by Ed Ifkovic
He held up his hand. “I can read your mind, Edna.”
I smiled. “I know you can.” I thought of something. “Did you ask around about Blake Somerville? His supposed stint as a Broadway actor?”
He nodded. “I called some directors, agents, anyone I could think of. No one has heard of Blake Somerville, the small-time and short-lived actor.”
“Perhaps a stage name?”
“If that story is true.”
“I guess so. But I need to find out more about him.”
“I’ve put the word out, Edna. If anyone knows anything, they’ll get back to me. You know how many bit players there are in our world.”
“We’re all bit players, George.”
He pointed a finger at me. “Some folks get bigger bits than the rest.”
“And he had to have an agent, right?”
“Unless it was some role down in the Village in a back room. Experimental, who knows? An unfathomable Strindberg translation.”
I shook my head vigorously. “No, not this man. His ego demanded Broadway.”
“But a bit part?”
“Nevertheless Broadway.”
“Well, the word is out.” He gathered his gloves, ready to leave, but glanced over my shoulder.
“Wait. What’s the matter, George? You look ready to tell me something.”
He grinned. “I guess you can read my mind as well.”
“Not much of a challenge, frankly.”
“Very nice.”
“You know what I think of your mind.” I smiled. “Well?”
“Aleck has been calling me.”
I breathed in. “I’m not surprised.”
“He’s not a happy man these days.”
“He’s not a happy man most days.”
“No, actually you’re wrong. Aleck enjoys his life these days, holding court as he luxuriates in his bathtub, beating folks at cribbage, fashioning an atrocious pun as he reclines on his sofa, his left leg curiously tucked under him. You’ve seen him in his glory. He was always the lonely fat boy in the corner, a little too girlish, dressing up in college in women’s clothes so people would laugh at him, but he was miserable all along. Now, he’s a celebrated raconteur, a popular radio personality…”
I broke in. “Tell me what he said.”
“I gather your columns in the Times have aroused some dissent.” A broad, toothy grin, savored. “Which, I told him, is what columns are supposed to do.”
“Did you read today’s column?”
“Yep, my dear. Your incisive attack on those who view the trial as a society event, the women with the minks and Rolls-Royces, the pearls, the laughter. Edna with a social conscience.”
“Exactly.”
My morning column dealt with the way in which the rich and famous found the trial a wonderful diversion from the cash flow of their Manhattan lives. I wrote, among other things, “It is considered chic to go to the Hauptmann trial.” Bruno—“the line his body makes from shoulder to ankle as he sits there is fluid, graceful. A painter or sculptor would be pleased with it.” But the face of a corpse. His voice as dead as his face. My parting salvo, a snide remark about our sloppy jurisprudence that played into the diabolical hands of good old Herr Schicklegruber.
“All the mink coats were saying to the Saville Row topcoats and burgundy mufflers, ‘Hel-lo, dar-ling! How are you! Isn’t this divine? Isn’t it wonderful?’”
I added, “It was horrible and sickening and depressing and wonderful, and it made you want to resign as a member of the human race and cable Hitler, saying, ‘Well, Butch, you win.’” Now, staring at George, I repeated that line.
“I know, Edna. I read it. Everyone read it.”
“I cringe when some sable-clad matron screams out ‘Divine!’ as she buys a cheap souvenir of that infamous ladder.”
He bit his lip. “Aleck said you’re not making friends there.”
“That’s not my problem, George.”
“Winchell is on the warpath.”
“Again not my problem.”
I reached for the check, squinted at the amount, and opened my purse.
“He wants me to convince you to temper your comments. They see you as pro-Hauptmann,”
“But I’m not.” A silly grin. “I’m anti-carnival and circus and kangaroo court. I want fairness. Did he really expect me to obey his command?”
He laughed. “Or that you’d listen to me?”
“I know what they’re saying, George, but Lindbergh is so worshipped…”
He spat out, “That Bruno Hauptmann has not a chance in hell.”
“My editor at the Times told me to write human interest pieces, to flesh out the lives of the players. That’s all I’m doing.”
“I don’t believe that, Edna.”
A heartbeat. “Neither do I.”
“Something stinks there, Edna. We all know that it’s an unfair trial.”
For a second I closed my eyes and felt like sobbing out loud. “Bruno may be guilty as all get out, but he shouldn’t be railroaded. A fair trial, George. I look at Germany, and Hitler and his storm troopers, and think…in America, it’s different. It has to be different, George. Otherwise how are we different from that monster over there?”
He sighed and stood. “I don’t think that’s possible in Flemington.”
“Neither do I.” Now I was crying. “Neither do I.”
Chapter Twenty-two
The alarm clock jarred me and I sat up in bed, facing a window slicked with ice crystals. Five a.m., still dark out, a faint white light at the horizon seeping in, giving the rooftops I glimpsed a misty halo. Bundled up, gloves in hand, I walked through the deserted lobby and began my morning stroll. I needed to walk because I needed to think. Another column due for the Times, a tedious routine I was weary of, but the trial was coming to an end.
A smattering of questionable witnesses for the defense, a motley assortment of charlatans and carnival sidekicks who did nothing to bolster Bruno Hauptmann’s defense. Indeed, just yesterday, watching Reilly mindlessly not challenge the fact that the discovered body of the baby was definitely Little Lindy, his assistant lawyer Lloyd Fisher yelled, “You are conceding Hauptmann to the electric chair,” and stormed out of the courtroom, to which Bruno added, “You are killing me.”
The identification of the baby’s remains was controversial—were they Little Lindy? So much decay…so much police bungling…
Reilly was never his best after drinking his lunch nearby. So as Wilentz skewered the testimony of the defense witnesses, I watched Bruno Hauptmann’s rigidly stoic face. A twisting of his head and a flash of irritation suggested his own bafflement as to why Attorney Reilly allowed such dreadful testimony. So be it, the winding down. The awful denouement of a tragedy, not Grecian, to be sure. More Jersey kangaroo.
I walked through the cold morning streets, not a soul out but me, the way I liked it. And my mind sifted and parsed and deliberated—and, finally, realized the anger I’d been experiencing was gone, replaced now by a deep sadness.
Yesterday the Times had purposely and cruelly, so I considered, run my column alongside Aleck’s own piece, a conscious juxtaposition that highlighted the different viewpoints he and I had been evolving. A firestorm erupted in the hallways of the Union Hotel. My gentle piece, “Anna and Anne: Two Mothers in Flemington,” was a bittersweet sketch of the two women at the heart of this case, both with the same first name, really, both mothers of boys, both facing horrible loss. An elegiac piece, intended to focus on the common ground the women shared. Yes, Anne was born rich and privileged, old American stock, Jersey royalty. Yes, Anna was a poor German immigrant who survived a brutal war and a struggling penurious life in the Bronx. The lives of women seen through the cockeyed prism of national headlines.
But Aleck’s column was a strident condemna
tion of Bruno Hauptmann, a sneering assault on the evidence the defense presented, and a conclusion that only the electric chair would even the score. “Bruno made that ladder with his own hands and it was to be the death of him.” A paean to Colonel Lindbergh—“America craves a hero just as parched earth craves the rain”—and, incidentally, rhapsodic praise for Anne Morrow Lindbergh. Aleck made comparisons of Hauptmann with Hitler, an insidious slap in the face. “Like Adolf Hitler, with whom he has a lot in common, he is a recognizable neurotic by-product of the German surrender of 1918.” His opinions, of course, and he is welcome to them.
But buried in the short piece was a veiled attack on…me.
Me, Edna Ferber. He bemoaned women journalists, in particular “one very familiar to me, indeed, long a friend,” but called them—called me—“sob sisters whose misguided adoration at the shrine of Bruno clouds the reality, fawning novelists who sentimentalize and thus forgive.”
My fingers trembled as I read those words.
Worse, my own column, admittedly sentimental and romantic, seemed to bolster his argument—and I looked silly, a condition I despise in women and refuse in myself.
I walked, my pace quickening. My breath froze in the crisp air.
A horse-drawn milk wagon lumbered by, and I smiled—1935, the triumph of the age of the machine, a line of parked automobiles on both sides of the street, some chugging smoke as the drivers warmed them up, but the farmers carted milk as though it were 1835. The butter-and-egg man. The bread man. I felt a sentimental tug of my heart. I was a little girl back in Appleton, Wisconsin, sitting on our front porch on North Street, watching Peter McClusky’s son Joe dropping off a quart of milk and a quart of heavy cream. Peter—Petey—the boy I danced with at Ryan High School.
By the time I walked back to the hotel, the sun was up; a few cars crept along, motors humming; and workmen passed by me, tipping their denim caps courteously. I was feeling better.
As I always did each morning that I walked, I paused in front of the boardinghouse where Annabel and Peggy had lived, my silent tribute to the two women I refused to forget about. That story still roiled in my brain and needed an ending. But this morning, lingering there, wrapping my cold arms around my chest, I heard banging and clanging on the side of the building. Nosy, I turned into the driveway and discovered that someone was rifling through boxes of trash. In the dim light, shadowy in the tunnel between two buildings, a figure was hunched over, tossing debris onto the ground, so intent that he did not notice my presence.
“Christ Almighty, man,” A voice yelled. The landlord stormed from the back entrance.
The intruder, startled, rushed away, empty-handed, and ran in my direction. He nearly bumped into me as I stood there, transfixed, and I came face-to-face with a red-faced Joshua Flagg.
“Mr. Flagg,” I sputtered, “what…?”
But raising a hand as though to push me out of his way, he barged past me, letting out a fierce grunt that reminded me of a trapped animal suddenly freed of its shackles.
“Just who are you?” I yelled to his back.
He ran down the street, a weaving wobble, left, then right, as though trying to avoid a hail of bullets.
The landlord wasn’t pleased to see me in his driveway either. “You,” he yelled.
“Well, yes, me, Mr. Trumbull.”
“What do you want?”
I stammered, “I was walking past, heard the clamor, and watched that man rifling through your trash.”
He glanced down the street, but Joshua was no longer in sight. “Trash day, this day,” he said by way of an explanation.
“What?”
“I put out the trash on Tuesdays.”
My eyes shot to the lopsided cardboard boxes piled next to some galvanized pails. “What was he doing?”
He’d started to back up, ignoring me, but now he turned. “Well, I finally cleared out that room a couple days back.” He pointed to the boxes. “Ain’t got no relatives I can locate—or care to locate. Sheriff says throw it all away. The murdered girl and the one what froze in the snow. Old clothes and movie magazines and snapshots and tubs of makeup and little else of value. A bottle of whiskey I got for my troubles.” A nervous smile. “A few bucks in their purses with their makeup and such. Owed me rent for the room, them two. After the fact.” He eyed me challengingly. “Due me, that money, wouldn’t you say?”
“I couldn’t care less, sir. But I’m intrigued by what that man thought he’d find in the trash.”
“He come around before, asking to go into the room.” A harsh laugh. “He’s crazy, that one. One more reporter, I guess, but I told him to get lost.” He shrugged his shoulders. “So what does he do? He waits till I haul out the trash and he’s there like a tenement rat climbing over the crusts of bread in the garbage.”
With that he tossed me a slight wave and turned away. Over his shoulder, he smirked, “You ain’t planning on going through the trash, is you, lady?”
“I’ve seen enough trash for one day, sir.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning it’s time for my coffee.”
***
In the café a waiter was placing white linen tablecloths on the tables, smoothing them out with deliberate care. He looked up as I strolled in and gave me a toothy smile. “You look frozen to death, ma’am.” A boy perhaps seventeen, gangly in his uniform, the pants too short as though he’d outgrown them since coming to work that morning, cowlicky hair and pimply face. And that farm-boy grin. I liked him immediately.
“I am.”
“The cure is coffee.”
“With fresh whipped cream,” I added.
He stopped short. “Oh, I heard about you.” But he rushed off to the kitchen.
Sitting behind me at a corner table was Horace Tripp, his back against a wall as he stared across the room. I wouldn’t have noticed him but for a raspy sigh that made me look back. I caught his eye. He stared through me. Wearing his white linen jacket, unbuttoned, which surprised me, he slouched in the seat, his elbows on the table and his gaze glassy. As I watched, he snapped out of his reverie, spotted me focused on him, and tossed back his head. “Well, well, Miss Ferber.”
“Mr. Tripp.” I nodded at him. “You seem unhappy.”
A whiskey laugh that went on too long. “I just got sacked.”
“Fired? Really?”
He bit the corner of his lip. “Yeah, I walk in and the boss says it’s time to go. And me already dressed in my monkey outfit with the fake smile plastered on my face.”
“And I thought you loved your job.”
Suddenly his face collapsed, his mouth sagging. “Funny thing is, I did. I…” His words trailed off.
I stood. “May I join you?” But I was already walking toward his table, even though it was clear my words alarmed him, his hand flying up to stop me. I wanted to talk with him.
Sarcastic, a tilt of his head. “Have a seat then.”
“Thank you.” I sat opposite him. “I’m sorry.”
He seemed to be gauging my comment, distrustful, but then, breathing in, he simply said, “Thank you.”
Sitting there, a tad disheveled, his careful hair now uncombed, he seemed less the suave Lothario slinking around the café, his leering eye sizing up available women. Now, to my surprise, I found myself admiring his looks, that pronounced Leyendecker chin and those high cheekbones. A wisp of gold in the corners of his gray eyes, quite appealing and utterly dangerous. A sleek, expensive man with the slightest suggestion of a glutton’s paunch as he stretched out in the seat. But a charmer, this one.
“What happened?”
“Why do you want to know?” But he smiled as he spoke.
“I’m a nosy writer. A phrase that in itself is redundant.”
That puzzled him but he let it slip by. “My wife.” Said, the two words hung in the air, explosive, l
oud.
“Martha?”
A sliver of a grin. “I only have one wife, Miss Ferber.”
“But many romances.”
“Good for you, Miss Ferber. Kick a man who’s down.”
“One of my specialties, George Kaufman once told me.” I stared into his face. “I always thought you saw such dalliance as a touchstone of your manhood.”
“Again, Miss Ferber, another salvo.”
“I’m sorry, but I have little patience with men who cheat on their wives.”
He broke in. “I can’t help myself.” A pause. “But you don’t want to hear that, do you? I can see you readying another shotgun blast to my ego.”
“Tell me what happened?”
“I thought Martha understood.” He held up his hand as he saw me opening my mouth. “No, please. Anything I say is going to inspire you to…”
“Inject truth?”
“Yeah, truth. Let’s go with that word.” He covered his chin with his hand, and when he dropped his hand into his lap, his lips were trembling. “Sooner or later she would leave me.”
“How long were you married?” I asked.
“We just got married. I mean, six months ago. A whirlwind romance in Newark, if such things can actually happen there. A short time in Manhattan looking for work. Both of us headed here to the Union Hotel Café for this job…this trial.”
“How long did you know her?”
“A matter of weeks.” A deep sigh. “Impulsive, that’s me. She fell for me, would you believe? She begged for marriage. I thought, well, maybe it’s time.”
“So now she’s divorcing you?”
His voice became fierce. “I don’t give a damn about her or this job. It’s that she’s been real vindictive. She went to the sheriff.”
I sat up. “About what?”
He debated telling me, drumming his fingers on the table. Finally, resigned, he said, “She told him that I snuck out of the café after Annabel left work—that I disappeared for a half hour.”
“Did you?”