50
PREPARATIONS
Hector let himself into their room. Hannah rose from the typewriter and said, “I’ve been worried.”
He kissed her hard.
Smiling, Hannah said, “What’s that for?”
“Just good to see you.”
“What’s been happening? You’re late.”
Hector went for the kind lie: “Just errands. Baby asleep?”
“Probably for another hour.”
He smiled, toyed with the top button of her blouse. “Spare a few minutes from your writing?”
“Aye.” She looked at her bandages. This smile: “Still a bit stiff, though. Achy. May need your help undressing.”
“Entirely my pleasure,” he said.
***
Bridget was still asleep; Hannah was still lingering in bed with Hector. The phone rang: Mary calling to set up their next day’s interview.
“Time we get back at it, eh, Hannah? How are you feeling by the way? Okay after the accident?”
“Feeling much better,” Hannah said.
Mary changed the subject again: “I have an idea for the dustjacket art for our book! It’s a collage of old photos of me, but painted. Just have to find the right painter.” The cover concept struck Hannah as daft, but designing book jackets seemed to be a task Mary took real delight in.
A second call came five minutes later. This one was for Hector. He slid from her arms and began to dress. He said, “My parcel has finally arrived. Going to run out and get it.”
Hannah said, “Parcel? What’s in it?”
“Something for your interview tomorrow,” Hector said. “Old momento from Hem, or really, from Pauline Hemingway, his second wife. Something I’ve been holding onto for a long time and a very special occasion. May loosen tongues. I’ll fetch it now. Shouldn’t take long.” It wasn’t as devious as Creedy’s mystery brew, but Hector wagered it might have roughly the same effect.
***
That night, Hannah again lay in bed with Hector, sprawled half atop him, waiting for their hearts to settle. She said, “I was reading more about you at the library today. This article by this guy, Bud Fiske.”
“About half accurate,” Hector said. “The usual thing: People, even real good friends like Bud, too often confusing me with my characters. Happens to me all the time.” He waved a hand, trying to brush it all away. “It’s getting old. Persona killed Hem. I really believe that.”
Hannah nodded slowly, then kissed his chest. “The novel you’re writing now isn’t going to help any of that.”
“Too late to reinvent myself now, Hannah. Too late, leastways, under that byline. You’ve gotta dance with the muse who made you. Once they brand you, that is.”
He remembered then, and slid from the bed. He slipped his Colt under the pillow and climbed back in bed with her. Hannah said, “You’re not serious, are you?”
“I sleep that way all the time. Until the past few weeks, anyway. Out of deference to you, and out of trust in you, I stopped. Figure dicey as things are around us now….”
Hannah half-smiled, still skeptical. “You really always sleep with a gun under your pillow?”
“Really. Always.”
“What have your other woman had to say about you doing that?”
“Some of my other women are what got me started doing that.”
“Murder is born of love, and love attains the greatest intensity in murder.”
— Octave Mirbeau
51
DEATH IN THE MORNING
When she arrived at the Topping House, Hannah found Mary sipping a drink that reeked of cocktail. It was 10 a.m.
“You’re at it early,” Hannah observed.
“It’s noon somewhere.” Mary frowned, then smiled her closed-mouth smile. “In New York, say. Figure my liver is still on Eastern Standard Time.”
“Aha.” Hannah shrugged off her coat, pointedly exposing her bandaged hands and arms.
The old woman held up her drink, letting it catch the morning light. “My latest craze,” Mary said. “One ounce of sloe gin, an ounce of brandy, one-quarter lemon juice and half of an egg white, served in a chilled cocktail glass. Here, taste—it’s yummy.”
Hannah was careful to sample from the opposite side of the glass from which Mary was drinking and took the smallest sip—just enough to get the taste of it. She hated the drink and made a face.
“Yuck. What’s that called?”
“‘Kiss the Boys Good-bye.’ Want one?”
“Sorry. I’m back on the feeding detail.” Bridget cooed in her still-bustier mother’s arms. The maid took the baby from Hannah and bustled out of the room.
Hector entered then, holding his mysterious parcel. He leaned down and kissed Mary on both cheeks. He said, “Thanks for yesterday. And enough with the musical comedy drinks, Pickle. I have a big surprise for you. Something from the wicked old days.”
Mary beamed mischievously. Hector held up his parcel, then pulled out a pocketknife and cut the twine binding it. He pulled loose the brown paper wrappers and opened the box and pulled out more packing material…soft foam. He said, “My housekeeper, Carmelita, maybe overdid the packing of this.” Finally, he pulled out the bottle.
Hannah, frowning, said, “What’s that?”
Mary, smiling, said, “Oh, I think I know. Aren’t you the wicked one, Lasso?”
Hannah said, “What is that?”
“Absinthe,” Hector said. He pulled out another smaller parcel. “Drip spoons and glasses,” he said. “Trust you have some sugar cubes around, Mary?”
Another wicked smile. “You can trust, Lasso.”
Hannah said, “I thought absinthe was illegal.”
“Very,” Hector said. “And for a long time. Back in 1935, in the Keys, an old painter brought three bottles of absinthe to a party at Hem’s. This is the last of those bottles. After Hem and I had our falling out in ’thirty-seven, Pauline brought the last bottle to me. Said to hold onto it, thinking the three of us would share it once she had patched things up with Papa…taken him back from Martha. Once Hem and I had made up. All of that didn’t happen like that.”
Hannah wrinkled her nose. “Still safe to drink?”
Hector shrugged. “Hard to imagine it being more damaging than it was in its prime.”
He winked at Mary. He said, “In vino veritas, yes? Warm the belly and loosen the tongue? You game, Pickle?”
Mary winked. “Set ’em up, Lasso.”
Hector smiled and began preparing the absinthe.
“I’ll pass on this, Hannah said.
“Absolutely,” Hector agreed. “Bridget’s too young to make her an absinthe fiend just yet.”
Hannah was a bit dubious about Hector’s strategy to get Mary drunk on absinthe: The widow Hemingway was already in the alcohol fog zone. Mary smiled drunkenly at her. “So, where do we start, Daughter?”
“At the end,” Hannah said, smiling. “I told you: Richard has the rest covered.”
“But you might think to ask something that he didn’t.” Mary smiled and accepted her first glass of absinthe. Hector seemed determined to nurse his.
“I’ve read your draft of your memoir,” Hannah said. What a slog that had been. Pressing ahead, she said, “I honestly can’t think of anything else to ask about those years before summer 1961.”
“Fine,” Mary said grouchily. “Fire away, MacDuff.” She took another drink of absinthe. She said, “You know, it’s the first time I’ve had this. I could learn to love this. Jesus, it’s got kick.”
“Like a fucking mule,” Hector said. “But when it’s gone, it’s gone.”
Hannah said, “What did you mean about ‘not depriving a man access to his possessions?’ I mean, when you locked up all of Papa’s guns, then left the keys to their hiding place in plain sight? What were you really thinking?”
Mary smacked her lips and sipped some more of her forbidden drink. “I know what you meant. Christ, Daughter: You go right at it, don’t y
ou? Jesus.”
“What did you mean? About the keys, I mean.”
“I meant what I said and I said what I meant.”
Hannah shook her head. “I truly believe this is the most important thing left for us to talk about, Mary.” Hannah moved closer, looking into the old woman’s eyes and shaking her head sadly. “You know as well as I do that you have been vilified by everyone who loved your husband for that statement. By those who feel you somehow failed Papa —”
Pure venom from the widow now: “Ernest failed me. And he failed himself, the big weak cocksucker. He failed the concern.” Mary’s face was red.
Hannah held her ground. She sighed deeply. “Mary, I’m not telling you anything you haven’t heard or read about yourself before,” Hannah said, soldiering on. “The faithful aren’t kindly disposed toward you, not at all.”
Hector reached over and shook Mary’s knee playfully. “Painting you as a sympathetic character is a tall order, Mary, you have to admit that. At least it’s so when it comes to Hem’s most passionate readers and scholars. You’ll probably see the strongest attack against you made next year, when this professor from Columbia publishes his biography of Papa. I’ve heard his treatment of you in the book is acid. This is your chance to cut your critics off at their knees. You can neutralize them with candor, I think. Tell them why you locked up the guns, then deliberately left the keys in easy reach. Be frank and pull no punches.”
The widow seemed to think about that. She chewed her lip. Hector watched her. He knew the look: casing angles; weighing gambits.
Hannah crouched down and squeezed Mary’s hands. “This is about your legacy, you know. Your long game. You have to fight, and fight to win. The rest,” Hannah said, stroking Mary’s hair with her bandaged hand, “the rest doesn’t matter.”
Mary was fuming, her already prim mouth a blood-red gash now. She batted away Hannah’s hand. “How long am I going to be forced to deal with this fucking, horse’s-ass question? You’re almost as bad as your useless fucking drunken husband, pressing me on this fucking, tired old blather. How fucking dare you? Remember, you’re working for me, missy.” Mary held up her empty glass. “I’m empty, Lasso.”
Hector handed her his barely touched glass and set about making two more.
Hannah kept her voice even: “It’s the only question that matters Mary—the one that stands between you and historical revilement, or respect. And you certainly do know that. It’s the only question that matters and the only one you’ve never satisfactorily answered. It’s the question your critics will be asking long after we’re all dust. Don’t leave the critics and scholars this one with which to speculate and play games. Not if you value your reputation. Not if you care anything about the judgment of history. That’s the long game we both play to win, now. The hands of history are on our shoulders this morning.”
Hannah was very aware of Hector watching her…measuring her strategies and angles of attack. She sensed he was taking a wary new measure of her. He was so Old World, in some ways.
Mary scowled. “I thought you were on my side, Daughter.”
Hannah winked. “I am. I’m doing my job—the one you recruited me for. I’m doing what Papa, or Martha, or more importantly, what you, as a professional journalist, would do: I’m trying for the story as it truly happened. In the end, that’s the only thing that counts for writers like us, aye? Damn the consequences and the window dressing. Tell it how it was, just like you’re titling your memoir. But you must dare to go even further than before—far out past the points you’ve ever gone before now, as Papa did at his best. But you must go still further—far beyond where Ernest ever dared go. Your own book doesn’t tell the whole story. You weren’t ready to share it when you wrote that draft. The whole, bloody world wasn’t ready when it happened. But I wager you are ready, now. You’ve proven yourself a thousand times over and you stand above reproach. You’ve nothing to apologize for.”
The absinthe had Mary now—Hector had seen it in the eyes of a few others, here and there. He winked at Hannah—their agreed-upon signal to really move in.
Hannah scooted closer, crossing her arms on Mary’s lap, looking up into her eyes, imploring Mary to talk. “You stood by Papa and caught hell from him for your trouble. You stayed with him through his alcoholism and his depressions and his selfish brutalities and his sicknesses and stayed on through his decline into madness. You stuck by Papa to his bitter, bloody end, and, when he was gone, you nursed his reputation back from the abyss of his self-destruction. You restored and secured Papa’s greatness with your version of Feast. Don’t you know that you’re so far above and beyond reproach, Mary? Don’t shy away from it anymore: Tell me why, Mary. Why did you leave the keys out where you knew Papa could easily find them?” Hannah waited a beat. She pressed down harder on Mary’s bony legs. “Why did you leave them where you knew that Papa would find those keys?”
Mary drained her drink and dragged her sleeve across her tight little mouth. Her eyes were red-rimmed. “It was his time—long past his time. I owed it to him.”
Hannah said softly, “How do you mean that, Mary?”
“I failed Ernest so many months before—that awful Friday morning in April when I found him sitting there with the shotgun and the shells. I shouldn’t have gotten in his way. It would have been kinder to Papa to let him get the job done then and there. But instead I talked to him. Soothed and stalled him. He kept muttering over and over, ‘Today is Friday.’ I talked over him. Delayed and distracted him until George—Dr. Saviers—arrived. Then we overpowered Papa and sent him off to the shrinks—those fucking ghouls. I agreed to all their idiot treatments and those horrid electroshocks. It would have been kinder, in the end, if I had let Papa be that cruel April morning. Let Papa get the job done quickly and relatively painlessly when he was still capable of doing it for himself.” Mary looked up startled as Hector placed a big hand on her shoulder and squeezed. He handed her another absinthe.
Hannah’s skin tingled: When he was still capable of doing it for himself. Hannah sat up straighter. “Papa would truly have shot himself that morning, you think? Before the Mayo Clinic and the electroshock therapy?”
“Yes,” Mary said, her eyes wet now. “Oh, yes. He was ready. It was his time. In stalling him ’til he could be subdued, all I did was cheat Ernest of escape and consign him to a few more hellish months that destroyed what little was left of the man. He had every right to hate me at the end. And I waged my wars with him in letters and notes sent to him, bursting with ultimatums and indictments, just as his mother did. Those letters did neither of us any good.”
Mary searched Hannah’s face. The old widow’s eyes were full of tears, and something had changed in them. “Just as bad as your old man. Badger, badger until you break me down. Just like your old man!” She took another deep drink of the absinthe…her eyes going farther and farther away.
Then Mary began singing softly:
Soy como soy,
Y no como Papa quiere
Qué culpa tengo yo
De ser así?
Hannah pressed: “What happened to Papa?”
It seemed that Mary was a long way away now, living in some bad memory. “I tell you Daughter, Papa was clearly sick before that April morning. Sick, and so terribly tortured. He had been for years. All those awful injuries when the planes went down just piled up on him and destroyed him. The internal injuries and the terrible headaches. God knows how many concussions that poor old head of his sustained. When the second plane went down, there was a hole in his skull all the way down to his brain, and the stupid quacks were pouring gin in the hole and letting your papa drink while they worked on him. Papa was pissing blood and scraps of kidney for days.
“He was never the same after that,” Mary said, shaking her head. “He’d have these terrible dreams and he’d wake up screaming and I couldn’t convince him that he was truly awake and back safe with me. Papa said he couldn’t tell his dreams from what was real anymore, and
I said, ‘They’re still only dreams, darling and so what can it really matter?’ He sneered and said that I was a bloody fool.”
Now Mary slipped into an imitation of her late-husband’s voice, remembering some long-ago tirade, reciting it as if she were some rickety recorder: “‘Dreams are as real as any real thing that happens to you when you’re living within them,’ he said. ‘Dreams make you sweat and they make you short of breath as though you’re really living it all. Dreamers are overtaxed and given heart attacks and routinely die in their sleep because of the exertions they make in their dreams. We pull muscles from using them in our dreams and wake up with cramps. Hell, dreaming of loving can make the young and even some of the old—a lucky few—actually come…or haven’t you ever had a wet dream? Most of my own best little deaths have come in my sleep. Dreams, good or bad, are as real as the realest thing that ever happened to you when you’re alive and moving within their country. And anyway, these aren’t dreams I am having, they’re bloody fucking nightmares.’”
Hannah remembered the bad summer of her own crack-up, when she had been wracked by the same horrible condition: swamped by dreams so real and detailed and mundane—dreams too-accurately mocking the dismal, mundane rhythm of her day-to-day existence. They left Hannah helpless to distinguish her waking from her sleeping hours. Even now, there were events in her life that Hannah couldn’t be sure were real or imagined.
Mary sighed. “Ernest’s ability to discern what was real around him became fuzzier. It got to be that just a simple thing like television did wicked things to his poor beleaguered brain: I was enjoying a presentation of MacBeth when I suddenly realized that Papa was not absorbed in, but rather, terrified by the program. Papa was quite insane—but not crazy, and that’s the worst way of all to be.” Mary kneaded her knuckles. “I’m coming to know that, on my own.”
When he was capable of doing it for himself.
Hannah couldn’t escape Papa’s last wife’s observation. Mary’s phrasing of Papa’s earlier, failed suicide attempt still resonated. Hannah said: “July second, 1961: When you came down the stairs, Papa wasn’t dead yet as you have always said before, was he Mary?” As she asked the question, Hannah extended her hand. Hannah held her breath. Mary, with a shaking hand, reached out and squeezed Hannah’s hand.
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