by Amanda Cross
“Did you see much of your real mother, Hilda?” Kate asked, choosing it as the least important, least emotional question she could think of. They needed time to get back to the heart of the conversation.
“Not a great deal. She fussed over me when I was a baby, but somehow I always knew she wished I had been a boy. Poppop made a big fuss about wanting me to be the same sex as his heroine, and I guess she played with me and that fantasy for a time. But there were nurses. It was from them Gabrielle rescued me. I can’t bear, you see, to have her analyzed, and glared at, and smirked about by people who haven’t a clue, really, of, what a gem she was, what a sweet, sweet woman. Not gooey, the way that sounds, forceful really, but oh so warm.”
“I have to ask you, Nellie. Do you know about Anne’s memoir?”
“Oh, yes. She sent me a copy. With a letter explaining about the papers, about how if she sold them, and she might have to, she would let me know because I would get half the money. She also said she felt she ought to offer me all the money, but she badly needed it. She lives in New York now, and it’s terribly expensive there, even though she has a good job. And the man she lives with can’t work. He’s had a breakdown or something.
“I’m afraid I gave you the impression that Dorinda and Anne and I aren’t really in touch when I said what I did about long-distance telephone calls. The fact is we stay wonderfully in touch now, all three of us, with letters, and occasional calls, and more occasional visits. I think Dorinda was startled by my call because she feared something had gone wrong. But we are in touch, all three of us, we really are. I’m sorry; I’m afraid I’ve got to the chattering stage.”
She put down her glass, and Kate took her hand. “Were you afraid,” Kate asked, “that I would do Gabrielle some damage; reveal Emile’s secret? Is that what worries you?”
“When I say we were in touch,” Nellie went on, as though she hadn’t heard even though she was answering Kate’s question, “I meant that we had all three talked about you, about your doing the biography. We had to decide what to do. I don’t want the story of Gabrielle’s life, or Emile’s either, to come out. They were sad lives, and I don’t think there’s much point in writing about them. I mean, I don’t think you’ll be missing out on much by not doing the biography.”
Not much, Kate thought, just the whole basis on which I’ve planned my life for the next five years or so. Well, did that really matter? Damn it, Gabrielle mattered. She remained this enigma in the center of this great phenomenon of high modernism. Surely she had a right to be heard. And how did Nellie know she might not have wanted her story to be told? Certainly she had gone to enough trouble to save those papers, whatever they were.
Nellie had waited for Kate to digest her comment; she knew its implications.
“Wouldn’t it be possible,” Kate asked, “to write a life of Gabrielle and leave Emile out; let him disappear in 1944, simply leave the story as we have all believed it up to now?”
“It would be possible,” Nellie said, “but do you think you could do that?”
Kate pondered it. “No,” she said. “You’re right, I couldn’t. I couldn’t know something and not say it. Not these days. That’s how biographies used to be written in the bad old times, but not anymore. Honesty and facing facts may not be worth much, but today it’s just about all we’ve got. I think I’d rather abandon the whole project.”
“There’s something you haven’t thought of, not having had the time.”
“There’s a lot I haven’t thought of,” Kate said. “A thousand things. But do any of them make any difference?”
“What you haven’t thought of,” Nellie persisted as though Kate had not spoken, “is how we have trusted you.”
“Have you? You’re right, I hadn’t noticed.”
“Kate, I’m afraid you’re in shock. Think a minute. I’ve told you the truth. I’ve offered a trade. But what’s to stop you from printing what I’ve told you and telling me, ‘Sorry, you were wrong to trust me,’ as so many journalists do?”
“I’m not a journalist.”
“You’re a detective, whatever you want to call yourself. You might have found out anyway. This way, we can make a trade.”
“Let’s walk,” Kate said, not yet ready to confront what she suspected was coming. “I’ve got to get the blood moving around again.”
They set out again for the lake without discussing it. Kate felt like someone who had learned the lines for one play and found herself in another for which, mysteriously, she was supposed to know her part. She realized that above all she needed time to digest what she had heard, to think it through.
“Of course,” Nellie said. “But you must just let me tell you our side of the trade. Since I am absolutely certain that Gabrielle would not have wanted anyone to discover or tell the truth or even a version of the truth about her life, I can be pretty certain, and Anne agrees, that the papers Gabrielle was so eager to save must not be autobiographical—at least, they probably don’t tell the truth about Emile and me and Poppop. But they are probably of great interest. What I thought, and Anne has agreed, is that we could let you see them, and then, if you thought them interesting, you could edit them for publication in place of the biography. You don’t have to answer; just think about it. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
Kate nodded and turned toward her hotel. She sensed rather than saw Nellie stand and watched her go. As though unable to consider the larger aspects of this situation, she started imagining herself telling Simon Pearlstine that she was abandoning the biography to bring out an edition of Gabrielle’s writing. He would demand the advance back; well, she would give it back. And then?
When Kate reached her hotel she found a message from Simon asking how she getting on; would she call and tell him? Kate was beyond figuring out what time it was now in New York. She found the hotel’s fax machine and, for the first time in her life, sent one. It said: “Having wonderful time; wish you were here.” Not, she thought, having finally reached her room and collapsed on the bed, too far from the truth. Reed would be preferable, but even Simon would be someone to talk to. Except, of course, that she must not tell anyone but Reed what she had heard. Whatever the bargain, or trade as Nellie called it, whatever Kate’s decision, she understood she was not free to consult anyone else. What had begun as a biography was, before her eyes, transforming itself into something else, as yet vague and troubling. Her literary self had become a detective, not, as always before, the other way around.
Chapter Seven
Kate flew back to New York with her thoughts chasing each other through her head; their resolving themselves into an idea was less probable than their leaving her confused, sleepless, and haunted by demons. If she dozed for a moment, characters from the Foxx drama came to derange her with their preposterous acts and suggestions. Several of the airplane’s martinis in small bottles failed either to encourage sleep or to discourage the ghosts. But at least by the time she had landed, hungry (for who can eat airline food?) and exhausted, she had made up her mind to arrange a meeting with Anne Gringold as soon as possible.
One thing was sufficiently clear: Dorinda and Nellie, while not exactly lying to her, had doled out the truth with great care, allowing it slowly to contradict previous impressions. With Anne, the situation might be different, for Kate had read Anne’s memoir, and so would begin with a wider base on which to build her theories. And certainly it was theories, however imprecise, that she required. Such as, why would the secret about who Nellie’s father was, after the death of all the principals, be so appalling? These days, such revelations were hardly even startling, at least after the first all-over sense of wonder. Nellie would become of more interest to the world, which was hardly a fate avoided by most people. Emile and Gabrielle were dead and beyond injury. Emmanuel Foxx’s reputation might be strengthened in some quarters and reduced in others, but it would probably not make any fundamental difference to anyon
e’s opinion of his major novel or any of his other works.
But to those for whom discretion and secrecy were a way of life, the public rendition of one’s family scandals was to be avoided at any cost. And why shouldn’t Nellie have grown sick to death of being cultivated as Foxx’s granddaughter, let alone wish to be further bombarded by those who would now know that her relation to the great man was one generation closer?
Obviously, Anne was the next step for Kate, less in the hope of learning the story of Anne’s life or Anne’s secrets, if any, which were, after all, peripheral, than the substance and subject of the papers Gabrielle had left with her. After this observation (upon which Kate would soon look back with as much sense of irony and bemused good humor as she could muster) she went to sleep for ten hours and awakened to a large breakfast, a conversation with Reed in which she told him nothing and told him she had told him nothing being not yet ready to tell anyone anything.
Eventually, she reached Anne on the telephone. Yes, Anne would see her, two days hence, wherever she, Kate, liked. Kate suggested her own apartment, and Anne agreed. It occurred to Kate that she had seen none of this trio in her own domicile. Only Eleanor had received Kate in her home. For all Kate really knew, the other three might live in spaceships circling the globe. Anything, Kate was beginning to think, was possible with those three.
When Anne arrived for their interview, Kate’s first impression was what a diffuse lot, as far as looks went, the trio was. Anne had clearly run to fat, an unkind way to put it, Kate admonished herself. She was solid and evidently indifferent, in these days of devotion to the presentation of one’s face and body, to her appearance. Her demeanor was more open than that of either Dorinda or Nellie, but then it was, after all, Anne who had written the memoir, Anne about whom most was already known, Anne who had been, through her memoir, the first to speak to Kate.
Kate offered her a drink and to Kate’s pleasure she accepted a beer. Kate joined her in one, and when they had settled down with their glasses, Anne remarked on how pleasant it was to sit in this comfortable room on an ordinary afternoon and drink beer. “I feel quite a truant,” she said. “Perhaps I shall now find the courage to take off an afternoon and go to a ball game. Except that there aren’t many baseball games played on weekday afternoons anymore, are there?”
“Perhaps we can go together,” Kate said. “I haven’t been to a baseball game in donkey’s years, whatever they are; a long time anyway.” We are beginning very far from the subject, Kate thought, and yet we are not insincere. I would like to go to a ball game with Anne. “The Mets, of course,” Kate added. “All my brothers are or were Yankee fans, so there’s no question about that. My brothers and I share no opinions whatever, which is rather a comfort; one never has to consider giving them the benefit of the doubt.”
“It’s nice of you to begin with a personal revelation,” Anne said, “since so many will obviously be expected of me. Not that I mind,” she hastily added. “I can’t imagine what it would be like to have brothers. Neither Nellie nor I has children, as I guess you know, and Dorinda has four sons, which is really going it a bit, Nellie and I feel.”
“I saw Nellie in Geneva just a few days ago,” Kate said. “But we never talked of her present life at all, just of the past. I had so many questions about the past I didn’t feel it right to ask about the present; anyway, I loathe people who keep asking questions.”
“Nellie has been married for years to a man who writes books on philosophy and theories of art, all in French, and all profound, and all close to incomprehensible, even, I understand, if you read French. They seem very happy. He can work anywhere, which is fortunate since Nellie tends to get moved around from time to time. Good beer.” Anne sat back in her comfortable chair, clearly relishing the leisure, the pleasure of not being at work in an afternoon.
“Do you still work for a publishing firm?” Kate asked. “Of course your memoir ended thirty or so years ago, so perhaps that’s a silly question?”
“Still the same job,” Anne said. “More responsibility, more pay, still the same job. It’s actually rather interesting, if you don’t pretend you’re selling anything more than a product. Not something sacred like books, I mean, just a product. You study the markets, develop selling and distributing techniques, use the computer inventively, and wish to God that the people who are supposed to fill orders, the warehouses and the accounting departments, did not make so many knuckle-headed mistakes. I’m very good at what I do, and the fact that it’s not madly glamorous or innovative means I can go on doing it even now when I’m getting a bit long in the tooth. I root for the Mets too, though I wish to hell they hadn’t gone in for ball girls. If a woman ever makes it into baseball, it should be because she plays so well they can’t not hire her. Till then, I’d rather not have girlish legs in ridiculous uniforms cavorting around like playboy bunnies. You mustn’t pay too much attention to me; I don’t often get the chance to shoot my mouth off; I’m either too busy or too tired. What did you want to talk to me about? Surely not the Mets.”
“As you probably know,” Kate said, “I’m a literary type. As such, I couldn’t help noticing that you ended your marvelous memoir the way Jane Austen ended her novels, rather too rapidly, as though you’d passed the interesting part and had to tie it all up as fast as possible, not much liking the way you had to end it.”
“How tactfully you put it, and quite right too. The end was about Gabrielle’s papers, but the story was really about me, as most stories are. I guess I knew readers, if any, would be rushing toward the inevitable end. No need to linger over it.”
“It’s an amazing story, the three of you there together, and you and Dorinda before that. It’s a heartwarming story. I was rather relieved,” Kate added, watching for Anne’s reactions with some trepidation, “to find that Dorinda was such a nice person. One gathered from what you wrote and from her mother that she went through a long period of being, well, rather a prig, which was so different from her as a child and young woman.”
“Yes. Dorinda’s come round nicely. We all have. Might I say that we all realized that someone would decide one day to do a biography of Gabrielle, it was really inevitable, wasn’t it, and when we heard it was you we were very pleased. I mean, it might have been someone less scholarly and less, well, intelligent, less able to understand what life was like when we were all young and modernism was at its height.”
“Am I to infer from that complimentary speech that you sent the memoir to Simon Pearlstine after deciding that I should do the biography—perhaps to add weight to that inducement?”
“Nellie and Dorinda both said you were clever as well as intelligent—a detective as well as a literary type. I see they were right.”
“Simon Pearlstine certainly went a considerable way toward giving me a somewhat different impression. But no doubt he was covering his ass, as they say in the big crude world. You said you wanted it especially for my eyes.”
“Yours only. It was to encourage you, specifically you, to do the biography of Gabrielle. Dorinda only sent it to Pearlstine after she was able to learn from that wonderful grapevine she still has her ear to that there was a real chance he was going to pursue you. There are no secrets in publishing, and my own sources confirmed Dorinda’s. You might wonder why I didn’t just send it to you myself. Partly, Dorinda is the one among us who does that sort of thing; but the truth is, I wanted this to reach Pearlstine indirectly, as a faintly mysterious document. Also, I had not quite overcome the need for distance I felt so acutely after I took Gabrielle’s papers to the bank in London. Anyway, we had looked into you and your doings, taking rather a long time and special care about it, well, mostly Dorinda did, but she had some help from me, and we definitely determined that you were exactly the right person. So when Pearlstine approached you, we went, so to speak, into action. You were chosen.” Anne smiled.
“You seem to mean,” Kate said with sufficient aspe
rity to indicate that she was not being carried away by compliments, “if I understood Nellie and she was certainly clear, you sent it to encourage me not to do the biography of Gabrielle.”
Anne smiled and put down her empty glass. “Well, not a usual biography; but an elegant portrait of Gabrielle as an introduction to your edition of her writings.”
“Which you spirited off at her insistence?”
“Exactly. Our feeling is that the lives of marginal people like the three of us and Emile are not what’s really important. What’s important, because it’s where all her real life went, was what Gabrielle wrote.”
“Another beer?”
“In a minute,” Anne said.
“You imply she was writing much of her life. Why did none of it ever appear, why did no one know of it or mention it until that moment when she gave you the papers in Kensington, practically Knightsbridge?”
“You can’t imagine even for a moment that Emmanuel Foxx the great creator could have borne her writing anything at any time. He was the writer, she was his muse, at least at best; his minion, really, not to say his servant. She kept all her writing secret, all tucked away. I don’t know when she began writing; no one does. It’s possible that she wrote the greater part of it all after Foxx’s death, when she was alone in Paris. Perhaps it was when she had finished writing that she decided to move back to England. Or perhaps she wanted to finish up in England; honestly, one doesn’t know.”
“Wouldn’t the actual papers themselves tell you something? The age of the paper, the ink, the watermarks, that sort of thing? Did you notice anything?”
“Not me,” Anne said. “Do let’s have another beer; it’s so pleasant, drinking and talking like this. At that time in London I felt as though I had some sort of divine command to follow; I shuffled those papers into a bank so fast, I never really got a look at them at all.” Anne pushed herself up from the deep chair where she had happily been lolling and followed Kate into the kitchen. “My thought,” she said to Kate’s back as Kate opened the beers, “is that you and I would look at them when we remove them from the bank.”