How I hated myself for saying things like that! I sounded like every other pretentious writer I’d ever gotten bored with at cocktail parties. The truth was, it didn’t sound any better to say, “I’m having this tremendous block. I haven’t written in years. I’m afraid the well’s gone dry.”
But I did still think of myself as a writer. I had always thought of myself that way, as far back as I could remember. But the only time I’d been confident of my art, the only time I’d been prolific, was before I started college. For some reason, all the reams of stuff I’d written as a kid—poetry, fiction, essays—I boxed up before I went away to school and told my mother she could put it out with the trash. Luckily, my mother was smarter than that. Ten years later while visiting home, I wistfully remembered the time I threw all my childhood writing away. “What a dope,” I said, sadly.
“You may be a dope, but your mother isn’t,” she said and led me to the closet where she kept the box all those years. I cried and promised her I would never again throw a piece of my writing away.
And I hadn’t, because there had hardly been enough to consider throwing away. A couple of notebooks. When I first met Catherine, I was in the middle of this most recent block. She used to refuse to do anything with me on Sundays till I’d written something—a journal entry, a two-line poem, anything. She wouldn’t even speak to me till I could show her something. Eventually, she gave in to my promises that I’d write later, after she’d gone. Then she stopped asking me about my writing all together. If I didn’t take it seriously, why should she?
I pretended to be reading Lucy’s journal, but my thoughts about writing were whizzing through my head.
“It’s difficult to be a writer,” someone said. “You have to spend so much time at it, alone.” I looked up, and Lucy was addressing me from the kitchen counter. She was leaning there casually, inspecting my spice jars.
“That’s the problem,” I said, nodding.
“What’s the problem?” Catherine asked, looking up from her stack of faded letters. “Lack of concentration?”
“Hmm,” I answered, trying to sound thoughtful, but wondering where Lucy had gone. I excused myself and went into the bedroom.
She was there, of course, in a pool of moonlight, and I didn’t turn the lamp on.
“You wrote so much,” I marveled. “I saw the receipts from all your short stories. You had a lot of conviction.”
“No,” she contradicted, “just time on my hands while Harriet was pursuing her career. And the need to make money in the best way I knew how. Later, yes, that was more art.”
I felt stunned by her honesty, like someone had pushed me backwards roughly and I couldn’t keep my balance. In fact, that’s the way Catherine found me, sitting on my ass in the darkness, in the middle of my bedroom. “I think I fainted or something,” I explained, lamely, and she helped me up without questioning me further. “I must be hungry.”
With a look of concern, she ordered in.
25
It was Lucy herself who gave me the idea. I have to admit I would have never come up with it, even though I had spent hours pouring over her personal papers. Catherine was still urging me to delve into history, do a slide show or exhibit, or write an article on Lucy and Harriet for one of the women’s journals. And I still had little interest in that. Though I was learning bits and pieces of their lives, I hadn’t strung them all together in an orderly, historical fashion. Both Lucy and Harriet were like messy, half-finished jigsaw puzzles, the grass and sky filled in, and the whole center of the picture missing. And I was still afraid what learning more would tell me—what I already half, or more than half, knew.
Maybe it would be better, I began to think, to write stories about them all—or a novel—to make up their lives as I imagined they might have been. I could change their names slightly, but borrow heavily from what I knew of their lives. Maybe that was what Lucy wanted from me, why she had chosen me to be the keeper of her words—a writer who needed subject matter and a reason to write again!
Well, I tried it. I sat in the evenings, on my day off, on my lunch hour, with a blank yellow legal pad in front of me. When that failed, I set up my electronic typewriter with a fresh ream of xerox paper next to it and stared hour after hour at the blank sheets I put into the roller. I bought a new daisy wheel for the typewriter so my words would come out sure and strong in Courier. I set a supply of black film ribbons by the desk. And after weeks in which I could not think of a single thing to say, I got understandably discouraged.
“Writing’s like any other kind of exercise,” Catherine remarked, wisely as ever. “If you don’t keep it up, you get out of practice. You need to write every day, anything, just to get the feel of it again.”
How did she know about everything? I wondered, and started writing little bits and scraps of garbage every day. It was all terrible. Still, I kept it. But when I sat down to start my novel, the pages in front of me were pitifully empty.
When two weeks had passed, I stopped sitting in front of the typewriter. Instead I stared at it from across the room. After another week, I put all the ribbons and paper away and unplugged the cord, the lifeline to my well-intentioned novel.
“I’m sorry, Lucy,” I said sadly to the empty room. The feeling of failure sat like an undigested meal in my stomach. Maybe Catherine had been right to suggest an article or something scholarly. The creative drive seemed to have left me all together.
At one of my lowest moments, after a hard day by myself at the store on Tuttie’s day off, I was sitting in front of the TV eating leftover pizza and watching back-to-back reruns of M*A*S*H in the dark, when I suddenly heard someone’s soft sigh from the corner of the room. Dressed in a dark color, so I could hardly see her, was Lucy, bending over her own cardboard box and lifting things out of it.
“I know it’s here somewhere,” she was saying, busily, more to herself than to me. “I’m sure I packed it.”
“Lucy,” I whispered, so she’d know I was watching her and not the TV.
But she paid no attention to me and continued rooting through the box carefully, shifting journals and stacks of papers from one side to the other. At one point, I saw her fingering the fountain pen and I thought briefly, that’s what she was after. But she laid it gently back in the box and lifted a flat brown envelope out instead.
“I knew it!” she smiled. “Here it is.”
“What?” I asked, smiling myself at the absurdity of talking to a shadow. I talked as casually as if it were Catherine or Tuttie in the room, sorting through the box. “What were you looking for?”
In the time it took me to get up and switch off the TV set, Lucy had vanished. I turned on a lamp and looked for a trace of her, and there was a slight scent of lavender in the air near the box. I peered inside and found the envelope she’d been looking for laid carefully on top. I didn’t recall seeing it before, and I’d been through the papers many times.
It wasn’t marked, so I opened it slowly, like someone savoring the moment of opening a special gift. Inside was a typed outline and about twenty pages of manuscript on tissue-thin paper, with a cover page that said “Outline for Novel” by L.W. Weir, 1929.
I only had to read a few lines to know it was the novel I myself had been trying to write. Lucy hadn’t even bothered to change their first names—maybe she meant to do it at a later time. But what happened? Why didn’t she write it? Did she have a breakdown and couldn’t go on? It was late, after midnight, but I sat down to read the outline carefully. Following it was a chapter of text. And as I was finishing, I heard a familiar voice say, “You go on from here.”
“What?” I asked the thin air, but there was no clarification. “Where?” And it wasn’t till the next day, after I’d slept with the envelope beside me on the bed, that I thought I knew what she’d meant. I couldn’t start writing a novel about Lucy because she’d already started it. It remained for me to finish.
• • •
“I don’t know,” Catherin
e said, and I found that hard to believe. I was sure she knew everything. Since our reconciliation, I’d been telling her every thought, every dream, every idea I had. It was just the opposite of the way I’d been with her before, the queen of concealment. I thought she was beginning to look a little worn down by my new revelatory manner. Was it healthy for a relationship to tell your lover every little bit of inspiration that came upon you, even when it was something less than inspiring?
But this, I thought, this was truly inspired—by Lucy herself. “I don’t know,” Catherine repeated. “Has anyone ever done this sort of thing before?”
I couldn’t think of any examples of someone writing someone else’s novel, though there were examples of vaguely similar situations. The staged version of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, for example, where the audience picked the culprit. Great literature, important stories, shouldn’t be left untold because the author died or disappeared prematurely.
“But that doesn’t mean writing it,” Catherine insisted. “I mean, it won’t be the same, it’ll lose its historical integrity. If you want to share Lucy and Harriet, I don’t see why you won’t just write an article about them. Something accurate. Or publish Lucy’s journal.”
“But that’s not the whole story,” I protested.
“You don’t even know the whole story,” Catherine said, a bit too sarcastically, I thought. “You still haven’t read everything in the box. You keep finding things, like this outline. And you antagonized Elinor Devere, because she was disrupting your romantic view of Lucy and Harriet. Seems to me like you just want to make up the story, your story, the way you see it.”
Harsh, but true. Who could read me better than Catherine?
“Honestly, Susan, you have to get these women out of your system or you’re not going to have a normal life!” Her tone suddenly softened, as if she realized how severe she sounded. “I can see us now, in our seventies, sitting in this room with that decrepit box, saying, ‘Which letter shall we read tonight, honey?’” She smiled at her own joke, and I laughed. “Promise me one thing,” Catherine said after a pause.
“What’s that?”
“Promise you’ll get the whole story before you try to write it . . . in whatever form,” she added hastily.
“It isn’t all that happy,” I said. “And I think it’s going to get unhappier.”
“Maybe,” she said. “Maybe not. Just promise me you’ll accept it.” She was staring into my face intently, her lips set in a firm line, her forehead slightly wrinkled with concern. I wondered, for an instant, what she saw when she looked at me—some glimmer of promise, some molecule of hope? I looked so deeply into her eyes that I almost thought I saw a tiny reflection of myself in them. But she blinked, probably to break the intensity, and I sat back, away from her.
“All right,” I said. “I promise.”
26
All this time, since our reconciliation, Catherine and I had been looking for apartments. We decided we could even try for a co-op, since I had money now, and Catherine had saved a little. Neither one of us was very interested in the idea of buying, because prices were grossly inflated. But then, so were rents, and at least with a co-op, you got something for the small fortune you invested. During the hunt, our perspective got slightly skewed, so after a month we were almost thrilled to find a renovated one-bedroom for just over one hundred thousand.
“There’s not enough room,” I said sadly as we sat across a coffee shop booth from each other. “You know, that saleswoman had me believing that’s what teeny-tiny apartments should cost.”
“And I thought my place was small,” Catherine sighed. “Honestly, we might have to give up this shacking up idea, Suze.”
“Not on your life,” I insisted. “It’s too hard to live separately. I want you around.”
She smiled. “You just want my body.” Her knee rested seductively against mine, and the pressure of it sent a surge down to my crotch.
“You know me too well,” I said weakly, concentrating on the heat between my legs.
“So what are we gonna do?” she asked.
“Go to your place?” I suggested, as a joke, knowing she’d already switched from the topic of sex. She clicked her tongue.
“You know what I mean,” she said. “It’s a horrible situation. We just aren’t doing what it takes. We should be getting up at the crack of dawn to get the Voice and read the apartment listings. We should be tacking notices up all over town. We should have a real estate agent. We should . . .”
I reached over and pushed two fingers gently to her lips. “Catherine,” I said softly, “remember the Ouija board? We’re going to get a place together. I know it. Things happen to me.”
She didn’t look the least bit convinced, but she finished her hot chocolate without another protest.
“There’s a Clara Bow festival at Film Forum,” I said. “I noticed it in the paper. Since we’re down here anyway, let’s go see what’s playing.”
“Who’s Clara Bow?” she asked, and it was hard for me to believe there was something I knew about and Catherine didn’t. When she found out it was from the 1920s, she decided it would be fun.
“Who knows?” she said. “Maybe Harriet will have a bit part!”
I knew that was highly unlikely. I’d read Roger Timberlake’s scrapbook and I didn’t remember any mention of Harriet in a Clara Bow movie.
Clara Bow was more popular than I had realized. We stood on line for thirty minutes to see her signature movie, It, complete with live piano accompaniment. Bow was beautiful. Both Catherine and I gasped at her first closeup. But then I gasped another time when Catherine did not. It was during a crowded restaurant scene, and I thought for a second that my eyes were playing tricks on me. But there was no mistaking her. Off in a far corner of the scene, wearing a shiny, feathered headdress and looking like she should have had a much larger part, was Harriet. The moment I recognized her, the scene shifted out of the restaurant.
I turned to Catherine, to see if she had noticed. She had such a good eye for detail. She was munching a giant oatmeal cookie, lost in the movie.
Everyone around us was laughing. Catherine was laughing, too. She finally felt me looking at her and turned to offer me some cookie.
“What is it?” she whispered when I sat there staring into her eyes. “Susan?”
• • •
I was right: there were no Clara Bow movies mentioned in Roger Timberlake’s scrapbook about his aunt. I was certain if she had had even a crowd scene in one Harriet would have sent a notice to her nephew. Clara Bow was a star even before she made It. A part in one of her movies, no matter how small, would have been something to write home about. After all, Harriet had gotten Clara Bow’s autograph for Roger two years before. I was confused but certain my eyes hadn’t deceived me.
Maybe Harriet had the power to get right into the film if she wanted to. Like they had the power to become real to me and stand in my living room. Or visit me in Saratoga and have sex . . . well, I hoped that was just a fantasy, for the sake of my relationship with Catherine. Obviously, ghosts had abilities far beyond what mere mortals knew. Harriet may have decided she should have been in a Clara Bow movie and plopped herself into the middle of it.
“Are you sure it was her?” Catherine said, for the fifth time after I told her. She was thumbing through Roger Timberlake’s scrapbook, reading bits and pieces that caught her attention. “Hey, did you see this? Harriet, the nascent feminist!”
“Yes, I did see it and yes, I did see her,” I insisted. I sat next to Catherine and flipped to the last page in the scrapbook. Roger had carefully pasted in the obituary notices, along with a few dried red roses, maybe from the funeral. I read the one from the Saratogian again:
MISS TIMBERLAKE IN FATAL CRASH
Miss Harriet Timberlake, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Wilton Timberlake of Union Avenue, suffered fatal injuries in a motorcycle crash on October 5.
Miss Timberlake, an actress who lived in New York City, was
riding in the sidecar of Mr. Harry Baum’s motorcycle when the crash occurred. Mr. Baum, also an actor, and Miss Timberlake had left the movie studio in Astoria, New York, where they worked, and were on their way to dinner with friends in Manhattan.
Near the studio, Mr. Baum lost control of the motorcycle and careened into a tree. He suffered a broken arm. Miss Timberlake received a blow to the head and died instantly.
Miss Timberlake, 29, graduated from Saratoga High School in 1915. In 1917, she appeared in her first photoplay, Samantha of Saratoga, filmed and produced locally. She went on to star in numerous regional theatre productions. Beginning in 1925, she was under contract with Famous Players/Lasky Studios in Astoria.
Funeral services will be held October 9 at 10 a.m., at the Grace Episcopal Church on Butler Street.
Miss Timberlake, who never married, is survived by her parents; her brother, Wilton III, his wife, Margaret, and son, Roger.
“She died in 1927,” I said. “The movie was released in 1927. Maybe she never got a chance to make it!”
“It might have been made early in ’27. Harriet died in October. You could check that,” Catherine said determinedly. She took the scrapbook back and leafed through the end pages, looking for a clue. “What puzzles me is, who was Harry Baum?”
I didn’t want to say it puzzled me, too, that it had been on my mind since I had first read the scrapbook and Evelyn Timberlake had mentioned Harriet seeing men. “Just a friend, probably,” I said casually. “Another bit player.”
“Hmm,” Catherine muttered, unconvinced.
The puzzle over It sent me back to the copy of Photoplay Bea had given me, where I remembered seeing a publicity article. Sure enough, Catherine was right—It was made early enough for Harriet to have been in it, if indeed she was. So why didn’t her clippings mention it?
We stayed up late, me reading letters from the box, looking for answers, Catherine correcting final exams. We’d both forgotten about our knees brushing in the coffee shop.
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