On its own merits, the place appealed to them. Also, they realized that living in southern New Jersey, a bit closer to Atlantic City, would facilitate Joe’s daily commute.
“This lawyer, Butler, was a friend of Uncle Steve’s for over sixty years,” Joe told Melissa. “Steve spoke to me more than once about the times he and Wilt Butler used to swim together in the Delaware River when they were kids, jumping off the tall cargo ships that had berthed at the old sugar factory in South Philly. Butler’s a good guy. He’ll make sure everything goes smoothly.”
Wilton Butler, although born in the same year as Uncle Steve, Joe had recalled, always looked to be considerably older. This wizened, almost bald barrister sported an oblong, clean-shaven head, save only for a few remaining clumps of white, bushy hair—all centered in front of his ears.
“Truncated sideburns,” Butler called them.
He was a smallish man, still thin, and had a calculating appearance that belied the friendliness of the greeting.
“Welcome, newlyweds,” he bellowed, in a voice that was a reminder, decibel-wise, of Uncle Steve’s. “And pardon me if I ask you to repeat yourselves now and then. My hearing isn’t what it used to be.”
After Butler handed over the pile of documents, Joe noticed that they appeared to be in order—and surprisingly free of legalese.
And while her husband flipped through the pages, scanning paragraph after paragraph, Melissa could concentrate only on the little house in New Jersey that she would soon call home.
Melissa had liked Uncle Steve’s rancher from the first time she saw it. In a pleasant, older neighborhood, it was fronted by large sycamores at curbside and was only a five-minute walk from a nearby shopping center.
“The backyard is beautiful,” she remembered. “Joe told me that the giant oak tree in the middle of the lawn is almost forty years old. Uncle Steve transplanted it himself from the adjacent woods right after he first moved in. He was careful to remember which branches faced the sun in the tree’s previous location, and he even used a compass to ensure that the replanting was exactly right. He was determined that the north side of that tree would still be facing north in its new home.”
Another attraction at Uncle Steve’s house was the large cultivated area where he had planted summer crops of tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, and Brussels sprouts. There was even a small group of blueberry bushes that bore fruit every June.
“I think I signed my name everywhere that I was supposed to—on the correct dotted lines,” Joe told the lawyer. “But don’t ask me if I understood anything.”
Butler flipped through the papers quickly, then he peered directly at Joe—from over the top of his half-circle reading glasses.
“I’ll need Melissa’s signature, too,” he explained, mysteriously. And when he had finished speaking these words, Butler couldn’t help but notice the surprised look on the faces of his visitors.
“While the remainder of Steve’s estate was willed just to you, Joe,” Butler continued, “he left the house to both you and Melissa, jointly.
“Even though, as we are all aware, Steve died before the date of your wedding, his will states: ‘To Joseph Carlton and his wife, the former Melissa Pienta Tomlinson.’
“So, I’ll need your name right next to Joe’s,” he instructed, now directing his eyes and his voice toward a slightly bewildered Melissa. “In the same eight places, I believe.”
Melissa always had a great deal more respect for those businessmen who talked directly to her while she was in Joe’s company. Too many others seemed to think, chauvinistically, that Joe’s consent was needed before a decision by her became final. Almost immediately, Butler grew in her esteem.
“You see,” Butler continued, almost as an afterthought, “Steve changed this will of his not too long ago. It was strange that he wanted to make this one, small addition—leaving the house to Joe and Melissa instead of just to Joe.
“I told him it wouldn’t be necessary. After all, he had informed me long ago that you two were going to get married. Either way, the house would be community property. So I didn’t see what difference it would make. However, Steve insisted. And even though, technically, you two weren’t married at the time he changed his will, Steve assured me that your marriage was inevitable.”
“Tell me,” Melissa interjected. “When exactly was it that Uncle Steve decided to change this will?”
“The date was March the twenty-first.”
Melissa and Joe looked into each other’s eyes right away, as if on cue. March the twenty-first was smack in the middle of the period during which they’d had no intention of getting married. At about that time, they were semi-officially an estranged couple. In fact, one day earlier, on March the twentieth, Melissa had visited Uncle Steve for lunch. That was the occasion when he had given her his advice to “go down to Islamorada and claim your man.”
Obviously, with this will of his as a vehicle, Uncle Steve was playing his own brand of a sure thing. For if Melissa and Joe had drifted apart, Uncle Steve’s ultimate death might eventually have served to bring them back together.
In effect, how could a separated Melissa and Joe fail to consider the prospect of meeting with each other at least once, socially, to discuss how they would approach their dilemma?
After all, a house left jointly to two unmarried people who are supposed to be married is not an everyday problem that can be solved by a solitary phone call.
The will would demand that they meet, and Uncle Steve knew all too well the power that could explode from one spark of a renewed relationship between two former lovers.
“He was playing his last card,” Joe commented. “It was an ace that he never needed.”
“That was him, all right,” Melissa concluded, her eyes meeting Joe’s knowing smile. “Good old Uncle Steve. If things went wrong, you could always depend on him to produce a winning move.”
Afterword
JOE AVENICK
I worked for James A. Michener during a five-year period in the 1970s. Thirty years after that I was outed as one of his ghostwriters—in Stephen J. May’s 2005 biography of Michener, titled Michener: A Writer’s Journey.
May revealed my role as a ghostwriter for sections of Michener’s books Sports in America and Chesapeake.
I also found that I wasn’t alone. May likewise highlighted the ghostwriting of Errol Uys, who wrote a good deal of Michener’s The Covenant and other works. I never knew of Uys’s existence until May interviewed me for his biography in 2003. Uys and I have since compared notes, and it is highly likely that there was at least one other ghostwriter who assisted Michener prior to our involvement and perhaps yet a fourth ghostwriter in the 1980s.
When I became aware of Michener’s hiring of Uys, and considering the feature articles that I ghosted under Michener’s name, it was then clear to me how Michener was able to “write” 70 mostly lengthy books and 398 magazine articles during his lifetime.
I first met Michener in 1973. Michener and his free-spending friend from Philadelphia, Edward Piszek, co-founder of Mrs. Paul’s Kitchens, were looking for someone with knowledge of sports to assist Michener with the forthcoming Sports in America. Piszek’s hefty wallet had bankrolled a number of Michener projects.
Michener knew he would need help because of his lack of knowledge about a number of sports, particularly football, golf, and track and field. The background I possessed as a newspaper sportswriter and columnist sealed our deal.
My first duties were to begin research for Sports in America and also to read the proof pages for Michener’s novel Centennial, which he had just finished writing.
After completing the bulk of the sports research, I then wrote the first draft for most of the Sports in America chapters, save those few that were mostly Michener’s recollections, theories, and recommendations. While Michener edited my first draft, I ghostwrote several magazine articles that appeared under his name in The Saturday Evening Post and in Reader’s Digest.
After
we finished Sports in America, I continued to work for Michener on his next book, Chesapeake. The work varied slightly on this project. Michener and I spent several months in St. Michaels, Maryland, trying to outline the work, selecting fictional names, and smoothing the plot. I then completed the detailed outline while Michener traveled about Maryland researching the sections that needed shoring up.
During my time in his employ, Michener and I would travel together throughout the United States, to Europe, and to the Middle East. Michener also visited me in Islamorada, the Florida Keys, where I introduced him to Melissa (Missy) DeMaio, an always-cheerful businesswoman who had no idea of his background and who had never read any of his books. Michener and DeMaio soon began a love affair—with Michener’s visits to the Keys then increasing exponentially.
I left Michener’s employ in 1978 for other interests, but we remained friends for the next 19 years, until Michener died in October of 1997.
Michener’s relationship with DeMaio inspired him to write Matecumbe (the word “Matecumbe” refers to two of the four islands that comprise Islamorada: Upper Matecumbe and Lower Matecumbe). He first showed me a rough draft sometime in the late 1970s, asking me for an opinion. Michener’s first version of Matecumbe had a single female lead by the name of Melissa and was in the form of a three-act play, something he had never before attempted. He told me he had always admired playwright Arthur Miller and was also intrigued by the fact that Ernest Hemingway wrote only one play during his lifetime, The Fifth Column.
In the second version of Matecumbe that Michener showed me, about a year later, he had transformed it into a novella. I told him, frankly, that the longish dialogue gave it the feeling of a play but that it still worked as a novella.
Michener wanted Random House, his publisher, to print Matecumbe. But Michener’s Random House editor, Albert Erskine, did not. Erskine told Michener he feared that Matecumbe was “just a love story,” much like Michener’s earlier novella, Sayonara, and that Michener shouldn’t compromise his burgeoning reputation as a historical novelist.
Erskine told Michener that Random House CEO Tony Wimpfheimer also disliked the prospect of publishing Matecumbe and that Michener should stick with those long, thoroughly researched books that dealt with the history of Hawaii, Spain, Colorado, and the like. (A number of years later, I tracked down Wimpfheimer, who had retired and was living in Purchase, New York. Wimpfheimer told me that the decision to scuttle Matecumbe was entirely Erskine’s decision.)
Amazingly, Erskine also tried to steer Michener away from writing any more small books similar to Tales of the South Pacific, which won Michener a Pulitzer Prize and was the basis for the long-running musical “South Pacific.”
“Erskine forced me to look at the bottom line,” Michener remembered. “Heavyweight books like Hawaii and Centennial made chunks of money.”
Although he relented to Erskine, Michener still held hope that Random House would one day consent to publish Matecumbe. He was convinced that this novella was even better than Sayonara, also a story of two love affairs, which had become a best-seller as well as an Academy Award winning motion picture starring Marlon Brando.
I met with Michener sporadically through the early 1980s. And even though he and DeMaio had then split, he was still reworking Matecumbe.
Michener told me that he had been on the peer review list in the early 1950s for Ernest Hemingway’s novella, The Old Man and the Sea, which later won Hemingway both the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize for Literature (1954). This peer review is described by Michener in a 38-page introduction he wrote for a later edition of Hemingway’s The Dangerous Summer.
After reading the proofs, Michener was overwhelmed with the allegories and symbolism of The Old Man and the Sea. He would try, Michener said, to put the same elements into Matecumbe.
“Hemingway told a simple story of a fisherman that seemed to be a saccharine treatment at first reading,” Michener said. “Instead of a fisherman, I finally found my vehicle—two divorced women. In Matecumbe, I want to hide the deeper thoughts between the lines of the two love stories. I need Matecumbe to exhale slowly all of the symbols and allegories.”
During his fine-tuning of rewrites, Michener peppered me for suggestions such as “give me a good name for a cat” (Puff ) or “what do people do when they visit the Islamorada Hurricane Monument?” (gaze in awe). He also decided to scrap one of his favorite devices—a geological history preface that for Matecumbe would have discussed the evolution of topography in the Florida Keys beginning with the Pleistocene epoch. “Too cumbersome for this book,” he concluded.
In 1974, I had introduced Michener to my uncle, Stefan, whom he subsequently used as one of the gamblers (“The Pole”) in Sports in America. I suspect that Michener was picturing Stefan while he rewrote an enhanced role for the Solomon-like Uncle Steve character in Matecumbe.
Eventually, Michener told me that there was no longer any chance of his convincing Random House to publish Matecumbe. He then gave me the manuscript outright, telling me that I could rewrite it if I wanted. Michener had sent me several letters indicating that he had gifted the manuscript to me, including one letter in which he specifically noted that he was giving me the copyright to Matecumbe as well as to other short pieces of nonfiction that he had written over the years.
This element of largesse was typical of Michener. To colleges and universities he gave millions of dollars. Friends and acquaintances rarely received money. Instead, he would give them personalized notes; hand-written poems; autographed books; and cooked hams at Christmas. Fellow ghostwriter Uys recalled the holiday goose that Michener gave him one year. It was inedible, though, being full of shot.
I often asked myself why Michener gave me the Matecumbe manuscript. It would be flattering to think he considered me the son he never had, but it was probably due more to trust. Most notable, I knew of his extramarital affair with DeMaio. His secretary/travel agent also knew (receipts from a trip to the Isle of Capri), and she received checks from Michener on a regular basis. I asked for nothing.
To the best of my memory, sometime in 1983 or 1984, Michener sent me some final paragraphs that he said should be inserted into the manuscript. From that point through this initial publication of Matecumbe, I never changed one word.* The more I read Matecumbe, the more I was certain it could not be improved—by me or by anyone. To me, reading it was like watching the film Harold and Maude. Every time I saw it, I recognized something new.
While Michener was alive, I did nothing with the Matecumbe manuscript. After his death, I made a few informal inquiries to publishing houses, but there was only mild interest. One acquisitions editor commented that “few people under fifty years of age have heard of Michener.”
Then, about a decade ago, while I was working for literary agent E. Sidney Porcelain, my curiosity bested me. One of my duties was to circulate sections of manuscripts that Porcelain had received from writers. I would regularly solicit opinions from other writers and editors that I respected, helping Porcelain to decide whether to represent these authors. Occasionally, I would send out copies of pages from Matecumbe to these reviewers, not telling them that Michener was the author. About half of my reviewers raved over Matecumbe, while the others were indifferent. One reviewer, who missed the point of the character development entirely, wrote a lengthy expansion of two Michener pages, declaring that “the Carlton character needs more depth.”
In the summer of 2005 I was in discussions with the editors at the University Press of Florida concerning a book I proposed on the history of celebrities in the Florida Keys. The editors then approached me about the Matecumbe manuscript after reading about it in May’s biography of Michener.
The first thing I explained to them was that this Michener novella may be light on pages, but it is far from a simple book.
In Matecumbe, the symbols and allegories that fill this apparently simple dual love story would require a trilogy to explain. Michener himself admitted that most of his loyal re
aders would like it but would probably fail to appreciate all facets of Matecumbe and would assume that it was merely a tale of two love relationships.
Sage advice would be that readers need to think as they read and that they should weigh the possible alternate/hidden meanings in Matecumbe. Specifically, they should ponder the recurring mention of the color blue as it concerns both Melissa and Mary Ann; the “why” behind the Reynolds character falling in love with Mary Ann; the old woman in the cemetery;the white cat, Coke; Carlton’s fear of hurricanes;the number of seeds in a watermelon; and especially the dialogue of the Uncle Steve character. If Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald can be commended for his words between the words in The Great Gatsby and his sharp social insight through symbolism, so, too, can Michener. As the Roman poet Horace stated, he “built a monument more lasting than bronze.”
Overall, Matecumbe is similar in structure and plot coursing to several of Michener’s previous works. Yet, it is also different, having a cutting edge that makes Michener’s characters come off as less straight-laced and less righteous.
Any critic who reads Matecumbe and concludes that it is “not exactly Michener” is probably right. It is, in reality, “Michener Plus.” I believe that his relationship with DeMaio caused this change. Prior to meeting DeMaio, Michener had the archetypical aloof Quaker personality. Afterward, he was more open, gregarious, and inquisitive. This alteration in his psyche is also evident in other books he wrote post-1984 and in the characters he created post-DeMaio. If we concede that Melissa (Missy) DeMaio was the real-life inspiration for the Melissa character in Matecumbe, then it is obvious that DeMaio was also the inspiration for the “Melissa (Missy) Peckham” in Michener’s 1988 novel, Alaska. It is also a given that “Peckham” is unlike any Michener character who appeared prior to his involvement with DeMaio.
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