Final Curtain: An Edna Ferber Mystery (Edna Ferber Mysteries)

by Ed Ifkovic

  “Ha!” Clorinda took a step toward me. “You seem to forget something, Edna.”

  “And what is that?”

  “On the night Gus was pushed to his death in New York, if I can believe the news accounts, I was dining with you and Tobias in this very house. Obviously a mistake on my part, such hospitality to a foolish woman, but, oddly, a blessing now. We were laughing heartily as dear, misguided Gus was toppling onto those tracks.” A dramatic sweep of her hands, that hypnotic voice covering the room now—the evangelist actress playing her last wonderful trump card.

  George stared at me, waiting, but there was twinkling in his eyes, a twitching of his lips, and, relishing the moment—he mouthed the words Last act—he bowed to me. “And?”

  A heartbeat. Silence, awful but deliberate. I had no proof, to be sure, but I’d anticipated a fierce coda to the question. So I waited patiently, while everyone watched.

  “I did it.”

  A squeaky, exhausted voice from across the room. We watched as Annika Tuttle swiveled in her chair, facing us for the first time. A haggard face, spent. A woman ravaged by a guilt that had plagued her for days, the sad young girl most likely manipulated by a voice that could not be ignored.

  I caught George’s eye. The same surprise there, though tinged with a trace of melancholy. We’d wondered if this moment would actually happen. It gave me mixed joy that it did because the sight of the doomed girl was overwhelmingly disquieting.

  “Annika,” Clorinda seethed. “Shut up.”

  Annika stood, though she gripped the armrest. “I did it.” A slight laugh, hollow. “On orders from a vindictive God.” She pointed to Clorinda. “She told me to. I believed her when she said God’s empire was crumbling, that Dak would be cursed, that Tobias was a sadistic tyrant, that she—only she—had God’s words whispered in her ear. I did her bidding, driving frantically to the city after Dak disappeared into his art, stalking the rally in Union Square, following Gus in the subway. Dressed in a homeless man’s coat and scraggly vaudeville beard and sloppy slough cap. I was one of God’s angels. I already knew what had happened to Evan. ‘Evan has to be taken care of,’ Clorinda told me. She paid him off, but he’d demanded more money. More and more. And right away. Afterwards I took the gun she handed me—wrapped in rainbow chiffon—and tossed it into Pierson’s Pond.” She smiled. “Where in winter Dak and I went skating. Where in the fall, at Pierson’s Mill, we bought apples together.” She stopped, shook her head wildly. “The gun smelled of death in her hands. God smites the unforgiven, the unclean. It’s the way of the Bible. Sodom and Gomorrah. Clorinda talked of Yael and Judith, Old Testament women who murdered justly—to save God’s kingdom. Israel. The wrath of a fearful God. Evan had to go. And so did Gus.” She fell back into her seat. “I did it.” A whisper. “For a God that doesn’t exist anymore.”

  Dak could barely speak, but he looked at her with sorrow. “You seemed happy when I said I’d planned to spend the night on Miss Ferber’s drawing. Be by myself.”

  “We did it for you.”

  Restless, Dak stood and paced the room. “Mother, no. Tell me—no.”

  But Clorinda said nothing. Tobias, his face purple with rage and wonder, waved a gnarled finger at her, and then, letting out a raw plaintive sound from deep in his chest, slunk out of the room. He bumped into George, and the framed poster he held crashed to the floor, the glass shattering. From the hallway his cries echoed, a sobbing man, lost.

  Annika was looking at Clorinda. “You promised me God and Dak.”

  George rolled his tongue in his cheek. “God has other plans for the two of you.”

  “I had too much to lose,” Clorinda said with a surprising fire to her voice. “I had all this to lose. I couldn’t. You don’t know Tobias. He’d take all this away from me. My fame, my church.” Suddenly she threw back her head, the jaw set, and fierceness came into her voice. I imagined Satan at the moment he understood that he would now reign in Hell. “They were sinners, those two. They had to die. The wrath of God on the infidel.” Suddenly she laughed so menacingly that Nadine burst out crying. “Evan laughed at me—said he expected monthly payments.” She laughed again. “His face when he saw the gun—‘You’re a preacher,’ he yelled. So the cynical man actually believed in something. And Gus, demanding money. Remember the Old Testament God, my friends. He abided no weakness, no disbelief. He didn’t forgive—he destroyed.” Her voice shook with fury as she raised a fist to the ceiling.

  George said the words from Billy Sunday that Tobias had once intoned: “I do not believe in a God who does not smite.”

  Clorinda looked at him, eyes blazing. She repeated that line. “I do not believe in a God who does not smite.”

  “But you’re not God.” My voice was even, cool.

  Still defiant, her eyes maddened, her voice rich with pride, “I work for Him.”

  “Not anymore.”

  George looked at me. “And the curtain comes down.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Opening night, the following night. The musical prelude began with selections from Show Boat—to honor me. The beginning of a weeklong production of The Royal Family. It was as though the murders of Gus and Evan never happened—as desired, the headlines in the morning press didn’t mention George or me. Constable Biggers and the state police swooped in, and I noticed that Constable Biggers, stoic to a fault, stood with his pad at the ready—with nothing written on it. He did have the grace to nod at Dak, and Dak swears he muttered something about not trusting religious zealots. He knew it all along.

  Opening night, and Louis Calhern, distracted, dropped me for real this time as he carried me up the staircase. An unladylike grunt from me, sputtering from him, and a whole lot of uncontrollable laughter from the audience, which, sad to say, was filled with many of my friends—and a few enemies—from Manhattan. I swear Dorothy Parker, sitting third row center, could not contain herself, because I recognized her high brittle laugh. Across the way Tallulah Bankhead rose and left the theater. Her distinct bourbon rumble drifted back from the lobby. “Goddamn!” The word punctuated the middle of one of my lines.

  Worse, given my best-seller fame, the important New York newspapers sent their top reviewers to opening night. The New York Times and the Herald Tribune, among them. They prepared their tongue-in-cheek reviews. Doubtless, for some, venturing beyond the sanctified borders of the Hudson and East rivers and into plebian hinterlands caused them to sharpen their pencils (or claws) or, at least, generate an undue reserve of bile; for one or two reviews dismissed me as “adequate” and not “very embarrassing.” A “workmanlike performance”—the kiss of death. Worse yet, the august New York Times saw fit to feature my name in bold relief—above those of the stalwart real actors, Louis Calhern and Irene Purcell—but, in a typographical mishap with wry results, misspelled my name as ENDA FERBER.

  Well, “enda” it certainly was, so far as my acting adventure was.

  My long cherished childhood dream of performing onstage was finally realized, and thus sated forevermore. For years I described myself in news biographies and interviews as a “blighted Bernhardt.” I’d best stick to writing my novels and short stories. Sometimes you have to have something placed squarely in your grasp before you realize you don’t really need it at all.

  Opening night, and my New York friends visited before the show—not afterward, as custom demanded. Before the show—ostensibly to wish that I break a leg. But, in truth, they feared, this body of cowardly souls, that my acting would be so dreadful, so humiliating, that it were best to avoid me when the curtain came down. I viewed this all with appropriate jaundiced eye and accepted their well wishes and premature huzzahs in good sport. What choice did I have? George’s wife Bea trooped in with Aleck Woollcott, who commented that my stage makeup as Fanny Cavendish suggested how I’d look someday in a velvet-lined coffin because my face seemed a Halloween specter. To which I shot
back, “Dear Aleck, my garish face can be scrubbed off with a hot face cloth. That’s one advantage I have over you.” He fussed and chortled, and I sensed one of our chronic and public feuds in the offing. Bea sighed and said flatly, “New Jersey seems to make you two talk like you’re on a grammar school playground.”

  Telegrams in my dressing room: “Love and Kisses to the Connecticut Duse”—from Alisa and Russell Crouse. “Gaylord Ravelstein Wishes Fanny Cavendish Great Success”—from Moss Hart.

  Yet that first night—and the following week—the dust of the previous days lingered, collected around the corners of my long hours. The deaths of Evan and Gus threw dark shadows into the Maplewood Theater. The Royal Family is a sprightly, sophisticated account of a venerable Broadway family—not, I insist again, the Barrymores—and the audiences roared and clapped and stood on their feet. Yet there I was, delivering lines George and I had written, waiting for the necessary laugh…and yet behind me, like some elusive specter, Evan and Gus haunted. Men of questionable virtue, perhaps, but nevertheless men who did not deserve their moments of dying chosen for them. No, indeed! I really didn’t know them, but of course I did: we meet them every day of our lives.

  So the week went on, and I discovered I was colossally bored by acting. What nagged was the awful routine—arrival at the theater, enduring the makeup, spouting the same lines night after night (and two matinees). Tedious, I learned, and numbing. I welcomed the end of the run. Those poor souls who act a part for a year or more, night after night, oblivion, the absolute abyss of boredom. Not for me, though I looked at the actors who recited my lines with new appreciation and wonder. When the week ended and I made my final bow, my final curtain, I could have wept for joy.

  That week, and the month to follow, summer passed into fall, the rest of the story unfolded—sad, but, in a way, bittersweet.

  Clorinda and Annika were taken away in a blaze of headlines and newsreels. Such is the price of fame and fortune that when you fall…well, the descent is long and spectacular. Icarus topples down and down into the blue waters. Yet Clorinda, perhaps a little maddened now, remained defiant and strident, not giving a modicum of remorse, her behavior somehow justified in the eyes of the God she created for the hopeful. In court she stood wild-eyed, arms flailing, and spouted Old Testament maxims, a steady flow of them that ignored the judge’s straightforward questions. She held one hand up and toward the high-placed windows in the chambers, and she announced that the coming world war was God’s punishment for what we had all done to her. “God doesn’t like to see His angels in chains.”

  Tobias disappeared. There was a front-page photograph of him in the Newark Press as he stepped out the front entrance of the Assembly of God, his driver Alexander padlocking the edifice behind him. He looked small and wizened, his face sagging under the weight of his loss. For Tobias truly believed in his God as he believed in his beloved Clorinda as the emissary of that vengeful God. Smitten with her, the old crusty bachelor, he lavished diamonds and other baubles on her, believing that a decorated Clorinda would also dazzle the worshippers. Like a medieval European Papist cathedral, resplendent in stained glass and marble frieze and carved-wood altar, plopped down in the middle of an impoverished world. So, too, Clorinda, flying across a stage in swirling rainbow chiffon and diamonds that caught the celestial light, was a beacon for the hungry believer. The only problem was that those cathedrals continue to dazzle. Human fragility and woe pass.

  So Tobias was shattered and abandoned his bride to the harsh judicial Fates. The Assembly of God was no more, the luxurious manicured grounds allowed to go to seed, birds nesting in the spire, feral dogs driving off the curious Sunday drivers who parked out front. And Tobias vanished with his millions, hiding away from reporters. One rumor said he retreated into a Park Avenue apartment, but who knows?

  Reporters noted that he did not return to the homestead out on Burnett Terrace. Hidden out in the bushes, their cameras ready, they saw nothing. Or, rather, they glimpsed Ilona now and then, though her biting condemnation drove them back. At night, I was told, the vast mansion was buried in darkness, save for one light at the back of the house, one light in a back bedroom, Ilona’s sanctuary. It stayed on all night long.

  On my last afternoon in Maplewood, the set taken down, Cheryl Crawford at the Jefferson Village Inn sitting with Paul Robeson as they discussed the next production, The Emperor Jones, the brief moment of The Royal Family was over. Louis Calhern and Irene Purcell ran for the train back to New York, luggage overhead.

  George and I sat in the Full Moon Café, a valedictory lunch with Frank, Dak, and Nadine. Dak’s invitation to us, which surprised. After the arrest of his mother and Annika, he became sullen, moody, almost angry. We left him alone, George and I, watching the sad young man grapple with yet another abandonment in his short life. During the week’s run of The Royal Family, he stayed away from the theater, and Frank simply shook his head when I asked about Dak. “Time.” One word from Frank. “Time.”

  So as George and I prepared to leave, Dak called us to the Full Moon Café where Mamie Trout, once a visitor to Clorinda’s puritanical religion, seemed a little distant. Yet she was graceful. George swooned over her apple crumble—the man who was indifferent to food—and she brightened and offered him another slice.

  “I visited Annika,” Dak began.

  We waited. I watched Dak get teary-eyed, turning his head away. He rubbed his eyes with the back of his wrist. Nadine reached over and touched his arm.

  “A sad, sad young girl.” My benediction.

  George spoke softly. “And how is she?”

  Dak forced a wistful smile. “She wouldn’t see me, so I came away.”

  At the time of Annika’s arrest, she’d pulled herself into the oversized chair, hugging her knees up against her chest, her head dipped out of sight. I thought of a beaten pet, cowering, closing itself off, retreating. Annika, that bright young zealot so passionately devoted to Clorinda, had revealed the cracks in that world. The cloudiness in her eyes. But in the last days, as she realized what she’d done—and the wrongness of it—those cracks widened, ate into her, until she was without focus. Shattered, ruined. The awful deed she’d perpetrated ate into her. Taken away like a hesitant lamb, she sobbed quietly. My heart went out to her, of course, this lovely girl.

  A day later, in a screaming jag, she had a terrible breakdown, attempted to take her own life, and was sent to the asylum in Newark. There, numbed by whatever medication given her, she stared at the cement wall.

  “I wanted to see her,” Dak went on.

  “This is not your fault.” I looked into Dak’s eyes.

  “Some part of me says it is.”

  “No,” I stormed. “This story has lots of victims, and you’re one of them. Annika, weak and hungry, listened to a powerful voice that made her kill. She was looking for a mother but found a…a dictator.”

  “Still…”

  I held up my hand. “You have a chance to create a happy life now, Dak. Do it.”

  He smiled. “We will.” He looked at Nadine. “That powerful voice made me leave Nadine. It won’t happen again.”

  Nadine was nodding at him. “We’re going to be married again.”

  “In the Congregational Church I attended as a boy. Before the loving God I remember from my early childhood.”

  George pointed a finger at Frank. “And maybe you’ve found a father, Dak.”

  Dak grinned like a little boy. “Of course, I have.”

  Frank had a catch in his throat. “Well, we don’t know for certain.”

  Dak stopped him. “I do. That’s all that matters.”

  ***

  That night I was back in my Connecticut house atop that tree-covered hill in Easton, my refuge from the world. Early evening, I sat alone on the stone terrace and watched night fall on the rolling hills. Lush and deep green, the garden lay before me. My housekeeper had p
repared a succulent salad with the overripe tomatoes and leaf lettuce from my own garden. I had a bowl of sweet peaches in cream, the luscious fruit bought at the market near the train station. Satisfied, a night I’d longed for. Not the clamor and shriek of Manhattan that I’d given up last year, the spurt of buses and the noxious fumes of squealing taxis. No, here was a night so quiet with only the hum of insects in the bushes, fireflies lighting on the hedges, the sporadic click-click of the persistent crickets. The heat of the August day gone now, a cool breeze like a zephyr swooping down from the massive oak trees on the hills that surrounded me.

  But I couldn’t rest. Idly, through my solitary supper, I’d leafed through the day’s New York Times. Again, the horror of Europe slapped me in the face. Hitler’s marauding troops. Capitulation. Despair. Death. All that grief before me. The horror of the last decade as I watched that madman assume power—the moustached dictator—until, at last, the invasion of Poland. The end of Czechoslovakia. The Third Reich. The Battle of Britain. The end of it all.

  On the front page of the Times was an article about another Nazi rally in Union Square, and there, forefront, was a grainy but recognizable snapshot of Meaka Snow. The camera caught her facing off a protester, her hateful sign slung back over her shoulder. The photographer caught the blankness of her stare. I’d dropped the newspaper to the ground, dismayed. The message on her placard was hard to decipher but one word was evident: Jew.