When I articulated this fear to Isabel, she laughed. 'Honey, loss is an essential component of life. In many ways, c'est notre destin. And yes, there are certain things you never really get over. But what's wrong with that?'
'It's so damn painful . . . that's what's wrong with it.'
'But living is painful. . . n'est-ce pas?'
'Cut the existential crap, Isabel.'
'I promise you this – the moment you begin to accept that you're not going to get over it . . . you might just get over it.'
I kept that thought in mind during the next twelve months – when I drifted into a brief fling with a Danish jazz bassist, and wrote my weekly column, and spent long afternoons at the Cinémathèque Française, and (if the weather was clement) read for an hour each morning on a bench in the Luxembourg Gardens, and celebrated my thirty-third birthday by giving notice at the Herald-Tribune, and writing Joel Eberts that the sublet of my apartment should end by December thirty-first, 1955. Because I was coming home.
And on January tenth, 1956, I found myself back at Pier 76 on West 48th Street, stepping off the SS Corinthia. Joel Eberts was there to meet me.
'You haven't aged one damn bit, counselor,' I said after giving him a hug. 'What's your secret?'
'Constant litigation. But hey, you look wonderful too.'
'But older.'
'I'd say, "exceedingly elegant".'
'That's a synonym for "older".'
We took a taxi uptown to my apartment. As per my instructions, he'd arranged with the janitor to have it repainted when the tenants moved out before Christmas. It still reeked of turpentine and fresh emulsion – but the whitewash of the walls was a cheering antidote to the ashen January morning.
'Only a crazy person decides to return to New York in the thick of winter,' Joel said.
'I like murk.'
'You must have been a Russian in a former life.'
'Or maybe I'm just someone who has always responded well to gloom.'
'What a lot of dreck you talk. You're a survivor, kiddo. And a canny one at that. If you don't believe me, check out the pile of bank and investment statements I've left in a folder on your kitchen table. You hardly touched a cent of your capital while you were in France. And the rent from the sublet built up rather nicely. Also: your stockbroker is one sharp operator. He's managed to add about thirty per cent value to both the divorce settlement fund and Eric's insurance payout. So if you don't want to work for the next decade . . .'
'Work is something I can't do without,' I said.
'I concur. But know this – financially speaking, you're damn comfortable.'
'What's in here?' I asked, kicking a cardboard box that was by the couch.
'It's all of the accumulated mail I didn't forward to you over the years. I had it sent up yesterday.'
'But you forwarded me just about everything, except . . .'
'That's right. His letters.'
'I told you to throw them out.'
'I decided that there was no harm keeping them until your return . . . just in case you decided you did want to read them, after all.'
'I don't want to read them.'
'Well, your building gets its garbage collected once a day, so you can throw them out whenever you like.'
'Have you ever heard from Jack or his sister again?'
'Nope. Have you?'
I'd never told Joel about my reply to Meg's letter. I wasn't going to now.
'Never,' I said.
'He must have taken the hint. Anyway, it's all history now. Just like Joe McCarthy. I tell you, I'm no conventional patriot – but on that day in fifty-four when the Senate censured the bastard, I thought: unlike a lot of other places, this country has the reassuring habit of finally admitting that it got something wrong.'
'It's just too bad they didn't censure him three years earlier.'
'I know. Your brother was a great man.'
'No – he was simply a good man. Too good. Had he been less good, he'd still be alive. That's the hardest thing about coming back to Manhattan – knowing that every time I walk by the Ansonia or the Hampshire House . . .'
'I'm sure that, even after four years, it still hurts like hell.'
'Losing your brother never gets easier.'
'And losing Jack?'
I shrugged. 'Ancient history.'
He studied my face carefully. I wondered if he saw I was lying.
'Well that's something, I guess,' he said.
I changed the subject. Quickly.
'How about letting me buy us lunch at Gitlitz's?' I said. 'I haven't had a pastrami on rye and a celery soda in five years.'
'That's because the French know nothing about food.'
I hoisted the box of Jack's letters. We left the apartment. Once we were outside, I tossed the box into the back of a garbage truck that was emptying cans on West 77th Street. Joel's eyes showed disapproval, but he said nothing. As the jaws of the truck closed around the box, I wondered: why did you do that? But I covered my remorse by linking my arm through Joel's, and saying, 'Let's eat.'
Gitlitz's hadn't changed in the years I had been away. Nor had most of the Upper West Side. I slotted back into Manhattan life with thankful ease. The bumpy readjustment I had been dreading never materialized. I looked up old friends. I went to Broadway shows and Friday matinees at the New York Philharmonic and the occasional evening at the Metropolitan Opera. I became a habitue once again of the Met and the Frick and the 42nd Street branch of the Public Library, and my two local fleapit movie houses: the Beacon and the Loew's 84th Street. And every other week, I punched out a 'Letter from New York' – which was then dispatched, courtesy of Western Union, to the offices of the Paris Herald-Tribune. This bi-monthly column was Mort Goodman's farewell present to me.
'If I can't get you to stay and write for me in Paris, then I better get you writing for me from New York.'
So now I was a foreign correspondent. Only the country I was covering was my own.
'In the four years I was loitering with intent on the rue Cassette (I wrote in a column, datemarked March 20th, 1956), something curious happened to Americans: after all the years of economic depression and wartime rationing, they woke up one morning to discover that they now lived in an affluent society. And for the first time since the Roaring Twenties, they're engaged on a massive spending spree. Only unlike the hedonistic twenties, this oh-so-sensible Eisenhower era is centered around the home – a happy, reasonably affluent God-fearing place, where there are two cars in every garage, a brand new Amana refrigerator in the kitchen, a Philco TV in the living room, a subscription to the Reader's Digest, and where grace is said before every TV dinner. What? You expatriates haven't heard of a TV dinner? Well, just when you thought American cuisine couldn't get more bland . . .'
That column (written in one of my flippant H.L. Mencken-esque moods) caused my phone to ring off the hook for a few days – as it was picked up by the Paris correspondent of the very conservative San Francisco Chronicle, who used large quotes from it in a piece he wrote about the sort of anti-American rubbish that was being printed in an allegedly respectable paper like the Paris Herald-Tribune. Before I knew it, I was back in Walter Winchell's column:
News Flash: Sara Smythe, one-time yuckster for Saturday Night/Sunday Morning and recent professional American-in-Paris, is back in Gotham City . . . but not too happily. According to our spies, she's churning out a column featuring a lot of cheap cracks about Our Way of Life for all those bitter expats who choose to live away from these great shores. Memo to Miss Smythe: if you don't like it here, why not try Moscow?
Four years earlier, Winchell's smear would have killed all potential employment prospects in New York. How times had changed – for now, I received a series of calls from editors whom I used to know around town during the late forties and early fifties, asking if I'd like to have lunch and talk things over.
'But, according to Winchell,' I told Imogen Woods, my former editor at Saturday/Sunday (now the number two
at Harper's), 'I'm still the Emma Goldman of West Seventy-Seventh Street.'
'Honey,' Imogen said, digging into her Biltmore Hotel cobb salad, and simultaneously signaling to the waiter for more drinks, 'Walter Winchell is yesterday's chopped liver. In fact, you should be pleased Winchell took another swing at you. Because it's how I found out you were back in New York.'
'I was surprised to get your call,' I said carefully.
'I was really glad you agreed to meet me. Because . . . and I'm being totally honest here . . . I was ashamed of myself when Saturday/Sunday let you go. I should have stuck up for you. I should have insisted that someone else give you the news. But I was scared. Terrified of losing my lousy little job. And I hated myself for being such a coward. But I still went along with them. And that will always weigh on my conscience.'
'Don't let it.'
'It will. And when I read about your brother's death . . .'
I cut her off before she could say anything more.
'We're here now,' I said. 'And we're talking. That's what counts.'
By the end of that lunch, I was the new Harper's film critic. The phone continued to ring at home. The book editor of the New York Times offered me reviewing work. So too did his counterpart at the New Republic. And a commissioning editor at Cosmopolitan arranged a lunch meeting, telling me she'd love to revive the 'Real Life' column – 'only tailored to today's sophisticated fifties woman'.
I accepted the reviewing work. I turned down the Cosmopolitan offer, on the grounds that my erstwhile column was erstwhile. But when the editor asked if I'd like to do a lucrative six-month stint as the magazine's agony aunt – I accepted on the spot. Because I was about the last person in the world who should be giving out sensible advice.
The Cosmopolitan editor – Alison Finney – took me to lunch at the Stork Club. While we were eating, Winchell came in. The Stork Club had always been his haunt, his outer office – and though everyone in New York now considered Winchell's power to be on the wane (as Imogen Woods had told me), he still commanded the most highly visible of all corner tables, furnished with its very own telephone. Alison nudged me and said, 'There's your greatest fan.' I shrugged. We finished our lunch. Alison excused herself and disappeared off to the Ladies'. Without thinking about what I was doing, I suddenly stood up and walked towards Winchell's table. He was correcting some copy, so he didn't see me approach.
'Mr Winchell?' I said pleasantly.
He looked up and quickly scrutinized my face. When it was clear I wasn't worth his attention, he picked up his pencil and glanced back down at his copy.
'Do I know you, young lady?' he said, a hint of gruffness in his voice.
'Actually you do,' I said. 'But you know my brother even better.'
'Oh yeah? What's his name?'
'Eric Smythe.'
I could tell that the name didn't register, as he pursed his lips for a second, then continued making a correction.
'And how's Eric?' he asked.
'He's dead, Mr Winchell'
His pencil stopped for a moment, but his eyes remained fixed on his copy.
'Sorry to hear that,' he said, sounding dismissive. 'My condolences.'
'You don't know who I'm talking about, do you?'
He said nothing. He continued to ignore me.
'"He may be Marty Manning's best scribe . . . but he used to be a Red." You wrote that about my brother, Mr Winchell. He lost his job after that, and ended up drinking himself to death. And you don't even remember his name.'
Winchell now glanced up – in the direction of the maître d'.
'Sam,' he shouted, pointing towards me. I continued speaking – the tone of my voice remaining conversational, strangely calm.
'And I bet you don't even remember me, do you? Even though you wrote about me just a week ago. I'm the Sara Smythe who, "according to our spies, is churning out a column featuring a lot of cheap cracks about Our Way of Life for all those bitter expats who choose to live away from these great shores. Memo to Miss Smythe: if you don't like it here, why not try Moscow?" Amazing how I can quote you chapter and verse, Mr Winchell.'
I felt a hand touch my arm. It was Sam, the maître d'.
'Miss, would you mind going back to your table, please?' he asked.
'I was just leaving,' I said, then turned back to Winchell. 'I just wanted to thank you for that recent mention, Mr Winchell. You wouldn't believe how many work offers I've had since you wrote about me. It just shows how much clout you still wield these days.'
Then I turned and headed back to my table. I said nothing to Alison about what had just happened when she returned from the Ladies'. I just suggested we order a final round of drinks. Alison agreed, and motioned to the waiter to freshen up our gimlets. Then she said, 'I bet you Winchell will now write something about you drinking too much at lunchtime.'
'That man can write whatever the hell he wants,' I said. 'He can't hurt me anymore.'
But, after our one and only meeting, Walter Winchell never mentioned me in his column again.
Still, he really had been most useful on the professional front. I now had so much work on hand that I was pleased when the phone eventually went quiet again. It allowed me to get on with a large backlog of assignments. As always, I especially liked writing over the weekends – as it was a time when all my assorted editors weren't working, and when the vast majority of my friends were with their families. Sunday, in fact, was the one day I was assured of never getting a single call – which also made it the perfect day to work straight through without distraction.
Until the phone rang one Sunday morning in May at the early hour of nine. I reached for it.
'Sara?'
My pulse spiked. The phone shook in my hand. I had been wondering if this call would ever come. Now it had.
'Are you still there?' the voice asked.
A long pause. I wanted to hang up. I didn't.
'I'm here, Jack.'
Fourteen
'SO,' HE SAID.
'So,' I said.
'It's been a while.'
'Yes, it has.'
'How are you?'
'Fine. You?'
'Fine.'
He didn't sound fine. His voice was constricted, diminished. He was as nervous as I was. I heard street noises in the background.
'Where are you?' I asked.
'The corner of Seventy-Seventh and Broadway.'
Just like old times, I thought. Sneaking out of the house to phone me.
'Are you busy right now?' he asked.
'Kind of. I've got a deadline . . .'
'Oh. Too bad.'
'Sorry. It's just . . . well, work.'
'I understand,' he said.
'How did you know I was back in town?'
'Walter Winchell.'
'My biggest admirer.'
He laughed – but the laugh quickly transformed into a cough. It took him a moment to bring it under control.
The Pursuit Of Happiness Page 66