Laura (Femmes Fatales)

by Caspary, Vera

  It took me about three minutes to realize that he was carrying a muzzleloader. Last night, when we were leaving the Golden Lizard, I had tried to look at his stick. He had snatched it away with a crack about getting me a rubber-tipped cane. That crack was loaded. Resentment kept me from asking any more questions. Possessions were like people with Waldo. He wanted to protect his precious stick from my profane hands, so he brought out his malice without the garments of wit or beauty. I had thought that he was showing off another of his whims, like drinking his coffee from the Napoleon cup.

  Now I knew why he had wanted to keep me from examining his cane. He carried it, he had told me, to give himself importance. There was the man’s hidden power. He probably smiled as he stood before Laura’s door, preparing to use his secret weapon. The second time was like the first. In his failing and disordered mind there was no original crime, no repetition.

  When the doorknob turned, he aimed. He knew Laura’s height and the place where her face would appear like an oval in the dark. As the door opened, he fired.

  There was a shivering crash. Turning, Laura saw a thousand slivers of light. The shot, missing her by the fraction of an inch, had shattered the glass bowl. Its fragments shone on the dark carpet.

  He had missed his aim because, as he fired, his legs were jerked out from under him. I had left his apartment as soon as I realized where the gun was hidden and remembered that I had deliberately put on a scene to stir up his jealousy. He was on the third-floor landing, his finger on the bell, when I opened the door downstairs.

  The old-fashioned hall was dimly lighted. On the landings pale bulbs glowed. Waldo was struggling for his life with an enemy whose face he couldn’t see. I am a younger man, in better condition, and know how to handle myself in a fight. But he had the strength of desperation. And a gun in his hand.

  When I jerked his legs out from under him, he rolled over on top of me. Laura came out of her door, looked down at us, straining to see our dark struggle on the staircase. We rolled down the steps.

  Under the bulb of the second-floor landing I saw his face. He had lost his glasses, but his pale eyes seemed to see into the distance. He said, “While a whole city pursued the killer, Waldo Lydecker, with his usual urbanity, pursued the law.”

  He laughed. My spine chilled. I was fighting a madman. His face contorted, his lips writhed, pointed eyeballs seemed to jerk out of their sockets. He wrenched his arm loose, raised the gun, waved it like a baton.

  “Get back! Get out of the way!” I shouted up at Laura.

  His flesh had seemed flabby, but there were over two hundred and fifty pounds of it, and when I jerked his arm back, he rolled over on me. The light flashed in his eyes, he recognized me, sanity returned, and with it, hatred. White streaks of foam soaped his lips. Laura called out, warning me, but his groans were closer to my ears. I managed to shove my knees up under his fat belly and push him back toward the post of the banister. He waved his gun, then shot wildly, firing without aim. Laura screamed.

  With the firing of that shot, his strength was gone. His eyes froze, his limbs became rigid. But I was taking no chances. I knocked his head against the banister post. On the third-floor landing, Laura heard bone crack against wood.

  In the ambulance and at the hospital he kept on talking. Always about himself, always in the third person. Waldo Lydecker was someone far away from the dying fat man on the stretcher, he was like a hero a boy has always worshiped. It was the same thing over and over again, never straight and connected, but telling as much as a sworn confession.

  Ever the connoisseur who cunningly mates flavor with occasion, Waldo Lydecker selected the vintage of the year ’14 . . .

  As might Cesare Borgia have diverted himself on an afternoon pregnant with the infant of new infamy, so Waldo Lydecker passed the nervous hours in civilized diversion, reading and writing . . .

  As a man might sit thus, erect as a tombstone, while composing his will; so sat Waldo Lydecker at his rosewood desk writing the essay that was to have been his legacy . . .

  The woman had failed him. Secret and alone, Waldo Lydecker celebrated death’s impotence. Bitter herbs mingled their savor with the mushrooms. The soup was rue-scented . . .

  Habit led Waldo Lydecker that night past windows illumined by her treachery . . .

  Calm and untroubled, Waldo Lydecker stood, pressing an imperious finger against her doorbell . . .

  When he died, the doctor had to unclasp the fingers that gripped Laura’s hand.

  “Poor, poor Waldo,” she said.

  “He tried to kill you twice,” I reminded her.

  “He wanted so desperately to believe I loved him.”

  I looked at her face. She was so honestly mourning the death of an old friend. The malice had died with him and Laura remembered that he had been kind. It is generosity, Waldo said, not evil, that flourishes like the green bay tree.

  He is dead now. Let him have the last word. Among the papers on his desk I found the unfinished piece, that final legacy which he had written while the records were waiting on the phonograph, the wine being chilled in the icebox, Roberto cooking the mushrooms.

  He had written:

  Then, as the final contradiction, there remains the truth that she made a man of him as fully as a man could be made of that stubborn clay. And when that frail manhood is threatened, when her own womanliness demands more than he can give, his malice seeks her destruction. But she is carved from Adam’s rib, indestructible as legend, and no man will ever aim his malice with sufficient accuracy to destroy her.

  THE END

  AFTERWORD

  All My Lives: Vera Caspery’s Life, Times and Fiction

  In November of 1899 Vera Caspary was, as she liked to say, “born in the nineteenth century by accident.” Her mother was in her forties, and Vera was eighteen years younger than her oldest sibling. A simultaneously spoiled and intimidated “baby,” she grew up on the south side of Chicago in a family of Portuguese-descended Jews. Her father, who was a buyer in women’s hats, wanted her to attend the University of Chicago, but shy and bookish Caspary thought she lacked the feminine wiles for co-ed life. Eager to write and be independent, Caspary got her foot in the door as an ad-agency stenographer. She pestered her bosses for writing assignments and answered job openings for writers with her initials, only to be turned down when she appeared. The year American women got the right to vote, Caspary began writing ads.

  Caspary wrote her first headline—“Rat Bites Sleeping Child”—for an exterminator. In the early twenties she left full-time copywriting to freelance and begin her first novel draft (Caspary 1979, 3, 6, 26–27, 51, 71–74).

  Caspary’s nineteen books, including the Edgar award-winning autobiography, The Secrets of Grown-Ups, sold well and were widely reviewed. Twenty-four movies were made from Caspary’s scripts, screen stories, and novels. The directors of these movies included Dorothy Arzner (Working Girls, 1931), Joseph Mankiewicz (Letter to Three Wives, 1949, which won two Academy Awards), Fritz Lang (The Blue Gardenia, 1953), and George Cukor, whose film, Les Girls (1957) earned Caspary a Screen Writers Guild award. Nominally single, in 1949 Caspary married a man of whom her family would have approved, though they would not have sanctioned her long affair with him. The Viennese-born producer Isadore Goldsmith, or “Igee,” became the love of Caspary’s life until his death in 1964. This was the life Caspary dramatized in her fiction, centered in women characters’ struggles to exercise the freedom of choice that jobs provided.

  In many of her novels, Caspary effectively merged women’s quest for identity and love with murder plots. She declared openly that she was not a “real” mystery writer, meaning she didn’t like crime fiction, and had no interest in private eyes and police procedures. She preferred character studies more than intricate plots that finally reveal “the sweet old aunt or a birdwatcher who ruthlessly kills half a dozen people to get h
old of the cigarette case with a false bottom that conceals a hundred-thousand-dollar postage stamp” (1979, 104). After completing a trio of forties murder mysteries—Laura (1942), Bedelia (1945), and Stranger Than Truth (1946)—she declared herself “on holiday from murder.” “The fact is,” she said, “I’m not nearly as interested in writing about crime as I am in the actions of normal people under high tension” (Caspary, 1950). Her novels revolve around women who are menaced, but who turn out to be neither mere victimized dames nor rescued damsels. Independence is the key to the survival of such protagonists as Laura; lack of choice engineers the downfall of her villains, among whom Bedelia is paramount.

  Since Caspary wrote her mysteries from the forties to the seventies, before the widespread development of female detectives, her reading of “detective” throughout her writing career was gendered as unattractively male. She wasn’t impressed by the tough private eyes of the thirties or by the male protagonists emerging in forties noir fiction and film—cynical loners manipulated by women and/or manipulators of women. Caspary pointed out that Mark McPherson, her police detective in Laura, was not hard-boiled, but sensitive and imaginative. When Otto Penzler asked for an essay on McPherson for The Great Detectives, Caspary chose to discuss Laura’s condemnation of detectives as the moment Mark came alive. Shortly after her reappearance in the novel, Laura tells Mark that detective stories contain two types of characters, “the hard-boiled ones who are always drunk and talk out of the corners of their mouths and do it all by instinct; and the cold, dry, scientific kind who split hairs under a microscope”(77). In her article for Penzler, Caspary echoes Laura that both types are “detestable,” which was why, until Laura, she “had never glorified a detective” (Caspary, 1978, 144-45).1

  Yet murder, as Caspary said in a 1970s working draft of her autobiography, was “another matter.” “I see now,” she mused, “that my [screen] stories were the extension of a long series of murder fantasies, not that I’ve ever pulled a trigger or wielded a knife, nor identified myself with the detective. Like Laura I hate detectives.” But she liked to make up plots as an “observer” and “witness” (“Discards,” 577), a stance she would later apply to creating multiple narrators and viewpoints in many of her novels and scripts. Caspary made murder a context in which both male and female characters resolve their own mysterious lives, as though the crime itself were a metaphor for the conundrum of relationships versus independence.

  “A Flaming Thing” in the 1920s

  Jane S. Bakerman discusses at length the lives of Caspary’s working girls in Chicago rent districts, offices, and speakeasy settings. She notes, “Much of the frustration [of Caspary’s characters] arises from the duality of their concept of the American dream, for while struggling to establish identities for themselves as wage earners, they believe, simultaneously, that they will have no identity at all unless they are indispensably desirable to the man” (1984, 83). Caspary similarly recalls the heady mix of wage-earning and flirting she experienced. “Working among men,” she says candidly in Secrets, “I had discovered that a girl need not be beautiful, not even particularly pretty. She had only to be a girl.” Caspary had grown up seeing herself as clever but unattractive. She quotes her somewhat competitive mother as having frequently said, “You wouldn’t be so bad looking if it weren’t for your nose.” Vera herself called this the “harsh Caspary bone structure.” Though she turned out to be a striking woman, it was a revelation to her that “The compliments of accountants and macaroni salesmen assured me that I had feminine power” (1979, 27, 44).

  At the start of the twenties she still lived with her parents, taking advantage of their evenings out to neck on the sofa and inventing out-of-town interviews for her job in order to lose her virginity. This was a turbulent time, particularly in 1924, during which her father died on the same day Bobbie Franks vanished. Vera not only observed the Leopold and Loeb murder from inside her community, but she spent weekends with her lovers at the Loebs’ cottage in return for handling its rental while the family avoided public contact (1979, 81–88). The “baby” became the support of her traditional mother, who was impressed that her daughter could “pound” money out of her typewriter. Vera had already left full-time advertising to freelance and begin writing fiction. Later in 1924 she moved to New York to edit Dance Magazine, achieving her goal of living a Bohemian life in Greenwich Village as she had on Chicago’s Near North Side. As she put it, life as a “flaming thing” meant that “Sexual inhibition was to be avoided like pregnancy and a repressed libido shunned like a dose of clap” (1979, 96).

  Caspary’s chief fictional portrait of her twenty-something-at-work-and-in-love self was Evvie (1960), for which she merged Chicago and New York settings. In Evvie, Louise, who works for her living, tries to shore up her lovely roommate, Evvie, who lives on an annuity from her stepfather and who pursues an obsessive love affair that leads to her murder. The novel is more an account of the era than a murder mystery, however, and its frank references to abortion and free love—as well as a scene in which, as Caspary put it, “two naked girls discuss sex”—was still shocking enough to be banned in Ireland (1979, 265; “Correspondence 1957–58”).

  The climactic, wild party in Evvie was modeled on a birthday celebration given for Caspary in 1926 by her pal Connie Moran at her Rush Street studio in Chicago that “smelled of paint and cats, spicy foods and French perfumes.” Caspary describes vividly in the 1970s draft of Secrets how at the real life party the “bootlegger came with a gallon of pure alcohol which we mixed with distilled water,” the Dartmouth football team crashed the party, an admirer threw Vera into Connie’s china cabinet, and Caspary learned that another good friend had taken up with her own former lover (“Working Draft,” 42, 134). All these details were applied in Evvie to illustrate the mix of liberty and vulnerability of women’s coming of age in the twenties.

  Her writing and editing projects during these years are stories in themselves. They included the Rodent Extermination League’s copy for a war-produced live anti-rat virus that died in the mail, a correspondence course to learn ballet whose impresario was entirely fictional, an ad campaign for a book on sex and love, and another mail-order course on playwriting whose lessons Caspary absorbed as she wrote them. Caspary called these her “fraudulent years” (1979, 68). Some particular oddities of these years are portrayed in Stranger than Truth. This satire was one Caspary had long wanted to write as retribution for the death of her editorial assistant on Dance Magazine, Bryne Macfadden. Bernarr Macfadden, the magazine’s publisher and Bryne’s father, was a man much odder than fiction. As a health fetishist who promoted his lifestyle in his publishing, Macfadden allowed no deviations from his routines. He forced his daughter to exercise vigorously to strengthen her heart problems and discouraged her from seeking medical treatment for a chronic cough that turned out to be tuberculosis, as this could damage his lucrative “cures.” When Bryne grew weaker and at last began to hemorrhage, Caspary was asked to tell her father. He responded by cutting off Bryne’s income so that she could not pay for a doctor. He did not attend her funeral, and her sisters could not forgive him (1979, 97–103).

  In Stranger than Truth Caspary transformed the Macfadden story into that of a plagiarist publisher of a series of “True” magazines—Crime, Romance, etc. This lying purveyor of truth dominates his daughter, Eleanor, who accurately suspects him of murder. Comic relief is provided by a fanatically devoted secretary’s testimonial, and the father’s secret is uncovered by an alcoholic Greenwich Village poet and an editor. Lola, the poet, has a white-painted milk bottle full of gin that Caspary lifted straight from the Macfadden offices, where the editor-in-chief even had to take off his “eye crutches” when the publisher was present (1979, 91–92). When the novel came out, Mary Macfadden, Bryne’s stepmother, wrote Caspary a letter of approval (“General Correspondence”).

  Between the Hammer and the Sickle: Caspary in the 1930s

  In the 1930s
, and somewhat in contrast to her first years in Hollywood, Caspary was attracted to Communism. During this time, Caspary supported herself with movie “originals,” or screen stories, which were summaries of action and character from which screenplays could be written by others. Women were admitted easily into screenwriting during this period because screenwriters weren’t highly valued or highly paid, whether male or female (Warren 1988, 9). During the same period, Caspary met many Communists, some of whom introduced her to socialist politics. Her mentor and early collaborator Sam Ornitz explained the apple sellers Caspary had seen in New York to her as capitalist victims. Even while selling screen stories, having a house built in Connecticut, writing radio dramas for a season in New Orleans, and bringing her mother triumphantly to Hollywood shortly before her death, Caspary secretly joined the party, attended “cell” meetings, helped to raise money for organizations associated with Communism, and wrote socialist plays and scripts with George Sklar, who would later co-author the play version of Laura. In the 1950s Caspary was “gray-listed,” and provided technically truthful but unrevealing testimony in response to California investigations of un-American activities (1979, 192–97). In 1968 she wrote a novel, The Rosecrest Cell (1968), based on this period in her life, admitting that “The skeleton in my closet carries a hammer and sickle” (1979, 169).

  Her involvement with Communism was sincere, if ultimately limited. In 1939, on the money from an “original” sale, Caspary planned a visit to Russia to view Communism first hand, but then derailed her trip in Paris in order to marry an anti-Nazi Communist spy whose sister had put them in touch. Though she detested the man, who talked only of American film stars, Caspary had promised to save him. Eventually she had either to use or lose her own visa for Russia. When her new fiancé’s papers did not arrive in time, Caspary left with relief. She later heard that he had succeeded in reaching the United States. During her travels in Russia, personal encounters impressed her most while she was chilled by “the sense of constant surveillance” and tension she found in the Russians she met (1979, 182–87). By the end of the thirties, Caspary had begun to part company with Communism and to return to themes of independent women at work.