by Ed Ifkovic
She simmered. “Do you know how offensive you are?”
“I can imagine, Lady Maud. But hear me out.”
She looked ready to press a bell at her elbow, but resisted. I fully expected burly wait servants, those rough-and-tumble men in stevedore shirts who shoveled the coal in her basement, to rush in and hoist me out like a sack of old potatoes. But I also realized something else: Lady Maud was eager to hear what I had to say. There was something in her eyes. Wariness, yes, but also curiosity. She was waiting.
Her voice was a low rumble. “Effrontery, Miss Ferber.”
I folded my hands in my lap and sat back, comfortable now, purposeful. I knew where I was going. “But I’ve come to believe the bigger surprise was the one that flooded Belinda Ross. You see, she came to care about Dougie, probably loved him back. A surprise because she’d been fashioned by Jackson Roswell into a tool for his own—of course, hers as well—success. A maniacal man, that Jackson, who took a young girl and told her he could make her rich and famous. A hardscrabble Pygmalion. And he almost succeeded. But he misjudged. Cold-hearted himself, severe, narrow-minded, wildly stupid, he thought her landing a rich husband—or a lover—was an easy maneuver. Take this step, take another. Giant steps.”
“Belinda was compliant.” She spat out the words. “His helpmate.”
I nodded at her. “Agreed. At first. A robot jerking her head up and down. May I take one giant step? Cyrus Meerdom. Tommy Stuyvesant. Dougie Maddox. But recently I learned—to my amazement, talk about the power of rumor—that Dougie was actually at her side during all of this maneuvering, that those two men were simply bit players in the drama. And Belinda, herself surprised, found herself in love.”
“With Dougie,” Lady Maud whispered.
“Exactly. A harmless young man, guileless, charming, maybe bumbling. But seductive to the girl. Two babes in the woods. Wolves everywhere, liars, dissemblers, folks ready to destroy them. So she started to distance herself from Jackson.”
“But…” she said, faltering, breathing hard.
“But it was too late. The two lovers were already entangled in a fabric of lies and deceit. Corey Boynton. Kitty Baker. Millie Glass. Jackson.”
“I don’t understand.” Her hands were nervous, clasped, then unclasped. A furtive look at the Chinese urn.
“Jealousy, maybe even dislike, masquerading as companionship, friendship. Brotherhood. Sisters. Shared confidences. Lies, lies, lies. Words, words, words.”
“I never liked Corey. A grubbing family.”
“Stung by his family’s loss of money after the Crash, he insisted he still be a part of that playboy life. He’d got used to money, and the loss twisted him, made him reckless. He resented Dougie’s happiness. So he sabotaged it, possibly unwittingly at first. A few words here, innuendo, whispering, lies. He was abetted by a partner-in-crime named Kitty Baker, a failed actress, unemployed, in Manhattan to find the success she saw Belinda achieve. Another casualty of the Depression. A pinched life, resented. As she watched Belinda on the arm of Cyrus, then Tommy, then Dougie, she burned. A fabricated story, doubtless about Belinda’s leaving Dougie for Wallace Benton. Maybe William Paley of CBS, now that his scandalous mistress Louise Brooks is taking her clothes off in a warmer climate of Hollywood. Jealous.”
“What if those stories were true? Belinda had a roving eye.”
“Stop,” I thundered. “Not true. I’ve sat with them, listened to them, sympathized at first, but finally realized I’d been duped. Lied to. Fooled by fools. Noel and I. Others. In these awful struggling times, the worms crawl out of the woodwork, infest, infect.”
“My Dougie.” A rasp in her throat.
“Yes, your Dougie. Belinda’s Dougie. A naïve young man, he dumbly listened to the ugly rumblings in his ear. He nodded at Corey’s poison. He believed what was said about Belinda. Poor Belinda fought him, denied over and over, watched his temper tantrums, and became exhausted by it all, maybe protested too much. But Dougie refused to listen to her. He’d made up his mind. Sick with love, feeling betrayed, desperate, haunted, trailing after her for crumbs of affection. Watchful, bewildered. A welter of conflicting emotions that ruined his days. He imagined her squired off in a Rolls Royce to a secret penthouse apartment on Park Avenue while he bayed at the moon in the streets below.”
She spat out her words. “You don’t know what she was up to.”
“I’d hazard a guess. Nothing. Yes—nothing. She was torn—battling with her brother over her freedom. She hated that life but didn’t know how to embrace the new one. She was coming into her own, as well. The two of them.” My mind reeled. “I’ll tell you something else, Lady Maud. I’m happy Dougie found love. A short life, as it turned out. I’m glad he had that moment. Yes, a bad ending, but for a while he was happy. And that counts for something.”
“Dougie was weak,” Lady Maud declared. “I hated that in him.”
“I imagine you told him that more than once. Not like his powerful father. A weak man.”
She lashed out. “I tried to make him a strong man.” Her hand slapped the desk. “I fought every bit of weakness in him—hammered at him. He knew he was weak.”
I’d had enough. “Oh, I don’t believe a word of that. You wanted a docile boy at your elbow, sitting in this sunny room surrounded by over-watered ferns in Chinese pots.”
She closed her eyes. “You’ve never been a mother, Miss Ferber.”
I debated my words. “Perhaps you never were one either.”
She cried out, “In my own rooms…in…” Her hand grasped her chin.
“I’m sorry, but I have to say all of this.”
She laughed. “You relish it.”
“I hope you don’t believe that. Lady Maud, Dougie believed that Belinda was unfaithful. The idea haunted him. That awful night in the automat. You know, I was with them all the earlier part of the evening. Bickering. Love pecks. Forgiveness. Back and forth. I love you. I hate you. I didn’t know what to think. You could see the chaos—maybe madness—in his face. Kitty and Corey, watching, probably savored the street show they had somehow fostered.”
“No.”
Suddenly she stood and crossed to the window. She stared down into the street. Quietly, “They’re tearing down another mansion,” she said, her voice shaky. “They’re all going. The Astors. The Vanderbilts. The Mellons. Soon—me. This grand home. So beautiful, so fragile. I’m left like an anachronism in this mausoleum. The wrecking ball banging against my nighttime sleep.”
“Lady Maud.”
She turned and watched me, quiet, quiet. Her face a frozen mask.
Her voice low, horrible. “You know his last days he did nothing but wander these streets. Out there. He’d bring back bags of ugly, gnarled, ice-stung apples. Odd bits of clothing he bought from derelicts on corners. You walk on Fifth Avenue and someone begs for a nickel. One after the other. Dougie spilled his coins into their dirty palms. I’d be driving in the car and the chauffeur would point—‘Your son.’ A smirk on his face. There was Dougie, disheveled, bent over against the wind, talking with people in breadlines.”
I waited, said nothing.
“‘Why?’ I asked him. I begged him for an answer. Do you know what he said? ‘They smile at me.’ What kind of an answer was that?”
Her fist banged the window and I thought she’d smash the glass.
Time stopped: my breath quickened: my mind a blur of black lightning.
“Dougie killed Belinda, Lady Maud.”
Her eyes closed, then opened wide, a sweep of fear in her eyes. “You know?”
I nodded. “There could be no one else.”
She wrapped her arms around her chest and swayed back and forth. “Yes.”
“Tell me.”
“A day before he was killed I walked into his room and he was crying on his bed. Just sobbing like a sad child. When I caught his e
ye, I knew.” A sliver of a smile. “But I suppose I always knew. The detective I hired was a fool, but I knew that when I handed him a fat check. But…”
“What did Dougie tell you?” My heart beat wildly.
“The stories he heard. The last straw. A penthouse on top of the new Wallace Benton building, built especially for her.” She paused. “It was an accident.”
“No.”
“Please. Yes—an accident.”
“No.”
She whispered, “He told me he’d returned for his scarf, but he was worried about leaving her alone in that place. Late at night. An automat. But she wasn’t there. His scarf was. He waited and then she stepped out from the back hallway, spotted him, backed out of view. He followed her. And he said he joked with her, tried to make her laugh. She was nervous. But then she laughed. He said he playfully put his scarf around her neck, toying with her—‘This way I won’t forget it again’—and she laughed, gave him a peck on the cheek. Yes, she said everything was all right, but she still wanted him to leave. To be alone. Just that night. They would talk in the morning. He got—angry, pulled her toward him, grabbing the scarf. She panicked, saw something in his eyes. And…”
“My God.” I breathed in, hollowness.
Lady Maud looked toward the window. “And then she was on the floor. He rushed out the back door and left it open. He ran through the streets. He ran to his rooms.”
“My God,” I said again.
Lady Maud took a step toward me. “Can you understand how horrible it is to listen to your son tell you that he murdered someone?” Her voice cracked. “Can you? Can you understand the chill that goes deep into your soul? Can you understand that you walk into a wall, you stumble, you don’t know where to turn? A nail in your coffin. Blackness, an abyss of horror. Life can never be the same.”
“Then he was murdered.”
Suddenly Lady Maud erupted, sobbing, her hands fluttering in the air like wild birds.
As I watched, stunned, she raged on, stumbling around the tight room. Then, her face drained of color, her hair broken free of that bonnet, she thrust out her arms. The Chinese urn of ferns toppled from its stand, fell to the carpet. It shattered into pieces, dirt spilled everywhere. The raw scent of rich soil.
She stood back, triumphant. “There!” Her voice broke. “There!”
Chapter Twenty-one
He created a life for her…
The morning of New Year’s Eve.
I woke with a start, disturbed from a restless night of sleep, that phrase roiling around in my head. Chauncey Waters confiding about his erstwhile boss, Jackson Roswell, the man who ironically set into motion this long Elizabethan tragedy of love and revenge, greed and ambition, decline and fall. Jackson Roswell, watching the world he created crumble around him as he hid in that squalid apartment over a stumblebum vaudeville theater in Hell’s Kitchen.
He created life for her…
And how had Chauncey finished his grim epitaph?
…and was furious when she wouldn’t live it.
The hollow-eyed man on that street corner: Nobody believes I had a life before this.
Something was wrong with the story, some stage direction missed, a stage manager slipping up, perhaps words that should never have been said. I lay in bed, snuggling under the warm fleece blankets, my eyes focused on the ice-streaked window, nineteen stories up, isolated. The sky over Central Park deep white with the promise of snow.
Cocoon. Moss Hart all over again.
Then I remembered something else, and I sat up like a bolt of lightning. Of course.
Bathed, dressed, contemplating Rebecca’s sumptuous buttermilk pancakes, I fiddled with a pencil and notepad. A half-hour later, antsy, I phoned a friend at the New York Times who promised a quick journey into the paper’s dusty morgue, the buried files. An hour later, as I sat in my wing chair by the terrace window, the phone rang.
I was right on the money.
The money—yes, it was always about the money.
I headed down into the street, determined to take my mile-long walk despite the chill. The doorman nodded at me, wished me a happy New Year, though I saw in his eyes what was always there whenever I ventured out in driving rain and snow blizzard and brutal August heat—Who was this maddened rich lady who missed the news that cars were invented to get from point A to point B? I agreed—yes, maddened. But especially this morning as I contemplated what to do, where my thinking led me. That news from the newspaper morgue. Yes, important. Grimly, I thought—morgue. How aptly we name the dark recesses of a journalistic grave.
Back upstairs I reached for the phone. “Noel, what are you doing now?” I heard banging in the background. The whistle of a teakettle.
A long pause, a chuckle. “Darling, have you been following anything I’ve told you for a month? I leave for Cleveland this very evening. Probably on a train packed with frantic revelers who will not understand that New York’s white-haired boy is famous and demands silence.”
“Noel, a note of caution. When you step off the train and see marching bands and tubas oom-pah-pah-ing around you—it isn’t for you.”
“I imagine New Year’s Eve in Cleveland is a desperately lonely event. A hope of heaven for the following year.”
My voice was grim. “That’s New Year’s around the world, dear Noel. Forced frivolity that ends in melancholy.”
He laughed. “You’re chipper, darling. Someone stole your lunch money?” A pause. “What task do you need of me?”
Quietly, I told him of my visit to Lady Maud and the horrid truth of her confession to me. Listening, Noel gasped, and for a moment I could tell he held the phone away from his ear. Finally, his voice hollow, he whispered, “I suppose I knew it all along. It’s just that you don’t want to believe the worse of the best of your friends.” Then, quietly, “Why did he ask us to help him? To clear his name.”
I waited a long time. “Because he thought he was dreaming and we would wake him up and say it never happened.”
“He couldn’t believe he could do such a thing.”
“He wanted it to…never have happened.”
“It must have been awful for you, Edna. Just awful.”
I didn’t answer, fumbling with the telephone cord, twisting it, wrapping it around my fingertips.
“Edna, what?”
I counted a heartbeat. Then, my mouth close to the receiver, I told him what I needed from him.
He debated refusing me, a moment of awful silence, but I knew he wouldn’t. I could hear the quick snap of a suitcase closing. “Edna, I’ll meet you there. A cab.”
I hung up the phone, yet I sat there, paralyzed, my eyes focused on the wall.
When I arrived at Eleventh Avenue, I noticed a cab idling in front of the Paradise, billows of exhaust smoke clouding the sidewalk. Inside, Noel’s long aristocratic head was leaning forward as he engaged the cabbie in some chatter. I smiled because that spirited conversation would doubtless reappear in one of his plays, a few smart and throwaway witticisms that critics might decry as rarefied, snobbish—but downright riotous.
Spotting me, he insisted I greet the cabbie, a string bean Cockney lad with freckles and a bushel-basket of flowery ginger hair that made him seem an unlikely harbinger of spring. “Harry tells me next year with FDR as president life will be…a bowl of cherries. I should write a song with those lyrics, Edna, though I believe I’ve heard them before.”
The cabbie leaned over and addressed me. “Next year, you wait and see.”
“Noel, must you engage the whole world in your tomfoolery?”
He acted shocked. “I try, endlessly. It’s a mistake to be witty, dear Edna. Such souls as I are always waiting for someone to say that they like them. A horror!” He leaned back into the cab where Harry was listening to the exchange. “Do you like my wit, Harry?”
Har
ry grunted. “Okay, so long as it comes with a dollar bill.”
Paid, grinning, he sped off.
Noel linked arms with me, the smile disappearing. “Edna, is this the last act?”
“Yes.”
He swiveled to look into my face. “Smile, Edna. I like happy endings.”
“Yes, happy. The tragic loading of these gritty streets.”
The breadline up ahead, unwavering on the arctic day. Beggars bunched by light posts. Young boys in slough caps hawked what looked like spools of twine wrapped around sticks. A squawking baby was lost in the folds of its mother’s shawl. A handwritten sign in the window of a store: Out of business. A newspaper kiosk at the end of the block, shuttered, its opening tarpapered, one corner loose so that it flapped in the wind.
The doors of the theater were unlocked, which surprised me. As Noel and I strode down the aisle, I could see the stage illuminated, someone standing on a ladder center stage. The sound of hammering. The shadowy figure had paused when he heard the door open at the back of the house, stepped down, and moved downstage to watch Noel and me walk through the dark orchestra seats. We stopped at the apron.
“Miss Ferber. Mr. Coward.” Jackson’s voice was hesitant. “Can I help you?” He pushed the ladder aside and dropped the hammer onto the floor. “Dammit,” he swore. The thud echoed throughout the theater.
“Questions.” I looked up at him as he stepped back.
He glanced into the wings, seemed flustered, but then he threw his hands into the air in a kind of what-the-hell gesture. He waited. Noel and I climbed the steps and walked out onto the stage. Noel’s eyes flickered, his body rocked back and forth as he faced the empty house. He mumbled softly to me, “I love being on any stage.” With the curtain up, the space seemed vast, a little intimidating. Noel looked out over the orchestra and tipped his hat. He pointed a finger at me. “Nancy Drew. The Secret of the Old Theater.”
Jackson, watching, was unhappy, his face set, tight, hard. “What?” Too loud. His voice went out over the house seats.
I fixed my eyes on Noel. No more humor. “Act five, dear Noel.”