The Man on the Third Floor

by Anne Bernays

  “No. Should I have?”

  This was a trusting soul. One of Hemingway’s wives had left a suitcase on a train filled with the only copy of her husband’s novel, still in manuscript. When he found out what she had done I could imagine the rage simmering, then boiling over, ending with a stinging slap to the cheek or, better yet, since Hemingway fancied himself something of a boxer, a perfectly executed right to the jaw. But why had the novelist entrusted his only copy to his wife in the first place? Was he hoping something like this would happen so he would have an excuse for sloughing her off? I’d read just enough Freud to grasp the notion that there are no accidents. Or was the missus envious of Ernest’s gifts and celebrity and so purposely left the suitcase on the overhead rack before leaving the train? Or did she, smarting from the inattention of a husband more occupied with his work than with his wife’s soul and body, want to punish him by leaving his work on the train? I believe their marriage went up in flames shortly after this sad event.

  I told Fleming that he would have to get one of the department’s stenographers to copy the manuscript on her own time. “You’ll be lucky if you can get it done for two bits a page.”

  He balked, saying he couldn’t afford it. “You watch,” he said. “I’ll get it done for nothing.”

  Damned if he didn’t. It took her three weeks, and she did a first-rate job: very few obvious erasures, only one or two typos. I asked him what he would have done had something happened to the manuscript. Fleming, flipping through the copy, said offhandedly, “I’d sit down and write it again. Sure I could. It’s all here inside.” And he tapped his head with his forefinger.

  I wrapped the manuscript myself in the mail room and took it to the local post office where I sent it off to Fred Forstman first class. I taped a letter to Forstman to the outside of the package, a letter I rewrote three times in an effort to tiptoe successfully through a transaction that could turn out badly if I wasn’t extremely careful. If, for example, I sounded too enthusiastic, Forstman, a small person—no more than five-foot-eight and all shaky ego—guarded his territory like a toothy animal bred to frighten off intruders, if not actually bite them. Almost anyone seemed like a marauder to Forstman. To say he was reluctant to share credit is putting it mildly. He had been known to reject a manuscript solely because he believed the editor who recommended it was getting too big for his boots. With this in mind I played down my role in the discovery of this rare talent named Fleming. My letter read, in part: “This manuscript is the work of a man in my department. He seems to be fairly well in control of the material and keeps the reader in mind most of the time, an admirable trait as you well know, especially in a first novel. While there are soft spots (see especially the scene in the mess hall when a nurse breaks down—too drawn out, not altogether plausible) and an occasional lapse in logic and coherence, Fleming manages to keep several balls in the air at the same time. While no O’Hara or Steinbeck, he does merit, I think, a second look. He came to me, I didn’t go after him; and I have to admit to reading the last half faster than I would have liked. . . .” This was a lie, designed to show Forstman that I was capable of a little too much haste. “The novel needs a whiz-bang title of course, to help move it along. Have we seen a war-in-the-Pacific novel? I don’t think so. On the other hand, there might be several of them out there waiting to get published. This may add up to a great big nothing, but as you yourself always say, you don’t lose anything by another read.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Day thirteen came and went without a response from Fred Forstman. It was ridiculous, I knew, to be so invested in the outcome, but somehow I had got Fleming’s future and my own confounded so that the outcome grew in importance the longer I waited to hear from him. He couldn’t not like Fleming’s novel; it was too obviously the real thing—nothing but truth in it. A moron could have recognized its quality.

  I had always thought of time as moving right along while we humans stood still, grabbing at it, as if it were a string being pulled too rapidly in front of us by an invisible hand. But now it went by too slowly, barely moving. On day fourteen I said fuck it, and decided to phone Forstman. I was about to dial when the boy from the mail room dropped the morning’s mail on my desk. The Griffin logo—an implausible creature with an eagle’s head and wings and the body of a lion, and what that had to do with publishing books, who knew?—was visible from several feet away. I felt like a high school senior hearing from the Harvard admissions people. I tore open the envelope. I needn’t have worried. “A winner,” Forstman wrote. “A page-turner. Couldn’t put it down; Judy had to literally pry it from my hands so I could get some sleep.” He assumed I knew that Judy was his wife. I was relieved, though not surprised by his response.

  This man had started out as the manager of a company that mass-produced bread in Queens, and by some circuitous route no one could describe, landed in the sales department of Griffin House in its early days, gradually working his way up to editor-in-chief. He had also bought into the company to the tune of forty-nine percent. The other fifty-one was owned by the publisher, making him the principal owner. The publisher, a man whose way I tried to keep out of as much as possible, had no literary pretensions, but he did own the place and one was smart to keep that in mind.

  Forstman set his own style in the office. From my small but probably accurate sampling, men at the top of their profession didn’t play by the same rules ordinary workers did. They used foul language freely and often to make their point. Some of them shouted when miffed. They came and went at will any time of the night or day. Fred Forstman, for instance, often spent the night on his office couch. He was expansive when pleased and told stories about World War II and his part in it, how he dabbled in the black market selling gun parts and other assorted military leftovers. It didn’t seem to make any difference that his stories were a mix of fact and fantasy. The turnover of his secretaries was legendary; some of us kept score. Once in a while one of them could be seen weeping in the hall outside his office door. I assumed he had given them a pinch on the bottom. There was a lot of this kind of thing going on at Griffin House. I walked in to the production department one day to check on a jacket design and found a new young secretary sitting on the art director’s lap. Neither seemed the least bit embarrassed.

  Forstman was known around the office as a cliché expert, like the one in The New Yorker. His memos, riddled with them, were passed around by his staff, for laughs, like dirty limericks. But he had a kind of idiot savant’s nose for which book, still in manuscript, would turn out to be a commercial success. If, additionally, the book also drew the admiration of critics from, say The New York Times or The Saturday Review of Literature (in my view hopelessly middlebrow, but never mind), so much the better. But commerce was far more to Forstman than what, with a faint sneer, he labeled “belles lettres.” You couldn’t send your boy to Yale with the proceeds from the sale of belles lettres no matter how many awards they won. To show he understood his younger and more idealistic editors—and to prove he was no troglodyte—Forstman made sure some of our more rarified and hard-to-sell products were placed alongside the blockbusters in backlit nooks in the reception area.

  Once in a great while, maybe every five years or so, a book would straddle the chasm between moneymaker—the kind of book people read on the subway—and the achingly truthful, profoundly revealing, luminous, unforgettable work of fiction by Evelyn Waugh or Edith Wharton, for example. But the appearance of such a book was almost as rare as the legendary green flash.

  In the end, of course, Forstman took entire credit for the birth of a major new American voice, the first writer to chronicle—with soul-searching truth and gritty realism— the bloody battle against our enemy in the Pacific theater in a novel entitled Men at Sea, Men at War. Buoyed by a generous advertising budget, the book took off like one of the V-12 rockets the Germans started lobbing over cities in England near the end of the war. Men at Sea also accomplished that rare chasm-straddling maneuver, earning no
ds of approval from reviewers and critics who mattered, as well as from composers of college syllabuses and conveners of conferences on “the state of the novel in a changing world” and similar head-scratching topics. Meanwhile, it secured a place on The New York Times best-seller list for six months.

  Fleming began to feel the heat generated by the flames of publicity. He was flooded by requests for newspaper and radio interviews. Agents sent him letters asking to let them represent him, girls who had seen his photograph on the book jacket wrote him, suggesting the two of them meet and submitting names of hotels in the City. Movie producers from the West Coast called Griffin’s rights and permissions department to see if they could buy the rights to his story. Look magazine ran a feature about him, with pictures of the man of the hour with his parents, and with a Hollywood starlet. He seemed mainly amused by this attention but, basically, untouched by the dust kicked up by his novel; it didn’t go to his head. I was delighted about this and when I asked him about it he said, “I have to be thinking about the next one.” I could have told him that if you hit it big with a first novel, the reviewers are out for your scalp when number two comes out.

  A few weeks after his novel was published Fleming said, “Don’t you think I ought to get an agent?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, I suppose so. But you’re doing great without one. If you get one you’ll have to turn over ten percent of everything you earn to him.”

  “It might be worth it,” Fleming said. We were having a drink in a bar filled with men in uniform and obvious government workers who had loosened their ties–literally and metaphorically—and were trying to flush the tensions of the war out of their systems with strong spirits. Fleming motioned to the bartender to bring us another round. “Then I wouldn’t have to think about the financial stuff. I do the writing, he does the figures. Isn’t that the way it goes?”

  “Who’ve you been talking to?”

  “Nobody in particular,” he said. He still wore that starry-eyed look, as if he’d bent over to pick up something sparkling on the sidewalk and found it was a diamond brooch.

  “Listen, Ed, I’m going to level with you. Of course you need an agent. All writers need an agent. They do your dirty work for you. I’m going to help you get a good one. But if you ever breathe a word of this to Forstman or anyone who might tell him, it’ll be curtains for my career. Well, maybe not curtains, but it certainly won’t send my stock soaring with the boss.”

  “I don’t get it, but I’ll agree. I don’t understand what all the fuss is about.”

  “The fuss is that Forstman believes he’d be much richer if it weren’t for those pesky agents—and he’s probably right.”

  I knew I was stepping a little out of line in helping him sleep with the enemy. But Fleming was my friend. We liked each other. We trusted each other. Why not give him an assist?

  So I helped Fleming find an agent, John Bailey, a small gesture of friend to friend. Bailey was a legendary shark admired by writers, feared by publishers. All I had to do, really, was make a telephone call to Bailey. When Forstman did discover who was representing his newest and brightest author, he made some remark about how fast Fleming seemed to be wising up.

  Fleming came over to our apartment for dinner at least once every week. Phyllis liked him to the point of flirting with him and vice versa, but never seriously enough to make trouble. Little things, like his praising her ingenuity in turning one small chunk of meat and a chicken neck into a delicious meal for five.

  One night, after Fleming had been over for dinner, Phyllis said, “You know, one sign that Edgar’s really okay is that the kids like him. I think children can tell whether or not someone’s genuine.”

  This was one of those sayings that emerge easily and that I’m somewhat skeptical of. Does it mean that children can spot a phony more accurately than an adult? And if so, why should this be? Kids have limited intelligence, limited judgment. Anyway, I kept these thoughts to myself and agreed that Kate and Henry seemed to like listening to Fleming’s jokes and his stories about what it was like to grow up next to a California bean field and what it was like (heavily edited, of course) to be in the wartime navy.

  “And that’s why,” Phyllis said, “I find it so odd that he’s a Republican. Aren’t most writers Democrats?”

  “I don’t know. I guess so.” For so long everyone had been focused exclusively on winning the war and their political opinions lay more or less dormant. Everyone pulling together, all eyes and hearts on one goal, differences buried. Now that the war was almost over, small fault lines had begun to appear and groups of this or that, some to the right, some to the left, were making noises. I have to admit that I had heard Fleming voice opinions about the Russians that surprised me and that I didn’t share. Phyllis loathed this kind of attitude. She wasn’t a Communist, she had never even considered joining the Party (as some of her dopey friends had), but she sympathized with their basic urgency to narrow or close the gap between those who own and those who merely work. She was, as I’ve mentioned, a liberal Democrat down to her toes.

  “I don’t know any Republicans,” she said, as she went off to take a shower before getting into bed.

  “Well you do now,” I said. “I’m not going to change my mind about him just because he voted for Wilkie. He’s a good guy—even the kids like him. You said so yourself.”

  “It’s just strange he thinks those things. He hates the Russkies more than the Krauts. Jesus!”

  AN ATOM bomb, something none of us had ever heard of— although there had been rumors during the war about a miracle weapon that could destroy a city in a flash—fell on two Japanese cities. The war ended within days. The bomb was so shocking that most of us couldn’t manage to consider its implications and so ingested its reality whole, thinking about it in its narrowest terms, as just another weapon in the armory. After V-J Day there was general rejoicing, and for weeks people went around in the kind of euphoria usually associated with strong drink or drugs. We gradually cooled down and went back to the life we once had led. Only after we left our apartment in Georgetown and got back to New York did I discover that I didn’t have my Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw records or my Victor recording of Mozart’s Requiem. When I wrote our landlady she denied any knowledge of them, and I knew she had simply declared them a dividend for having to put up with two small children.

  Our apartment was on Eighty-Seventh Street between Second and Third Avenues. It was in an okay building with a costumed doorman and an elevator man named Max who knew everybody’s business. Your mail was delivered on the floor right outside your door. The place was small; my mother would have called it a matchbox: Kate and Henry shared a room, an arrangement neither of them would have chosen, a living room and a dining room so tiny that when you pushed your chair back to get up it hit the wall behind, leaving a mark. Post-war life seemed to flow more or less seamlessly from pre-war, the interruption better forgotten than dwelled upon.

  Henry got his first pair of eyeglasses at the age of eight; they made him look owlish and didn’t help with his popularity at school. He told me he wanted to go to Harvard, like me, precocious child. Henry seemed preoccupied with the war and kept asking me what being a spy was like. I told him I hadn’t been a spy even though the work I had done was classified. “I never got overseas,” I said. He seemed disappointed. He wanted to know if Hitler was really and truly dead and I assured him he was. Would he grow up to be a nervous Nellie? Kate, at six, had the kind of face photographers love: large blue eyes, and an expression that suggests premature cognition: I know what you’re thinking. I know how things work. I know how to make a perfect omelet.

  As for Phyllis, nothing much had changed since the first year of our marriage. She had always kept a part of herself off limits to me—not the sexual, but the opposite, the parts lying deeper beneath the surface. I’m not talking about her dreams or the girlish secrets she shared with her best friend, but intentions, shades of meaning, bits of family history, apprehensions. O
n the other hand, she was extremely vocal with opinions that had no immediate impact on either of us, especially about politics. Her sympathies clearly lay with those she felt had drawn a lousy hand in the game of life, so to speak. She was adamant about Truman, maintaining that he shouldn’t have dropped the A-bomb.

  “Yes, but it saved an awful lot of American lives. It ended the war,” I said.

  “I know. American lives. But what about all those Japanese lives? Don’t they matter?”

  Whenever I tried to engage her in conversation about things she considered trivial, such as whether Randolph Scott was a fairy or Sinclair Lewis was a genuinely classy writer, she got a jelled look on her face that said, “Let’s get this over with.” But how can I be sure that I interpreted that look correctly? She reminded me a little bit of May Welland in Wharton’s novel, whose “abysmal purity” left her husband Newland in the emotional dust. Of course, May wasn’t volatile, just steely. But she and Phyllis could have been sisters as far as their convictions went. Like May, Phyllis never did anything overtly awful or destructive, but she had placed a boulder between us that I couldn’t budge. After a while I guess I gave up trying. But at least I had Henry and Kate, who were openly affectionate and were always asking me to take them to Central Park and buy them ice cream on a stick.

  The war ended in August. I went back to work at Griffin House in September. They had given my old office to a lady editor who smiled at me in a friendly way as I walked down the hall. They had to scramble to find me another place for my desk, my shelves, my files. My new office had a window that looked out over Madison Avenue. I figured that Edgar Fleming had something to do with my new digs; he had upped my status with the house. The manuscript of his second novel, Clarion Call, a bildungsroman about a boy with just a bit too much curiosity growing up in rural California, had recently been edited, copy edited and sent to the production department, where they had farmed out the jacket art to a hotshot designer. Meanwhile, the promotion and advertising people were gathering to plan a campaign to put the novel over via fireworks and searchlights. Hollywood was sniffing around, having been alerted by Forstman that the new Fleming would be an ideal vehicle in which to insert Glenn Ford or Jimmy Stewart before stepping on the gas pedal and driving swiftly to the bank.