by Ed Ifkovic
Inside was stark and unassuming, with a wall of cubbyholes situated behind a high wooden desk. An old woman sat on a stool, waiting. Carlotta introduced me and the old woman beamed. She walked to some cubbyholes, extracted assorted mail, and handed the pile to Carlotta. “Nothing for Millicent today,” she said. “But you got a bunch of letters, as well as spring flower catalogues.” Carlotta reached for the mail. I watched Carlotta tuck the mail into her purse.
I found the brief respite from the library annoying, largely because Carlotta bored me with talk of her new dresses, of the peculiar behavior of her favorite dressmaker. I wanted to be back at the library. At the Copperhead Inn, however, I did savor the moist, brown molasses gingerbread with whipped cream.
Carlotta idly sifted through her mail.
Suddenly she frowned, pulled one letter out and bit the corner of her lip. She ripped it open and I watched her scan the brief contents. From where I sat I could see it was a short hand-written note. Carlotta’s face became flushed. She looked faint, one hand going to her temple.
“Carlotta, anything wrong?”
She looked at me, tried to smile. “Oh, no,” she stammered. “Just a nuisance letter.”
“A what?” I looked at the note in her hand and noticed her fingers trembling. Carlotta tucked the letter back into the pile. She called the owner over. “Mabel, could I use your phone a second?” Her voice was squeaky.
Mabel nodded. I heard Carlotta speaking softly on the telephone that sat on a nearby counter. She was calling home to Martha, asking her to take the supper Julia would prepare over to Millicent Wright’s. There was a flurry of back-and-forth language, some brusque words. “I know I said I’d be back home early, but something’s come up.” A pause. “Edna and I have to head to Westport anyway.” Finally: “Thank you, Martha. Thank you.” She hung up the telephone, looked distracted, and then dialed another number, this time speaking so softly I could barely make out her words. But I did hear her mumble, “A half hour or so. Yes. Now.” When she hung up the telephone, she must have realized I had listened to everything in the small room.
“I have to run an errand out of town. To Greenville. One town over. But don’t worry. I’ll be back by seven to get you. At the library.” She looked at her watch: five o’clock. “We’ll have a half-hour to get to Westport.”
“Is everything all right?” I probed.
Carlotta paused, rubbed a free hand through her hair and seemed to debate answering me directly. She tapped the envelope she gripped tightly. She smiled that same thin, unhappy smile. “Of course.” Then, seeing my face, “All right, Edna. It’s just that I have to take care of something.” She breathed in. “Nothing important, really. My third and final and most annoying ex-husband. Nathan Brosnan. You’ve heard me malign him often. He lives with his slattern wife and a passel of snot-nosed children in Greenville. I have to straighten some lingering financial obligation I have with him. Every so often he appears back in my life, like an old wound, gives me massive indigestion, and then he disappears for another two or so years. It’s really nothing.” She sighed. “Don’t worry.”
But I did because I scarcely believed a word she was telling me. Well, maybe some facts rang true: Nathan Brosnan, perhaps, and his residence next town over. That I already knew from previous conversations. His struggling life, his weaknesses. And his occasional reentry into her life. But the rest of it—the frantic errand, the financial obligation, and, more so, her dismissing its importance—all that smacked of falsehood, of not-so-clever dissembling. My reportorial instincts, honed from girlhood on the streets of Appleton, Wisconsin, always served me well: I could spot the attempt to conceal something as easily as I could spot an ill-used adjective in a page of my own first drafts.
We walked out of the restaurant, stood on the sidewalk. “Carlotta,” I began, “are you sure you’re all right?”
“Of course.” But she was looking into the street.
We heard a horn toot, and looking around, we spotted Jason Fargo tooling by. He waved but did not stop. Carlotta turned to me. “Goodness gracious. My second husband. Two out of three. Were it not for the fact that husband number one is long dead, I’d now expect to see him walking up the sidewalk.”
I smiled. “Perhaps his ghost . . .”
But Carlotta shivered. “I wouldn’t be surprised. Sometimes I sense his presence in the middle of the night, pointing a finger at me and accusing me of something. Then, oddly, Peter will appear unexpectedly for breakfast.”
“Peter never knew his father, true?”
“Yes, Harold killed himself months before Peter was born.’
“Quite the life, Miss Carlotta.”
“I should have remained a virgin.” Then she looked at me, the middle-aged virgin, the celibate novelist who wore my literary chastity belt for all to see. “I’m sorry,” she mumbled.
I shook my head. “Virginity is a safe haven for women who cavalierly misplace their dance cards. On purpose.”
Carlotta didn’t laugh.
I walked back to the library, but I had trouble focusing on my research. I found myself thinking about Carlotta and that sudden disturbing letter. Carlotta, now flying over dusty roads, headed out of town, frantic to resolve—what? Some dilemma. Perhaps it was nothing, she being the melodramatic actress, each moment embellished and overwrought.
At seven that evening, exhausted, my notebooks jam-packed with bits and pieces of local lore and custom, a rich treasure trove of background from colonial Connecticut, I left the library and stood on the sidewalk. Miss Dangerfield had handed over some pamphlets and treatises. “Use them at your leisure.” Carlotta was only fifteen minutes late, and very apologetic.
“Did Miss Dangerfield bother you?”
“Why?” I asked.
“The townspeople dislike her. A woman who believes she owns the books in her care.”
I became the defender of the redoubtable Miss Dangerfield. “She does own them,” I replied, somewhat testily.
Drinks and a late supper with two old friends in Westport was a pleasure, as expected. I’d known Margo Tanner as well as her husband, Bartlett, since coming to New York from Chicago. She was the woman’s page editor of The New York Herald, he the feisty and opinionated publisher of The Centurion, where I had placed a short story or two. Carlotta, I’d learned, was an old friend of theirs, in fact, a distant cousin of Bartlett. So we spent a leisurely late evening, or at least I did, renewing an old friendship.
But Carlotta was out of sorts. Hardly the lively bon vivant she often was, the raconteur with this Broadway morsel or that, she became moody and withdrawn, with a faraway look in her eyes. Nothing drew her out. She smiled a lot but that smile seemed wistful and melancholic. I watched her carefully, bothered. And a little annoyed. I could see Margo and Bartlett glancing at each other, both curious. I talked too much, as was my wont when bored or annoyed, barging into sentences with opinion and authority that perhaps was unnecessary. Bartlett was occasionally too Wall Street in his sentiments. But no one checked my flow of words, and I thanked God my nemesis, Dottie Parker, that witty and often cruel dinner guest, was nowhere near the evening. She’d ridicule me with some hideous barb that would sail back and forth for days across the Round Table at the Algonquin.
Carlotta’s distractedness gave way to simple drunken moodiness. There was generous wine at the table, fresh from Canada, Bartlett insisted, and Carlotta drank most of it. I drank none at all, uncomfortable with Carlotta’s excessive loudness and then her catatonic silences. Finally, after numerous attempts, we said our thanks and goodbyes, and I held a knowing look with Margo, who insisted I drive the ungainly Pierce-Arrow back to Rawley’s Depot.
“No one drives my car but me or Eben,” Carlotta managed to say, slurring her words.
“I prefer not to spend the evening in a ditch,” I announced, taking the keys.
“My, my.” She laughed a drunkard’s unpleasant chortle. “A little imperious, aren’t we, Miss Edna?”
�
��I wear that title gladly.”
Near midnight I drove back to the Inn like a somnolent ghost, in slow motion, lethargic, creaking around woodsy corners and nasty night shadows, the regal car obeying my turns and twists. Carlota slumped over, snoring. But back at the Inn, late now and closed up, the house in total darkness, I found myself with a headache. Carlotta staggered into the Inn, and I let her stumble and bang her away into the kitchen. I gathered my research notebooks, my pencils, held them tightly to my chest, and made my way up to my bedroom. Long after I shut my door I could hear Carlotta stumbling in the rooms downstairs, sputtering and mumbling, and, at one point, laughing so hideously I thought of witches from Shakespeare. Or maddened hags shrieking at young girls being joyfully hanged at Salem.
CHAPTER FIVE
The next morning, rising early, I walked into the sunlit kitchen to find Peter Brewster sitting there, drinking a cup of coffee, but still wearing his snug leather coat. I felt a sudden chill, recalling Carlotta’s words: Whenever she felt the awful presence of his dead father during the night, she’d find Peter sitting at the breakfast table in the morning.
“Good morning,” he greeted me. “Everyone sleeping in?”
“Except for you.”
“I made a pot of coffee.” He pointed to a counter. “Help yourself. I wanted to talk to Mother.”
“We had a late evening,” I told him, pouring myself coffee. From a bowl, covered with a cloth napkin, I took a blueberry muffin.
Peter was frowning. “Edna.”
“What is it?”
“She’s been drinking too much lately. More and more. Have you noticed that? Something’s bothering her.”
I said nothing, sitting down at the table, staring into his worried face. He stared back at me, eyes pale and soft, waiting for me to say something. Sipping the coffee, I ignored his stare, as he cleared his throat. “I don’t believe in thrusting you into family business,” he said slowly, “but my mother is my concern and I don’t know what to do.”
“Why don’t you ask her?”
He smiled. “My mother long ago learned the art of avoidance. Sometimes when I’m talking to her I get the feeling she’s acting a part—that our conversation is less mother-son and more a rehearsal for a play she’s writing in her mind.”
“Well, actresses are a breed apart.”
“And Carlotta Small is a singular woman, I’d say.”
“What do you think the problem is?” I sipped the coffee. It wasn’t very good. He noticed me making a face.
“That bad?” he joked. He sucked in his breath. “Ever since she started working on her memoirs, she’s been out of sorts. I don’t think it’s a good idea, her dredging up her past. All those marriages, that New York partying, those eccentric friends of hers, all those years away from Broadway, hiding out in this house.”
I was surprised. “Hiding out from what?”
“Who knows? There are demons in her, frankly. And the battles with Martha get more and more crazy—real crazy. And her love of wine hasn’t made it any easier. She used to drink in solitude, in her bedroom. I’ve never seen her fallen down drunk at the dinner table. Never. You saw that. Now my mother is a hopeless drunk.” He winced. “And that’s a horrible line for a son to say about his own mother.”
“I didn’t realize it myself, Peter, sorry to say. I mean, in New York I’d see her drink socially but . . .”
“Somehow, back at the Inn, she lets go of any inhibition. I’ll tell you, I’m worried. She’s falling apart. I was happy when I heard you were visiting. She’s resisted guests—friends from New York—the last couple years or so. I took it as a good sign that she was reentering the world. I know she has great respect for you. She values you—‘an honest woman,’ she called you, ‘rare in a Broadway personality.’ I’d hoped she’d cut back on the drinking.”
“But you must have some idea what’s bothering her?”
A fake laugh. “Just because I’m her son? No, no. She plays the role of Mother less than she plays the role of Beautiful Actress with Flawed Son.”
I debated telling him about yesterday’s strange behavior at the post office, the arrival of the letter, supposedly from her third husband, and her rushing out of town, neglecting her obligation to Millicent Wright. I decided not to mention it, at least not directly. “I get the feeling she’s bothered by some dealings with her ex-husbands.”
He looked surprised. “Jason Fargo? That leech? True, he’s been around quite a bit lately, and that isn’t good. He’s involved with her memoirs, wanting to help her but . . .”
“But you don’t believe that.”
“Damn right. He’s up to something, I’ll bet. Mother gets weak around certain kinds of men, you know. During one of her drunken rants, she told me he’s two-timing her—if that’s possible after you’re divorced—with Martha. Lord, Martha’s in her sixties.
“And that’s absurd?”
“I find it hard to believe.”
“No truth?”
“Frankly, I doubt it. Mother’s always suspicious. Jason and Martha had a moment, but that was decades ago.”
“What about her last husband?”
Now he looked at me, puzzled. “Nathan Brosnan? Why, he has nothing to do with her these days. A real worm, that one.”
“Has he visited here?”
“Not that I know. I can’t imagine why. One night, in the sauce, Mother mentioned that he’d threatened legal repercussions if she badmouthed him in her memoirs. He disappeared after Mother’s last—and final—return to Broadway. It was his money that got the show produced. But since then—nothing.”
“But he was her husband.”
“For God’s sake, it was a one-year marriage.”
“They all were, I gather.”
Peter nodded. “Mother doesn’t like stage runs longer than a year. She gets bored with the part she’s playing.”
“Perhaps she should stick with rehearsals. Out of town trials.”
Peter took me seriously. “Mother has never believed in trysts, in affairs. Bad marriage, yes—illicit romance, God, no.”
“I’ve always found that strange, given her reputation.”
“My mother likes virtue the very same way some people like travel—it gives them something to do with their time.”
I had no idea what that meant, and Peter himself seemed to question his statement.
He stood up, walked to the kitchen window and stared out over the back lawn. “I see Eben is hacking limbs off an old apple tree. That man sure likes to hack things to death.”
“What?”
“He spends so much time pruning the bushes and trees around here, creating bonfires back by River Road, and if you ask him why, he’ll tell you that he wants the acres to look like they did when his family owned the place. As if he’d know. It’s his little obsession.”
“Did the Smalls really take the Inn away from his family?”
“Decades ago. Fair and square, I’m told. Respectable sale at auction. Eben’s Yankee forebears had become dissipated and weak—and in debt.”
I wanted to talk more about Carlotta and Martha. “Why the friction between your mother and Martha?”
He seemed surprised, but considered the question long and hard. “I think they’re two different people, though connected by blood.”
“Has it always been that way?”
“Always. I sensed it when I was a little boy.”
I shrugged my shoulders. “I sensed tension the minute I arrived.”
His face closed up, his eyes narrowed, and I noticed a line of sweat above his upper lip. “You see, Martha has largely run the house over the years, especially those years when my mother was in New York. Or when she traveled throughout America and Europe. But when she returned here, especially after she retired from the stage, Mother just assumed she’d be the top dog here. She was the famous one. She thinks the Inn is more her. They argue about that.”
“Nothing else?”
“What else coul
d there be?”
“Did you live with your mother in New York?”
For some reason he blushed, color rising through his high cheekbones, darkening the scar on the side of his face. He brushed hair away from his forehead and reached for a cigarette, lit it. I waited. “No, I stayed here, even when Mother was in New York. Even after she no longer acted. Or when she spent a year in Europe. You know, Martha really raised me, truth to tell. She was like a mother to me. She was a mother to me. A loving, devoted mother. Yes, a nanny during the days when she was working at the school, but she’d rush back home afternoons. A worried mother hen. She’s the one who sent me to school, tended to my bruised knees, my bruised ego. Mother would swoop in, out of New York or Paris, loaded with presents. Not that I didn’t love my mother. It’s just that Martha was the constant, the taskmaster, the one who seemed obsessed with making me the model citizen.”
“And that meant keeping you away from the New York stage?”
He grinned. “How did you know that? You’re right. Martha never approved of Carlotta’s being on Broadway. Never. And she didn’t like the fact that I wanted to be an actor. Even today she finds my writing plays suspect. New York is a corruption—her word.” He grinned. “Look what it did to Mother.”