by Ed Ifkovic
“I should hope so,” I declared. “I’m not eager to hold audiences with people.”
“Even your loyal readers?” Martha asked.
“Readers are not loyal,” I said. “One false move on my part, one weakly plotted novel, one scene that offends, and they’re at Brentano’s picking up the latest Frances Parkinson Keyes atrocity.”
Martha laughed, a full, deep laugh that went on too long.
“Not Connecticut,” Carlotta said. “Loyalty is engraved on our birth certificates and engraved on our tombstones. We’re as solid as rock formation here. And as dull and unimaginative.”
I smirked. “Then I’ve obviously made a mistake writing my new novel about such an assortment of ciphers.”
“Don’t listen to her, Edna. You’ll have an exciting week,” Martha insisted. “Trust me.”
“I should hope so.”
“Lotta only believes life is fun in New York.”
“After tonight is over,” Carlotta repeated. “I promise.”
That afternoon, after a light lunch prepared by Julia who said not a word to me, I lingered in my room, sitting by the back window where the cool autumn breeze seeped under the old sills of the rickety hand-blown windows, and I devoured local histories I’d found in the library downstairs—in particular, a thin pamphlet written on the history of the Inn, scribed by Leonora Clapp Morrison, some descendant of old Rawley and Eben Travers, who chronicled the role of the Inn as an important stopping point for travelers in colonial and federalist America. She surmised that Washington himself stopped at the Inn for a respite, but did acknowledge the story as apocryphal. That pamphlet, stained and yellowed, as well as the volume issued by the Danbury Historical Society—Sketches of Early Life in Rawley’s Depot, Drawn from Papers of the Travers, Small, and Rawley Clans (1897, by Thankful Lindsey, hist’n, Connecticut Colonial Dames—were fascinating, replete with anecdote and color and observation. I scribbled furiously on my pad, culling this morsel, that bit—foibles, idiosyncrasies. I was starting to envision my hero, Captain Orrange Oakes, riding on a majestic stallion across the rocky Connecticut ridges, scouting the land for his estate, his eyes sweeping down over shabby Indian camps, over lakes and streams teeming with fish, forests of game and fruit. A new Eden. Yes, I thought—Eden.
Late afternoon I went downstairs, intending to take a walk, but found myself staring at a man introduced as Jason Fargo. He stood and mumbled some idle flattery. “An honor, Miss Ferber.” He bowed and, strangely, I felt he expected me to hurl a compliment his way. I said nothing. Carlotta was fluttering around him, almost manic. I disliked him immediately, and then waited to find out why I felt that way.
Jason was a short man, far shorter than Carlotta herself, a wiry man, but probably had been a handsome man many years ago, though I suspected the years had packed a little weight on his wrestler’s frame. With thinning hair, a pencil-thin black moustache that reminded me of villains on Mississippi show boat melodramas, and ruddy, sun-burned high cheeks, he looked vaguely snake-oil merchant to me, some shrewd, manipulative drummer who was more sham than sure. He moved too much, I realized, a man uncomfortable with silence, with stillness. A frantic barn rodent.
“Jason has brought a volume for my research.” Carlotta was speaking too fast, her voice too loud. “Broadway Annual: 1906. For my memoirs. He’s a goldmine of information. You know, Jason worked in theater, too, in management at the Lyceum for years and years. He knows . . .”
Jason interrupted, laughing. “I’m her convenient memory. It also guarantees that any mention of me in her memoirs will be favorable.” He withdrew a pack of Camels from his breast pocket, lit one for himself, one for Carlotta. None for me.
I disliked his voice—too thin, like escaped air.
“Don’t count on it,” Carlotta chided. “I’m a truth teller.”
“I was your best husband. You should never have left me.”
Carlotta looked confused. “Jason, I thought you did the leaving.”
Jason turned to me, showing too much teeth, yellowed. “See what I mean? She needs me to correct her fragmented history. Sometimes I think Carlotta wasn’t paying attention as she was living those grand and exciting years. A little too much enjoyment perhaps. Right, Carlotta?
Carlotta no longer smiled. “Perhaps if you’d stopped romancing every pretty chorus girl . . .”
“Now, Carlotta . . .”
She turned to me. “Jason has college-aged children now and a wife who lives in another town.”
“We’re working on our marriage . . .”
Carlotta made a dismissive sound.
I looked from one to the other. A curious tension, there.
Jason maneuvered the conversation back to me and my work. “Brilliant, that So Big. You are the great woman novelist of our time.” Fawning, leaning in, he reminded me of Uriah Heap, some Dickens slick creation. I loved flattery, truth to tell, often demanded it, but his rambling, with more and more sensational hyperbole heaped on me, left me cold, cold.
“I’m going for a walk,” I announced. I took my jacket from a wall hook.
Carlotta looked nervous. “I’ve invited Jason this evening. With the others. I hope you don’t mind.”
Jason started to say something oily, but I sharply closed the kitchen door behind me and stepped into the backyard. I took in a deep breath, exhaled, and savored the crisp air. Hell’s kitchen, I thought, that room I’d just left. All that blue cigarette smoke, that servile flattery, Carlotta’s frenzied panic over—what? I had no way of knowing.
Outside, as I turned toward the front of the house to begin my mile walk, I spotted Martha sitting on a rope swing hung from an old oak. She wore a light jacket, too light for the afternoon chill, and she was staring off into space, a cigarette hanging from her lips, unattended. Even from yards away, I could see she was trembling.
I said nothing, just walked away.
So I walked, as I always did. Walk was salvation for me, inspiration, a clearing of the cobwebs, a pulsation of red blood. I wanted to think of American Beauty, of Tamar Oakes, of Orrange Ozick, of Polish truck farms, of Yankee ingenuity, of my notetaking, but the brief scene in the kitchen and the image of Martha on that swing, solitary and lost, disarmed me. I strolled away from the Inn, past the late-Victorian gingerbread home down the lane, the one occupied by Stanley Lipinski. Nearing it, I noticed he was in the front yard, painting trim on the sagging porch. The house seemed an anomaly near the other two Colonial structures, an afterthought, as it were, a lavish wedding cake confection, turrets and floor-to-ceiling windows, all lace filigree and nook and cranny, widow’s peak and wraparound porch.
I walked by him and he stopped what he was doing, straightened his body. He was a robust-looking man, beet-red face and shiny balding scalp warring with shabby blond hair, a man with tremendous belly and thick, square torso. A bruiser, the kind of stolid, dull soul I used to spot working the Chicago stockyards, cigar in the corner of his mouth, glazed-over eyes, the red runny noise of a hardened rum drinker. As man as dull as a plodding farm animal.
“Mr. Lupinski,” I yelled to him, with a slight wave of my hand.
That startled him. He didn’t answer. So I nodded and kept going.
As I passed, I turned back. He was still standing there, immobile, a statue in flannel and burlap, expressionless. But his head was inclined toward me, disapproving.
During the course of my lengthy walk a couple of automobiles passed by, and the inhabitants slowed down, pulled closer, peering out the windows. I tried to look straight-ahead but felt compelled to glance into the vehicles at the occupants, only to discover rigid, hostile faces, jaws set in some squirrelly, censorious glare. People who obviously wanted to keep their distance. What was with these people? I wondered. I was a stranger in town, a tired middle-aged woman in a sensible dress and jacket, with my hair permed by Mr. Richard at Casey’s, on Madison. Hardly the peripatetic Jezebel or itinerant thief. I looked schoolmarmish, someone’s maiden and comfortable aunt
. Why this distrust?
And then, walking back, just as I turned back into the yard, Jason Fargo’s car sped by me, sending dust into the air. I paused to wave but he didn’t spot me, sheltered as I was by some thick hedges. Instead, he stared straight-ahead, transfixed, yet his face was set in a look that struck me as both angry and fearful. He disappeared around a turn, headed up over Caleb’s Rise. I heard a blare of a horn. Jason honking at what?—perhaps a hapless squirrel that got in his way.
CHAPTER THREE
The Dinner to Meet the Famous Authoress.
That’s how I felt this little one-act play should be entitled, some throwaway vignette wherein the winsome writer, bedecked in smart citified dress and vaguely Deco-ish brooch—the gift from Sinclair Lewis after I won the Pulitzer—would be compelled to smile and smile, so hard on the jaw muscles, until the supper guests, sated with food and too much drink, staggered from the bountiful table.
The first person I met was a young man. “I’m Peter Brewster.”
So this was Carlotta’s son from her first marriage. I was intrigued by his looks: clean-cut, strong jaw, blue-black hair, intense ice-blue eyes that held mine, purposely. But on one side of his face there was a grotesque jagged scar, and one eye was half shut, giving his face a lazy appeal. But a strong young man, I thought, that new breed of young men flowering after the War: fearless, a little cocky and sure of themselves. Still, definitely a decidedly handsome man, dark complexioned, lanky.
“What do you do, Peter?” I asked, while he still held my hand.
He grinned. “I hate to admit it, but mostly I’m into insurance in Danbury, where I live. At least I go into an office now and then. But mostly, in my mind, I’m a struggling playwright currently doing one-act pieces for a small theater in the Village. Experimental pieces, very bleak German Expressionism, very Strindberg, with a touch of Gogol.”
I had no idea what he was talking about.
“Very nice,” I assured him, letting go of his hand. “What do you plan to do when you wake up?”
He laughed. I laughed. The scar moved on the side of his face. Women, I realized, must find him irresistible.
Carlotta smiled. “Peter, with his looks, was first an actor.”
An odd silence swept the parlor. Martha grunted. Everyone looked elsewhere. Then, suddenly, I recalled the stories I’d heard in New York, mainly from Woollcott: how Peter was injured in an auto crash some years back, his mother driving, drunk perhaps, months in a hospital, then a depression that effectively ended his stage career. I’d heard stories of his moodiness, his volatile fits, his melancholia, the young brooding artist.
Now, smiling at me, he shook his head. “Miss Ferber, I had an accident. It’s no secret.”
“You look just like your mother,” I noted. “And that’s a compliment.” And he did: that same dark exotic coloring, those penetrating eyes, that shock of blue-black hair. The way he tilted his head when he smiled.
“This is my fiancée, Delia Ballard.” He nodded toward the young woman he brought with him, now plastered to his side as though she feared she might otherwise topple to the floor. Her, I did not like. The initial glance, I told myself, that one-second of eye contact, forged an indelible opinion on the brain. So did Delia Ballard strike me . . . something weasel-like about her, too grasping, too hungry, a mouth that quivered. Beautiful, to be sure, and dark like her lover. But all sharp edges to her nose and chin and ears and brows, so unlike the soft romanticism of Peter and his mother. A brittle woman, all angles, and none of them good. Becky Sharp on the prowl.
I knew, from conversations with Carlotta earlier in New York, that she disliked Delia, and I wondered whether those talks had colored my own view of the young woman. Doubtful, I concluded, as I let no one else make up my own mind. The problem, as I spotted it, was simple: Delia—“I’m an actress,” she proclaimed, though no one asked her—didn’t know where to center her cloying attention. Long used to flattering Carlotta mercilessly, she now had me to contend with. And I was Show Boat and The Royal Family. I was legitimate Broadway, blazing in lights. I was Edna Ferber, capitalized. I was her possible ticket to Ingénue of 1931. Or some such worthless acclamation.
“And what have you been in?” I probed, innocently.
She drew her body closer to Peter, if that were possible.
She hesitated. A flickering of the eye, a flash of indecision, a drizzle of nervous drool at the corner of her scarlet-painted mouth. “I’ve had some lines in one of Peter’s plays in a workshop theater on Greenwich Avenue.”
“No Broadway?”
“Not for want of talent and looks,” she said. She laughed a deep whiskey laugh, which she’d not been born with.
“It’s a shame I make it a point never to include parts for beautiful, clever women in any of my plays.”
“What about . . .” Peter began, listening closely.
I cut him off. “Those decisions are made by George Kaufman, of course.”
Dinner, suitably, was served at eight. Served by a strangely gaunt Julia with the calculation of an efficient mime, the meal was to my liking: pumpkin and sausage soup spiced with aromatic fennel, paper-thin pork chops glazed with honey and thyme, candied sweet potatoes, meaty and bubbly under a slathering of thick brown sugar, a garden salad of summer lettuce, diced celery cubes, overripe tomatoes, slips of basil. Dessert was homemade peach and pecan ice cream, chilled to Arctic temperatures, served over slices of glossy custard pie, creamy yellow. With an orange-spice tea bought in Chinatown by Carlotta’s son.
I approved of the meal, joyously, though not the garrulous, annoying guest list.
Perhaps that was unfair, I told myself when the meal was concluded. After all, everyone there seemed delighted to be in my presence, and no one really offended. No one called me Mrs. Ferber. No one mentioned the brouhaha over Cimarron and the disgruntled citizenry of that oil-soaked yet grammar-school-educated state. No one insisted I discuss my novel in progress, something taboo and irksome.
Only Delia bothered me. Throughout dinner, Delia kept leaning left toward Carlotta—“You really do have an autumn look, Carlotta, earthy and sensual and rich”—then to her immediate right—“Miss Ferber, that dirge ‘Old Man River’ is spine tingling.” So much rocking back and forth that I feared I’d faint from vertigo or palsy.
“I didn’t write ‘Old Man River,’” I announced, a little haughty. “A chap named Jerome Kern. You may have heard of him.”
Delia refused to be flustered, which is a shame in a person whose native talents are patently limited. “But you inspired it . . .”
Carlotta kept trying to steer the conversation away from Delia—and from Jason Fargo who looked unhappy but kept interrupting her—drawing my attention to her oldest and dearest friends, the Fenwicks. Mostly quiet throughout the dinner, the Fenwicks, Henry and Peggy, seemed a disastrous couple woefully out of place, plopped by some malevolent fate into a cauldron of people they scarcely knew how to handle. He was a picker at his food—a deadly comment on his character, I believed—and she was the glutton, also a character flaw. “I’m a childhood friend of Martha and Carlotta,” Henry informed me. “We were playmates. And, I must admit proudly, a sixth or seventh cousin, many times removed. Somewhere in the house is a genealogy that straightens it all out.” It was his longest speech of the evening, for which I was grateful.
“Henry is a dear,” Carlotta fake whispered to me, “even if he is a Republican.”
Peggy grimaced. “Carlotta, dear, we’ve had this conversation before . . .”
Carlotta looked at me and winked. “We’re forbidden to discuss politics, religion, and the Polish invasion into Connecticut at the dinner table.”
Martha interrupted. “Which is why we spend most dinners doing nothing but rehashing those very tired topics.”
Everyone laughed, except Delia.
Henry Fenwick, at fifty-five, had the look of Solid Citizen, albeit something out of Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street: tall, stolid, respectable, bespect
acled, salt-and-pepper hair, an expensive Brooks Brothers suit with an unassuming and unthreatening necktie. He had perfect gleaming teeth, straight as piano keys, which I distrusted in a man his age. It suggested he’d never bitten into anything that needed chewing, or even deliberation. Life had come a little too easily for the unchallenged soul. And Peggy Fenwick, distaff cheerleader, stared at him as though she’d suddenly unearthed a missing Caravaggio in a dustbin. Curiously, there was about Henry a slightly casual flair, a hint of Common Man, doubtless affected, but Peggy was emphatically grande dame, a fiftyish wife with thick no-nonsense pearls, a formal black velvet dress with burgundy lace and velvet piping, more appropriate for dining at the Algonquin. Or an evening at the Met. The schoolmarm from Gopher Prairie who’d married the town banker. A woman who stared out at the world behind owl eyeglasses, so magnified you thought she had a serious birth defect. Eyes so huge and luminous you had to look away, bothered. Part of it was the unrelenting intensity of her stare. Did the woman ever blink? I wondered. Didn’t old-moneyed Yankee women blink in public? Was it indecorous? Forbidden by Connecticut Statutes?
“And what do you do, Mr. Fenwick?”
He cleared his throat, but Peggy, his publicist, responded. No clearing of her cultured-pearl throat. “He’s town selectman in Chatham, one town over.”
“And,” Carlotta added, “more importantly, Republican State Chairman of the State of Connecticut.”
Peter grinned. “And poised to be the next Republican candidate for Governor.”
“And a shoo-in in this Republican state,” Peggy said, triumphant.
I noted that Henry chose not to speak, simply basking in the glow of his coterie.
“My, my,” I warbled, totally unimpressed by local politics. After all, I’d covered crucial Presidential conventions. I’d seen local hacks—had anyone heard of Warren G. Harding?—rise ingloriously to the top of the dismal heap.