Clio Rising

by Paula Martinac

  One evening, though, Ramona turned to me with a mouthful of cracker and pimento cheese and said, “We need to start dating, Liv.” I might have spat out my Diet Coke if she hadn’t added quickly, “I mean, look at us. We’re pathetic. You haven’t been to that bar you like in ages, and I’ve turned down so many dates, pretty soon I won’t get any invitations.” We made a pact: she would ask out the cute marketing guy she’d met at a book party, and I would venture back to Ariel’s.

  As I got out again, my thoughts turned surprisingly more to Hallie than Thea. One evening, I pulled out the slender stack of cards I’d given Hallie over the months we’d slept together, which she had returned to me at the end and which were held together with a rubber band. At different times in our relationship, I’d slipped them under her office door, dropped them into her briefcase when her back was turned. Cards with roses and glitter, bites of love a besotted girl would find heart-poundingly romantic.

  “But they’re yours,” I had protested.

  “I can’t have them in my office anymore, Livvie. I don’t even trust putting them in the garbage. They’re yours, not mine. Burn them, hide them in a drawer, I don’t care.” What I had wanted her to say was: “Read them, treasure them, remember me.” What a big mistake I’d been for her. She’d risked everything carrying on with a student— and a female one at that.

  Clio had felt her photos from Deauville Beach were too personal and painful to even take up space in the world. In what seemed like a fitting end, they were destroyed by the firemen’s hoses. Now, I found I couldn’t stand even the idea of my cards to Hallie. If I didn’t get rid of them, they could come back to mock me, reminding me I’d handed over my heart to someone who didn’t want it. And that I had done it again with Thea.

  On a night when Ramona was out with the marketing guy, the bits of flimsy cardboard went up in flames in our kitchen sink. I swept away every ash and aired out the apartment so Ramona wouldn’t sniff even a trace of smoke. Later, however, she did ask me about a dusting of purple glitter on the kitchen counter, but I just shrugged it off and she forgot about it.

  My ceremony felt cathartic, like using a smudge stick. And in the moment when the first card, with a riot of yellow daisies on the front, caught fire, I thought I understood Clio better than I ever had.

  • • •

  The first responders had found two metal strongboxes in Clio’s ravaged apartment. The larger one, a compact safe squirreled away in the back of her only closet, held a miscellany of papers, including a thick manila folder labeled “Ephemera.” The file contained letters and postcards from contemporaries like Janet Flanner and Natalie Barney, correspondence from editors, contracts with magazines, and other business-related material that would prove a treasure trove to literary scholars. Also inside the strongbox was her will, which stipulated that the new archival material be catalogued with the rest of her papers at the New York Public Library but be closed to the public for thirty years. No reason given.

  The second metal box held only a lumpy, oversized envelope addressed to Miss Bliss in Clio’s unsteady hand. In it were her fountain pen, a letter, and the unfinished story I’d watched her struggle with for months, still titled, “The Less We Know.” Her will referenced the envelope— “Miss Bliss will know what to do”— and my stomach lurched when the lawyer read that part of the codicil to me. At not quite twenty-four, I now had not one, but two literary secrets to protect.

  I kept the story to myself, but I used Clio’s Sheaffer proudly at work. “Bequeathed to her by the Clio Hartt,” Bea liked to brag to clients when they admired its rich, marbled green color. “It’s the one she wrote The Dismantled with.” Clio had never specified that, so I didn’t know if Bea had fabricated the story for effect. I did know Clio treasured it, though, and preferred the fountain pen to the typewriter Bea had given her when they signed their agency contract. I had always suspected the pen was from Flora, but I never asked. Having Clio’s pen in hand, so smooth and solid, let me pretend she’d merely lent it to me and that I’d be seeing her soon to return it.

  In the privacy of my bedroom, I read Clio’s letter— a succinct half-page written with the pen before she locked it away in the strongbox. The very sight of her shaky penmanship made my eyes well up.

  After, I moved on to the story, which I perused three or four times, stopping to reread lines and paragraphs like they were breadcrumbs dropped expressly for me. And then I returned it to its envelope, taped it up, and added it to the brown paper bag holding The Dismantled.

  January 18, 1984

  My dear Miss Bliss,

  I can almost hear you chiding me for writing something you will only read when I am lying in Oakdale Cemetery: “Don’t be maudlin, Miss Hartt!” Perhaps you will understand better when you are closer to my age, that I can see the end coming like it is the cat slinking out of the kitchen for his nap. I don’t think you will be disappointed there is no money for you— what I have left will help my brother’s wife get by in the homeplace. But I am leaving you something. I am too tired now to be writing or signing anything and am putting my pen away so that can be yours. Like the pearls, the old thing isn’t worth much, but it holds value for me just the same.

  As for the story . . . it remains unfinished, it never quite came together, although the bulk of it is there. It should never see print. I have burned the earlier versions of it, which I know you will not approve of. I do trust you on this, Miss Bliss. I trust you too to know what it means and where it fits. You are sharper than I was at your age, and you know I have no taste for memoir.

  Please do not squander a moment of your luminous future.

  With gratitude from your friend—

  Clio Hartt

  The Longer View

  October 2017

  The day Ingrid Coppersmith contacted me, I had gone home early complaining about a headache. Hunched in the unfinished attic, which didn’t quite accommodate my height, I found the liquor store carton labeled “NYC,” the one I sidestepped every December when I retrieved the Christmas decorations. Lacy cobwebs connected it to the eaves, and a film of dust coated the top.

  As I unpacked it, I took silent inventory. Clio’s story and novel manuscripts rested under layers of the documentary detritus of my fifteen years in Manhattan. Playbills from shows like The Normal Heart and Angels in America. Faded snapshots of annual Pride parades, Gerri and Renee popping out of them in T-shirts bearing slogans like “Silence = Death” and “Read My Lips.” Yellowed copies of WomaNews, where Vern first published her comic strip. The Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich books Thea gave me, skimmed but never devoured. The program from Eli’s memorial service, complete with Auden poems. A framed photo Ramona had taken of me and Bea, the day I left the agency to become an assistant editor at NYU Press. Bea was half-scowling, but my face glowed. My first boss’s voice came back to me: “I spent three years training you just to lose you to a university press?”

  The box of memories had moved with me from apartment to apartment, relationship to relationship, until it ended up here, in the Craftsman-style house my wife and I bought together when we moved to the Finger Lakes region and I became a senior editor at Cornell University Press.

  I lifted out the old Gristedes bag that held Clio’s secret. Inside, the envelope Clio entrusted to me in her will was still secured with tape that had yellowed and curled with age. My fingers slipped under the flap and pried it open easily. Although I hadn’t read it since the day Clio’s lawyer presented me with the envelope, “The Less We Know” was as fresh in my memory as if no time had passed, as if my psyche had stored it away for this moment.

  Clio had never finished the melodramatic story, and the language and plotting were rougher and less cohesive than the other stories she had written before her death. This was the piece she’d started over and over again, amassing first pages until they mounded into a small stack that I had mistaken for a novella. She had burned all those early efforts with their different names, reducing the pile to a
fourteen-page remnant about two sisters— the older, a brilliant sculptor wasted by alcohol and drugs; the younger, a workman-like portrait painter struggling to disengage from her sister’s excesses. Serena, the older of the two, turns the care of her illegitimate daughter over to Odette, who is married and therefore seen as more stable. But years later, when she learns she’s dying, Serena regrets the decision.

  At the top of page fourteen, at what felt like the climax moment of the story, the work simply dropped away mid-scene. The final paragraphs, written with the Sheaffer pen I still owned, read like something out of a nighttime soap opera, but they had scorched my memory just the same.

  So many ugly words passed between them that day, they blurred in Odette’s mind. “You stole my daughter, my flesh,” were among the words her sister spat at her. Serena’s pores oozed with the stench of alcohol, and Odette shrank back from her.

  “I stole nothing! You asked me to raise her. You don’t even remember.” Serena had plotted it out all those years ago, how Odette and Thomas would give her girl a better life, and she’d begged her sister to see it her way and comply. “I didn’t want to, Serena. You insisted! You said I could give her stability, and I respected your wishes. Now you come back, all these years later— for what?”

  “I’m here to claim her.”

  Odette’s heart skipped. Claim? she thought. Who had the better claim— the sister who birthed her, or the one who raised her up from an infant? Each saw their claim as equally strong, their ties to the girl equally unbreakable.

  “Maggie needs us both,” Odette began, to crack open the part of Serena that might still hear reason. “Just please let me be the one to tell her.”

  And that was it.

  I had tucked something else into the envelope, too. The only interview Clio had done between 1936, when The Dismantled was published, and her death in 1984 had appeared in the New York Review of Books on the thirtieth anniversary of her great novel. She was obviously enamored of “thirty years”— maybe it carried a roundness or fullness for her, or maybe it held some other significance. After her death, I had retrieved a microfiche of the NYRB piece at the library.

  NYRB: Many of your fellow writers penned memoirs and autobiographies about their expatriate time in Paris. You’ve no doubt read the most recent ones, Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast and Janet Flanner’s Paris Journal.

  CH: Actually, no, I haven’t. No offense to Hem, poor man, or to Janet. I was fond of them both, really. But I don’t need to relive those days. They’re up here (taps temple).

  NYRB: Then, you won’t be publishing a memoir?

  CH: Why would I? I have said everything I wanted to say about my life in my fiction.

  The Dismantled was still bound with the original twine. I had scissors in front of me to cut it, but it took a glass of Syrah before I could manage the snip. This was the moment Clio had trusted me with, the “longer view” that had seemed so vague when I was twenty-three.

  After a lifetime of editing, I knew what I was looking at— pages slashed through and rewritten, chapters removed, sections shuffled. Flora’s blue ink had faded to an azure color and contrasted sharply with Clio’s preferred black. I marveled at the audacity of editing with pen; the rare page bore no marks at all. Clio had not exaggerated Flora’s role in the novel’s birth.

  I poured myself another glass.

  On the second pass, I realized that Flora had also peppered the margins with comments like: Birdie, this took my breath away! and I love this! Please don’t change it! and Genius! She’d maintained the integrity of Clio’s story, but she’d infused it with her own flourishes and style.

  “Who had the better claim,” Clio had written, “the sister who birthed her, or the one who raised her up from an infant? Each saw their claim as equally strong, their ties to the girl equally unbreakable.”

  Were the changes greater than what, say, Maxwell Perkins did for Thomas Wolfe or Gordon Lish for Raymond Carver? In the thirty years of my own career, had I never sliced and diced someone’s work? I could think of several authors indebted to me for honing their manuscripts into top-notch books in just this way; one had been short-listed for the National Book Award. Flora had a talent for editing, even if her writing went unappreciated.

  “Maggie needs us both,” Clio had concluded.

  Her secret weighed on me like a box of books, but I couldn’t follow Clio’s wishes until I gave three people a heads-up.

  • • •

  My wife, Mel, a professor at Ithaca College, stared at me with her mouth agape. “That’s what was in that ratty old box?” she said. “Jesus Christ! And to think I wanted to throw it out when we moved here. I was tempted, you know. Where did you squirrel it away?”

  “The attic, of course.”

  Mel smiled. She hadn’t been in the unfinished attic in all the years we’d lived there. Now the historian asked gingerly, “Do you think . . . Could I have a look?”

  The second person I told was Ramona. She’d headed the Bea Winston Agency since Bea’s retirement, when she also assumed responsibility as Clio’s literary executor. Not that there was much execution involved anymore. The Dismantled had slipped from university syllabi, as it had in the 1960s, before Bea helped revive it. “It’s too slow for readers nowadays,” Ramona explained once. “All those winding paragraphs don’t work with the 140-character crowd.” And Clio’s posthumous volume of short stories, which I’d helped bring into existence, had long been out of print.

  Through the phone line I could sense Ramona’s shudder of excitement. She had soaked up so much of Bea’s personality over the years that I sometimes joked about her being Mini-Me. “Oh, my God, Livvie, this is fabulous,” she said. “Thank you, thank you, thank you! This is going to break the literary world wide open.” I didn’t bother to correct her impression that my revelation was somehow for her. Ramona and I had shared the Gramercy Park apartment for four years, until she married the marketing guy, and I still harbored affection for her, talking to her more often than I did two of my sisters.

  And then there was Gerri. She and Renee had moved to western New York a few years before I did, and Gerri had accomplished her dream— founding an independent publishing house called Aurora Books, which had become a leader in literary fiction and nonfiction.

  “Can you do dinner this week?” I asked as casually as I could.

  “Renee’s booked solid for weeks. I hardly see her myself. How about the end of the month?”

  “I meant just you and me,” I said, and my oldest friend let several long seconds slip by. We always met as a foursome, either at their house or ours. “There’s something I want to tell you.”

  “You okay, Liv?”

  “I need some help.”

  She breathed in sharply. “Is it Mel?”

  “No, no. It’s a work thing.”

  The next evening, I met Gerri at the Moosewood Restaurant in Ithaca— her favorite place. She and Renee had become vegetarians after they left the city; I tried in solidarity, but it didn’t stick.

  “You scared the shit out of me on the phone,” Gerri said when we had our soups and salads. “First thought, cancer. Second, divorce.”

  It wasn’t as paranoid as it sounded: Gerri herself had pulled through breast cancer, and Renee’s parents had stunned everyone by divorcing after fifty years of marriage.

  “This isn’t anything you could ever imagine,” I said. I laid out everything as she picked at her salad and ignored her squash soup. A thin skin formed on top as it cooled in the bowl.

  Gerri waited until I finished to speak. “You didn’t . . . Did you bring it with you by any chance?”

  Of course I had. “Holy shit,” Gerri said as I removed it from the trunk of my Subaru. We sat in the car with the lights on while she leafed reverently through the manuscript, nervous about cracking the brittle pages. “Wow, she really did carve it up. We’re talking literary bombshell. Or at least a scholarly one.” Her next words made heat rise to my cheeks. “And you’re s
ure this is what Clio wanted?”

  There’s a specific way that a family member— like, say, an older sibling— can work their way under your skin to your vulnerable spot, and Gerri was nothing if not my sister-of-choice. We had annoyed the hell out of each other so many times over the years and had even stopped talking for brief periods. Now, I hated her for homing in on my self-doubt: Am I doing the right thing?

  I snatched Clio and Flora’s work from her hands. “So, you’re basically saying you don’t trust me.”

  She stared at the manuscript in my lap like it was some strange species she didn’t recognize. If she knew how to rile me, she also knew how to win me back. “You’re the best editor I know, Liv.” She flashed an exaggerated, confident smile. “After me, that is.”

  • • •

  After several meetings with Ingrid Coppersmith, we settled on this: I would permit her access to my own recollections and to Clio’s literary showstopper, but only if Aurora Books could publish the new biography. At first Gerri protested what she viewed as nepotism, but she eventually gave in when I suggested that the press’s proceeds could fund a residency for a woman writer at Cornell. She agreed, then, that keeping Clio close seemed like the safest route.

  When the biography appeared in the front window at my local bookstore, the cover stopped me cold on the sidewalk. I’d seen it on the Aurora website, of course, but the printed volume carried so much more weight. There were Clio’s penetrating eyes, their azure translated to smoky gray in the black-and-white photograph, the dashing novelist sitting for her portrait in the Paris studio of Man Ray wearing the pearls I still kept in a drawer— Dismantling Clio Hartt: Her Life and Work, by Ingrid Coppersmith. I found myself buying a copy, even though Gerri planned to deliver copies to me herself.