Stranger Than Truth

by Vera Caspary

  She yawned. “As far as I’m concerned one saloon is like another.” She ran her hands through her hair, pinned on the side of her head a pirate’s hat with a dagger hanging over her right eye, tossed a mangy fur cape over her shoulders, rubbed the toes of her slippers against her stockings and started out. In the foyer, as we waited for the elevator, she looked at herself in the mirror.

  “Would you say that face reminded you of old Gorgonzola? Very, very old Gorgonzola made from the milk of scrofulous goats.”

  The elevator stopped for us but Lola paid no attention. She was digging through the antiques in her pocketbook. At last she pulled out a tarnished lipstick. With tiny, caressing movements of her veined hand she painted a Cupid’s bow. A new group of Barclay employees was gathering before the elevators.

  “How the devil did you ever get that high-class job?” Lola asked. Her voice could have called the cattle home from far fields.

  I jolted her elbow. In the group around us there were probably one or more of Munn’s spies.

  Relentless, she boomed, “Not that I’d begrudge it to an ambitious fellow, but how a clean-cut type like you ever got a break in this dump is what baffles me. Have you also discovered where the body’s buried?”

  We had let three cars go by. Suddenly Lola decided that the art work on her mouth was finished, and shoved me toward the elevator. Someone hurried in behind us. I smelled toilet water and peppermint. It was Munn, dressed like a clubman in a velvet-lapelled overcoat and derby hat.

  “That’s how I keep my job,” Lola confided in her booming contralto. “I not only know where the body’s buried, I’ve got maps. X marks the spot. I’m doing my autobiography and when it’s published some juicy fruit is going to hang from the gallows tree.”

  The elevator bounced to a stop. Munn excused himself as he pushed past us. Lola thumbed her nose at his back.

  We took a taxi to the Algonquin. The lobby was filled with people waiting hungrily to recognize celebrities or be recognized themselves. “In twenty years,” Lola said, “nothing about this dump has changed except the costumes. When I started coming here skirts were so short that if a breeze blew your bra showed.”

  A crowd waited at the dining-room door. The head-waiter looked at me indifferently, but when he saw Lola, he was like a father whose wandering child has returned. Within seconds we were seated at one of the better tables.

  “We don’t see much of you anymore, Miss Manfred,” the headwaiter said and bent over our table like Essex before Elizabeth.

  “That’s what you tell all the girls,” Lola said.

  “You used to come every day, Miss Manfred.” The head-waiter’s brown eyes were reproachful. “Don’t you like us anymore?”

  “I don’t sleep with the better literary set now. Will you please have one of your nice waiters rush to this table with three old-fashioneds?”

  “Three, Miss Manfred?”

  “Two for me and one for my youthful paramour.”

  Unruffled, the head-waiter moved away.

  “You’re disgusting,” I said. “Why do you always have to show off?”

  “I’m too lazy to write poetry. And the self-expression offered by my duties on Truth and Love does not satisfy my exhibitionistic nature.” She took off the pirate’s hat, put it on the seat beside her, looked at her face in the mirror, cried, “What a Gorgonzola!” and blew a kiss to someone on the other side of the room. When the waiter brought our drinks Lola raised hers in a toast.

  “To the painful death of Noble Barclay!”

  “Can’t you find some other way to earn your living?” I asked. “When it flavors your liquor, it’s going too far.”

  She held up the glass and squinted at me through the ice and liquor. “I wish you’d stop talking about him all the time. I came here to forget.”

  “It was you who proposed the toast.”

  A waiter thrust menus into our hands. I asked Lola twice what she’d like for lunch. She shuddered delicately. I ordered Vichyssoise, liver and bacon and salad for both of us. A man waved across the restaurant at her and she threw him kisses with both hands. “Isn’t he growing repulsive, though?” she inquired of me, and smiled at the man.

  When she had finished the first drink she said, “You’d be surprised if I told you how long ago it was that I first read the Barclay Bible.”

  “I thought you didn’t want to talk about it.”

  “I read it before six million suckers had paid him their good dough, before it was translated into sixteen languages. I said it was hogwash and anyone who plunked down a dollar for it would be carried off to the nut house. Prophetic, wasn’t I?”

  “You’ve been saying it ever since. At least since I’ve known you.”

  “My opinion. May it ever be right, but right or wrong, my opinion.”

  A fat man stood over our table. Lola raised her eyes to him slowly.

  “Why haven’t I seen you of late, beauty?” asked the fat man.

  “Darling!” exclaimed Lola. “I’ve been thinking about you for weeks. We must get together. Do give me a ring soon.” After he had gone she said, “I’d have introduced you but I don’t remember his name. I think I had an affair with him. He’s an oaf.”

  She settled down to her second drink. There was something childish about the way she held the glass in both hands and bent her head like a baby with a mug of milk. Looking at me over the glass, she asked, “Do you remember Coué?”

  “Was he also one of your lovers?”

  “Don’t be silly. He was French.”

  “I didn’t think you were prejudiced against any race, color or creed.”

  “I mean he was a Frenchman in France. He did come over here for a lecture tour, but I never heard him. What I’m trying to say is that I laughed at his book; I thought autosuggestion was pure hogwash. I go into hysterics over all those psychology and Unity and Rosicrucian Help-Yourself-to-Health-and-Wealth books. Once a boy friend took me to an Oxford Group meeting and I laughed myself into the nearest saloon. I’m just giving you my record.” Her voice softened and she said to the middle of the room:

  Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau,

  Mock on, ’tis all in vain!

  You throw the sand against the wind,

  And the wind blows it back again.

  “When I write my autobiography I’m going to call it ‘Sand Against the Wind.’”

  “That’s a nice poem. You haven’t lost your touch.”

  “Kind of you, Ansell, too, too kind. I’ll mention you in my book. The young man who paid me the ultimate compliment. Mixed me with Blake.”

  I frowned. Her chatter skipped ahead of my lame intelligence.

  “Blake,” she said emphatically. “Blake, William, English poet, 1757–1827. You heard of him probably at college.”

  I did not mind the sarcasm. The poet’s name had rung a bell in my memory. The bell tolled but I could not remember whose funeral it marked.

  Lola prattled on. She had said that she wanted to forget Barclay, but he had become her obsession. All roads led to Truth-Sharing. “They’re not so different, you know, Buchman and Barclay. Buchman made the Oxford Movement a success because Moral Rearmament provides the exaltation of confession. Public confession, mind you. A few true believers get together and relieve themselves by telling each other what a hell of a time they had being immoral. Out in the Bible Belt when I was a kid I’d go to revival meetings and witness the same kind of orgasms under canvas.”

  “Are you defending Barclay?” I asked.

  “Explaining him to myself. I’ve got to tell it to myself over and over, otherwise I’d commit suicide out of sheer disgust for the human race. The things people believe! Were you ever psyched?”

  “I’m not inhibited, thank you.”

  “As an enlightened intellectual, you probably consider psychoanalysis the last word in spiritual pathology.”

  “Spiritual is an unscientific term. You ought to be more precise when you get into these discussions.”
>
  “You sound like a professor. What I mean is this: In psychoanalysis you not only get relief by naming your sins and lifting them out of the mysterious hell of the unconscious, but you also transfer your guilt to the doctor. Barclay uses something of the same technique. Look at the Introduction to his book. No matter how evil the poor suckers think they are, Barclay’s worse. He’s committed all the sins in the calendar and he’s willing to take on the burdens of his followers. Truth-Sharing cleanses in a cheap, easy, popular way. You don’t have to pay the doctor or fear the tortures of hell. It’s the poor man’s psychoanalysis. You find a bosom friend, get him excited about Truth-Sharing, and then confess your sins, your frailties, your secret thoughts, whip yourself into a hysteria, release the sense of guilt and whoops! my dear, deliverance.”

  “You make it sound too simple.”

  “All theories are simple to the people who believe them. When the tormented heart cries out for relief, it doesn’t make much difference what method heals the pain. It doesn’t matter what you believe as long as you can believe. ‘Mock on, mock on, Voltaire.’”

  The waiter brought iced soup. Lola ate two spoonfuls and asked for another drink.

  “Do you think Barclay explains himself that way? Do you think he knows that he owes it all to the psychiatrists, the psychologists, the theologists, the theosophists, the faith healers, the priests, the witch doctors and ancient gods?”

  “Why should Barclay figure it out?” Lola asked. “He doesn’t have to. Why explain a miracle that brings you hundreds of thousands of dollars every year?”

  “Just the same he strikes me as a sincere guy,” I said. “He certainly doesn’t spare himself when he talks or writes about his guilty past, and you can’t deny that he practices what he preaches. Whether we mock at him or not, Lola, I feel that Barclay believes he’s got the true formula for health and happiness, and he wants the world to share it.”

  “At one dollar the volume, three-fifty in morocco. And yearly subscriptions to his magazines.”

  “That makes him no less sincere. Most roads to happiness extract a higher toll. The modern Messiah can’t walk barefoot.”

  “What price sincerity?” Lola tossed the phrase at a roomful of complacent celebrities. “What’s sincerity worth except to the man who profits by it? We are surrounded by hordes of people who can believe in anything sincerely as long as it brings them a good living. Fascists believe in Fascism, don’t they, especially the big ones whose attitudes pay a profit? There’s nothing in the world, my friend, so sincere as self-interest.”

  The waiter stood beside our table listening to Lola’s talk. She noticed him at last, pushed the soup cup toward him and said, “Lucky you. You can afford to be sincere about your work. It’s not hard to believe in a good meal.”

  “Thank you, Madame,” the waiter said.

  “I’d like another drink.”

  “Not till you’ve eaten,” I said.

  “Strong-minded, aren’t you?” Lola pouted. “A nice thing, plying me with liquor and asking a lot of impudent questions. Now that you’ve had your way with me, you get stingy.”

  “Eat your lunch. When your plate’s clean, I’ll buy you another drink.”

  Five more men came to the table. Each time it was a love reunion, followed either by a lapse of memory or the news that the ex-lover was but repulsive. When she had finished her salad I told the waiter to bring coffee for me and a double brandy for the lady.

  “How you understand me! I shall put you in my memoirs. ‘John Ansell, a talented and handsome youth.’ How do you like that?”

  “Splendid. Just so you don’t say I was your lover.”

  “How ungallant!”

  “I prefer my amours retail.”

  I let her finish her brandy before I asked anymore questions. As I lit her cigarette I said, “You must have known Barclay a long time.”

  She sighed. “Longer, darling, than I care to remember.”

  “Was he one of your lovers?”

  “Take that back or I’ll leave the table.”

  “Perhaps Wilson was,” I said, still looking into her eyes. It was a shot in the dark but not too inaccurate. The bell that rang at the name of Blake had reminded me that Wilson’s collection had included a number of valuable Blake items.

  “Who, dear?”

  “Warren G.Wilson.”

  There was no alteration in her posture or her expression. One blue-veined hand rested on the table. The other held the brandy glass. Her face did not change. No muscle tensed or contracted. I felt rather than saw the wincing and shrinking.

  “Warren G. Wilson,” I repeated.

  “Never heard of him.”

  Lola finished her brandy, fished around on the banquette and accused a busboy of stealing her hat. The head-waiter hurried over to soothe her while the busboy and I crawled under the table. We did not find the hat until Lola got up. She had been sitting on it.

  “This is a plot to discredit me.” Her hands smoothed the hat as if they were comforting the old wreck for some cruel insult. Then she put her hat on at a crazy angle and forgot all about it. On the way out of the hotel she stopped to speak to another brace of ex-lovers. Both, she confided when we were in the taxi, were filthy bastards.

  “And you’re not much better. The lousiest detective I ever saw. Why don’t you learn the tricks? You can get a course by correspondence, five dollars down, five a month.”

  Her voice was hard. She had tried to be funny and had not succeeded. For the rest of the way back to the Barclay Building she looked out the window.

  Eleanor was reading proof in the Truth and Love office. She looked demure and beautiful in a dark dress with a stiff white collar and starched cuffs. The office smelled of fresh-cut flowers. On Lola’s desk stood a glass vase filled with American Beauty roses. It had not been there when we left the office and I wondered, jealously, who had sent them to Eleanor.

  “Did you have a good lunch?” Eleanor asked.

  “Superb,” Lola said. “He’s a dream man, a gent of the old school. He buys you hundreds of drinks and expects nothing for it.” Her voice was rough and I could tell that she was still smarting from the wound inflicted by my ignorance.

  “I’m sorry if I said anything out of the way, Lola. I certainly didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”

  “I’m bloody but unbowed,” Lola said. Then she noticed the flowers. She looked accusingly at Eleanor.

  “It’s so hot in here,” Eleanor said apologetically. “I opened the box and put them in water. It always hurts me to see flowers die. There was no card again.”

  Lola tossed the pirate’s hat into a corner. The fur cape lay in a heap on the floor. She kicked it with the toe of a shabby patent-leather slipper. Lola must have been close to fifty, but she put on a show like a spoiled three-year-old.

  Eleanor picked up Lola’s hat, dusted it and hung it up. She shook the dust out of the fur cape. “We needn’t keep them in the office,” she said. “I’ll give them to the girls in the reception room. They’re always so grateful. I’ll be right back, Johnnie.” And Eleanor carried the roses out of the office.

  Lola swept out, too, turning back at the door to inform me that she had to pee. In a few minutes Eleanor came back.

  “What’s the matter with her?” I said. “Why’d she lose her temper all of a sudden?”

  Eleanor shrugged. “She drank too much at lunch, I guess. She’ll be all right in a little while.”

  “Must be pleasant for you, working with all that temperament.”

  “I feel sorry for her. She’s been unhappy lately. She’s such an unhappy woman.” Eleanor looked at a water spot left on Lola’s desk by the vase.

  I was still uncertain about the flowers and I said cautiously, “Why did the roses make her angry?”

  Eleanor wiped off the spot. “American Beauties always do. This has been going on for months. She probably loathes the person who sent them.”

  We dropped the subject. I was less interested in
Lola’s tantrums than in Eleanor’s charms. The stiff collar and demure dress made her particularly seductive. I kissed her. She softened in my arms, snuggled against me, let me kiss her forehead, her neck, her mouth.

  “You’re wonderful, Eleanor. Any other girl would keep her eyes on the door and remind me that someone might come in.”

  “I don’t care who knows I love you.”

  What could a man do about a girl like that, a girl who wore a chastity belt but handed him the key? Since she would not worry about our being caught in the office I was the one who had to remember conventions.

  I straightened my tie and combed my hair. “I wanted you to have lunch with me glamorously in some costly dive, but you found a worthier escort. What about dinner?”

  “It’s cooking.”

  “What’s cooking?”

  “Dinner.”

  “Whose dinner?”

  “Ours, foolish.”

  “I may be dull,” I said, “but your persiflage perplexes me. I’m inviting you to dine with me.”

  “And I’m telling you that our dinner is being prepared by Brenda who works for me afternoons. You’ve been ill and you oughtn’t go around eating in restaurants. Brenda is preparing a simple but nourishing meal.”

  I kissed her again. I was a happy fellow. The girl loved me. She worried about my health. She planned my meals. She let me kiss her as often as I liked and did not care who knew that she loved me. This would have been the best evening of my life if it hadn’t been for Blake. The same Blake, William, English poet, 1787–1827.

  In a city of seven million, it should be possible to find three people who know and like the same poet, quote him and collect his works. There was a logical connection between Eleanor’s tastes and Lola’s. They worked together and probably talked about authors and books. I figured it out that way when I saw the poet’s name lettered on the backs of three volumes in Eleanor’s apartment.

  She had gone to the kitchen to mix a Martini. I wandered around the living room, looking at her things, noticing how cozy she had made the small apartment. When Eleanor had come to the hospital to see me she had told me something about herself and I knew what a struggle it had been for her to convince Noble Barclay that she would rather live alone in three rooms on East Tenth Street than to enjoy the luxury of his duplex on upper Fifth Avenue.