had occurred uncomfortably close to each other. I reminded myself to look for the simplest explanation, which would be that Harry had simply bought some bad drugs. I was tapping my toes nervously beside the door when Glenys found me, her mascara running down her cheeks.
“I knew it,” she hissed, stabbing her finger back in the direction of the living room, toward Beverly. “You’ve been going behind my back all this time, Louise. Not with Harry, but with her! You’re friends with her! Oh, I can just imagine it, the two of you laughing at me, the silly wife.”
“I’d never laugh at you. I only went to dinner with the guys and her once, and I didn’t realize—”
“You went to dinner with her?”
“Glenys, please.” I put my hands on her shoulders, but she shrugged me off. “It’s not what you think, and, besides, I thought the two of you were…” I searched for the right words. “I thought you and she had…” My words fell feebly on my own ears. That Glenys and Beverly had maintained some sort of peace surrounding Harry’s funeral didn’t mean Glenys would want to imagine Beverly at dinner with Joe and me.
Beverly chose the absolutely wrong moment to stride up to us right then, acknowledging Glenys with a comment about when the caterers had to leave. Glenys’s eyes were green fire. Beverly leaned in close to me and whispered in my ear, “Come by my apartment next Wednesday around lunchtime to pick up the article.” She pressed something into my hand, a hot, damp triangle of notebook paper, then swept back into the party to continue her bizarre role as co-hostess. Glenys and I both watched her go, a stunning figure even in drab mourning clothes.
I stuffed the paper into my pocket, knowing without looking that it contained her address. The last thing I saw as Joe led me out the door was Glenys’s blotchy face, all the hatred, grief, and frustration she must have been feeling since Harry’s death pouring, like lava from the top of a volcano, toward me.