Now, lying again on his side, again crippled, again beaten to a pulp, with his cheek not in the dirt but on the nubby hospital sheets burnt with bleach, Frank was angry, he was furious actually, and it’s possible he’d been furious for many years and transmuted his fury into desire, furious that never again would he come to possess youth or love. And though he hadn’t wasted either of them entirely, neither had he protected them as fiercely as he could, if protection was even possible; and if protection had not been possible, then his fury came from the fact that no one had told him how brief the window would be. Or maybe they had told him—maybe it was obvious to everybody but him, maybe it’s the message Tenn was sending with his neglect, his abandonment—but he was too romantic to believe any of them or to pay attention or to swallow his pride, in which case he hated himself more than he already did, he was angrier than he’d ever thought it possible he, sweet Frankie Merlo, could be, this man who was once a boy so in love with life that he believed he’d dance his way through it up to the very last day.
He looked to that night in the hills above Portofino as the beginning of his punishment. Since then, it had been meted out in gradual doses, slowly, one poisonous drop at a time, over the years he continued to dare to live free, to love with abandon, to chase beauty whenever it crossed in front of him like a deer on a country road. Not once in those years with Tenn did he question his right to gorge himself on beauty until he burst, and then to drop everything to chase the deer into the woods for more. He should have known better. No one gets away with such a life.
The note to Anja he’d scrawled yesterday on the back of her letter was currently flying across the Atlantic, all the way to Madrid, on wings of hope and desperation. Frank pictured the note like that, like a determined bird on a lonely mission, flapping furiously, its neck outstretched. It would get to Anja as fast as it could, and when she received it, she’d pull down the trunk from her closet, fill it with her multicolored print dresses, and make her own frantic journey over the ocean to Frank’s bed in Memorial Hospital. From here, much restitution could be made. He could devote himself to Anja and her career—the way he had with Tenn’s—but on this go-round with a kind of purity. He could be monkish in his service to her, his body cleansing itself with each day that passed.
For a time, in the years after Portofino, he considered having a go with Anja, trading the title of Mrs. Williams for Mr. Bloom. They would have lived companionably together, splashing around in the waves, managing the sun. Would he have minded so much? Would Fate—or the Lord, if his mother was right about His existence and His judgment—have shown him more respect, or an ounce of mercy, for that sort of sacrifice? Would there have been a reward instead of this reckoning? Penance, his mother would call it. The priest has encouraged Reconciliation, that mystical sacrament Frank last practiced in grammar school.
Where was the priest, anyway? The next time he showed up, Frank would ask him why it was never too late to Reconcile, to confess, why God gave you a pass as long as, in your final hours, you admitted He was right all along. Frank and Father Kelly had little else to talk about over these long days and nights in the ward, why not introduce the subject of the Holy Lord’s pettiness? Their visits were strained rituals, and yet Frank came to tolerate, if not enjoy, the old man’s company. His ministry was a distraction from the endless wait for a single word from Tenn.
Over his time at Memorial, plenty of their friends had come or called on Tenn’s behalf, each delivering his excuses and promises and his secondhand wishes for good health. “We expect a full recovery and nothing less,” Audrey Wood had told him this very morning, in her dictatorial way, patting his icy hands, emphasizing the “we,” as if she were Tenn’s wife and not his agent, as if Tenn had just stepped into the next room and would be back in a moment with the tea and cookies.
The day Truman visited, he was sitting on the edge of Frank’s bed when they carried out the corpse of Mike Murphy, who’d died a few hours before. The body floated by them covered in a sheet. The only time the ward went quiet was for those ghostly processions. As soon as Mike was gone, the screams and shouts started up again. Somebody tossed his empty bedpan into the hole that the absence of Mike and his bed had left. Then all the guys started throwing their bedpans. In tribute. In defiance. It brought tears to Frank’s eyes. The clatter was like fireworks. Frank was in too much pain to get to his bedpan, so he motioned to Truman to do it before the nurses rushed in and put a stop to them. That was something: Truman Capote holding up Frank’s plastic piss tub and tossing it, ever so gingerly, across the room. Afterward, he wiped his hand on the sheet. “I’ll be back when you’re feeling stronger,” he said, and kissed him on the lips without shame.
Truman was the only friend who made no excuses for Tenn, for the cancer, for anything. “I hear he thinks you’re contagious,” he said, in the doorway. “Irene called him up the other day and gave him hell for it. For this—” He extended his arm to indicate the ward. “Now he’s going to hear from me!”
Frank nodded and closed his eyes. Truman stood there a few moments longer.
“Just hold tight, Frankie,” he heard him say, before he drifted off.
Frank and Tenn had both messed things up in the years since Portofino, but their mess was not unfixable, not to Frank, no matter what they’d said in the heat of battle. The shattered glass could be vacuumed up from the rug, or the rug thrown out, what did it matter, it was just cheap glass, it was just an old rug not even in fashion anymore. Their past may not be rewritable, but it was bearable. Frank didn’t want to go back to his old life with Tenn, or even start a fresh one with him. All the negotiation required for that was too far ahead, with too many steps in between, too many characters on the narrow stage. He no longer allowed himself the luxury of future plans. The only luxury he’d allow himself, for now, was the hope that, sometime in the next few hours or days, the hand that nudged him awake would be Tenn’s, that when Frank opened his eyes it would be Tenn’s face that greeted him, Tenn’s voice telling him it’s OK, baby, keep resting, there’s no party to get to anyway, no place more important to be than here, now let me catch you up on all you’ve missed. . . .
6.
THE SKELETON OF A SPARROW
Anja Bloom at fifty,” said Tenn. “Still immune from the ravages of time!”
They stood facing each other in the restaurant of the Waldorf, his hands in hers. It was the summer of 1982. His hands were dry and cold, though he had just shuffled in from the sweltering street. Anja had been waiting over thirty minutes for their one o’clock lunch date, sipping mineral water and reviewing Hovland’s notes on Sequence and searching her heart for the forgiveness she had narrowly convinced herself to show. Already her limp, reticent hands gave her away. Forgiveness had never come easily to Anja. Nineteen years had passed since Tenn had abandoned Frank to the desolate wards of Memorial Hospital, seven since he had explained away his actions in his Memoirs by turning himself into the devoted, heartbroken, misunderstood lover. In that time, out of loyalty to Frank, in revenge for his desertion, she had erased Tenn from her life.
She had spotted him immediately from the window in his wide-rimmed glasses and Panama hat. Broken as he was in that final act, his air of gentility still surrounded him like an atmosphere, thick with gravity and vapor. It permeated the glass. He had grown stout and now sported a bushy gray beard and what could only be called whiskers. There was a young man on his arm helping him to maneuver through the sweaty rushing sidewalk crowd, though Tenn seemed capable enough, at seventy-one, of doing so on his own. At the hotel entrance, the young man had kissed him on the cheek and pushed him gently but firmly toward the door the way a father does for his child on the first day of school.
Up close, Tenn’s complexion was rutted, pocked, pale, his eyes heavy-lidded and wet, as if he had been crying or suffering a bout of allergic fits. His clothes, at least, were presentable and familiar: a pressed button-down shirt open at the
throat, a gray linen suit in keeping with the pretense of an upscale midtown lunch, dress shoes appropriately shined, and a small Chinese fan poking from his jacket pocket. Anja had heard the stories and expected far worse.
That he’d read in the Times that she was back in New York for a spell, and that she had recently celebrated a birthday at a glitzy party on the Upper West Side, were the excuses he had given for his most recent letter with an invitation to lunch. The letter had sat unopened on her desk for two days until curiosity got the better of her. Most of the letter was nothing new. He didn’t expect her to believe him, Tenn wrote, but every word of his Memoirs was true to the best of his recollection. He’d loved Frankie. Frankie’d kept him tied down to earth. Since Frankie, he’d been floating, flying blind, wandering willy-nilly. Everything he’d touched had turned to dust. He’d been fighting some sort of curse since The Horse got sick, he wrote, a curse he was just now surrendering to. He was bone-tired. Finished. This lunch would be the last time he’d see her before he moved to the Far East, said the letter. Before he left, he wished to surround himself once more with a person who knew his goodness. It was unclear whether the goodness he referred to was Frank’s or his own.
Over the years, Tenn had sent Anja multiple iterations of this same letter. They had started in the months after Frank died. The letters waited for her at the front desks of hotels. Her manager forwarded them to her at her various new addresses in Madrid, in Amsterdam, in Los Angeles. The letters begged her to see him and to hear his side of the story. They talked big of parts he could create for her onstage, of film productions of Sweet Bird of Youth and Suddenly Last Summer that he could adapt to suit her great talent and beauty and range. It was possible Tenn did not remember writing these letters, that even this most recent one with his request for a lunch had been sent in a fog; it was possible that, last week, when Anja sent word to meet her at the Waldorf, he believed it to be her invitation to him and not her RSVP. If she trusted the stories, the pills and alcohol had finally taken their toll on Tenn’s memory and judgment and concept of reality. He had grown more paranoid and desperate and afraid. His only reliable and devoted company were those in his employ.
Why did Anja agree to meet him in this state at this time? Why now did she choose to believe his version of history, and, possibly, to forgive him? She supposed it was because she had fallen in love.
Tenn ordered a martini—a “see-through,” he called it—drank it all at once, and flagged down the waiter for another. He asked how long Anja planned to stay in New York. She said she was not sure. She did not mention Pieter Meisner, the Columbia professor of physics from whose bed she had just come, in whose apartment she had begun to keep clothes and books. Then followed a discussion on safe terrain: the lure of certain cities, the disappointments of others. He had recently become enamored of Bangkok, he said, one of the few places older gentlemen could go where they were still respected, where they were not lied to. The States showed men of his age and stature and proclivities no deference or loyalty, he said; neither did England or Italy, not anymore. Lose your youth, and you lose everything. Morocco had some promise, he said. Even Mexico offered intriguing possibilities. Thailand, though: it was Thailand where he must make his final settlement. Had she ever been, in her many exotic travels? She had not.
“I hear there is a problem with street crime in Bangkok,” she said.
He waved this away. “You befriend the locals, and they protect you. You grease their palms so they don’t clean your clock. Not the most honest system, I’m afraid, but its terms are clear. You pay one way or another.”
She said that sounded like a perfectly fine plan.
“And how do you find Svoboda?” he asked, the unprovoked pivot she expected, though not so early in the conversation. They still had empty plates between them. Neither had yet to utter Frank’s name. He gave her a thin smile and looked straight into her eyes, which brought on a wave of guilt she instinctively submerged. Jan Svoboda was the Czech playwright-director also mentioned in the Times article about her birthday party, the young phenom rumored to have written a new play of “magic and magnificence” and “extraordinary significance” especially for Anja Bloom, his favorite actress in the world. Anja had not yet appeared on any stage, let alone Broadway, though Broadway was where Svoboda could put her—or where she could put Svoboda, Hovland insisted—if she found the play worthy of her time and dedication. Hovland urged her against it; Mitchell, her trusted manager, was thrilled by the idea and by the play itself; Anja, the only person whose opinion mattered, was conflicted. Doing the play would mean staying in New York, a city whose grittiness and danger exhilarated her like a dare; it would mean many grasses matinées with Pieter, who stayed up all night to look at his stars and never taught before mid-afternoon; it would also mean eight shows a week in Times Square, which meant a long delay for Hovland’s Sequence, a script that showed magnificence and significance of its own.
“I think Jan is brilliant,” Anja said. “He reminds me of Visconti, precise and intellectual without the sacrifice of passion. Though this new play is not about the heart.”
“The heart is out of fashion,” Tenn said, gloomily. “It has been for some time.”
She wondered for a moment if that was true. It was not. “Crimes of the Heart,” she said. “I seem to remember it won the Pulitzer Prize last year.”
Tenn rolled his eyes. “Third-rate watered-down Mississippi Gothic melodrama!” he said, loud enough for the woman at the table beside them to turn around, recognize one or both of them, and stare. “‘A gruelin’ nightmare’ indeed! I walked out in the middle of Act Two.”
“Dreamgirls?” Anja offered.
“Will you do it?” Tenn asked. “This brilliant heartless play of Svoboda’s? Or will you finally let me write you something? I can have it for you quickly. Before the fall of the first autumn leaf. Before the end of August, if you can’t wait that long! Give me the opportunity.”
“I don’t know what I will do with Jan,” Anja said. “I am at a fork in the road.”
“I’ll write you something with heart and poetry and muscle,” Tenn insisted, his right fist striking the table. “I don’t understand life anymore, but I understand death. Death is the only thing that’s comprehensible to me now. I’ll write you something more transcendent and daring than Hovland and Svoboda combined could make for you.”
“You tried that once already,” said Anja, bitterly.
When the stage version of Suddenly Last Summer premiered off-Broadway early in 1958, Anja was in Germany with Hovland finishing Angle. At the time, she vaguely recalled being aware that a new play of Tenn’s had been paired with another of his one-acts, and that the entire production, called Garden District, was receiving mostly positive reviews. She recalled that she’d sent Frank a letter from Freiburg to say she was sorry to miss the goings-on in New York, but that she was nearly done with a film she and Hovland had great hopes for, and that she wished Garden District a long run. In the middle of that year came the release of Angle, the film that made Anja Bloom a star. She got so caught up in the buzz of Hovland’s worldwide vindication and the explosion of her own career that she stopped following Tenn’s and Frank’s and Visconti’s and everyone else’s.
One night in 1959, she agreed to go on a date with a minor actor. She did not recall the name of the actor or the film he took her to see, only that they were in Los Angeles and that it had recently become necessary for her to wear dark glasses to keep from being recognized. There on the screen, in the assumed safety of the theater, as the arm of the minor actor found its way presumptuously around her shoulders, came the trailer for Suddenly, Last Summer. The naked native boys rushed up the mountain, banging their strange instruments. Elizabeth Taylor talked with agitation of her white and transparent swimsuit, then fell to her knees on a sandy beach. Anja gasped. There she was, exposed, assaulted without warning, by a memory she had mistakenly assumed belonged
only to her. She understood immediately why Tenn and Frank had never once mentioned this rape of a play—now a major motion picture, now a vehicle for Elizabeth Taylor and Katharine Hepburn—in their conversations and letters in the years after Portofino. While Anja was finding her way as an actress, Tennessee Williams was twisting her and her mother and Paraggi and Testa del Lupo into a shameful nightmare to shock the world, purely for his own gain.
Anja interpreted Suddenly Last Summer as Tenn’s revenge on her for going beyond him in fame, as her punishment for not following behind him begging for scraps like an American actress. Hovland helped her to see the wrongheadedness of this interpretation. Like every great artist, said Hovland, Tennessee Williams shaped the clay of his experiences not into a literal representation but into an uncanny sculpture, one that bore within it a truth half recognized, half intuited, and entirely ineffable. Suddenly Last Summer belonged to her no more than The Rose Tattoo belonged to Frank, even though, without them, neither of these plays would exist.
“You’re not Catherine Holly,” Tenn said to her now as, one by one, more patrons of the Waldorf restaurant turned to glance surreptitiously in their direction. “Your mother is not Violet Venable. None of us is, or ever was, Sebastian Venable. Suddenly Last Summer was not for you, Anja, or even about you. That play was the detritus of my psychotherapy, the slime that leaked from my head when they shrunk it. It was my way of making sense of my time in Barcelona, not Portofino. It was a war cry against the butchers who called themselves doctors and cut out my sister Rose’s brain.” He looked away. “It also happens to be the last best thing I wrote.”
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