Stranger Than Truth

by Vera Caspary

  An ambulance shrieked down Fifth Avenue. Its siren roused me. The circle was broken; I heard every living sound: the taxi horns, the tires, the brakes, the clatter of heels on the pavement, the shrill young voices. The NYU students were still passing, talking of their class work, probably, of French and trigonometry, of economics, of UN, the Russian drives, of Benny Goodman, Jack Benny and Benay Venuta.

  Eleanor had gone. She had hurried off, clattering along like the others on her high heels. Bareheaded, fur coat open, one of the crowd, like the girls she envied, the college girls with unimportant fathers. I hurried after her. NYU students swarmed the path. Three girls walked arm in arm, whispering. I cut through their secrets. “Where’s the fire?” they shouted after me.

  At Fifth Avenue and Eighth Street, Eleanor jumped into a cab. I rushed across the street after her but a horn warned me and I leaped back to the curb. The lights had turned green. Eleanor’s cab moved off. Before I could find an empty taxi, hers was nothing but a red tail-light among a lot of other red tail-lights.

  I walked up Fifth Avenue. At Twenty-third Street I remembered that I had not eaten dinner. I decided to go into Childs. On the way I bought a newspaper. I did not read it right away, for I was too concerned with my own affairs to care about the rest of the world. When the waitress brought my steak and French fries, I opened the paper.

  It was a conservative paper, not a tabloid, so that I did not see Lola’s picture until I turned to Page 3. It was a one-column cut made from an old photograph taken when Lola had been slim and young and dark-haired. The headline ran across two columns. It read:

  POETESS FOUND DEAD

  Lola Manfred’s Body Found in

  Greenwich Village Apartment

  Suicide, Police Theory

  I pushed my plate away. The odor of the fried potatoes sickened me. The waitress hurried across the tiled floor, but I had already grabbed my hat and overcoat. I motioned toward the table where I had left two dollar bills beside the plate. The waitress stared after me through the plate-glass window.

  I started walking north, thinking of Lola and what she had said about her autobiography. Sand Against the Wind was to have the title because Lola had mocked at everything. She had to be an exhibitionist, she explained, because she had become too lazy to write poetry. There had been more to it than that, I thought. Something besides laziness had paralyzed her talent.

  At Thirty-fourth Street I went into a cigar store and waited in line until the phone booth was empty. Fortunately Riordan’s home phone number was in the little book I carry in my pocket.

  “This is Ansell,” I said and waited for the name to register. “Ansell of Truth and Crime Magazine.”

  “I know. In trouble, Ansell?”

  “Lola Manfred didn’t commit suicide. I’d bet my last dollar on it.”

  “Who’s Lola Manfred?”

  “Haven’t you seen the papers? Poetess discovered in Greenwich Village studio apartment. They say it’s suicide, but I have a hunch. Lola Manfred knew who killed Warren G. Wilson…”

  “Just a minute,” Riordan said. He must have put his hand over the mouthpiece and talked to someone else. Then he said, “Meet me at Headquarters. It’ll take me about twenty minutes. I’ve got to get dressed.”

  As I hung up I thought I heard a woman’s voice protesting.

  Part Four

  THE SERPENT’S TOOTH

  BY ELEANOR BARCLAY

  “Look deep into your unremembered past. Let your thoughts drift aimlessly. Awful images may float into your mind, images too terrifying to be recognized by your conscious personality. Do not repress them; do not let shame defeat you. If you are ever to conquer Self, to become whole, free and unafraid, you must dig hidden, obliterated, censored memories out of your consciousness. Be not afraid. Wander freely and nakedly in the deepest, darkest, most forbidding jungles of memory.”

  My Life Is Truth

  NOBLE BARCLAY

  AS I STRETCHED my hand toward the doorbell my heart began to pound so that its throbbing seemed to fill the foyer. Such a chic little foyer all done up in black-and-white squares by a decorator who secretly loathed the rich and hoped they would suffer claustrophobia waiting for elevators. There had been, three years earlier when Gloria rented the apartment, a wan philodendron in a white pot on the black marble table. In my vague and sentimental way I had felt sorry for a living plant imprisoned by Fifth Avenue elegance, and had watched it as a mother with a puny child. At my father’s door the philodendron flourished like the green bay tree.

  My hand fell away from the doorbell and I held it over my heart, believing the pressure could mute that noisy throbbing. It was like me to be thinking about the philodendron when I had to face my father and ask him a question which for months I had been afraid to whisper to myself. All of my life I have turned from unpleasantness to study the frost patterns on a window pane or the play of light and shadow under a tree, to listen to the buzzing of a fly or the steam hissing in the radiator.

  There were actually two questions, the one I had been afraid to ask my father, and the other newly born out of my conversation on a park bench with Johnnie. When Johnnie told me that ugly tale I had not turned away. Every fiber of me listened. I had heard not only voice and words, but I had tuned my ears to catch the undertones, the significance, the meaning of the meaning.

  Your father warned me against trying to find out anymore about this case. He’s been protecting you and what he tried to say is that if I love you…

  While I rode uptown in a taxicab and as I stood in the black-and-white foyer, looking at the philodendron and attempting to quiet the tumult within me, these words were like a far-off echo. I was determined to greet my father boldly, to question him courageously, and not to let him charm me into docility and agreement.

  The door was opened by Hardy, Gloria’s butler. I hurried past him through the Empire drawing room which had been decorated for Gloria by a pale young man who made a religion of interior decorating and gave every room a name. Father’s study, which was called Contradiction, was down the hall toward the rear of the first floor. I hoped that I would not find him there, for then I should have been obliged to ask my questions immediately, and my courage was faltering.

  Except for the chatter of servants in the kitchen the first floor was quiet. In the second-floor sitting room I found Gloria. She lay on a fur rug before the fire, wearing leopard-skin pajamas and studying her French grammar. The room was filled with an expensive scent, one of those synthetics called Fierce or Flagrant or Fearless.

  “Hello, Eleanor. I hope you know you stood us up for dinner. What’s the idea? Don’t you know what night this is?”

  “Where’s Father?”

  “Are you out of your mind?” Gloria rolled over on her back with a liquid movement acquired by years of ballet training. “It’s Friday.”

  “Friday?” I must have sounded like a cretin. In the Barclay family calendar Friday was more sacred than the Sabbath.

  “Isn’t it awful about Lola?”

  “What about Lola?”

  “Don’t you know?” Gloria sat up, embraced her knees and drew in her breath. “She’s committed suicide.”

  I walked unsteadily to a wing chair close to the fire. It seemed, as I eased myself into the chair, that I had always known that Lola would be found on the India print cover of the studio couch with an empty glass on her wormy walnut table.

  “Why do you think she did it?” Gloria asked, her bosom rising and falling in excitement. “Drunk, I suppose.”

  Hardy knocked on the open door, arranged his handsome face in proper solemnity, announced, “It is one minute before nine, Mrs. Barclay.” He then made a ritual of tuning in WBOR.

  Downstairs the servants were grouped around the kitchen radio and in the nursery the English Nannie listened in snobbish loneliness. From every part of the house rolled the Battle Hymn of the Republic, and a baritone sang one line, “His truth goes marching on.” The music faded, an announcer said, “T
his is the Voice of Truth,” and after a heart beat’s pause, my father began: “Good evening, friends. This is Noble Barclay.”

  Before I knew Lola Manfred, my mind had never admitted doubt. Faith was rooted in my worship of my father, not in his philosophy. I had gone through periods of rebelliousness—once when I refused to pose for anymore Truth-Girl photographs and once, for seven weeks, when I wanted so much to go to college—but in the end I was always sorry because I had been willful and disloyal.

  Until I was six years old I had lived with my mother’s people and heard my father’s name whispered like a naughty word. When he came to fetch me I was as terrorized as though the Devil had come to lead me off to Hell; I kicked and fought and bit until the movement of the train had lulled me and I fell asleep in his arms.

  In my father’s house adoration had been the prevailing mood. There were devoted servants and doting secretaries, all Barclay followers, ex-invalids or reformed sinners restored to health and respectability by his teachings. I became chief drum-thumper in the procession of converts. Governesses read to me from my father’s book as though it were the Bible.

  One word struck terror in my heart. Disloyalty. The word cast its shadow upon the memory of departed servants and secretaries. And when I was twelve, his worshipful wife, Janet, became overnight as hateful as a disloyal upstairs maid. The next morning my father had my things packed and off I was whisked with a governess and a plump, red-haired secretary to Florida. Father joined us. The redhead remained loyal for almost a year, and then she left us, too, and there was a happy interval when his daughter, the Truth Girl, had no rivals.

  When I was seventeen, Father took me to California. When he was not too busy he wooed me as though I were as blonde and breasty as his favorite starlet, and had flowers sent to my room every day. Father became busier and busier with tasks involved in launching his magazine, Truth in Hollywood, and on the way home Gloria had a drawing room on the same train.

  In New York Ed Munn waited at the station to take me home in a taxi while Father drove Gloria to her hotel in the limousine. It was my loneliest year. We had a big hotel suite but Father seldom used his rooms. I had no friends. I had never gone to school and it was better to dine and go to a show with Ed than to spend my evenings alone. That was during one of the periods of rebellion, when I wanted so desperately to go to college. I thought that if I had a tutor and crammed hard enough I could slide through the examinations.

  My education had been haphazard. Whatever I had learned I owed to Janet Ordmann Barclay who thought intelligence and knowledge more important in a governess than the pretty legs and large breasts which were my father’s standards. He did not approve of formal education. In his unregenerate days he had been thrown out of four colleges, and felt it his duty afterwards to expose the weaknesses of modern education. Truth Magazine writers proved that college weakened moral fiber, bred perversion, encouraged drunkenness, spread degeneracy. Charts with little cartoon men mounted on ladders showed that the percentage of failure was higher among college graduates than among the untaught.

  Noble Barclay’s daughter was educated in the offices of Truth Publications. I was young then and believed what I read. Truth and Love editorials preached on the curse of the frigid woman, and I thought there must be some congenital cause for my apathy and disgust when my fiancé tried to hold my hand.

  No one in the office was told about our engagement. I cringed when Ed’s dry cautious fingers touched me, and shrank from the rubbery feel of his lips. Fortunately the man was not hot-blooded. He “respected womanly delicacy” and avoided any real conflict between us. My education was progressing. I looked at other men, measured him against the clever young cynics who wisecracked at the Editors’ Table and lost their jobs through disloyalty; I compared him with the sleek young advertising solicitors in double-breasted suits and bright neckties. Presently I began to play an elaborate game of hide-and-seek, became coy, capricious, frail, and finally deceitful in my excuses to avoid a dinner or an evening with him.

  One day in the office Lola Manfred whirled around in her swivel chair and said, “There’s no law, kid. You can say no to the jerk.”

  I was working on a manuscript called That Braun Woman, The Truth About Hitler’s Love Life. The pages littered the floor and I stooped to pick them up, glad for an excuse to hide my scarlet countenance. “What are you talking about?” I demanded, choking over the question.

  “I’m neither deaf nor blind. I can always tell who’s on the phone when you answer, and when he corners you here in the office, I sicken at the sight of your innocent agony. You loathe him, Eleanor. Why do you let him pursue you?”

  I tried to be loyal. I told her my fiancé was kind-hearted, understanding, my father’s dear friend. Lola snorted. I had to defend myself because I was engaged to him, and I lashed out at Lola, accusing her of prejudice and intolerance.

  “Do you believe in Truth-Sharing, Eleanor?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Why are you blushing?”

  “I love my father.”

  After that, in my presence, Lola was less critical of Father. But I knew just the same that she continued to broadcast scorn particularly if Ed Munn or some other “loyal” employee was within earshot. That was typical of Lola. The posturing, the dirty words, the hard-boiled attitudes were veneer over a tender and tremulous heart. She was unendingly generous and patient with poor and simple people; bitterly cruel to the pompous and arrogant.

  I learned to love Lola, but in self-defense I was sometimes arrogant and always too proud to let her see that I agreed with her about Ed Munn. But when I finally had the courage to tell Father that I wanted to break the engagement (he told Ed for me), then I celebrated by going to dinner with Lola.

  It was that night, deserted by her between the entrée and the salad, that I met Mr. Wilson. It was an innocent pickup and a virtuous friendship. I often talked to Lola about him and planned a meeting for them over my congenial dinner table. I thought Lola and Mr. Wilson would like each other. There seemed coincidence in their common passion for Blake who is not a popular poet, and I felt certain that we would become a warm trio. Both of them seemed to understand me in the way older people who have not forgotten youth can understand the young.

  I told each about the other, tried to arrange dinner parties, but never succeeded. Although Lola seemed to grow more and more petulant when I chattered about Mr. Wilson, I found nothing strange in her behavior. Lola was an unhappy woman, often irritable. So I quit talking about things that disturbed her. And when Mr. Wilson died, the circumstances were so bewildering that I brooded but could not talk about it, and I never told Lola that the man whose murder was reported in the newspapers had been my Mr. Wilson.

  “Now that Lola’s passed away, you’ll probably be editor of Truth and Love,” Gloria observed, looking up from the French grammar. The broadcast was over and she had returned to her schoolgirl pose, so that when my father came in, he would chuckle and smack her buttocks.

  “Shut up!”

  “What elegant manners you have, Miss Barclay.”

  “I don’t care. It’s positively ghoulish of you to think about her job when she’s…”

  “Not cold in her grave?” Gloria looked at me sharply. “What a mess you are, Eleanor! Why do you go about without hats all the time? You’d better comb your hair and put on some powder before your father comes home.”

  When, brushed and docile, I came out of Gloria’s dressing room. Father was sitting in one of the wing chairs with Gloria on the floor at his feet, her tilted chin supported by both hands.

  “Ed’s handling it for me,” my father was saying. “‘Spare no expense,’ I told him, ‘give her a decent funeral, I’m paying for it.’ She didn’t leave a sou, poor soul, hadn’t even provided for a decent burial. But I want to do the right thing; she was a loyal employee…”

  Lola was dead and could not resent the remark. “She wasn’t loyal. She hated you and you knew it,” I told my fath
er.

  Gloria looked as if I had said something indecent. The room was hot and sickening with the scent of Fearless or Fierce or Flagrant.

  “Now that she’s dead,” my father said reprovingly, “it doesn’t behoove us to speak ill of her. Poor Lola had faults, but who that is human hasn’t? Young people, Eleanor, are likely to be intolerant. You misjudge Lola. She had a bitter tongue. It probably amused her to poke fun at me, but she was never disloyal.”

  Gloria’s voice rose and fell in enjoyment of the morbid situation. “What did you find out? Drunk, I bet.”

  “There’ll be an inquest. You may be asked to testify, Eleanor.”

  “What do I know?”

  “That she was emotionally unstable. That she drank too much. That she indulged a tendency toward melancholia. You were with her yesterday. What sort of mood was she in?”

  I did not answer Father’s question, for I was thinking of Lola as I had last seen her. She had stamped on her fur coat and gone off to the Ladies’ Room, but when she had returned, remorseful and over-rouged, she had been contrite and eager to please me. I had been too self-centered to pay much attention to Lola; I was annoyed at her childishness and concerned with trifles, for Johnnie was coming to my house for dinner. Five phone calls to Brenda, all finicking and worthless, about the chilling of cocktail glasses and heating dinner plates and being sure the flowers were properly arranged. It was too late now for apology or contrition, and useless to wonder if my selfishness was not in part to blame for her despair.

  “The tragedy of waste. Waste of life and waste of talent. All because of alcohol.” Against the fire my father’s profile was dark and strong and sad.

  “No,” I retorted. “You oughtn’t to say that. It was worse than just alcohol…”