The Man on the Third Floor

by Anne Bernays

  This conversation had stalled. I told her I’d see her at dinner. “That is, if you’re well enough to come downstairs.”

  Phyllis came home a few minutes later. By this time I was sitting in my study reading a manuscript about peacetime uses of nuclear energy. The agent’s covering letter had stressed that this was an important subject, that the author, a retired admiral, earned his chops, and that I would be extremely foolish to give this book a pass. “I’m sending it to you first off,” the agent wrote. My eyes glazed; I just couldn’t get it up for nuclear power, however “important” it was to the future of mankind. I viewed my distraction as ominous. This is your job! Do it. Do it with joy. I wondered where Barry was.

  Phyllis burst into the room. She ripped off her hat, sending a pin flying. She talked excitedly. “Arnie has to testify,” she said. “It’s the worst thing that could possibly happen. How can they do that to this lovely man?”

  “But you’ve known for a while this was going to happen. Why are you so surprised?” I was giving her a hard time when I should have tried to make her feel better. She seemed to ignore my remark and insisted that Arnie wasn’t ready to testify.

  “I doubt one is ever ready for this sort of inquisition,” I said. I sounded inexcusably smug. I kept wondering where Barry was.

  “If he doesn’t rat on his erstwhile friends he goes to jail for contempt.”

  “It’s a lousy time,” I said.

  She asked me if that was all I had to say. We knew how to get under each other’s skin; it was amazingly easy. Did that mean we were truly devoted to each other or the opposite? Who knew?

  “You’re no help,” she said. “I’m going to go up and see Kate. Have you been up to see her?”

  “Wait,” I said. “Before you go up. I bought her a little present. I think she’s wearing it.”

  “Walter—how sweet of you.” She started to melt before my eyes. “I hope Henry won’t be too envious.”

  “When he recovers from meningitis, I’ll give him something too,” I said. Completely uncalled for.

  Barry came into my study a few minutes later, probably having waited until he heard Phyllis go upstairs. I asked him where he’d been. “Gassing up Baby,” he said. I didn’t altogether believe him even though there was no evidence that he was lying. He asked me if he could bum a cigarette, he was all out of Camels. Paranoia crawled along the skin of my arms. “You’re usually here when I get home,” I said.

  “Not this time,” he said, accepting the cigarette I handed him without lingering for a friendly squeeze of the hand or something more. I told him Kate knew about him, that is, him and me. He said he figured it was only a matter of time. He sighed. “And I was just getting used to living here,” he said.

  “Barry, this is serious!”

  “I know it is, man, but a little humor never hurt any situation.” He tried to reassure me; Kate wouldn’t tell anyone. He knew her pretty well. She adored me, she wouldn’t betray me. I answered that she also loved her mother; if she kept quiet she would be betraying her mother. If she told her mother I would be the one betrayed. Kate was in an awkward place. I didn’t envy her. “You can see how she’s being pulled in opposite directions,” I told him.

  Barry went right on, as if nothing I’d said made the slightest difference, concluding—and I must admit it made sense—that Kate would hardly light the fuse on the bomb that would explode the family. “She likes things the way they are.”

  Barry picked up the glass I had been drinking from and took a couple of swallows. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. I wanted to lick it. Distracted by my own lust I hardly listened as Barry went on to complain that I hadn’t been myself since Kate’s illness. I knew that already, he didn’t have to tell me. “Don’t go nutty on me,” he said. I felt a tear leave my eye and roll down my cheek. “Jesus,” Barry said. “You’re in rotten shape.”

  At that moment we heard Phyllis coming down the stairs. Barry swiftly withdrew to the servants’ part of the house. I composed myself as best I could, picked up the manuscript and waited for my wife to come in.

  “It’s beautiful, Walt. I mean it, it’s perfectly lovely. What a nice father you are.”

  Her admiration for me was so patent that I was certain Kate had said nothing to incriminate me. But Phyllis was worried. Kate had begun to cry, and when Phyllis asked her what was the matter, Kate said she didn’t know, she didn’t know why she was crying.

  THE FOLLOWING day, Arnie Brill, Phyllis’ boss, dove from an eleventh storey window—a bathroom—in the federal courthouse on Foley Square, landing on a car, injuring its driver, and killing himself.

  Phyllis found out about it while she was at work. She called me right away. I could barely understand what she was telling me because her voice was muffled by her tears. She said her office was in turmoil. I had met Arnie once, briefly, and found him less than impressive; there was something furtive about his face, his eyes, that stuck with me. Still I was angry this had happened. What kind of country were we living in? Where was our brave soldier-president when we needed him?

  “Did he have a family?”

  “There’s a wife in Wilkes-Barre. They’re separated. Their two kids live with her.”

  “A silver lining of sorts,” I said. I could almost see her scowling.

  We both hung up. When I saw her next, she looked as if she had been disassembled and put back together wrong. Her hair was all over the place, her slip hung beneath the hem of her skirt. It made you wonder what she had been doing. Barry, who had fetched her in the car, came into the study with her and said, “Mr. Samson, I brought Mrs. Samson home. I don’t think she’s feeling very well.”

  “Thank you, Barry, I’m grateful to you for taking such good care of my wife.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Samson.”

  Phyllis took out a handkerchief and wiped her eyes. “Oh Walter, what have we done?”

  “Who?”

  “Those monsters in Washington. They’re not human. Why can’t they leave people alone?”

  “Come here, Phyll.” I held out my arms. I’m not a complete bastard; I can be reached. Phyllis fell against me and held on tight. She was perspiring; the smell rising off her body stung my nose. It made me pity her. I held my breath.

  Because Arnie was Jewish, the funeral was scheduled for the following day. Phyllis said I shouldn’t go. Wouldn’t it look odd, I asked her, my not going to the funeral with her? She said we were in the second half of the twentieth century, wives did things alone. “You have your work,” she said. The entire staff of WNYC would be there, as well as his family and friends, even the separated wife. I needn’t go. To be honest, I was relieved because I hate funerals. This hardly put me in a class of one, but I found them too fantastic. Years earlier I had gone to the funeral of one of my father’s cousins and didn’t recognize the man the eulogizers were talking about, so heavily did they apply the brush of fiction to a man no one loved and most people feared. So I was delighted that Phyllis urged me to go to work instead.

  The papers headlined Arnie’s suicide; no one called it an accident. Depending on the publisher’s political stance, the story either praised the House Un-American Activities Committee for rooting out yet another disloyal citizen, or else condemned our indigenous fascism “capable of hounding a decent, innocent man to his premature death.” I wasn’t surprised at how Arnie’s suicide divided sentiments. Some people thought Abraham Lincoln was an opportunist and a hypocrite. Some people believed Hitler was a savior.

  It took longer for Phyllis to shake off her grief over Arnie’s death than it had taken Kate to recover from meningitis. Often, when I came home, I would find the two of them in our bedroom enveloped by an air of intimacy. Phyllis would be lying on her bed, with a box of Kleenex on the bedside table, her eyes often puffy and red, Kate half-sitting, half-reclining in her mother’s chaise lounge. I knew as soon as I entered the room that they had been talking about something they didn’t want me to hear. Their words had flown off an
d were lost. I caught them in my inner ear.

  You know your father loves you.

  Yes, I know he does.

  He’s used to having his own way. His mother spoiled him. She called him “my little prince.”

  “What’s so bad about that?”

  “It tends to make a man feel he’s better than anyone else.”

  “Why did you marry Dad?”

  “What a question! Because I loved him.”

  “Even though he acts like he thinks he’s a prince?”

  “He doesn’t do that all the time. Look at how he came home every day early just to be with you when you were sick.”

  ”I know.”

  “Get me a cigarette, will you? They’re over there.”

  “Mom, are all men like Dad?”

  “I wouldn’t know. Most of them, I guess. We women have to put up with a lot of crap. Excuse me for that. But we get a lot, don’t we?”

  “Do you still love him the way you did when you got married?”

  “Enough questions, Kate. Have you done your home-work?”

  “I love you, Mom.”

  The several times I walked in on this pas de deux, I withdrew, after taking off my jacket and exchanging it for my favorite cashmere cardigan. They stopped talking and stared at me until I had left the room. It was unnerving. Kate was always wearing the pendant; I figured she wore it to bed.

  It didn’t occur to me to find anything unusual about Phyllis’ prolonged sorrow. I knew she had liked and admired her boss a lot. I was also aware of how theatrical her responses tended to be—about almost everything.

  DEATH WAS multiplying around us that spring. Fred Forstman finally gave up the ghost and was dispatched with a large and star-studded funeral at Temple Emanu-El on Fifth Avenue, a synagogue so assimilated that wearing a yarmulke was frowned upon, if not prohibited. Attendees included the mayor of New York with his wife, embraced by a mink stole, the heads of NBC and CBS, and a couple of aging movie stars whose memoirs Forstman had brought out with the help of ghosts. I had to go to this funeral, there was no way I could escape; and to be perfectly honest, I wanted to see how they managed to get rid of all the wrinkles and carbuncles on this man, the very things that made him singular, and in some ways—maybe perverse—beloved. The rabbi sounded like Anthony Eden and looked like my dentist, Dr. Leonard. The speeches lasted nearly an hour, with the temperature in the building rising a degree or two every fifteen minutes or so. By the end it was stifling.

  Two Forstman sons gave us a look at Fred at home. Was this the bawdy teller of tall tales, misogynistic individual I had learned to love? “He took us on picnics to Bear Mountain.” “He made funny hats for us to wear at birthday parties.” “He loved Pinocchio; he saw it ten times.” A former colleague at the milk company where he had worked years before coming to Griffin extolled him as a “gentleman’s gentleman” and no one sniggered. His wife said nothing but sat in the front pew throughout, wiping her eyes. The rabbi talked about the generosity of his spirit matched only by the generosity of his purse. That didn’t sound quite right to me, but never mind.

  I told Barry about the funeral. He said he wished he had been there. “Our memories are mostly separate,” he said. “Do you realize that? We almost never do anything together just the two of us except when I’m driving you someplace.”

  A month or so after the stir created by Forstman’s death, everyone at the publishing house had slipped back into their daily routines. It was then brought to the attention of upper management that Griffin House had a small but worrisome cash flow problem. This news reached us in the form of a memo, “for internal distribution only,” from the publisher. The problem had arisen mainly because, in an effort to beat out the competition, we had got into the habit of shelling out bloated advances to authors who either never delivered as promised or whose books had disappointing sales. There was the book by a doctor, for example, that promised eternal life in return for foregoing all foods beginning with the letter C. This is an exaggeration, but not so farfetched as one might think. Diet books by the pound. One advocated eating only grapefruit, presumably until you practically dropped dead from malnutrition. Another that you could eat anything you wanted, except that no portion was allowed to be any larger than what you would feed a hamster. Yet another instructed you to make love three times a day for six weeks. Another killer. None of these books earned back their advances, although the sex one came close. There was a surgeon from a celebrated clinic who promised a book that would extend a person’s life by a good two-and-a-half years if he would adhere to a regimen that eschewed all protein, fat, and all citrus fruits. The doctor’s book was three years past deadline, and I called him many times only to be told that “the doctor is in surgery” and would call me back. He never did. We didn’t go after people like him, we simply wrote it off as you do a bad debt.

  One night I had an especially vivid dream about a silent movie star, someone like Theda Bara or Gloria Swanson, dark shining hair, wide round eyes heavily outlined with kohl, bending over a cradle and covering the baby lying in it with great, slurpy kisses. The dream stayed with me through breakfast, came with me in the car, and abruptly turned into an idea for a book, as we approached Sixty-Seventh Street. I tried the idea on Barry. I treasured these times when he and I were in the car together. No one could interrupt; no one could hear what we were saying to each other. We were sealed together inside a capsule. Taking a risk, I sat in front with him. Sometimes I put my left hand on his right thigh. He would frown and accuse me of distracting him. “Do you want me to get into an accident?”

  I asked him if he remembered a silent screen actress named Lucille Baroney, also known as Lula. He’d heard the name but nothing visual came to mind. I told him she was almost as popular as Lillian Gish and Mary Pickford. She wasn’t much of an actress but she had a great body and could cry on demand, which made her a hot property. There was a lot of waterworks in silent movies. She was rumored to have had torrid romances with Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Lionel Barrymore, and the Prince of Wales. Barry asked how old she was now. I guessed late sixties.

  “A cow put out to pasture? What happens to all these old has-beens?”

  “Would you read a memoir by her?”

  “Probably, if it was juicy enough.”

  “I can’t imagine it wouldn’t be.” I was thinking that if I bought another graceful mid-list book, it would sell fewer than five thousand copies and put Griffin that much further behind. I wished Forstman were still around to advise me; the man had an uncanny sense of what would sell and what wouldn’t. I needed a moneymaker. “I seem to recall that Miss Lula or whatever her name was, enjoyed a varied sex life.”

  “You mean like you and me?”

  Barry and I shared a quiet moment or two musing about this. Then we were at my office building. It was already almost nine-thirty and a few stragglers were entering the building in a hurry. I gave Barry’s thigh a hasty squeeze and joined the latecomers.

  I went straight to our so-called library where we kept reference books, Who’s Who, The World Almanac, assorted dictionaries and encyclopedias, histories of English and American literature, and an encyclopedia of Hollywood from the birth of movies to the present. In this volume I found exactly what I was looking for.

  I went back to my office, taking the book with me, and called Charlie McCann. “Hey pal, I need your help.”

  No one had ever said or suggested that Charlie wasn’t a decent man; he was a grown-up boy scout without the fervor. It would never have occurred to me that he would do anything underhanded or break a promise or lie in order to make himself look better. This probably caused problems for him; most of us get through by resorting to one small subterfuge after another that we convince ourselves won’t hurt anyone. But neither was Charlie too good to be true, because as I said earlier, part of him had been shut down during the war when he was sure he was going to die. He was married and had two young children to whom he was extremely kind. I would gu
ess that his wife, Marcia, had to put up with unexplained periods of silence from her husband, which all in all, is not too high a price to pay for a good man. Charlie had reached a stage in his life where envy and resentment had said goodbye to him forever. That was a plus for me, because, had things been just a little different, he would have had my job and I his.

  I asked Charlie to sit down. He was wearing the uniform— pink shirt, black string tie, dark gray trousers, neatly pressed, a muted Harris Tweed jacket with little twigs embedded in the cloth, and a good shave. He was a good-looking guy with a nose that had been smashed in a high school football game, giving him the look of an intelligent bruiser.

  I told Charlie I wanted him to go after a memoir by Lucille Baroney.

  “That old crock?” he said. “You must be joking.”

  I assured him I wasn’t joking. “I think she lives somewhere near Boston.”

  “You say you got this idea from a dream?”

  “Well, I probably shouldn’t have told you that. It makes me sound like a lunatic.”

  “I’ll buy that,” he said. He pulled a pack of Chesterfields from his jacket pocket and lit up. There was no mistaking his feelings: he didn’t like the idea. He considered himself to be a literary editor and so far had managed to stay away from the kind of book that Lucille Baroney’s book would inevitably turn out to be: a series of anecdotes bordering on the sleazy. Charlie asked me if I though Griffin was really that sort of publisher.

  “You betcha,” I said. “Where have you been, my friend?”

  Charlie sagged. He let out a deep sigh. “I suppose you’re right,” he said.

  “Come on now,” I said. “It’s not so bad. Just think of her as one of those little folks from outer space, like that business in New Mexico. Little men with funny heads.”

  “It might not be worse than The Folly,” he said, using the word we had attached to an epic battle with a Princeton historian who insisted that not a single word of his manuscript about the opening days of the Civil War be changed, even though it was crammed with inconsistencies and factual errors. It all ended with our not publishing the book and the author threatening to sue; the case was still pending.