by Amanda Cross
“That’s right. No biography. But there will be a very exciting book, if you want it. And I can always add on a short biography, more of a portrait really.” Kate welcomed her drink, added the soda, and sipped it gratefully. “It’s rather a long story I’m afraid.”
“I take it Nellie has indeed burned everything, including your intentions regarding her grandmother.”
Who’s not her grandmother, Kate thought of saying, but did not. She had determined not to mention to anyone (except Reed) the secrets she had heard. She saw that as part of the bargain. The truth about Nellie’s father and even Anne’s might come out someday, but it did not seem to her that it was her task to bring those stories into circulation. If she understood the bargain, she would edit Gabrielle’s novel, add a (it was to be hoped) well-written, concise biography of Gabrielle, and leave the Foxx and Goddard secrets to silence or, at least, another generation’s efforts at detection.
“You remember the papers that Anne took from Gabrielle’s room, the ones she put in a vault and, as far as I can tell, forgot about for decades?”
“Of course I remember. I’m the one who sent you Anne’s memoir, you do recall that?”
“Simon, please don’t be petulant. In fact, be patient. This won’t take forever, but I have to tell it in my own way.”
“Patience is my byword, indeed my standard.”
“Glad to hear it. I’ve always thought patience . . .”
“Kate, if you start on some disquisition on patience, however perceptive, I shall choke you on the spot and The Stanhope will never give me a table on Fifth Avenue again. What happened to Gabrielle’s papers after they had languished for decades in some bloody bank?”
“It was a very nice bank.”
“KATE!” Simon ejaculated, causing those seated at nearby tables to raise their heads and regard him with a mixture of curiosity and disdain.
“We got the papers from the bank, took them back to a house in Highgate Anne had borrowed, complete with cat. We had a very nice woman taxi driver after we had liberated the papers, but I’ll skip that part.” Kate smiled at Simon and he ruefully smiled back. “The papers had been bundled together any which way, and it took us the better part of a week to get them into some sort of rational order. Not to keep you in suspense, let me say that they turned out to be a novel written by Gabrielle, really a kind of counter novel to Emmanuel Foxx’s Ariadne. That we were able to decide which pages went where was wholly due to the fact that she had, in a rough way, structured her novel on Foxx’s. It is Gabrielle’s version of the Ariadne story, standing in contradiction to Emmanuel’s version. Her novel’s rather wonderful, if you want to know, and the point of my being here this afternoon and drinking this lovely scotch is to suggest that I edit her novel, and add, if you decide to publish my edition and agree with this idea, a short biographical portrait of Gabrielle that I shall try to make as elegant as possible. And I have brought back my advance, not in cash, I’m afraid, nothing so dramatic. Just a check. I suppose we’ll have to write a new contract if you’re interested, or else just tear up the old one. I hope you aren’t going to be dreary and legal about it, though I admit I’ve put you in an awkward position.”
“Awkward. Just the word of all the possible words I would have chosen.”
“I do think, dear Simon, that you, that is to say your publishing house, will do wonderfully well with this novel. My own opinion, for what it’s worth, is that it will alter everyone’s view of high modernism, it will bring gender to the foreground of what had previously been a rather reactionary and male literary period, and it will get a great deal of attention indeed.”
“I have to take it up at an editorial meeting, needless to say, but of course we’ll want it. Why are you giving me back the advance in any form of currency?”
“Because we have to make an entirely new arrangement. The royalties from Gabrielle’s novel will go to Nellie and Anne. You can pay me a fair price for my biographical portrait, if you want it, perhaps even a sliver of the royalties for the introduction and the editing, whatever is fair. And I would be grateful if you helped a bit with the expenses of editing: research, typing, copying, that sort of thing. Do we have a deal, always assuming your editorial meeting agrees?”
“You take my breath away. Nor am I sufficiently breathless to ignore the fact that you’re sitting on a whole lot of information about Gabrielle you’ve decided to hold out on. There has to be some reason why you abandon a full-length biography with such alacrity. After all, we could do both the edition of her novel and a book-length biography, no reason not.”
“We could,” Kate said, “but I don’t want to do all that. And with the letters burned, I honestly don’t feel there’s that much to say. Whatever Gabrielle really was and thought, wherever she had her being apart from her obvious role as Emmanuel’s wife, is in her novel. Scholars and biographers will be reconstructing her life from that novel for years to come. Simon, please take the check, order us another drink, and try to find out as soon as possible if your company wants to do Gabrielle’s novel my way.”
“Kate, no one ever gives back an advance, not without an extended court case or under the most unlikely circumstances. I’m afraid you do need an agent, contrary to my earlier advice. At least hold on to the advance until we know where we are. You did interview people, travel, spend time. Let’s not talk about money right now; let’s talk about a publication schedule.”
“I’ll try to do the editing in a year, and the portrait, if you want it, as soon after that as I can. I’m a fast worker.”
“So I’ve noticed. That’s a lot of work for a year.”
“All right, two years. If we settle this, I’ll start right now and keep going until I reach the end. If you want to do this . . .”
“Stop saying ‘if.’ Of course I want to do it. We ought to be talking money in a more orderly manner. Perhaps I should talk to your lawyer husband. Do get an agent; I’m beginning to feel like a confidence man talking an impoverished widow out of her pittance.”
“Naïveté is not my mode,” Kate said, “though I have been known to be humble under the proper circumstances. Stop worrying. I want to make sure that Nellie and Anne get the royalties, and if I understand advances, they’re only against royalties anyway. You’d have to pay it to them, which seems a bit odd. I realize this is an unusual situation: I have a talent for them. Simon, will you please just decide if you want to do this book or not? I think the fact that Anne sent you her memoir might be looked on as a manifestation of your rightness for this task. Dorinda’s network thinks you’re sound, really sound.”
“When do I get to read the novel, in the form it’s in now, the one you’ve got?”
“When the contract is signed, all agreements made, all that behind us. In other words, given the trouble lawyers can make about any arrangement for, the benefit of their billable hours and the assurance that, in the most unlikely events, their client has the upper hand, probably in about six months. But if you think you want to go ahead, I’ll get started. After all, I’m going to edit it for someone.”
“That’s the perfect exit line,” Simon said. “But don’t exit. Tell me more about the novel. Tell me more about Nellie and Anne and Dorinda. Have you met Dorinda?”
“I’ve met them all,” Kate said. “They’re like a coven of good witches, if you can imagine that. They’re all in their sixties, and I keep thinking of them as young women, not in looks but in attitude, manner, vigor. It’s as though they only found the point of youth when it stopped oppressing them and let them be young.”
“That’s a wonderful Fansler statement, full of profundities that make either no sense or the greatest sense. Well, I do see what you mean. Is that why they, or Anne, suddenly decided to liberate Gabrielle’s novel after all this time?”
“They were waiting for the perfect moment in the history of modernism,” Kate said. “And do you know, h
aving consulted a number of colleagues on the matter, I think they found it.”
“They were waiting for you,” Simon said.
“I happened to be on the horizon when they needed an editor,” Kate said, “and when I was looking for a new adventure. Just as you were looking for a good book. We both just mistook the exact nature of what we were about.”
The waiter appeared, and Simon ordered another round, omitting the bicarbonate of soda. He looked, Kate thought, like a man who found money on the street and didn’t quite know what to do with it. No, he looked like someone who had received a gift and wasn’t sure what accepting it would entail. On the whole, Kate decided, smiling at him, he looked pleased.
Indeed, he was. When all the arrangements had been made, remade, refined, redefined, and quibbled over, Kate had the contracts on her desk and realized that she was actually going to have to do the job she had talked herself and Simon into. She had also been talked, if not skillfully manipulated, into it by the three beneficent witches, Dorinda, Anne, and Nellie.
Before she got actively under way in the editing of Gabrielle’s manuscript, she intended to have a long talk with the three of them together. For Kate, that alone would be the end of the beginning.
She had summoned (invited was the kinder but rather less accurate word) the three of them to her apartment. Nellie had flown to New York not only for this meeting and a reunion with the rest of the triumvirate but also to sign the contracts for the publication of Gabrielle’s novel with Simon Pearlstine’s company and with Kate. Nothing, it seemed, was done these days in publishing or anywhere else without contracts spelling out every conceivable and inconceivable eventuality from death to disinclination. The lawyers for Anne and Nellie, recruited by Dorinda, had prescribed the most careful restrictions on the kind of publicity they would countenance for Gabrielle’s book, and Kate had, on the advice of yet another lawyer, insisted upon okaying the jacket and catalogue copy.
Bright young people, to judge from Kate’s students, still seemed to want to go into publishing despite the fact that it was as underpaid as it was unaesthetic in its aims. She had now decided after this experience to advise them to publish a book instead. One surely learned from that operation more about the perils and mechanics of publishing than by acting as the assistant to someone in subsidiary rights.
All three—Dorinda, Anne, Nellie—agreed to come to Kate’s apartment and sip their preferred drinks in her living room. Kate had determined to leave forever as strange and unknown to her as they now were the homes, together with the two eccentric male companions, of the three women. In addition, she wanted to be in charge of this encounter, to stage-manage it, if one were to put it frankly, to learn what she had to learn and go on to the next stage of her life—the editing of Gabrielle’s novel—with the past spoken of by them all, however secret, however never to be revealed it would then remain.
The three arrived together, Dorinda chatting as soon as she entered, the others more silent, as she imagined they had been in their girlhood. Anne and Nellie she had come to know fairly well, to admire, to like, to be glad they had chosen her to figure in their lives and plans. Dorinda she knew less well, but had more active affection for. She knew Dorinda’s life. However different it had been from Kate’s in one or two of its aspects—certainly no one in Kate’s family had ever done anything half so interesting as marrying a famous author, or indeed anything interesting at all, except, Kate admitted to herself, making money, which they found interesting and which she was interested in spending in her own way—except for those one or two aspects, Dorinda had lived Kate’s life a generation earlier. And Kate knew what a numbing and terrible time that generation of women had endured. Dorinda was beginning to awaken, and if awakening had come rather late in her life, the sudden revelation of what mattered had revealed itself to her and Kate at about the same moment in the course of the twentieth century. Dorinda, like so many vital women, had been full of beans as a girl, had then gone into a dreaming sleep for many years, disguised as sex object, mother, hostess, housewife, and had only now resurrected herself. Kate believed in born-again women, and Dorinda was a rare and wonderful example.
“Beer for Anne,” Kate said, sticking as always to the fundamentals, “sherry for Dorinda, and what for Nellie? Or have you all changed your minds?”
“We’ve brought a bottle of French champagne,” Dorinda announced, extracting it from her compendious leather bag. “It’s really French,” she assured them, as though champagne was in the habit of appearing surreptitiously in other countries. “We thought we might drink to Gabrielle’s novel and to you, Kate.”
“We can’t start with champagne,” Kate said, taking the bottle from Dorinda. “Devoted as I am to libations and the lovely rituals of wine and companionship, we’ve got to have reached certain understandings before I celebrate. I’ll put this in the refrigerator to keep it cold for the right moment if it comes. What would you like in the meanwhile?”
“But I thought everything was settled,” Dorinda said, flopping onto the couch like a package dropped from an airplane. “Sherry for me, as always. I thought we were celebrating Gabrielle’s novel which you are editing, together with biographical portrait. Can’t we celebrate that?”
“Not exactly,” Kate said. “Anyway, not yet. Beer, Anne?”
“I’m rather off beer since our days at the Hampstead pub,” Anne said. “British bitter on draft is not to be followed by bottled anything, at least for a while. Do you have white wine?”
“White wine it is,” Kate said, “and I quite agree with you about the bitter on tap; I wish we had some now. And you, Nellie? We only drank coffee in Geneva.”
“White wine for me too,” Nellie said, sitting on the couch with Dorinda. Anne followed Kate into the kitchen to help with the drinks.
“It’s a funny thing and I just noticed it,” Anne said as Kate collected bottles and glasses. “When we were young, Dorinda was so much better-looking than I. And now we’re old women and there is nothing to choose between us. I suspect that’s because neither of us has bothered much with trying to pass for young. Of course, Dorinda is thinner, there is that.”
“Slimness is either in the genes, or earned at tremendous cost,” Kate said. “I wouldn’t give it another thought. You both look wonderful, if you want to know.”
“Thank you. That’s how we feel; it’s quite extraordinary.” Kate and Anne returned to the living room and sat in the chairs on either side of the couch.
“No cat, however,” Anne said.
“Two minds that move together,” Kate said. “I was just thinking that Lavinia’s cat ought to be here at this moment. I think of her as a familiar; isn’t that what witches called their cats?”
“Are we witches?” Dorinda said. “What fun.” Nellie and Anne looked startled.
“Of the very best kind,” Kate said, “like the doormouse’s butter. There has been something Alice-in-Wonderland about all this; believing six impossible things before breakfast, having all the wickets move because they’re animals, going through mirrors. Perhaps you know what I mean.”
“Fathers turning out to be someone else, all except mine,” Dorinda said. The others sipped silence with their wine. Dorinda, Kate suddenly understood, was the leader, the one who made it all happen, the one who had always made it all happen. Whoever anyone’s father was had nothing to do with it; it was Dorinda who had wanted Anne and then Nellie with her, who had wanted it again sometime in her early fifties, perhaps just after her encounter with Mark Hansford.
“There were rather a lot of secrets,” Nellie said. “And burned letters; I know you regret that. But there probably wasn’t anything in them that was important. Gabrielle just wanted the record swept clean; I think she wanted to be remembered as herself, by her novel.”
“Except,” Kate said, looking at Nellie, “you mentioned that I was a detective the first time we met. I am, you know, t
hough only of an amateur and rather literary kind. Did you speak to me about my being a detective because you wanted me to stop being, to restrict my detecting to Gabrielle’s manuscript?”
Anne spoke: “Nellie meant that it would take a literary detective to discover the order of Gabrielle’s pages. She has certainly been proven right. Besides, aren’t all scholars really detectives? Hasn’t somebody said so?”
“What brought you three together again, so many years after Gabrielle died?”
“I began reviewing my life,” Dorinda said. “That dreadful Mark Hansford was the beginning of that, I can see now. Once I’d broken free from the spell of Arthur, I seemed to gather strength at every turn. I went back to the beginning, to Anne and Nellie. We got back in touch, we began to talk, we rekindled our friendship. Can I have more sherry?”
Kate poured it for her. “And was it when you three began talking again that you decided to do something about Gabrielle’s papers?”
“Not right away,” Nellie said. “It took us a while to become close again, to begin to talk about the past, about our fathers, all of that.”
“Not until Emile died, in fact,” Kate said. “That was when it became safe to talk about Gabrielle, and Emile, and all the rest of it. That’s when Dorinda told her mother about Nellie, when Eleanor told Dorinda about Anne. Did you tell her the rest of it? Did you trust her not to tell me when I went to see her, or hope that she would tell me?”
“Tell you what?” Dorinda said, without conviction.
“Answer me, please,” Kate said. “I want to know if Eleanor knew.”
“Yes,” Dorinda said, sighing in a fatalistic manner. She exchanged glances with the other two. “My mother knew. She thought we should tell you everything but that. She was used to keeping secrets, you see. But I wanted to give her the chance to see you and decide to tell you if she wanted to. She likes you very much, but she thought that was something no one else had to know; we decided no one would know, ever.”