Judge Gitlin nodded thoughtfully and took a pull at the bottle of Scotch. This time Zelda didn’t yell at him. “It’s not as easy as you make it sound, Jonathan,” he said quietly. “First of all, you are a minor yourself and there is no court in the land that would give you the custody of an infant child.”
“Why not?” I asked. “All I have to do is file a birth certificate that I’m her father.”
“You can’t do that,” the judge said. “There are many legal problems to surmount. A search would have to be conducted for any possible relatives or family. Then if there are any, consents would have to be obtained, and if not, she would be made a ward of the state until her disposition was settled.”
“That’s stupid,” I said. “What’s to stop me from just going off with her?”
“You know better than that, Jonathan.” He looked at me thoughtfully. “But there might be a way to keep her close to you with much less of a problem. However, it would take the assistance of Jack and your mother.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“If they were willing to adopt her, I could find ways to expedite things.” He paused for a moment. “But that is a decision they would have to make for themselves. It’s something we can’t urge on them.”
I turned to my mother. She was looking down at Danielle and crying. Jack went over to her and knelt by her side. He looked up into her face, down at Danielle, then up at Mother again.
He cleared his throat. “I always wanted a little girl.”
***
There was one more task to be done. The following month, two days before Thanksgiving, my brother, Daniel, and I took my father home. The first winter chill had frozen the ground, and while the grave was being dug, I walked Daniel up the hill to where the still had been.
There was nothing there but a black hole in the ground and a mass of tortured tubing burned and melted black with the earth. I stood there for a moment, then turned away. It seemed as if only yesterday I had been there, but yesterday was forever.
We walked back down to the cabin. It was already falling apart. The curtains Betty May had been so proud of were nothing but tatters, and the new paint was already peeling off the wood. Most of the windows were broken and the cold air blew through the room.
Daniel looked at me. “So this is where it all began. I never knew.”
“No one ever knew,” I said. “I wouldn’t have known if he hadn’t shown me. And it was here I began to learn about the goodness of him and how much I really loved him.”
We went back up the knoll to the cemetery. The grave was almost ready. Finally the two gravediggers climbed out and placed the two-by-fours across the open grave. They laid the heavy canvas straps across the planks, then went down the knoll to where the hearse was waiting.
We watched as they were joined by the driver and his assistant and took the coffin out of the hearse. Slowly, carefully, they made their way up the knoll. Despite the cold, I could see the sweat standing on their faces as they walked past us to place the coffin on the two-by-fours. They stepped back, each man taking up an end of the canvas strap, and looked at us expectantly.
I turned to Daniel. He and I had agreed that we did not want a minister. He nodded. The man pulled on the straps, raising the coffin slightly. I kicked one two-by-four out of the way; Daniel kicked the other. Slowly, the men lowered the coffin into the grave. Just as it settled to the bottom they snapped the canvas straps loose and brought them up.
Daniel and I bent down and each of us picked up a handful of earth and threw it into the grave on top of the coffin. Quickly the two men began to shovel back the earth. At first, it rattled hollowly against the wood, but gradually the sound grew muffled. At last they were finished, and giving the earth a few final pats with their spades, they went down the knoll, leaving the two of us alone.
Daniel looked at me. I nodded. He turned back to the grave. His voice husky and low.
“Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.”
I looked and saw the tears running down Daniel’s cheeks. I reached for my brother’s hand and held it tightly. “If you listen, Daniel, you can hear him.”
It was like a whisper on the breeze.
***
“Thank you, my sons.”
Harold Robbins, Unguarded
On the inspiration for Never Love a Stranger:
“[The book begins with] a poem from To the Unborn by Stella Benson. There were a lot of disappointments especially during the Depression—fuck it—in everyone’s life there are disappointments and lost hope…. No one escapes. That’s why you got to be grateful every day that you get to the next.”
On writing The Betsy and receiving gifts:
“When I wrote The Betsy, I spent a lot of time in Detroit with the Ford family. The old man running the place had supplied me with Fords, a Mustang, that station wagon we still have…. After he read the book and I was flying home from New York the day after it was published, he made a phone call to the office on Sunset and asked for all the cars to be returned. I guess he didn’t like the book.”
On the most boring things in the world:
“Home cooking, home fucking, and Dallas, Texas!”
On the inspiration for Stiletto:
“I began to develop an idea for a novel about the Mafia. In the back of my head I had already thought of an extraordinary character…. To the outside world he drove dangerous, high-speed automobiles and owned a foreign car dealership on Park Avenue…. The world also knew that he was one of the most romantic playboys in New York society… What the world did not know about him was that he was a deadly assassin who belonged to the Mafia.”
On the message of 79 Park Avenue:
“Street names change with the times, but there’s been prostitution since the world began. That was what 79 Park Avenue was about, and prostitution will always be there. I don’t know what cavemen called it; maybe they drew pictures. That’s called pornography now. People make their own choices every day about what they are willing to do. We don’t have the right to judge them or label them. At least walk in their shoes before you do. 79 Park Avenue did one thing for the public; it made people think about these girls being real, not just hustlers. The book was about walking in their shoes and understanding. Maybe it was a book about forgiveness. I never know; the reader is the only one who can decide.”
Paul Gitlin (Harold’s agent) on The Carpetbaggers after first reading the manuscript:
“Jesus Christ, you can’t talk about incest like this. The publishers will never accept it. This author, Robbins, he’s got a book that reads great, but it’s a ball breaker for publishing.”
From the judge who lifted the Philadelphia ban on Never Love a Stranger, on Harold’s books:
“I would rather my daughter learn about sex from the pages of a Harold Robbins novel than behind a barn door.”
On writing essentials:
“Power, sex, deceit, and wealth: the four ingredients to a successful story.”
On the drive to write:
“I don’t want to write and put it in a closet because I’m not writing for myself. I’m writing to be heard. I’m writing because I’ve got something to say to people about the world I live in, the world I see, and I want them to know about it.”
Harold Robbins titles from RosettaBooks
79 Park Avenue
Dreams Die First
Never Leave Me
Spellbinder
Stiletto
The Betsy
The Raiders
The Adventurers
Goodbye, Janette
Descent from Xanadu
Never Love A Stranger
Memories of Another Day
The Dream Merchants
Where Love Has Gone
The Lonely Lady
The Inheritors
The Looters
The Pirate
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Harold Robbins, Memories of Another Day
Memories of Another Day Page 47