by Ed Ifkovic
Now he narrowed those eyes, questioning, and they were suddenly lost in the crinkly folds of his red skin. For some reason, perhaps a nervous habit, he ran his tongue over his thin upper lip. Recoiling, I was reminded of croaking pond toads that had mastered similar behavior.
“So you’re writing a book about our town,” he said.
“Hardly.”
“She’s soaking up the atmosphere . . .” Carlotta began.
Roger cut in. “I would have thought Hawthorne had sufficiently covered New England for world literature.” He just stared.
Whatever did that mean? I wondered. “I thought I’d give Connecticut a shot,” I offered, cavalierly.
“Why?”
“Why not?”
“I think you have to be born here to feel the spirit of Connecticut.”
I looked at him through squinted eyes. “Sometimes an outsider can see things the native sadly misses.”
“Like what?”
“Like self-congratulation, for one.”
Emerson smiled. “Ferber,” he said. “Jewish, no?”
“As a matter of fact, yes.”
Carlotta looked uncomfortable, looking around, edgy, wanting to be away. “Roger holds some—well, harsh opinions of the world.”
Roger drew his lips into a thin line. “Carlotta doesn’t care for my worldview.”
“Which is?” I asked.
“In a nutshell?”
Obviously, I thought, an apt metaphor for the editor himself.
Carlotta answered for him. “Roger’s latest hobby horse that he’s riding is Germanic will power. Very Nietzsche, he claims. Read his editorials—all Sturm und Drang. Roger believes that the German nation is worthy of reverence.”
“Disciple, disciples, and dogma. The three D’s,” he proclaimed.
“Really?” I raised my eyebrows. “The Germans seem to enjoy losing whatever war they foolishly initiate.”
Roger glared at me.
Carlotta looked serious. “Roger says he’s a descendant of Ralph Waldo Emerson.”
Roger nodded. “The great American essayist.”
I thought it my turn to annoy those present. “I’ve always found his writing a little labored. Great thinker, yes, but stylist, no.” I smiled. “Were I a schoolteacher, I’d grade him an A for philosophy, but a D in composition.”
Carlotta looked shocked. “Edna, really.”
Roger started to walk away, tucking the newsprint to his chest. “Enjoy your stay, Miss Ferber. But be careful what you say about us. We Yankees aren’t happy with strangers taking potshots at us.”
“Thanks for the advice, Mr. Emerson.” I spoke to his retreating back. “Then you must remember Ralph Waldo’s dictum.”
“And what is that?” he asked, turning back.
“‘Every generation must write its own books.’ It’s my favorite line from your—well, ancestor.”
Emerson freed a hand to scratch his chin, looked at me through those slatted eyes. Obvious dislike, a little uncertainty, a bubble of moisture at the corner of his mouth.
Carlotta took my elbow as we moved away. “A despicable man. He spends much of his editorials on the sins of New York City and the dangers of world financial domination by the Jews. He’s real tired. Our own Father Coughlin.”
“Lord,” I confided. “And I’m certain I’ve now been added to his list of dreadful Jews—and New Yorkers.”
Carlotta laughed. “Hey, you were on that list before he even met you. We’re all on his list of questionable Americans. Anyone decent is on that list. But he’s harmless, Edna.”
I made a harrumph sound that suggested a contrary opinion.
We strolled across the town green where I read the chipped and faded tablets chronicling the history of the small village. One of the pioneering Travers clan, I duly noted, had died in the Revolutionary War, Lemuel Ezekiel Travers, a lad of nineteen. The elegant barn-red saltbox that housed the Rawley’s Depot Historical Society was closed, and Carlotta mentioned that it was never open. “Some years back some alleged descendant of the Rawleys, a grande dame named Ethel Singleton-Rawley, with pince-nez and heaving bosom, moved to town from New Rochelle, started the society, collected old papers and displayed them in glass cases, and then promptly had a stroke and died. So went the society.”
At one o’clock, somewhat peckish from the walking, we stopped for lunch at the Copperhead Tavern, tucked into a brick building that also housed the Jamison General Store, a cluttered emporium that fronted the green, a mélange of basic essentials for the townspeople, everything from notions, tonics, tobacco, elixirs, needles and pins, girdle stays, writing tablets, a cracker-barrel store with a soda fountain and four or five marble-topped tables with ice-cream chairs. An old man, bundled in parka and wool hat, rocked on a chair planted just to the side of the entrance. “Morning, Joe,” Carlotta said.
“Miss Carlotta.” He doffed his hat.
We entered the doorway of the tavern, a few steps away. A dimly-lit, low-ceilinged room, wall sconces illuminating the pinewood tables. A display of arrowheads mounted over the fireplace. A Revolutionary War musket over the door that led to the kitchen. Everything musty and worn. Quaint, I thought, perhaps too much so.
“The menu never changes,” Carlotta told me as I stared at the “specials” on a pocked blackboard. “At one point Mabel Trumbull will erase the board and then write the same specials back on it. It’s quite funny to observe.”
We settled into a table by the front window, the only customers in the place, and ordered bowls of hearty New England stew, with chunks of warm corn bread, steaming chicory coffee, lightened with farm milk. I was just savoring the stew—savory cubes of marinated beef, so tender and aromatic—dipping in the flaky corn bread, when there was a sharp rapping on the window. Peter Brewster, without his embryonic actress girlfriend, was grinning like a surprised birthday celebrant. Carlotta motioned him in.
“Join us.” She smiled at her beaming son. “Have you had lunch?”
He shook his head. “No. Delia is picking up a dress she’s had altered. At Henrietta Dressmaker. I’m playing hooky from Danbury.” He looked out the window, expecting to see her. And within seconds she hurried by the window, and Peter rapped on the plate glass, drew her inside. She didn’t look too happy, but then, I surmised, she perpetually believed herself the fated heroine of a tragic melodrama, a long-running one at that.
“Mother is showing Miss Ferber the town,” Peter told her.
“And what will you do after those five minutes are up.” She laughed at her own wit, a harsh throaty laugh.
So Peter and Delia pulled up chairs, ordered the same stew and corn bread—Peter: “It’s really fabulous, right, Mother?”—and Delia asked for seltzer water because, she said, the tap water reminded her of cough medicine.
“So what do you think, Miss Ferber?” Peter began.
“About what?”
His hand swept the air. “This town. This village.”
“I haven’t seen much of it yet.”
“You’ve seen it all,” Delia broke in, laughing again.
“You gonna use it in your novel?” Peter asked.
I didn’t answer.
Carlotta spoke, “Edna doesn’t like to speak of her writing when she’s working on a project.”
I hadn’t realized I now had someone speaking for me, which I resented. I was a big girl, quite. “I don’t like talking about my writing when I’m writing.” I smiled demurely.
“I told you.” Carlotta tapped her son on the back of his wrist.
“That’s just the opposite of you, Mother.”
“Meaning?”
“In every conversation you bring up your scandalous memoirs.”
“I’m an actress. That’s what I do. Talk out loud to people.”
“Now you’re talking in print to people, telling juicy stories.”
“But not about me,” Carlotta insisted. “Scandal, yes, but I come off as the virtuous heroine in them. I’ve observed
illicit behavior, not engaged in it.”
Peter looked at me. “Mother insists she’s ready for sainthood.”
“I am, really.”
Delia, I guessed, liked the “out loud” part of being an actress, so she started to talk out loud about Broadway, but mainly her training at some drama school I had never heard of. “Surely you know Ezra Tallinn,” she demanded, “the Russian drama master, on Fifty-seventh and Tenth, the walk-up studio.” But I shook my head: no, never heard of him. Sorry.
“Even Barrymore took classes with him,” she pouted.
“I doubt that,” Carlotta said, and Delia glared.
“Where were you born?” I asked Delia. I was trying to define the slight accent hiding behind the affected Tallulah Bankhead drawl.
Delia seemed surprised that I was asking her anything. She hesitated, started to say something that came out errr, then stopped.
I smiled. “My questions get harder.”
Peter laughed.
“Well, I was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, but I’m trying to forget it.”
“Your birth?”
She grimaced. “My place of birth. Not a very romantic place.” She smiled. “I’m inventing an entirely new past for myself, so that when I become famous on the stage, another Ethel Barrymore, I hope, my bio will be more glamorous.”
This confirmed my initial judgment of the young woman. Empty-headed, vainglorious, a seeker after hollow, ill-deserved fame. A steel-foundry daughter, perhaps an ironmonger’s offspring, turning her back on her family. “So where do you say you were born?” I asked, innocently.
“Cheyenne, Wyoming.”
“Good God,” I exclaimed. “A cowgirl. Belle Starr with lasso and six-shooter.”
“No,” she said. “Hardly. A gold miner’s daughter.”
More so, I thought, looking away, a gold digger.
While we were enjoying a frothy Boston cream pie, compliments of the woman who served us, we were joined by Henry Fenwick and his wife, Peggy, who’d stopped into the General Store for a newspaper and some patent medicine. “We can only get Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound there.” Peggy pointed next door. “It so soothes Henry’s stomach.”
I looked at my watch. I needed to get to the library. Carlotta noticed me fidgeting. “A minute more, Edna dear. A minute more. These are dear friends.”
I nodded, gave my full attention to the pie, which was delicious. Peter was talking about a play he was working on. “I’m hoping Jason will consider it,” he said. It seemed that Carlotta’s second husband, Jason Fargo—the misguided soul whose presence seemed to generate so much heat between Carlotta and Martha—operated a small theater in Weston, the Burnham Playhouse, largely a summer stock venue, where Broadway second-stringers and faded ingénues kept their careers afloat.
“I’ll speak to Jason,” Carlotta assured him.
Peter blathered about his play, The Prisoner of Winter, a two-act farce, he claimed, largely a satirical take on some dreadful Russian concoction by Gogol. Sensibly, I devoted my attention to the pie. I heard my name mentioned.
“Perhaps Miss Ferber will read it,” I heard Delia say, smiling at me.
I swallowed my forkful of pie, wiped my mouth, taking a long time to do so. “I make it a point not to read unpublished material,” I announced, a little too archly. And Peter got red in the face, sputtered, and suddenly discovered his own piece of luscious pie.
“I mean no offence.”
Peter grinned, sheepishly—I found it endearing, really—but now seemed unable to stop gabbing about his play, going on and on, with wild hand gestures and a voice that rolled up and down, high and low, a little too manic, a little too defensive, and I found myself staring at the Fenwicks who’d said so little during Peter’s frenetic monologue, but looked sorry they’d wandered into the restaurant. Henry Fenwick, as befitting a man who would be governor of a small state, looked sufficiently bored, unconcerned with anything that smacked of the arts or, I supposed, humanity. He would be more comfortable, I realized, in a conversation speckled with phrases like “fiscal irresponsibility” and “patriotic duty” and “gubernatorial accountability.” Had he been around in Salem days he might have hanged or incinerated Peter for creating lies and calling them theater. Frankly, I would have hanged Peter for the sin of utter boredom. And I would include the vivacious and perky Delia as his devilish and inept accomplice, just for the delight in seeing her swinging off a rope, while she discussed her birth in the Wild Bill Hickok West.
Henry’s face cagily hid his boredom, which probably meant he’d be the next governor. But Peggy, the hausfrau and smartly-dressed soon-tobe first lady of the State of Connecticut, was a different story altogether. As Peter babbled on and on, moving from exposition through feeble climax to falling action and finally a denouement that came too late, she exhibited a range of emotions that traveled from simple dislike to outright hatred. So transparent was her unlovely face, so evident her displeasure with the bumbling Peter, that when he finished, she breathed an audible sigh of relief, so loud we all looked at her. She didn’t look apologetic. Instead, she snorted, “I find the theater tedious.”
“Well, thank you,” Carlotta spat out, sarcastically.
Peggy backtracked. “I mean, I like seeing plays on the stage. Of course, Carlotta. Seeing them. My Lord, going into New York to see you was always thrilling. But not talking about them.”
“Sorry if I bored you.” Peter’s tone mimicked his mother’s. And I had to smile, looking from mother to son. They both had the same facial expression now: indignation, combined with a trace of sputtering anger. The scars on the side of his face got darker when he was disturbed, I noticed. Still, his mother’s handsome lad.
Henry changed the subject, speaking too loudly about the delightful Indian Summer they were enjoying, but he shot his lovely bride Peggy a look that silenced her. She seemed to regret her faux pas.
“I’m sorry,” she mumbled. “I’m a little out of sorts. I woke with a headache. Go on, Peter,” she urged.
He looked flustered. “I’m all through now.”
Carlotta added, apropos of nothing, “When I finish my memoirs, Jason wants me to do a one-woman reading of selected parts at the Playhouse. The spicier bits.”
“Banned in Boston,” I quipped. “Wanton in Weston.”
“Edna, you and Kaufman can make a play out of my life.”
“I think you should hire Anita Loos or Elinor Glyn. Sort of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes wedded to sub rosa Three Weeks.” I looked at my wristwatch. “I need to get to the library.” I looked at Carlotta. “It’s getting late.” Already the day was spent, nearly three o’clock. I knew I’d get little done at the library that day, but I had to begin.
Carlotta seemed on the verge of discussing her life story as play, but stopped. She bristled. “And I need to get to the dressmaker for a fitting. Lord.”
Peter spoke up. “Come with us, Mother. We’re going for a drive down along the coast, out toward New London. Skip the dress fitting. Let Martha take care of Millicent tonight.”
“No, Millicent doesn’t favor Martha.”
“Mother . . .”
“No, I rather enjoy spending time with Millicent.”
“But . . .”
“No, Peter.” Emphatic, turning away.
He shrugged his shoulders, leaned over and gave his mother a quick peck on the cheek.
Delia whispered to him, “I want to go home. What’s this about taking a ride?”
“I just thought . . .”
A whine. “What about what I want to do?”
Carlotta and I left, leaving them to their bickering—and the Fenwicks looking for excuses to flee. “I’ll meet you before five or so for coffee and a snack, Edna,” Carlotta said. “Then I need to head home. I’ll walk you to the library. I’ll introduce you to Miss Dangerfield, who’s expecting you.”
She left me at the library, where she hastily made the introduction to the librarian, a prim-looking woman named Mi
ss Dangerfield, as severe as winter and as treacherous. She’d awaited my arrival, though, she said, “closer to noontime,” and I apologized for the late hour. But Miss Dangerfield handed over a pile of yellowing scrapbooks, thick town histories, church biographies, collections of maps, annotated ledgers, even some hand-written diaries—all entrusted to me with the proviso to be careful, diligent, and steady. I felt admonished like an errant schoolboy caught defacing a water bucket. But it was a rich collection of materials. I opened one of the scrapbooks, running my fingers down columns of yellowing newsprint that some grandmother had pasted onto black tidy sheets: an article about a fearsome hurricane that had descended on the area back in the 1840s, cows gone mad, one family uprooted, a church tower damaged. I began scribbling notes into my pad, moving from one book to the next, with a trained, incisive eye.
So the afternoon was profitable, with me working feverishly, and the forbidding Miss Dangerfield metamorphosed into a kind and diligent woman, spending some free time—when not stamping out books for the few souls who wandered in—leafing through some archival boxes of clippings donated to the library. Occasionally she’d walk over, deposit a yellow and brittle article on the corner of my desk. “Perhaps this will interest you?” Said in a timorous, tentative voice. She had a good eye: her located articles often dealt with old Yankee families, with Indian artifacts unearthed, with horse trading, even one dealing with local debates over the question of abolition. A few on the immigrants moving into Connecticut, mostly Hungarians around Bridgeport. The Italians in New Haven. I thanked her.
Later we shared a cup of tea she prepared in back, and I found her lively, witty, a sparkling intelligence in those tired eyes, housed though they were in an austere, bland face I could imagine Anne Hutchinson might possess. I knew I’d be working in the library throughout the week. Miss Dangerfield encouraged it.
“If you check the card catalogue,” she said, finally, “you’ll discover copies of all your works. And much taken out. Just check the library slips at the back.” She grinned.
I read the hand-written placard over her desk: We close promptly at seven p.m.! I smiled: an exclamation mark.
Late in the afternoon Carlotta gathered me, insisting we break for coffee. “Don’t you get headaches in libraries?” We strolled back to the Copperhead Tavern, but on the way stopped by the post office to retrieve the day’s mail. There was no rural free delivery—that quaint RFD I had come to know in other outlying areas of the country. A Sears Roebuck catalogue into a farmer’s mailbox. Rather, the Rawley’s Depot Post Office was a squat clapboard building, plopped directly downtown, a separate building between two long stretches of storefront, a white-painted structure with an old black tile roof, with a prominent American flag planted squarely in front of it. It reminded me of a one-room schoolhouse, with its tiny windows and no-nonsense façade. “In fact,” Carlotta shared, when I mentioned the fact, “it was a one-room schoolhouse. Look.” She pointed to a wooden plaque nailed to the front. It announced: “Placid Jeffery’s Cabin. Later District School, built 1792.”