Clio Rising

by Paula Martinac

  “No wonder it’s so cold in here,” I said. “That should be boarded up properly. I’ll get the super to—”

  “Absolutely not! Then I would have to burn my papers in the sink and that would be such a mess.”

  I tried to remain hopeful that she didn’t mean to burn anything significant. “Um, by papers, what do you mean— old phone bills and things like that?”

  “Why on earth would I burn a phone bill? I’ve hardly spoken to anyone but you and Miss Winston in years. No, I mean a few letters. A manuscript or two that might confuse people.”

  I went from stunned to horrified at the speed of light. My mind raced to Bea, who would salivate over Clio Hartt manuscripts, no matter what state they were in.

  “That is so wrong, Miss Hartt! Please, you just can’t. Your safety—”

  She clicked her tongue dismissively.

  “And, and posterity!” I said, switching tracks. “Anything you wrote is valuable to the literary world. You’re the great Modernist writer. You said so yourself.”

  “I did not. I was simply repeating what Tom Eliot said.” For the first time since I’d met her, she blushed a bright pink.

  “So where are these manuscripts? Are they under your desk? In the closet?” With a frantic three-sixty twirl, I did a visual sweep of the apartment.

  Clio placed her hand on her chin as if she were studying a poem or essay she couldn’t quite figure out. “Let’s sit down, Miss Bliss,” she said, “and calm ourselves. I can see you’re getting worked up over nothing.”

  “It’s hardly nothing!”

  “Well, since you feel so strongly about posterity, there’s something I’d like to tell you. A secret. But you must promise to hear me out— to listen and not judge.”

  • • •

  It was an hour, maybe a little more, before I left Milligan Place. Under my arm were two manuscripts in a brown paper bag, each fastened separately with twine.

  My throat scratched, but I didn’t dare stop at Mr. Park’s for a Coke or— what I needed more— a beer. I went straight to the office, set the parcel down in the middle of my desk, and stared at it.

  Chapter 25

  She had instructed me just to listen, but I proved an unwilling recipient of her secret. I blurted out, “I thought you didn’t trust me anymore.”

  Clio nodded in a halting way, as if she only partially recalled her own words. “You’re used to keeping secrets.”

  How did she know that? I had never told her about Hallie, never mentioned that my parents and sisters didn’t know I was gay. I’d also never confided the deep relief I’d experienced when I unburdened myself to Aunt Sass.

  Although I wasn’t one to defy my elders, I couldn’t keep myself from protesting. “I’d rather not know yours. It’s too much, Miss Hartt. Wouldn’t Miss Winston be a better choice?”

  She shot me a frown. “Miss Winston wouldn’t suit. And I should share this before I die.”

  “I wish you’d stop talking like that. It’s so morbid.”

  “It would be morbid for you to imagine your death,” she snapped, “but not for someone my age.”

  A picture of Eli formed in my mind, but I didn’t say anything.

  “Miss Bliss,” she said in a gentler tone, “telling Miss Winston would be a mistake. She might rush into something. I need someone who can take a longer view, really. That’s you.”

  A longer view. Her words tumbled out smoothly. I didn’t understand them, but they sounded in my young ears like high praise.

  “Where do you hope to be in thirty years?” she asked.

  In thirty years, I’d be my mother’s age. Instead of raising kids, though, I wanted to be sitting behind an editor’s desk in a prestigious press, my days booked with clients and agents. Or maybe I’d have my own publishing house that fostered women writers and writers of color who’d been ignored. Nothing lightweight, but work that really mattered. It would be my legacy, my—

  “You are ambitious, Miss Bliss,” Clio said with a sly smile that made me realize I’d been rambling. “You think big.” I don’t think she meant her next words to undercut my dream, but they did. “Thirty years ago, I thought I’d be back in Paris by now, but that never happened. Well, let’s get on with it, shall we?”

  I found myself helping her pull a slim storage box, the kind you might keep out-of-season clothes in, from under her daybed. I got down on all fours and reached back with the fireplace poker to grab onto it. Dust bunnies scuttled out, and Clio suffered a brief coughing fit that required a glass of water.

  The box bore a thick coating of dust I attempted to clean off with several paper towels. With each swipe, the towels came back charcoal gray.

  “How long has it been since you looked at this?”

  “I moved here in 1941.”

  The dust had begun to settle when my parents were teenagers who had not even met.

  Stacked in the box were five yellowed manuscripts, each tied with twine, each bearing a different title page. The titles were nondescript, forgettable— except for one that read, “All This.” Clio had been writing a story or novella by that name when I first knew her, then changed it to “The Less We Know.”

  “Bring them all out,” she said.

  As I withdrew them one by one, the title page of a manuscript near the bottom read clearly, disturbingly, “The Dismantled: A Novel by Clio Hartt and Flora Haynes.” My eyes darted to Clio’s, but she simply stared at the stack of paper in my hands.

  “You wrote it together?”

  She reached for the manuscript that bore both their names and sat down on the bed with it in her lap.

  “This was the beginning of our end,” she said.

  She had written, she said, four successive drafts of “a very bad novel.”

  “Perhaps the worst novel ever written,” Clio said. “It read like the sentimental stories I’d published so successfully in magazines. The ones they practically threw money at me to write.”

  “I love those stories! They’re so well-plotted and so evocative. You underestimate them, Miss Hartt.”

  Clio half-smiled, as if thinking, “What very bad taste you have!” But what she said was: “There’s nothing wrong with them technically. They just aren’t art, really.” She sighed. “The very bad novel was all about a poor Carolina girl who gets involved with a sophisticated artist and her life is changed forever. It had substance but no style. It challenged nothing and no one. It would have gotten published, to be sure, but you would never have read it in college. It wouldn’t even be a footnote in someone’s thesis.”

  She ran a hand over the title page.

  “Flora had written those wondrous plays, so daring and fresh. She saw me struggling, running out of money, getting more and more frustrated and close to giving up on the thing. She secured Louise’s patronage so I wouldn’t have to keep writing the magazine stories, and I could just focus on the book. That money was a godsend, though what Flora had to do to get it—”

  Clio’s mouth twisted into a grimace, and she didn’t elaborate. With nothing specific to go on, my mind pictured sexual contortions, acrobatics, silk scarves, handcuffs, the wax on Barb’s breasts—

  The sound of Clio gulping water interrupted my thoughts. I hoped for a moment that the story had come to an end, that Flora’s role in the novel was maybe simply pimping herself to Louise— and others?— to get an influx of cash for Clio.

  “Then Flora offered to look at the thing. It had swelled to a bloated size, and I was despondent. ‘A quick edit,’ she said. I jumped at the chance. She was working with a theater group, and she was in peak form, writing such sharp dialogue. Her taste was impeccable.”

  A headache started just between my eyes. The throb of it made me close my lids briefly while she continued her story.

  “She ended up infusing my very bad novel with life. Wrote new scenes, like that luminous ending Hemingway raved about in his review. She even dreamt up its title. Literally— it came to her as she slept. But when I insi
sted on putting both our names on the thing, she just laughed. ‘You’re the novelist, darling,’ she said. ‘I helped a little.’ I dedicated it to her, which was something at least.” I recalled the vagueness of the dedication: “To F— for love, for life.” Hallie had told me it referred to Flora, or else I wouldn’t have known.

  Clio coughed, rough and rasping, like part of her lungs might come up through her throat. When I refilled her water, she drank down the full amount and then drew the story to its close.

  “She was so thrilled when the reviews poured in and critics compared me to Joyce! Not a shred of jealousy in her. There wasn’t a lot of money from the book, but there was literary acclaim, which we both thought was better. Especially since we had stipends from Louise. And after a while, I forgot which words I’d written and which she’d written. It was like we were one artist.”

  I opened my eyes to find her staring at me with a questioning look on her face, gauging my response. “It was all so innocent, really. We were a team, so completely in harmony. And if we’d stayed together, it would have been fine. But after we came back to New York, Louise demanded more and more of Flora’s time, and Flora just gave it. There was so much drinking— and other things. Flora would wink and say, ‘I have to go powder my nose,’ and everyone would laugh at the joke she’d become.”

  When Clio couldn’t abide it anymore, when she had found herself drinking away her own career and needed to take back control, she moved to Milligan Place for breathing room. In the depths of her addiction, Flora called it a betrayal and threatened to tell their secret, claim her place in the novel’s birth. Her own playwriting was suffering from the debauchery of her lifestyle, and she couldn’t get anything produced in New York or elsewhere.

  “She did manage to tell my editor, one night at the White Horse Tavern, but he brushed it off. He laughed about it when he told me and called her pathetic. I felt sorry for everything that had happened between us and decided to make peace. But then I heard from Louise that she was cutting me off, and I knew it was Flora’s doing. It was over.”

  She was gripping the manuscript to her chest.

  “It was wrong to take full credit. The best bits were likely hers.”

  “You don’t know that,” I said. “You said you forgot who wrote what.”

  “Anyone could check it,” she said. “It wouldn’t be hard. There will be crossings-out everywhere, new pages added, pages deleted. Flora had a distinctive hand, more like printing than handwriting. She used blue ink. It wouldn’t take a scientist to decipher who wrote what.” The manuscript shifted on her lap, as if sliding toward me.

  My stomach dropped, and I must have lost color in my face because she added quickly, “Then again, I could just burn the thing.”

  “Miss Hartt, that’s like—” I couldn’t think of anything to compare it to, but it felt like a form of murder. “I can’t let you do that. It needs to be preserved.”

  “Then take it with you, Miss Bliss. Get it out of here. If you don’t, I’ll be forced to destroy it. The thought of my dying in this room, and you know I will someday, with strangers finding it, and having no explanation—” Her voice had cracked on the word “strangers.”

  She had roped me in good. The room felt even colder now that I had become her accomplice.

  In her kitchen, I located a brown paper bag from Gristedes and put the damning manuscript at the bottom of it. On top, Clio placed a second manuscript with the title, “Before the Fire: The Collected Stories of Clio Hartt” on the front page. This was the work she had told Bea about and promised to submit for publication. At the door, she patted the side of the bag as if it was a cherished pet.

  “Don’t lose it,” she instructed. I couldn’t help but notice the singular, but I wasn’t sure what she meant— the bag itself, or one of the manuscripts in particular.

  “Please don’t burn anything while I’m gone,” I said.

  Chapter 26

  February 1984

  With the news of her first book in almost fifty years, Clio was set to ascend to the literary heights once again. It didn’t matter that only three of the sixteen stories were, in fact, new— she was a rock star, the Michael Jackson of the publishing world. Luckily, “Madame Louise” was not among the included stories. The sharp resemblance of its plot to that of her masterpiece would have caused critics to bare their fangs. Also absent was “The Less We Know,” the piece she had been writing and rewriting the first pages of since I’d known her, giving it different titles, never feeling it was quite “there.” She had never let me read it.

  What she did include were the two North Carolina-themed stories. “Before the Fire,” the lovely novella she finished before our trip and named the volume after, was first. “An Old Woman’s Bed,” the piece she had conceived in her Dry Ridge motel room— and set in a very similar cabin— was second. She had obviously completed it at some point without announcing it to me. It was a delicate story of looking back on a long life with both wisdom and regret.

  The third new story, called “Monkey,” revolved around a stuffed monkey— not unlike the one that had tumbled out of her luggage. The toy was at first the cherished “child” of two women who lived together (coded lovers, it seemed), and later became the focus of a vicious argument that ended their relationship. The monkey in the story, in fact, came to a violent end, wrenched apart by its arms.

  Now that I knew the story of Clio and Flora and The Dismantled, I wondered if “Monkey” was an extended metaphor for what had transpired between them. Clio couldn’t set the record straight, but maybe she had devised a code she hoped a literary scholar would someday unravel. My theory seemed like a stretch, and of course I couldn’t share it.

  Bea speculated that Clio might have held onto the story for years, never feeling it was quite polished enough, or that maybe a magazine had rejected it long ago, and she’d filed it away out of annoyance or frustration. Knowing Clio, Bea’s theories seemed plausible.

  Within days of offering the collection, Bea had sold the manuscript and had me deliver the contract to Clio for signing. The apartment felt cozier than it had in weeks, and at first I thought the super had finally bled the radiators. Then I noticed a pile of ashes in the fireplace.

  “Miss Hartt,” I said, alarmed, “what were you burning?”

  “Just a few little things. Nothing to trouble yourself about.”

  “But we talked about—”

  “I said, do not trouble yourself,” she repeated.

  We huddled together at her desk so that she could sign the three copies of the contract.

  “And Miss Winston thinks this is all in order?” she asked with her trusty Sheaffer pen in hand.

  “She does.” I smiled at the memory of how Bea had described it, and I thought the phrasing would tickle Clio. “She said, and I quote, ‘This contract is as tight as a virgin on her wedding night.’”

  Clio let out a little snort. “Are there any virgins on their wedding nights anymore?”

  Putting her signature to paper proved a hard task, and my heart ached as I watched her. At first, she hesitated, as if she’d forgotten how to sign her own name, and I leaned into her, hoping my closeness could impart some oomph. Then she began, her pen scratching across the page as she formed each letter deliberately and awkwardly. The end result looked like a bad forgery, something accomplished on a light table by a novice, but I had witnessed it and knew it was genuine.

  Then she had to do it again and again. At the end, she leaned back in her chair, spent.

  “And you’re done!” I said proudly.

  “That was not half as bad as my new will,” she remarked. I had made the call to her lawyer’s office and arranged the meeting, not with Mort Barber or his daughter Miriam (who had both passed), but with Mort’s grandson, the third generation of Barber lawyers. I hadn’t been present for the will signing, but now I knew it had happened.

  “I feel so much better,” she said. “I think I’ll have a nap. Would you just escort me
to the bed?”

  She’d always been so adamant about not needing assistance with daily routines, I felt worried. If signing a few papers could strip so much energy from her, she must be feeling very weak. I worried that she’d suffered more ministrokes while she was alone. Her repeated assertion over the past few weeks that she wouldn’t live much longer seemed less far-fetched.

  I offered my arm, and we made it slowly to the daybed where I pulled back the quilt and helped ease her down.

  “Could you . . .” she said, pointing to her shoes, and I slipped them off and raised first one stockinged leg, then the other, onto the bed.

  “I don’t know why I’m so tired,” she said. She occasionally took sleeping pills, because her rest was far from satisfying, and I wondered if she’d slipped up and taken more than one.

  “There, that’s nice,” she said, patting my hand.

  “You rest now, Birdie,” I said, keeping my other promise to her.

  She smiled and closed her eyes.

  • • •

  A few days after Clio signed the contract was Valentine’s Day, and I had a date with Thea for an Indian dinner on Sixth Street— an evening we’d planned before I’d found out about her affair with Barb. Thea had a favorite restaurant, both for the dishes and the romantic tone set by twinkling white string lights. In all my months in New York I had never been brave enough to try Indian food, thinking it too spicy for my taste; but for the first Valentine’s Day I’d ever had a lover to celebrate with, I agreed to step outside my comfort zone.

  “Do you still want to?” Thea had asked on the phone the day before, giving me an easy out. But I had a present for her, and I acted enthusiastic even though it felt like the evening could be a small disaster.

  Since our fight, Thea had made two additional trips for job interviews. We’d had no sleep-over dates, just a couple of nights of talking and drinking and trying to be casual, plus a few slapdash make-out sessions where we either missed each other’s mouths or accidentally clacked our teeth together. We acted like a married couple who’d tried counseling with no luck. I didn’t know what would happen on Valentine’s Day, but I changed my sheets just in case we gave it one last go.