by Anne Bernays
Fleming came over to join us. “I see you two have been getting to know each other.” Quick flick of eyes from Mary to me and back. “Isn’t she a charmer? I told you. Looks like Grace Kelly, only more so. You know what I mean.”
“Grace Kelly?” Mary said. “I don’t see it.”
Fleming grabbed Mary around the waist and gave a mighty tug. She looked startled, lost some of her balance, and put her hand to her hair, as if to make sure it was still there. “Eddie, sweetie, you’re such a bear!” She didn’t look exactly pleased.
I began to have a good time, just chatting without thought or topic, the booze easing my uneasiness. I talked briefly to a youngish man who, when he found out what I did for a living, told me he was writing a book about his experience as an ambulance driver during the war and, amazing myself, I asked him to send it to me.
Phyllis said she wanted to leave. “These people are troglodytes. One of them said they weren’t allowed to mention FDR’s name in their house. They had to pay a fine. What kind of friends do you have?”
I reminded her that Edgar Fleming was my best and most lucrative author. “Besides, we’ve been friends since ’44. So he’s marrying the enemy. You don’t have to live with him.”
“Doesn’t it matter to you?” she said, as we rode down in the elevator, paying no attention to its operator, whose back was to us and who no doubt relished some of the talk he heard on the trips up and down, up and down.
“Not really,” I said. “What matters is his prose and his energy. That’s all I really care about.” This wasn’t altogether true, but I’d found that if I made stark black or white statements I was more likely to get off easier than if I had argued each little point with her, peeling it, testing it, twisting it.
On the way home, with Barry at the wheel, Phyllis was saying something in her urgent voice. It was hard to focus on what she was saying because I was mesmerized by the back of Barry’s head, where his beautiful black hairs came together over the exact middle of his neck, an arrow pointing down towards the site of love.
“I don’t think you’re listening to me,” Phyllis said. “I just said I want to go back to work.”
“Why now?” I said, forcing myself to concentrate.
“It was all those so-called women of leisure, they gave me the creeps. All they do is sit on boards and have their hair and nails done. That’s not me, Walt, you know that. I’m bored at home. I can read just so many books. I’m wasting my time.”
“You’re not wasting your time,” I said. “You’re a mother. Remember Henry and Kate?”
“For heaven’s sake, Walter, you sound like some old fool. What did I go to Bryn Mawr for? Why did I take art history and French literature? So I could plan my children’s meals? So I can find my way around carpet showrooms? You try it, just for a week. You’d go nuts.”
I sighed, trying hard to put myself in her place. It wasn’t easy. Isn’t that what women did? “What did you have in mind?”
“The same thing. You know, WNYC. Preparing scripts for the guys who read the news, book guests, all-around help for everybody. Not much money there but I loved the work.”
I pointed out that she hadn’t worked at the station for almost fifteen years. Lots of changes in that time. Television, the Cold War, Marlon Brando, that new kind of acting where you pretended you weren’t acting, blacklists. Books with blunt sex in them. Dirty words. I was aware that I was throwing cold water on her plan without the slightest justification for doing so. Why shouldn’t the old girl go back to work? Did I have a trace of atavistic caveman? Man hunts woman cooks. It was nonsense. Besides, if she had a job and was out of the house, my own life would be easier. I stared at the motionless head in front of me and turned my hands into fists to keep me from reaching out and stroking him from behind. Oh my god I can’t stand it.
I told my wife that she should do what felt right for her, she should go ahead and work again. “In any case, I can’t stop you. This is 1954.”
“And why on earth would you want to stop me? “Phyllis said. “Honestly, Walt, sometimes I haven’t the faintest idea what goes on inside your head.”
A wave of self-pity washed over me and nearly cut off my supply of air. Only the thought of Barry waiting for a good-night hug and kiss kept me from throwing out my arm and smashing Phyllis in the face. I had never before felt this kind of fury and it frightened me; I didn’t know what to do with it. I must have shown some of this on my face because Phyllis said, “Poor dear. You’re tired. I promise you I won’t turn into one of those man-eating bitches. Once they get a bite of the big world they feel they don’t have to be decent wives and mothers anymore. I’ll be home for dinner every night, I promise. I’ll help the children with their homework.”
My self-pity had given way to guilt and I reached for Phyllis’ hand. It was cold and silky. I gave it a squeeze and withdrew before she had a chance to squeeze back.
When we reached the house Barry sprang from the driver’s seat and hurried around to the rear door, which he held open for us. Phyllis thanked him with the polite tone she used when talking to anyone who worked for her.
“Yes, ma’am, Will that be all?”
“That’s all for tonight, Barry. I’ll need you tomorrow morning at ten-fifteen.”
Barry said yes ma’am again. Following Phyllis from the curb to the front door, I looked at Barry with love and wonderment while his eyes flickered with amusement. I adored this man whose mind never traveled very far but whose body gave me extreme pleasure, the sort of pleasure I wasn’t sure I deserved.
While Phyllis was getting ready for bed, I told her that I had to draft a letter that needed to go out first thing in the morning.
“Why do you always work so late?” she said. She stood near the bed, wearing a nightgown that reached her ankles and emphasized her considerable belly.
“I get some of my best ideas at night,” I said. “I won’t be long.”
“Right.” She pulled back the covers and lay down. “By the way, did I tell you I’m glad now you insisted on hiring Barry. He’s very reliable. I wonder, does he have a girlfriend? I certainly hope so, good-looking man like that. Does he remind you of Montgomery Clift?”
Bingo! “Not in the slightest,” I said. “And I don’t know whether he has a girlfriend. He doesn’t confide in me.”
Phyllis looked at me blankly.
“I somehow doubt it,” I said, regretting it the moment the words left my mouth.
“Why do you say that?” she said.
“I don’t know. He seems to enjoy his own company. I’m probably wrong, he probably has a thousand ladies hankering for him. Anyway, it’s none of our business. And about my late hours. You should be used to it by now.”
“Well, I’m not.”
“DID YOU by any chance hear what she had to say about going back to work?”
I had tiptoed upstairs and was standing inside Barry’s room, where we were nuzzling each other. Barry thought it was a fine idea. Too many women were just lazy, why shouldn’t they work in an office or whatever if they had someone else to do their domestic dirty work? We were whispering because cook and maid were in their rooms. Somehow, after all this time, we had still evaded detection. Grete and Marie knew nothing about Barry and me. At least we were fairly sure about this. On the other hand, maybe there were suspicious nighttime noises, creaks on the stairs, doors closing and opening—and just hadn’t let on. Or maybe they were gathering evidence to do me evil in some quiet, diabolical manner. My mind went swiftly down the paranoid trail until I stopped it abruptly. The master was humping his chauffeur—happily. If this meant taking risks, that’s the way it was going to be.
“Your old lady’s got balls,” Barry said. “She’s okay. I like that in a woman.”
“And you’ve got some cheek,” I said. “Is that any way to talk to your employer?”
“You love it, you old cocksucker.”
CHAPTER 5
Edgar Fleming asked me to be best man at his
wedding. This happened near the end of one of our lunch meetings, which were part social, part business, the two functions having, in our case, become so melded that you couldn’t have pulled them apart. Generally, I let Fleming do most of the talking; Edgar Fleming didn’t at all mind talking about himself. There was always a bit of news, his run-in with Spyros Skouras, his flirtation with Tallulah Bankhead, his night out with William Faulkner or Red Warren drinking whiskey in some West Village dive. He had somehow transformed himself into an entertainer and intellectual guru, a kind of Dick Cavett or Bill Buckley without the microphone or camera. When he asked me to stand up with him at his wedding, my hand with the coffee cup in it stopped halfway to my mouth.
“Well,” I said, putting down the cup. “I’m flattered, naturally, but what about your brother? Don’t you want to ask him?”
“Grant and I are on the outs this year. Even years we’re on the outs, odd years we’re civil to each other—barely. Too much wailing about McCarthy. I can’t take it; I mean he’s a broken record. He and I don’t exactly see eye to eye about what’s going on in the State Department and elsewhere in D.C. Grant’s a screenwriter. Last one he did was for Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck. It wasn’t too shoddy. He’d be okay if it wasn’t for his goddamn hobbyhorse. Grant’s been blacklisted so he peddles his wares under a pseudonym, something like Lucky Jonas. Who’s going to believe that? Funny, we’re in the same racket but worlds apart in our thinking. Actually, by not asking him, I spare him the embarrassment of saying no.”
I asked Fleming whether Grant was going to be asked to the wedding.
“I haven’t made up my mind on that one.”
A little earlier Fleming and I had been talking about his new novel. He pushed them out like a champion laying-hen. You would think, given these circumstances, that they would lose their freshness and energy after a while, but he managed to keep his readers rapt, begging for more. He had begun to use some characters in more than one book. One of these was Aubrey Galliston, a kind of armchair detective-philosopher whom his readers responded to as if he was a real flesh-and-blood person: “Oh, I absolutely love Aubrey, don’t you just love him?” But our discussion was really perfunctory, because Fleming needed almost no coaching; he would create an outline, keep the action of a novel within one short time period, say a week or two, and then account for the action on every single day covered. Work-wise, Fleming was a Prussian.
Years before, I had discovered that it was futile to try to match an author with his work. If you loved his book, you might be very disappointed to discover a roaring narcissist, a drunk, a compulsive womanizer, or any of a number of disagreeable types. Or you might meet a really nice guy, someone you want to make a friend of. There was no predicting which it would be. If this seems hard to credit, just think of an actor who plays the part of an axe murderer. You don’t confuse the actor and his role. It’s a good idea not to confuse the author with his fiction.
So Fleming was nothing like most of his characters. Ask him where they came from and he would likely say, “I make them up.”
As we rose to leave, Fleming clapped me on the shoulder and told me how glad he was that I was going to be his best man. I had some misgivings, centered mainly on the blacklisted brother whose nose might be out of joint.
ABOUT MARRIAGE, an odd business in which patience is an absolute necessity and an attitude of inertia a definite plus. What, after all, is truly worth screaming and yelling about? My amour propre? Your precious longings? Forget it. If you marry you have to decide to put up with a difficult situation in which at least half of a man’s freedom is compromised. Every so often I stopped to consider why I married Phyllis. In spite of my experience as a youth at camp, I considered myself heterosexual—so let’s get that out of the way at the start. I was attracted to her, not so much to her sexual promise as to her spirit, which caught most people’s attention. But, think of it, love is nature’s cruel joke: you see your mate-to-be in a light so flattering, so pearly, it can’t be—and isn’t—real. By the time the luster has worn off, it’s too late.
Phyllis was an original. As it happened, she remained that way, but this trait isn’t quite so appealing after you’ve lived with it for twenty years. You would like a little less singularity, a little more harmony.
Phyllis graduated from Hunter College in 1927 and went straight to work. This put her in a category of less than one percent of her American sisters. She edited an inhouse newspaper for the Hearst Corporation. It was several steps up from an entry-level job, and according to her she worked very hard at it, producing a mimeographed, stapledtogether, newsy, weekly document that went to—and was presumably read by—every employee in the company. After that she went to work for the Radio Corporation of America in their advertising department, and then to radio station WNYC, the “voice” of New York City and the place she was working when we met. So Phyllis and I were basically in the same line of work in spite of the fact that for ladies to get this sort of job was extremely difficult and rare as diamonds in the mud. I knew an assistant editor at Griffin House, for example, who manned the telephone switchboard during lunch hours even though she had earned a Phi Beta Kappa at Radcliffe. She said, “I don’t mind, really, I think it’s sort of fun. You get to listen in on conversations.” Idiot!
Phyllis had a way of persuading the hesitant that she was the absolutely right person—especially if she was dealing with a man. I don’t mean she flirted or slept her way into rooms other ladies couldn’t enter. There probably was an element of coquetry in her approach, but that wasn’t the main ingredient of her success. It was her self-confidence and a mastery of several critical facts that demonstrated she knew what she was talking about.
Phyllis had an abundance of energy and enthusiasms and didn’t mind taking risks. Mentally, I set her against my mother who generally steered away from anything odd or risky. In our marriage Phyllis was usually the one who initiated things—from choosing where we lived, to how we spent our money, to sex. Like our switchboard girl, I didn’t really mind; it left me more time to make decisions at work, something I enjoyed very much. Which manuscript to get behind, whether to let the production people do the jacket picture or send it to an outside professional, how to write the jacket copy, etc. I was good at taking a situation apart and putting it back together again in a different configuration. I was able to judge with fair accuracy the ultimate consequences of my choices. At home I was limp.
So it’s easy to understand why my feelings about weddings were, to say the least, ambiguous. The part of me that was romantic—the part I lavished on Barry—enjoyed seeing four starry eyes locked in early marital bliss. The part of me that had soured made me want to rise up at the ceremony itself—like Mr. Rochester’s brother-in-law in Jane Eyre—and yell “Stop!”
Phyllis said, “What do you think I should wear to the wedding?”
I knew she didn’t expect me to answer; she was already going over her filmy wardrobe, all neatly lined up in her scented closet (lavender), each waiting to be next to her warm skin.
“Not black,” I said. “Or white. White’s for the bride.”
“I know that, Walt, who wears black to a wedding?”
I thought this was an interesting conceit and I could see that many might be tempted. Then Phyllis was saying that we had to get them something “really nice.” I reminded her that I could put the price of the item on my expense account, but in the end I didn’t. I wanted to pay for it myself.
“By really nice do you mean expensive?”
“Natch,” she said. “I thought maybe something from Jensen’s, silver, silver candlesticks, or maybe a glass tray. They mold them into different shapes. Why don’t I get one for us?”
I told her to go ahead and find something “really nice,” hoping she would pick up on my sarcasm.
She ended up getting a silver platter with the bride and groom’s initials intertwined in the center so that they resembled a bird. So pretty, so useless. It cost three hundr
ed bucks but I didn’t begrudge the money she spent on it; Fleming was my golden goose. It was Fleming who was responsible for my own bright arc at Griffin House.
THE WEDDING was to take place in St. James’ Episcopal Church on Madison Avenue, where many of New York’s smartest showed up every Sunday, sang standard Anglican hymns, and listened to a sermon that more often made them feel better rather than more anxious or guilty—no hellfire or brimstone. The minister would be one of those silver-haired prep-school types with wonderful diction and a deep, reassuring voice. The church itself was a darkish, soaring structure, traditional in ambiance, entirely suited to the congregation—and vice versa. One of my cousins, bless her, switched religions from Hebrew to Episcopalian and became a member of St. James’. I admired her guts but didn’t appreciate what turned out to be a convincing disguise. Her second husband was a minister.
On the day of the wedding, a Saturday, I left the house after eating a light lunch. Phyllis was trying on dresses, one after the other. “I wish I’d bought that little green number at Bendel’s,” she said.
“Why didn’t you?”
“It did nothing for my eyes,” she said, twitching her body in front of the full-length mirror. “Does it make my bottom look fat?”
“Of course not,” I said. “You do not have a fat bottom.”
“Why does he want you there so early?”
“Nervous groom,” I said.
The engraved wedding invitation, with self-addressed envelope and a small square of tissue paper, said that the ceremony would begin at four-thirty. It was a warm day in mid-April. Phyllis wore a cobalt blue dress with one of her five-foot-long scarves and a waist-length mink cape, which was fashionable but not Phyllis’ style. I’d never seen it before. “You like it?” she asked.
“I’m not sure. When did you buy it?”
“I didn’t. My sister lent it to me.”
I reminded her what time the wedding was called for. “They’ll start on time. It’s like a high school class. The bell rings, we all sit down. Teacher’s already there.”