by Ed Ifkovic
Clorinda, fluttering, reached for the iced tea. “Annika is a calming influence on Dakota.” Another throwaway line.
Tobias went on. “The only theater is a church hall.”
“Clorinda,” I began, “an idle question. Last time when I mentioned Nadine Chappelle, you were horrified. In fact, you ran out of the room. You didn’t know Dak’s ex-wife was in town…”
“Stop!” she yelled. Her fist pounded the table. “Did you hear what Tobias was saying? She is Hollywood. She tried to destroy my boy…that…that foolish marriage. I could not believe that she’s come here. To Maplewood. She came back with one purpose. To seduce him back to Hollywood.” She pounded the table again. “I won’t allow it.”
I’d had enough. “There was even the suggestion that you employed Evan to seduce Nadine as a way of getting Dak to agree to an annulment…”
I stopped, so raw was the look on her face.
“How dare you, Miss Ferber?”
“I have these questions. Believe me, Clorinda, I’m trying to save Dak from a murder charge.”
“And you do it by accusing me of being a…a panderer?”
“I’m trying to clear…”
George was clearing his throat. “Edna.”
Tobias stood, his small body shaking. All of us turned to look at him as he trembled, head bobbing, his skin an awful purple. He shook his fist at me. “How dare you? In my own house. How dare you?” He reached out toward Clorinda, his fingertips touching her extended hand. It reminded me of Adam and God in Michelangelo’s famous ceiling fresco. Fingertips touching. The blessings of heaven on earth. The merest touch that suggested volumes. Tobias grabbed at his heart and bent forward. “How dare you? My wife is a saint.”
Chapter Eleven
The desk clerk called to me as I headed into the breakfast room. “Miss Ferber, a package came for you this morning.” He handed me a rectangular box wrapped in wrinkled brown paper and tied with white string. I joined George at the corner table and as the waiter poured me coffee—with the whipped hot milk I requested—I tore open the package. An exquisite drawing in a burnished gold Victorian frame, the fully realized landscape that Dak had promised me. Finished now, and beautifully done: the result of his sensitive, intimate touch. A luminous work that reminded me of the Durand landscape Dak had pointed out to me. A woodland scene in lush summer. I fairly lost my breath. An accompanying note said, briefly, “Miss Ferber, as promised. Fondly, Dak.” The drawing was signed on the back: Dakota Roberts for Edna Ferber, Orange Mountain in Summer.
“I know where I’ll hang this.”
George smiled. “I’ll sell you the one he made for me, Edna. Then you’ll have a matching pair.” A lengthy pause while he lifted a coffee cup. “Oh, that’s right. I haven’t received mine yet.”
“I’m the one who believes in his innocence.”
“As do I.”
“I’m…looking into it.”
“And I’ve been your tagalong jester, Sancho Panza lurching uphill while you tilt madly at windmills.”
“Jealousy is an awful thing, George.”
“Edna, eat your breakfast. You have a long day. You need to hide the painting so I can’t steal it, attend a rehearsal under my direction, and catch a murderer. In that order.”
“It’s not funny, George. Evan is dead.”
His voice got small but with an edge. “Oh, I know, Edna. And I’m worried that you’ll blunder into something that will get you killed.”
“Nonsense.”
“I joke about everything, my dear, but I’m not joking about this.”
I touched Dak’s gift affectionately and tucked it back into the box.
“I have a busy day. I’ll be rushing back to the city after rehearsals, George. I need to meet with Doubleday, and I’m having dinner with Aleck.” Aleck Woollcott was a close friend who invited me to dinner after a brief business meeting with my publisher. Aleck Woollcott, bon vivant and critic, the inspiration for the popular drink, the brandy Alexander; and, unfortunately, the enormously rotund instigator of some of my most vitriolic and smoldering feuds. At the present time, however, we’d called a pax manahatta. The two of us were cut from the same piece of easily bruised cloth. Tonight’s dinner—a prelude to Aleck’s making the trek to Maplewood next week for my own final curtain—was to test the waters. Aleck could not wait to see a disaster. Or perhaps not. Lately, I’d practiced good behavior, cloyingly sweet with the café society legend, though sometimes it took all my strength to avoid the easy skirmish with the gloriously round Aleck.
“Are you going to behave yourself this time, Edna?” George grinned his ah-shucks Huck Finn grin.
“Why should I?” Then I smiled, too. “We’re friends this summer, Aleck and I. I’ve decided to have peace in our time. I have nothing on Chamberlain selling out Czechoslovakia.”
George stood. “Good. Time for rehearsal.”
Which went smoothly, with George very pleased. Louis almost dropped me in a crucial staircase scene, but didn’t. Panicking, he jostled me as if I were a burlap sack of old potatoes. His face turned scarlet as he whispered an apology. As the author of The Royal Family, I was treated with undue reverence, and Louis Calhern, a longtime star player and robust man, usually picked me up as though I were a fragile Ming vase. George, noting his tentative scooping up of the lovely authoress, had yelled, “Christ, Louis, imagine she’s a clay pot from Woolworth’s.”
“Thank you, George,” I answered back.
“Edna, that’s not a line from the play I wrote.”
Everyone laughed, and so did I. Louis, grinning, swooped me up as though I were a bale of hay and hurled me up the stairs.
Spontaneous applause, and Louis bowed. I tried to look ten pounds lighter.
After lunch, I caught the Lackawanna into Manhattan, a half-hour ride. Arriving at bustling Penn Station, for a moment disoriented by the ebb and flow of rushing crowds, I veered toward a taxi stand to head uptown. Queued up, hit by a blast of noxious bus fumes, I turned away, shielding my face. My eyes locked on a small kiosk where daily newspapers were suspended on a rack.
The New York Post, a subway tabloid usually considered by me as tawdry yellow journalism, caught my eye, an array of papers hanging left to right. The garish big-font headline:
NAZI NOSE DIVE!
Stunned, I handed over a nickel and scanned the front page, looking at the sheet-covered corpse positioned on a subway platform, alongside a steel post that identified the stop as Times Square.
“Lady.” I looked up as the young man squiring folks into taxis called to me. “You going or not? I ain’t got all day.” Grumpy, yet oddly friendly, the paradoxical mix of New York City attitude. I nodded and slipped into the backseat and gave the address of Doubleday.
To this day I cannot say how I knew, what dark atavistic impulse told me, but I knew under that morbid sheet was the body of Gus Schnelling. No matter: sometimes my journalistic nose understood situations long before my intellect grappled with them. A nose for news, my father once called it.
The Post misspelled his name: Gus Shelling.
The article contained very little information. There had been a much-publicized Nazi rally at downtown Union Square, which drew upwards of fifty people, many of them carrying placards and banners displaying swastikas and the ferret-like visage of the German madman. Inside the Post there was a photo taken of the rally—arms raised in grotesque salute, straight-out, rigid, menacing. A fiery speaker lauded Hitler’s economic rejuvenation of the Rhineland—and his rapid dominion over brutalized Europe. Photographs of families, too, with one man holding up a child whose simpering grin especially alarmed me. The father was a beefy lout, adenoidal looking, and a woman with stringy hair and pasty face clung to his arm. The starved, pinched faces of the Depression. Other men and women celebrated German ascendancy, German-American alliance, the awful Bund, a
worship of the Führer, whose redundant picture dominated so many posters. Swastika armbands graced upper arms. Nowhere in the photo—I stared, eyes close to the grainy shot—could I see Gus Schnelling or Meaka Snow.
Yet, hours later, his body lay on a subway platform blocks north of Union Square.
The rally had been rowdy, the Post reported, the police ringing the crowd as anti-fascist protestors yelled catcalls at the Nazis. The boisterous rally was intended as a crowd-provoking preamble to a speech in a hall up in Yorkville at ten that night. But Gus never made it. After the rally, a dozen cohorts headed through the underground, planning to make a transfer at the Forty-second Street subway stop. Some vociferous protestors followed, monitored by the police. Both groups screamed at each other, and the police broke up fistfights. On the packed subway platform at Times Square, around nine o’clock, an hour after the rally ended, the jostling crowd shifted. While police restrained another aggressive protester who tried to assault a taunting Nazi, the train approached and, in a flash, one of the Nazis, standing on the edge, was pushed into the path of the speeding train.
Gus Shelling (their spelling), aged twenty-seven, of uncertain address, was pronounced dead moments later.
Witnesses said an old man, white-haired and wearing a baggy trench coat despite the awful heat down there, had deliberately pushed Gus. The sign Gus carried flew into the air, and in the ensuing panic, as cohorts tried to reach him before the train crushed him, the old man had fled up the stairs and into the street. In the confusion the police, alerted, rushed to rescue Gus, not realizing he’d been pushed. When others yelled about the old man, they gave chase—to no avail.
I read and reread the short piece. Horrible, such a death. A violent end to a life that celebrated violence. What mattered now was that a young man had been crushed to death. Awful, awful.
There was no mention of Meaka Snow. I wondered whether she’d been there, at his side, the loyal comrade in a frightening cause. Gus’ convert who came to love his cause. The Nazi maiden with the electric hatred.
Gus Schnelling, dead. Evan Street dead, his crony. Or enemy? Gus who wanted to retrieve something from Evan’s room. Something incriminating? Evidence? Had he killed Evan? Well, Constable Biggers need not monitor the swaggering Gus any longer.
Now his full attention would rest on Dak.
Dak.
Back in Maplewood, a short train ride away.
***
My business at my publisher’s concluded successfully, I met Aleck Woollcott for an early dinner at Maxim’s on East Sixtieth Street, a familiar if pedestrian watering hole and eatery for the ragtag remnants of the old Rose Room of the Algonquin Round Table, long gone now but nostalgically remembered. Aleck relished the French cuisine because the elegant dessert cart, wheeled past him a number of times in the course of our dinner, was calculated to get the obese man salivating and tongue-tied. I liked the place because they always remembered my name and gave me the table by the front window. The maitre d’ had a wife who had memorized parts of Show Boat—the autographed copy I gave her insured copious sherry aperitifs and the coveted table. The spoils of fame, mocked by me in my fiction yet, sadly, savored by a woman who liked her fame and fortune.
“Edna,” Aleck began, “we’re all driving out on Saturday.”
“All?”
“I’m gathering carloads of your enemies, but I fear such a caravan would clog the highways.”
“What cattle car are you commandeering?”
He squinted. “Fat jokes, Edna? A week in New Jersey and you’re already indulging in puerile humor.”
“I seem to recall that you were born in New Jersey.”
He shut up, peering at the menu. “Ah, sirloin with fried potatoes.”
Aleck sat back, adjusting his eyeglasses. A huge man, round as a bowling ball, with an owl-like pink face and short, pudgy fingers, he looked the court eunuch in his rumpled white linen suit that was his one summer look. For a while he discussed recent croquet games played in Central Park and at the Swopes estate at Sands Point, Long Island—everyone’s current passion, Aleck being particularly good at it. George despised sports—except for croquet. Aleck told me an anecdote of Harpo Marx trying to cheat, which I’d heard before. Noteworthy games went on for eight or nine hours, Aleck indefatigable at the obsession. “Really, Edna, no one can beat me.”
Then, suddenly, as we were served our dinners, he looked me in the eye. “I hear you’re involved in a murder in Maplewood.”
“Evan Street, an understudy.”
A smile. “Let me ask you this, dear Ferb. How are you going to get away with it?”
I cut into my steak and then held the knife toward him, menacingly. “Aleck, if I’m going to murder someone, I’d pick a more expansive target to shoot. Then I wouldn’t need a good aim. Just fury.”
“Nice, Edna. Did you rehearse that witticism?” He chuckled. “Tell me all about it.”
So I did, and Aleck, a curious man with keen observation, listened closely as I chronicled Evan’s death and the cast of characters in Maplewood.
He reflected, sipping his cocktail, “You know, Edna, I talked to Louis Calhern one night.”
“Louis?”
“Yes, an old friend, but this was before the murder. He did mention an understudy that got on Frank’s nerves, and he was a little peeved at Cheryl for bringing him into the mix. Frank’s not one to abide nonsense. Evan, I assume. Too good-looking for his own good. Louis told me that this Evan seemed too…hungry. A cocksure lad, annoying as spit.”
“Aptly put, Aleck, I grant you. A man who relied on his looks and glib tongue.”
“Good looks. Hah! You have to feel alone in the world to develop a personality.” He let me consider the words for a minute.
“So you know Frank Resnick?”
“Everyone on Broadway knows Frank. Except you, of course, who only socialize with the very rich or the very poor. All the rest—that middle road of drab functionaries—you cavalierly ignore. Not colorful enough for you. The rich intrigue you with their corruption and secrets, and the poor intrigue you with their pettiness and secrets.”
“Well, thank you. Wit and wisdom from the oracle of Carnegie Deli.”
“Ah, my dear Ferb!”
“Tell me about Frank.”
“An efficient stage manager, much in demand, though Louis and I both discussed why he is in exile with you in Maplewood. People leave New Jersey—they don’t go there. Not willingly. Not without a judge’s mandate. Once again, you’re the exception. And Frank, too.”
“I wondered the same thing. He’s giving undue attention to a charming young man who is suspected of murdering Evan.”
“My, my, Edna, a regular cesspool you inhabit in that sylvan glen.”
“Tell me about him.”
He sat back, his fingers drumming the dessert menu. “Frank has always been a quiet, quiet man, almost a hermit. No one is ever invited to his place on West End Avenue. He refuses most invitations to get-togethers, unless mandated—you know, the demands of staying alive on Broadway. He refuses to gossip and argue—though he knows a lot of scandal, let me assure you. And he has decided to avoid all facial expression lest an onlooker assume he cares.”
“But he obviously does care these days. He’s a different man in Maplewood, it seems. Nothing like what you describe. I can see it in his fury. His pointed—almost manic—defense of Dak. Why such a shift in character? He had a confrontation in the street with this…this Annika Tuttle, one of the zealots of the town.”
His eyebrows rose. “Really? Frank engaging in a street scene? Are you sure? The Frank I know walks away from confrontation.” He signaled to a passing waiter and ordered coffee—a pot, not a cup—and a strawberry soufflé and a Bavarian chocolate roll. “Anything for you, Edna?”
I shook my head. “No, Aleck. Go on, please.”
“Frank
led a wild younger life, if rumor is to be believed—and it usually is. I always believe the worst of people. That why I’m pleasantly surprised when I notice crumbs of decency in them later on. But Frank—where was I?—Oh yes, Frank spent or misspent his young manhood in Hollywood, supposedly as a budding actor. I gather he got caught up in a life of parties, drinking, drugs, mayhem, women who should know better, and sleepy-eyed mornings waking up in a sheriff’s cell. Hubba hubba, dance the night away.”
“Frank?”
“Amazing, no? But he went sober, cold turkey as some would term it—a horrible metaphor, the maligning of a very good Thanksgiving repast—and came back East. No talent for acting, he realized, and a decided talent for asceticism and monkhood and teetotaling. Edna, he’s no fun anymore.”
“But he stayed in the world of theater.”
“It’s in the blood, dear. You of all people should know that.”
“Well, he’s demonstrating signs of life in Maplewood.”
“I insist that is an oxymoron.”
“Really, Aleck, it’s a quaint village.” I smiled. “The heart of the town is actually called ‘the Village,’ capitalized.”
“Where folks are murdering one another—and not just the lines of The Royal Family.”
I shifted the subject. “I picked up the Post coming in. That young Nazi who was pushed onto the subway track was working on The Royal Family as an electrician.”
Aleck whooped, drawing the attention of the other diners. “Another death? Really, Edna, what is going on there?” Aleck contemplated both desserts the waiter placed before him. He groaned at the confectionary sight.
“Hold on, Aleck. I think it had to do with his fascist politics. He handed out a vicious Hitlerite leaflet as George and I sat on the porch of the Jefferson Village Inn. He and his girlfriend are—were, at least one of them—rabid followers of Nazism. The rally yesterday in Union Square.”
Aleck was shaking his head. “An ugly crowd, that. I read about it, of course. Good riddance, I say. Hitler Youth deserves no old age.”