When I passed Bea’s office on the way to the copy machine, I spotted her with my single sheet, her aviator glasses pushed up her nose, her head bent in thought. On my route back to my cubbyhole, I saw that Bea was, unbelievably, still reading, which didn’t seem good.
“Livvie!” she called out, just as my butt hit my desk chair. “My office, please.”
It was hard to read her face, which bore a strange look of neutrality. In my limited experience with her, Bea was always one way or the other.
“Sit.” I waited for the announcement of my failing grade. “You read that fat manuscript in one night?”
“Into morning. I’m a fast reader when I focus. And you told me you wanted the report today.” I had a sinking feeling that maybe I’d misunderstood her directive and was about to be chastised for reading too quickly and not critically enough.
“I did.” She removed her glasses and set them on top of the page. “I like this report,” she said, and my stomach did a happy dance. “Concise. You haven’t wasted my time. Ramona and Nan repeat themselves sometimes, and Therese—” She made a fluttering motion with her hand that I knew, from photocopying Therese’s letters, meant her writing rambled. “But you come directly and eloquently to the point. Very un-Wolfe-ian for an Asheville girl.”
“Thanks for the assignment,” I said, feeling myself color at her compliment. At the same time, I was bracing myself for a “but” with my hands clutching the arms of the chair.
“I’m not a fan of satire myself,” she said. “Yet I appreciate it when artists display a talent for it. Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here made a big impression on me when I was young. About the rise of American fascism. Do you know it?”
I said I didn’t, although I’d read Babbitt in college, like everyone else.
“I met his wife once,” she went on. “Dorothy Thompson. A great journalist in her own right. She passed away soon after I started this agency or I would have wooed her as a client.”
I smiled and nodded, wondering where her thoughts were leading.
“Now Diane is no Sinclair Lewis,” Bea said, confounding me: Who was Diane? “But Big Thunder is, as you point out—” her glasses slid back on, “— ‘a worthy addition to the genre of political satire.’ And that’s been the domain of male writers for too long.”
“Diane,” I realized, was D. A. Westerly. To me, initials hinted at a male writer— which was likely why the author had chosen that route.
“When people find out the writer’s Afro-Korean-American, well, we could shake up the status quo and turn this town on its head.” Bea’s face glowed, like she was already planning the interviews and publicity. I’d seen a similar sparkle when she thought about a new volume from Clio Hartt, but I’d mistaken it for simply smelling book sales in the air. In fact, Bea Winston cared about the success of women writers because they were women.
“Oh, and by the way, Diane had to cancel for this Friday,” Bea said as I was leaving her office. The cancellation meant I’d stayed up all night for no good reason, but at least the task was off my plate. “Put her on your calendar for two o’clock next Friday.”
My calendar? “Really?”
“Yes, you’ll sit in.”
I didn’t own a datebook, but the stationery store where I had picked up notebooks for Clio was on my walk home. My quick half-salute made Bea raise an eyebrow, but I guessed by the crinkle at the corners of her mouth that she secretly liked it.
• • •
I’d always been partial to libraries, the older and grander the better. I went into mourning when the original Pack Memorial Library in Asheville, a 1920s-era edifice built with tile and marble, was replaced in the 1970s with a shiny glass cube.
The New York Public Library’s main reference library at Forty-Second Street screamed “library!” In the DeWitt Wallace Periodical Room, I was comfortably surrounded by wall murals depicting publishing giants like Scribner’s and Harpers.
A helpful librarian assisted me in locating the journals and magazines that had provided Clio’s meal ticket in the 1920s and ’30s. It turned out that Clio had been a semi-regular in McCall’s, a monthly magazine Aunt Sass had subscribed to one year because a telemarketer talked her into it, along with Field & Stream. Although McCall’s had seemed like fluff for housewives to me, it had apparently once published serious fiction by literary lights. Clio had several dozen stories published there over the course of her years in Paris, and was also a fixture in The Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan, Redbook, and other magazines. I spent the better part of an afternoon printing her stories from microfiche, but decided I’d need a return trip to amass them all.
Reading the stories while I was printing them out offered me a glimpse into Clio’s writing. She hadn’t always been the darling of Modernism, composing circuitous sentences that went on for half a page, stymieing even some scholars. There was a pre-Dismantled Clio whose writing was sharp, pithy, and accessible to readers of popular magazines, not a maze of words you lurched your way through. That early style had more in common with Fitzgerald than Joyce. What I found particularly interesting was that so many of the stories took the North Carolina hills as their setting. The characters weren’t the jaded, oversexualized sophisticates of her novel, but down-home people like many I had known myself, facing real-world problems like poverty, lack of education, and unwanted pregnancy. What had made her switch styles? Where did the author of The Dismantled come from? And where had the other Clio gone, and why?
• • •
When I handed Clio the pile of microfiche copies, she grabbed me by the arms and kissed me once on each cheek. “You are my savior!” she said, and my cheeks and neck warmed with her approval. She must have noticed, because she added quickly, “That’s the way we greeted each other in Paris,” before returning to her hands-off policy.
“They’re very good stories,” I said, no matter how ridiculous it was for someone like me to praise someone like her. “I especially liked ‘The Gospel According to Nelle.’ I have a sister named Gaynelle, and we call her Nelle. Everybody used to call her Gay, but she got touchy about it.” The look on Clio’s face hardened as I wandered off-topic.
“There are more than I remembered,” she said, steering the subject back to her work. “This could definitely fill a book, don’t you think?”
“I do.” My tone was cautious, because I knew Bea was expecting something more. “Although adding some new work would be better. You know, a cover blurb like, ‘Including the first new Clio Hartt stories in fifty years!’”
She tuned me out as she fanned the printouts across her desk and scrutinized them one by one. The white print on black was hard to read, and she held them right up to her nose. As she did, her enthusiastic mood dulled to an aged patina.
“Oh, this one is downright childish,” she said, tossing a story from McCall’s onto the floor in an impromptu rejection pile. “This one, too. I can’t believe I ever wrote this way.” She sat down wearily. “Maybe there won’t be enough after all.”
“You should have Bea give them a look, once I’ve collected all of them,” I said. “Get another eye.”
“Yes, that might be a good idea.”
“Have you ever thought of . . . I don’t know, writing about North Carolina again?”
She often pondered my questions before replying, but this time she said, “I couldn’t possibly,” immediately. “I can barely remember Paris, let alone home.”
“Maybe reading these will jiggle your memory.”
“I find them almost painful to read. My first inclination is to rewrite them all. And that is a daunting idea, Miss Bliss.”
My immediate future flashed in front of me, sitting side by side at the desk as we both got progressively older, Clio rewriting the same page over and over. “Stuck in the Middle with You” would play as the soundtrack.
“I have so little time left,” she said.
“But these were published! Editors obviously liked them enough to pay yo
u for them. And you were in great company— wow, the table of contents on these issues! Willa Cather, Sinclair Lewis, Carl Sandburg . . .”
She picked up another microfiche copy, grimacing as she scanned it. It was the Nelle story I’d praised as my favorite.
“I don’t even know what the title means anymore,” she said. “‘The Gospel According to Nelle.’ I haven’t thought about church or gospels since . . . well, I don’t even know really.”
“Church was a big part of my life,” I added, even though she rarely responded to my personal comments. “Sang in the girls’ choir for eight years. It was both a comfort and an oppression, when you come right down to it.”
Clio tossed me a look that said she was listening, but barely. Maybe she was formulating her own thoughts about what church had meant to her once upon a time, before Flora, before Paris.
“I mean, a lot of these stories were so interesting to me, I could have read more,” I continued, hoping that at least an echo of my words got through. “A few of them would have made great novels, if you had decided to do that.”
She flipped the pages of “Nelle” until she came to the end, then returned to the beginning. “Which ones?” she asked.
“The Nelle story, for sure,” I said, jumping in. “When I got to the last page, I wanted to know what happened to Nelle— whether she stayed or left.”
“She left,” Clio said definitively, although she’d insisted she couldn’t remember the story. “There was nothing for her there.”
“There was no there there,” I said.
“That isn’t what Gertrude meant,” she said with impatience. “But it is probably one of her better lines.”
Soon, she made it clear that she wanted me to go, to give her a chance to mull over the stories I’d retrieved. I told her I’d be back at the library that weekend, before stopping at her apartment, to locate the rest.
“No hurry,” she said. “They’ll only make me more heartsick than I already feel.”
She said “heartsick,” but I heard it as “homesick.”
• • •
Sue was the keeper of our grandmother’s recipes for Southern delicacies like pimento cheese. I’d called her only once in the five months I’d been in New York, although we’d been in almost daily touch before I left. My three older sisters, especially Sue, had taken adamant stands against the move, following my parents’ lead.
“Mom, it’s Aunt Liv!” my eight-year-old niece, Pokey, screamed into the receiver before she let it drop to the floor.
“What’s wrong?” Sue said, her breath short and ragged.
“Well, hello to you, too,” I said. “Nothing’s wrong. Things couldn’t be better as a matter of fact.”
“Damn, Liv, you scared me. My first thought was you must have been mugged or raped or something.”
“And if I had been, don’t you think I’d call someone who was maybe closer than seven hundred miles away?”
Sue’s tone shifted from concerned to snide. “What is it then? You taking up a collection to come home for Thanksgiving?”
Thanksgiving seemed so far away, although it was a matter of weeks. Still, I hadn’t considered traveling all the way to Weaverville for turkey and dressing. Gerri had mentioned an annual “misfits” Thanksgiving dinner that she and Renee hosted, and after they broke up, she talked about moving it to Thea’s— or wherever she would be living by then.
“No, I’m not calling for money either,” I said, sidestepping what could be an unpleasant revelation— that I was considering spending my first big holiday away from home. “I’m calling for Meemaw’s pimento cheese recipe.”
Sue snorted. “A recipe! Livvie Bliss wants a recipe! Shit, was that a pig just flew past my window?”
I explained about Clio Hartt, whom Sue had never heard of. Clio was not part of the high school literary canon, and Sue had trained as a practical nurse instead of going to college. “She’s a very big deal,” I said, a bit too defensively.
She left me hanging on long distance, the minutes clicking away, while she rifled through her recipe file and scolded her children. Thinking she’d forgotten me, I was about to hang up when she came back on the line, in mid-argument with her youngest: “You better have brushed your teeth by the time I get off this call! . . . So, can you even get pimentos up there?”
“It’s not Mars, Sue.”
The ingredients sounded like a recipe for a heart attack, but pimento cheese was one of the great pleasures of my youth, the way it dressed up even the humblest cracker. “You have some way to grate the cheese?”
“I’ll improvise.”
There was stern silence from her end. “You cannot ‘improvise’ this, Livvie, or it won’t taste right.”
“I’ll let you know how it turns out! Gotta go! Thanks a bunch!”
She was in the middle of saying “See you—” when I hung up.
• • •
“What is this?”
I was taking advantage of Bea’s lunch date to type up notes on her new Selectric. My own typewriter was an older IBM that it was getting harder and harder to find ribbons for. Bea wouldn’t junk it, though, because it was among the first machines she had bought when she started her own firm.
The Selectric was positioned on a typing table in a corner of Bea’s office, and I didn’t hear Ramona come up behind me. I jumped, sending my chair swerving.
“It has your name on it.” Ramona was holding my Tupperware container of pimento cheese.
Even though Ramona had had plenty of time to warm to me, and even though I’d gone out of my way to please her— ordering extra boxes of blue pencils, springing for the occasional egg on a roll when I knew she hadn’t had time for lunch— my very existence continued to aggravate her.
“Is it dip?” she asked, holding it up to the light.
“Pimento cheese.” She wrinkled her nose, so I continued, “A Southern delicacy.”
“Really?”
Ramona lifted the lid and peered inside, but I couldn’t afford to protest, even though she looked like she might sniff it. Bea was chummy with Ramona, often stopping in her office to swap stories, and I wanted Ramona to at least tolerate me.
“It doesn’t look bad,” she allowed.
Apparently, she was not going out for lunch . . . again. Unlike Bea, who was always on the move at midday, Ramona worked straight through lunch. I assumed she was building her client list so slowly that her expense account just covered breakfasts or before-dinner drinks, but not lunches or dinners.
• • •
“It’s for Clio,” I said with a tight smile, the “put it back, please” implied.
“I wasn’t going to eat it,” she said. She clicked the Tupperware closed again and peered down at the Selectric, straining to see my notes, like the kid in school who studies and studies but still can’t figure out the test answers. Her hovering could have been annoying, but I had an unexpected stab of sympathy for her.
“I’m going out to get a sandwich pretty soon,” I said. “I could bring you back some chicken salad.”
She shook her head like I’d suggested a bowl of Gravy Train. Her eyes dropped to the Tupperware container again. “Do the pimentos make it spicy?”
“They give it a kick, yeah, but there’s also cayenne that spices it up.”
“So you actually made it yourself?” She was so interested in my cheese, I wondered if she was broke. In the past, she’d offered to pay me back for food, but when I caught a glimpse of her wallet, it was empty of anything but credit cards. All her money may have gone to her wardrobe.
“From my grandmother’s recipe.” As much as I hated to give in, I did, because it looked like Ramona wasn’t going away. “There are some crackers in the kitchen. I can let you try a taste, if you want.”
“Really? Well, maybe just a bite.”
I took the container from her and she followed me to the kitchen area like a hound dog. I portioned a dollop onto a cracker from a box left over from an agency op
en house, handed it to her, and watched her nibble at it, eyes closing like it was caviar.
“That is amazingly good,” she said, when the cracker had vanished and her eyes had opened again.
I made her a second cracker.
“Really?” The girl appeared to be starving, but I wasn’t sure if it was for food or something else. “What’s that tang underneath?”
• • •
“Not sure what you’re tasting. It might be the mayonnaise.”
The word had an immediate effect, like she was considering whether to spit it out. But instead she continued chewing and asked from behind her hand, “Did you say mayonnaise?”
“I know, it doesn’t sound good, but hey, it’s kind of addictive, don’t you think? One time when I was in grammar school, my sister Nelle and I ate a whole bowl by ourselves. Our mother was hopping mad.”
She swallowed.
“Where are you from again?”
“North Carolina. Weaverville, just outside of Asheville. A tiny speck compared to New York. How about you?”
“Pennsylvania,” she said, stopping short, as if to leave the specifics to my imagination. But then she continued, not making eye contact. “Pittsburgh, actually.”
I handed her a third cracker with cheese, which she nibbled while she told me about getting a scholarship to Carnegie Mellon to study acting. That career choice explained why she was paper thin. I blinked hard to dispel an image of her hunched over a toilet bowl later, forcing herself to upchuck the pimento cheese.
“So how’d you get started with Bea?”
“How everybody gets a job in New York. Or an apartment. You know somebody who knows somebody who went out with somebody,” she said with a shrug.
“And do you still do any acting?”
Ramona winced. “And when do you think I’d go to auditions?”
“Well, have you asked Bea? Maybe she’d be flexible with your schedule.”
“Oh, Bea doesn’t care,” she said. From the rapport I’d witnessed between them, I knew that wasn’t true, but Ramona seemed comfortable being a grouch. “She likes you better than me anyway.”
Clio Rising Page 9