by Carson, Tom
A few short takes from Washington on quickie trips aside—and yes, I’d avoided reinterviewing LBJ—those two pieces were my only reprieves from the drudgery involved in becoming the latest ex-Mrs. Murphy. After my Columbian year, I had days when it drove me half batty to wake up feeling engulfed again by an environment and characters my journeying had largely left behind.
That meant not only Murphy himself, now an infuriating clown as he flashed Time-cover grins and told whoppers for a stenographer’s benefit. It meant tepidly circumlocutious, porcelain-pale, easily flushed John Lavabo and the cast of A Clock with Twisted Hands. All of them but Hal Lime—bruited for a supporting Oscar by now after playing Gunnar Dyson, the wisecracking Swede who ended up staying behind to cover his squad’s escape, in Corrigedor Story—got shaken down for their two cents and wooden nickels regarding Bran and Viper.
I did like seeing Hans Caligar again, especially after his denturized elevator mutter of “Remember, the smart only shame themselves by negotiating with the shtupid.” Yet I’d found myself blush-worthily eager when Viper’s own turn came to be deposed, swiftly setting it down to a yen for revenge.
That yen was disappointed. In a polka-dot dress all wrong for March and warning us what to expect in May, she’d played the tearful innocent much better than she had Vickie Patricia Lucy, not that Pam had great grounds to scoff there. No, she’d never had anything “like that”—nice moue of disgust—to do with Mr. Murphy. She didn’t go with married men, and had liked and admired me much too much [insert two-way stare here] to even think about it. Yes, she’d been up to his room at the Peter Minuit those five times. (We knew it was more like fifty, but five was all the hotel’s former night clerk could confirm.) But only to help him with his revisions by reading Vickie Patricia Lucy’s new lines, and she’d never removed so much as a hairpin.
Yes, she’d been admitted to Bellevue—no, not the psychiatric wing!—on December 5, 1941. Only for unspecified “abdominal bleeding,” though, not a miscarriage. The verdict was an early period and bad cramps. The hospital records bore her out, but in those days it wouldn’t have taken much pleading from someone as lissome as Viper for Bellevue’s Kildare-was-here not to have written everything down.
And she was sorry, but would we—would we mind? Her high-school fiancé, really the only boy she’d really loved, had been killed at Kasserine just last month. It was awful to answer these questions when she was still grieving for him.
Unsurprisingly, when our gumshoe checked, said boy’s genuinely grieving parents were stumped that Betty, as they knew her, had flashed out of Flatbush in June 1940 without a toodle-oo to now mantlepieced Phil. Even so, Kasserine Pass was Kasserine Pass: our worst defeat at German hands before the Battle of the Bulge’s opening days, and we didn’t know about the Battle of the Bulge yet. Grieving parents are grieving parents, and Viper was so good Oliver Watson had made up his mind he wouldn’t challenge her testimony directly.
We knew we had to call her if they didn’t. I’d named her, after all, but Oliver was dreading what it would do to our case. That changed once Trinka Solynka took the stand.
Posted by: Pam
Remember, they were still trying to nail me on desertion. Trinka’s job was to describe Bran’s life after Mrs. Murphy started wanderlusting all over the country—just for the romps and nectar, I gathered. A pitiful picture she gave too, applying that artless accent like dill on a turbot: sad Mr. Murphy shutting himself away for hours before emerging to test the pillars’ lack of give, Samson-style, a stricken expression on his sadly beardless face (she mimicked him slowly, regretfully checking). Gulled Mr. Murphy gazing at gulls under the portrait of Dolores Ibárurri—the other Mrs. Gillooley, and why hadn’t I seen that until now?—in the vain hope I’d swoop in on my broomstick and start sweeping the kitchen.
It was just how Bran behaved when I was on hand, and it wasn’t Pam he was mourning. It was inspiration’s failure to pipe up now that Dolores no longer leaned down. But I don’t think Trinka ever understood what he did for a living, or indeed that he wasn’t just a millionaire—her exaggerated estimate of his place in the cosmos—by dispensation of strange American gods. Certainly in her day no evidence of his labors had made it out of his office except when she emptied the trash.
As indifferent as I was to the money angle, it did annoy me that Trinka was Murphy’s witness when my signature was the one on her checks. My whispered question whether that could be brought out earned a look of woe from Oliver Watson, since it would indicate financial independence and he did care about the alimony. It was not only what I was paying him for but, if all went well, with.
More infuriatingly, Bran’s lawyers made bold to ask Trinka about the Murphys’ conjugal relations—and she quite naturally reported they were nonexistent. Of course they were, when she was there cooking or cleaning! She wasn’t a live-in maid, and Miss Hormel (not called) to the possible contrary, I wasn’t an exhibitionist. Yet Trinka had been an awed if dictionaryless witness to some of our rawer fights, and her recaps of those gave spectators their first real prickle of juridical porn. Spoken in lisped and zaftig Danzigzags, “An’ then Mist’ Murphy say I never knew how good Colum Firth had it—an’ she say well I sure rather look at Vacheton Moment than that God damn thing” had a tawdry allure so fleshy Trinka might as well have been kneading her own mammarial concertina at the time.
I hadn’t seen myself impersonated since Purcey’s callous halls. In this case, any fool could see and hear that Trinka’s regal tut-tuts, airy chinlifts, and dismissive those-little-piggies flutterings of fingers were the fruit of spellbound attendance at Brooklyn movie palaces.
Still, as I watched her burlesque a Pam I knew had never existed, one thought kept insisting it was fertile. Dear God, was Bran determined to turn us all into actresses? And bad ones at that? Bolstered by Addison’s lunch-break mutter of “You know, I do wonder if Murph’s been smiting the sledded Polack on the ice,” that intuition convinced me to lobby Oliver Watson for a fresh line of questioning when Trinka returned to the stand.
My attorney hated the idea. With all our attention focused on Viper, we’d never raised the issue during discovery. Like most trial lawyers, Oliver had a horror of asking questions whose answer he didn’t know, and he was still nettled at Jake and me for keeping Sharon Halevy Cohnstein’s existence hidden. But with Viper herself due to testify next and still unbudgingly backing Murphy’s story, he reluctantly agreed.
Before he got to it, he had to take Trinka back through her whole morning’s testimony—chivvying her as to whether Mrs. Pam hadn’t really said Thus-and-so instead of Such-and-such, etc. With her Danzig-in-distress English up against his curlicued kind, it was so tiresome it bored even me, and I’d been the one God damning the Mighty Tower to begin with. It was late in the day before Oliver, fresh out of pickable bones and splittable hairs, gave me a helpless glance to see if I still wanted to go ahead. I nodded.
“Ah, before we let you go. One last question, Miss Solynka. By any chance, in the past eight months, have you yourself ever had—ah, sexual congress? With your employer?” Even Oliver couldn’t keep it straight that Bran didn’t pay her wages.
“What? No!” Trinka cried just before giving Lyndon Johnson’s afternoon delight my worst scare of the trial. “She go Congress! Not me.”
“No, no. That’s not what I’m asking. Miss Solynka, have you—yourself—ever had illicit relations with Mr. Murphy?”
Trinka thinking hard was like a steam shovel waiting for its operator to show up. “My aunty she come say hi one time. Was bad?”
“No, no. Have you—your honor, may I have a word with my client?”
Since he was sitting behind me, I didn’t actually see it. Languidly coughing to draw Trinka’s attention, Addison raised both hands for a gesture involving a circled thumb and finger, a forefinger and movement.
As her first moment of
total understanding during an ordeal that puzzled and frightened her dawned, her face bloomed happiness that she could be helpful at last. No wonder Bran enjoyed banging her.
“Oh, boinky-boink! Yes, yes, yes, yes. Tuesday, Thursday, Tuesday, Thursday. But never when Mrs. Pam home”—and her face went from virtuous to sly. “When she go Congress.”
Posted by: Pam
That was how Viper Leigh went from being the final witness scheduled on Bran’s side to the first called on ours. To say she was seething is to remark Versailles cost money, and that polka-dot dress was history too. When she marched her upthrust pear boobies and tight-skirted rear past Bran’s table, her icepick heels were stabbing the floor like Trotsky’s comeback in the role of Banquo’s ghost.
Unlike Trinka, whose testimony is what gets Murphy v. Murphy cited in dictionaries of American slang (“boink, v.: sexual congress; wide 1943–45 service, Broadway use; from ‘boinky-boink,’ n.; earliest known citation…”), Viper didn’t say much for the books. She sure made a splash in the papers, though: red playwright promised marriage, stage cutie avers [“Bombers Pound Hamburg”—see p. 4]. viper’s heartbreak at lost child: ‘my poor muffin,’ she sobs [“Algiers Conference Wraps Up: Churchill Pleased”—see p. 9]. two-time pulitzer champ can’t even spell: ‘peter minuet tonite?’ murph’s mash note read [“Attu Battle Ends with Mass Nip Suicide, Says Army”—see p. 15].
I wasn’t prepared for how much her confession hurt. You get used to seeing these things as circuses, Panama. Then you remember how once there you were in the forest. I hadn’t known Murphy first took up with Viper in October ’41, before she’d been cast in Clock and just two months after our return from Maine. I could have lived without learning their nickname for me was Helen Keller. Nor had I known he’d had her on the same Sutton Place sofa where he and I—early on, early on!—had done our best to widen Dolores Ibárurri’s eyes once or twice.
Remember, not only was Bran my first husband. For what now seemed longer than he’d deserved, I’d gone on thinking he’d be the only one.
By the time Oliver finished leading Viper through her Peter Minuit minuet, my hubby’s lawyers were peering under their chairs for a briefcase to piss in. Out to discredit her, they fell back on trying to bully her into admitting she’d set out to entrap Bran by getting preggers. Was that a mistake, and not only because Viper’d succeeded in provoking compassion for that tiny Murphine seahorse flushed into the sewer system. When they pushed one time too many, her eyes glistened.
“I’m sorry, would—would you mind? I’m sorry. I’m doing my best, but—oh, Phil!—my fiancé was killed at Kasserine Pass. And he never even—we never. And it’s so awful, so awful, you see—to be answering these dirty sex questions, when—oh, Phil, Phil, Phil! Oh, I’m so sorry, Your Honor.” [murphy trial bombshell: bran called viper’s uso work in phil’s honor ‘waste of time,’ says weeping flatbush girl. see p. 45 for yankees win and all sports coverage.]
Once Viper swept her boobies back off the witness stand, I probably shouldn’t have been taken aback at how anatomically—I mean automatically—she joined our circle outside the courtroom. Doing their best to form a coral reef of friendship inside a surf of reporters, Roy Charters, Addison, Jake, and (this was heroic; I loved her for it) Sharon Halevy Cohnstein weren’t expecting it either. I’d just yowled that I needed a drink when there Viper was, reaching out: “Pam! I’m so glad it’s over [sic]. I just hope I helped.”
Actresses, honestly! The latest role is the only one. It doesn’t matter to them how vivid your memories are of their late-1941 performance in I’m Fucking Your Husband or their polka-dotted turn in Spring 1943’s discovery hit And I’m Going to Lie My Cute Can Off About It, Too. Not to mention a part that Viper, then delirious, had been unaware of playing: her feverish skin and pears’ contribution to Miss Hormel’s Revenge, a chamber piece I didn’t want revived. As she grabbed my arm and I inhaled her perfume, thrust upsettingly back to the last time we’d been in physical contact, all I could do was stare into her breathily bright-lipsticked face.
“I hope you write a play one of these days,” she told me. “Wouldn’t that show him? And I’d like to be in it if I could.”
At which I must’ve stared twice over. Even in his Topanga garden, Addison was delighted by the memory. “Isn’t the power of the unconscious splendid?” he mused. “She can’t have realized what she was implying.”
“Oh, not a chance of it.” Then I hesitated. But I was older and a long way from that dressing room, and Gerson was nowhere in sight. “Even so, I swear I got worried the first words I typed when I got back to Roy’s were going to be ‘Act One.’”
He didn’t bat an eye. “She was pretty. Dumb as cornstarch, but pretty,” he said fondly, and never brought her up again.
Posted by: Pam
Up until Viper’s testimony, my four months on the sofa in Roy Charters’s study had been as unstained by carnality as the New York edition of Henry James that loomed over me. But that night, not without a certain grim inner mutter of plus ça change on Pam’s part, my editor and I had our first fumbling go at the old buck and wing. Volcanic it wasn’t, and when I finally met the woman whose bra cups Roy may have been hoping I’d fill—bustling Cath Charters was no more than a name to me then—I saw how the Buchanan bod might’ve started out looking like a bit of a stretch and ended up seeming like a bit of a letdown.
On my end, once I’d quit counting the Marquands between (Sinclair) Lewis and (Walter van Tilburg) Clark, I spent most of the ten minutes it took feeling mystified that anyone as brainy as Roy could think sex as a deed was a cure for loneliness. As opposed to tender confirmation it had been defeated, my own lost ideal. That notion must be more afoot in the land than I’d gathered, and so on.
Once Viper’s stint on the stand was done, so I learned from Garth Vader’s Dat Dead Man Dere, Bran’s lawyers begged him to let them barter for the best alimony deal they could. Yet my hubby was the same Murphy who’d taken A Clock with Twisted Hands on his back and staggered a few more blind steps up the mountain before letting the opening-night audience leave, and by that time he didn’t care about the money either. He wanted self-justification. To get it, he was depending on the oldest unofficial rule of American jurisprudence: you can’t wrong someone hateful.
In the good old tennis court of public opinion, I can’t say he failed. Not going by the jolly men in later years who’d react to being introduced to Pam by playing the asinine trick of snatching their bee-stung hand away and chuckling as their upheld palm implored my mercy. Making a joke of it, yes, and swinging back in for the grip. Still putting me on notice they knew I had a shiv in my purse.
In a suit brown as autumn, Bran had testified much earlier. Consulting his own interlocked Pulitzer-winning hands, he’d won a few stunned looks from his soon-to-be ex as he described how he’d encouraged my writing. Did he mean “You’re really so much better at those little book reviews”? Had he known it was going to be my excuse to abandon him, he wouldn’t have lied about thinking Pam had talent: “I wasn’t under oath then, Your Honor” (Time-cover grin). A loyal husband will do these things to protect his home’s harmony.
I’d been furious, but Oliver hadn’t been able to damage Murphy much. Neither Trinka’s boinky-boinks nor Viper’s Peter Minuit minuet had come out at that point, and my fussbudget lawyer was no match for Bran at charm or stagecraft. By my own turn, my hubby’s case was in much worse shape, and Oliver was concentrating on refuting the desertion charge. His purpose in walking me through my Regent’s assignments wasn’t only to remind everyone that I hadn’t been rowdying around the country for fun, something Roy Charters’s testimony had already confirmed.
What Oliver hoped would sink in was an ultimately patriotic contrast: Pam singing democracy’s arsenal while Bran sat on his. Pam watching Sherman tanks roll out as Colum Firth’s author played mannequin games with Viper
Leigh; Pam freezing her pants off in a Tennessee coal mine as on Sutton Place Trinka gave demonstrations of how to play the accordion lying down. Was my lawyer glad Viv and the others had taken me down the shaft on a Tuesday.
“And as you watched them plant the dynamite that afternoon, Mrs. Murphy, did you have any inkling that at the same moment, in New York…”
“No, of course not,” I said, thinking all this might sound very different if Bran and Trinka’s boinky-boink hour had come at the end of the day. Except for one anodyne sentence, however, my happiest and then most disconcerting Riceville memory had stayed unmentioned in print.
I hadn’t expected Bran’s lawyers to take me through the same itinerary. Soon I understood what they were listening for: a fractional hesitation, a small but fatal shift in tone. “Mrs. Murphy, did you ever commit adultery in Tennessee?”
“No.”
“Did you ever commit adultery in Michigan?”
“No.”
“Did you ever commit adultery in Texas?”
“No”—and suddenly I was terrified they’d ask about Washington, D.C. But Jake had immunized me there; it never crossed their minds.
There was one other state I had to brace myself for. Its tourist brochure was looking at me and we’d made the beast with two left feet that morning. I only kept my poise by remembering that adultery with Ohio wasn’t adultery in Ohio, something I thought Roy would laugh at that night but he oddly didn’t.