by Ed Ifkovic
“Surely, it will come back.”
“Edna, I’ve been drinking so long that whole parts of my life are a blank. A total blur now. A haze. I’ve never told anybody this. Do you know why I left Broadway back in 1906 at the height of my fame? I started to panic because I couldn’t remember my lines. I had to have cues every few minutes. It got to be embarrassing. And then, off drink for years—I think I was still haunted by Harold’s unexpected suicide—I went back in 1917. That one play Nathan produced. The Slave to Love. But New York and . . . and . . . things, made me drink heavily again, too much, and suddenly the fear was there. Again. I blanked out. I couldn’t remember lines. So I fled again. That’s the real reason I left, Edna. And somehow I managed to keep it under wraps. I gave this excuse or that. I had so many. The press called me Carlotta the Gypsy—withdrawn, moody, secretive, mysterious, glamorous, exotic. The truth is I’m frightened of it all. I’ll never go back, of course, especially now, a has-been in my fifties.”
“But the publicity over the book . . .”
Carlotta shook her head. “I thought it was a good idea at first, not realizing how impossible it was. The press releases were Jason’s idea. He wanted it. You know, he thinks he’ll make money off it. His playhouse is faltering. Lord, then there was a horrible piece in Roger Emerson’s tawdry rag, talking about my memoirs as some kind of payback, some retaliation for the abuses of Broadway, my getting even with folks. But he always hated me, that man, and he made it all up. But that piece, and others like it in The Herald, The Tribune, all over, made reporters seek me out again. And suddenly I remembered what it was like to be famous. I liked it.”
“But the book?”
“I told everyone it was coming along. It made me popular—and a little dangerous. I had backstage anecdotes about everyone. In New York I told Philip Barry that he was in it. I told Barrymore, for God’s sake. I told Fontaine she was in it. I told Susan Glaspel that I would be telling about the time she and I made fun of a waiter at Delmonico’s.” She paused, a thin smile on her face. “I was making it all up. In my bedroom the sheets of paper are bare. I scribbled notes that led nowhere. I lied to Jason, even. ‘When I’m done with a draft, I’ll let you read it,’ I told him. The lie grew and grew. Not a real word written, Edna.”
I felt a pang of sadness. “You didn’t have to write your life story. You didn’t.”
Fiercely: “Yes, I did. Because I said I was writing it.” Now she grinned. “Once I told myself I would never write it, it was easy to give in to Nathan.”
“But look how it got you in trouble, with your ex-husbands, for one.” And, I thought, I wonder if the projected book—the story of Carlotta scribbling in her study—had taken on mythic proportions in the Broadway loop—had led to murder. Maybe. Maybe not.
“I feel like my life has been a lie. When I invited you here, I was hoping you’d somehow inspire me. But that was dumb, I know. I can’t remember whole years, Edna. It’s as though I was in a coma. Worse, I suspected Martha knew. No, she never probed in my room, where I hid at night, scratching on a pad. And drinking. I said I wrote in the middle of the night. But she made a few cruel remarks. She knew I had blanked out on the years, of course. She’d mention something that happened, and I’d not have a clue about it. And then she mocked me because of my drinking, which had been getting bad again. The pressure, the stress on me. Really. She was a teetotaler, you know. A Prohibitionist, big time. A moral gadfly who turned up her nose at gin while lifting her skirts to men who were just a little bit tipsy.”
“What had she said about the book?”
“Only to say, early on, she’d best be left out of it. Just mention she was my sister who lived at the Sugar Maple Inn, but no references to her life, she said. None. ‘I won’t be a part of your sordid Broadway document,’ she said. We had a big fight about it, before, I guess, she suspected it didn’t exist. ‘No one wants to hear your tale of New York fame and your husbands, Moocher One and Moocher Two, as she called Jason and Nathan. Then, cruelest of all: ‘Are you going to talk about how you drove Peter’s father to jump off your roof?’ How we fought over that. She liked Harold. Everyone liked Harold. I liked Harold. But he was troubled, but not because of me, Edna. He was a haunted man. My marriage to him was lovely. I was young, he was young. He was trouble. I was flamboyant—all over the press. I was famous. So when Martha and I fought, she’d always bring up his name. ‘You killed the only decent man you ever knew.’” Carlotta stopped. “She made awful accusations about me and him. Filthy accusations.” Carlotta started to sob again, put her head down onto her arms, shook. She looked up. “I loved my sister, Edna, but only sometimes. She was a moralistic tramp. A loose woman thumping a Bible in my face. Edna, most days of my life I hated the ground she walked on. There wasn’t a day I didn’t want her dead.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
In town the following morning, dropped off by Eben, I knew where I was headed: Roger Emerson’s Gazette office. I strode into the small front office, the bell over the door clanging. I frowned: a bell? Was I entering a country grocery store? A young woman, sitting at a desk just feet from the front door, glanced up, but didn’t smile. “Help you?” She was a plump, brassy girl, with a round purple face, too much vamp eye makeup, a flapper’s shrill lipstick, and a chopped haircut that made her look like a fuzzy chestnut. I asked for Emerson, but he’d already looked out from a back office, spotted me, and stood in the doorway, a grin on his oddly cherubic face. I wondered, idly, if the receptionist was a sister, so close was the resemblance. Or was it simply a similar vacuity that seemed to unite the rotund pair?
“Come into my office.” He waved me in. Walking by him, I smelled a musky cologne that could have been lingering body odor, a suggestion of hayfield and raw, upturned farm soil. Not unpleasant, but better on a cow.
“Mr. Emerson . . .”
“Roger, please.”
“Mr. Emerson, I’ve come to see you, sir, not because I believe you can be talked to civilly, but because I will get some personal satisfaction from having my say.”
“And here I thought you’d stopped in to debate my First Amendment rights.”
“There is such a thing as responsible journalism, and I fear you missed that class at whatever backwater school you attended.”
He grinned and waved toward a chair. “Please.” He sat down behind his desk.
“No thank you. My stay will be brief.”
“Miss Ferber, do I detect anger?”
“No, not quite. But you do probably detect disgust and annoyance, most likely because you’ve doubtless elicited those responses from others you’ve attacked.”
“Attacked? How have I attacked you?” He widened his cornflower blue eyes, a look of mock concern. He dropped his jaw.
“Mr. Emerson, if I my quote from my memory, which is, unfortunately in a situation like this, photographic. ‘Miss Ferber, purveyor of farmwife potboilers, is part of a long tradition of insensitive, self-serving authors who have plundered, dare I say raped, the pastoral Connecticut landscape for their own monetary rewards. She, like others . . .”
“Do you like my style?” he interrupted, smugly.
“If illiteracy rates as a style, then you’re a master. But let me finish a quotation of your drivel. ‘She, like others of the Hebrew mold, sees herself as the Wandering Jew, sacking and marauding and pilfering and, ultimately, flagging local tradition to death.’” I smiled. “Check your thesaurus, Bub. I think you meant flogging, though that’s still an inappropriate word.”
The smile was thin now. “A typesetting error, Miss Ferber.”
“Be that as it may, let me say one thing before I leave this establishment. I hold the press in the highest esteem, Sonny—always have, especially as I started out a reporter. And you have a right to bluster as much as you wish, although I think your puerile sentiments should be contained on an editorial page, not on page one, masquerading as objective reportage. So be it. Your rag will be ground into pulp almost immediately, or pl
aced on the bottoms of parakeet cages, making them messier than intended. But—” I blurted out loudly because he seemed ready to speak—“but when you use your limited powers in the service of wrong-doing, when we’re talking about murder here and you prematurely condemn people, when you falsify information and quotation, well, that’s frankly criminal. You, sir, are a hateful man, and that will be the epitaph graved joyously on your tombstone by a happy multitude.”
He stood up. The humor was gone now, replaced by a splotchy purplish face, the small eyes lost in the folds of the buttery fat. There was sweat covering his chin and cheeks, and even the wavy blond hair, so much like bleached straw, seemed suddenly dripping, plastered to a red and shiny scalp. “You, Miss Ferber, are sadly mistaken, I fear. And represent a minority opinion.”
“And what does that mean?”
Emerson reached behind him and handed me a rough draft of an article he was working on. It was filled with cross-outs and strikeouts, but the headline caught my eye: “The Germans Understand the World Depression.” I skimmed its contents and felt a cold chill sweep up my back. My fingertips tingled, my tongue ran over my lips, and I felt my body become heavy. Emerson was building a specious argument that the German economy, impacted by world economic depression, was now on the rebound with the election of Adolph Hitler’s Nazi Party—the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. “Hitler, the charismatic leader of the Nazis, is now a force to be reckoned with, following the September 14 elections in which the Nazis received over eighteen per cent of the vote, garnering 107 seats in the Reichstag. This now will be the new Germany. A nascent empire, on the move.”
I looked up. “And your point is what, sir? That you are an advocate of that Charlie Chaplin clown.”
He scoffed. “A clown no more, Miss Ferber. All over Germany now the Nazis are marching in the streets in their brown shirts and acknowledging Heil Hitler.”
“And this means what to you?” But I was faltering.
“It means that there is finally a world leader on the horizon who understands that Jewish conspiracies must be checked.” He spat out the words.
“And you believe Jews are at fault . . . for the world depression?”
Emerson grinned. “I’m not alone. Hitler will bring Germany back to the greatest glory. He’ll tear up that insidious treaty of Versailles, he’ll end reparations to Allies, and he’ll put the Jew in his place.” He slipped another typed sheet to me, and I stared at it. An excerpt from Mein Kamp.
“I know the book,” I remarked, acidly.
“But have you read it? It’s magnificent, a manifesto. Subtitle says it all. Four and a Half Years of Struggle Against Lies, Stupidity, and Cowardice. Do you know of the Aryans, Miss Ferber? The blond-haired, blue-eyed master race.”
I scoffed. “You may have blond hair and blue eyes, Sonny, but no one on your best day would term you part of a master race.”
He bristled. “Jews are the Untermenschen,” he snarled. “Do you know what that means?”
“I speak German, which I doubt you do, sir. Racially inferior men? Was that Hitler’s definition of self?”
“If I may quote Hitler: ‘All the human culture, all the results of art, science, and technology that we see before us today, are the creative output of the Aryan.”
“Tell that to Aristotle or Michelangelo or Confucius or . . .”
“He said, ‘The greatest threat to the Aryan is symbolized by the Jew.’ He said that. He did.” Now he sounded like a little schoolboy getting testy on a playground.
I stood up. “Enough. You convince me of your own inferiority, sir. And if you think you can intimidate me simply because you believe my Jewishness makes me weak or hesitant or passive, Bub, you have another thing coming. Men like you, leeches on the body politic, come and go, like rashes. Hitler, sooner or later, will be taken care of.”
He started to say something about quoting me.
“And,” I added, “references to me in your yellow press will probably make me more famous. Maybe more rich.”
He talked over me. “Right now in Germany, while we speak, Brown Shirts are smashing the windows of Jewish shops and homes. Think about that.”
I turned away. “I’d wish you good day, but I don’t like to lie.”
He said to my back. “In Connecticut folks go back a long way. Pride is everything. Anglo-Saxon authority. Heritage. Tradition is everything.” He was sputtering. “We keep our lives to ourselves. Everyone has secrets, but we don’t like outsiders coming in and airing them.”
I had no idea what he was talking about. “Mr. Emerson, I think you should read your alleged ancestor, Ralph Waldo. I don’t think he’d agree with you. In fact, he’d consider you a nasty boy and would probably send you to bed without your supper.”
I stormed out.
In the anteroom the receptionist was staring, having listened to the conversation. I stood before her, narrowed my eyes, and shook my head. The young girl started to say something, but a severe glance from me—who surveyed her from her bad hairdo down to her fat ankles, stuffed into black patent leather shoes that were years old—caused her to start to choke, and suddenly she spat out the gum she was working with the intensity of a cow on a cud. It landed, I noted, on pile of that week’s Gazettes. The one with Carlotta and me on the front page.
Still livid, I sat in the Copperhead Tavern and tried to calm down. It did no good. My temples throbbed, my eyes ached, and my shoulders felt hollow and tight. Good Lord, I thought, the man is a madman. And a dangerous one. And he brought out the worst in me. Or maybe it was my best? For a moment I forgot about Martha’s murder and Carlotta’s difficulties. Rather, sitting there, a cup of tea before me, I let my mind entertain images of Hitler, Germany, Jewish shopkeeps, and the coming horror. This could only get worse before it got better. That much I knew. How my cronies and I in New York mocked, derided, satirized that beer-hall buffoon, he of the abnormal moustache and the guttural oratory. Now, leaving Roger Emerson’s presence, I understood something else: the game was over.
Trooper Wolniak found me sitting there, long after my tea was cold, and joined me. I filled him in on Emerson’s Nazi harangue.
“He’s trying to get to you. Obviously, you represent something that scares him, you know.”
My voice still trembled. “But I can’t fathom why an American can embrace such a point of view.”
Stas sighed. “You should hear my father on this. Hitler has made a point of talking about the inferiority of the Polish people.”
I smiled. “So you and I are two lepers.”
“Ferb, Emerson doesn’t speak for America.”
“I hope not.” I paused. “I pray he doesn’t. But hysteria . . .”
“No,” he stressed. “I know too many Polish sons who’d fight to the death to stop any nonsense like that in this country.”
We stared at each other, two human beings from different worlds; bound together, I believed, by fidelity to some worthy truth, some justice. I liked the young man immensely, and thought, suddenly, that I might even be infatuated with him: the sheer force of his physique that belied the gentle manner, his steely eye, the authority of that uniform. Yes, I thought, here is the real American—red blood, sinew, keen intellect, a sense of real values. Here, I thought, is, in fact, American Beauty, writ large. As for Roger Emerson—well, he was its antithesis: the America that lives under a rock, occasionally crawls out, has a moment in the sun, and then shrivels up, back to dust.
The conversation drifted to the investigation, and Stas confided that Captain Smith was considering an arrest warrant for Carlotta Small. “I thought I’d give you the heads-up on that, Ferb. You have a right to know.”
I was surprised. “But surely there’s no real evidence.”
“Well, Eben spotting her, her lying, her animosity. Captain Smith thinks it should go before a Grand Jury.”
“When?” I demanded.
“Dunno. I’ll hear about it after the fact.”
“Tell me, St
as, do you think there’s enough evidence?”
“Not yet, truthfully. But who else?”
“But motive! I don’t see motive.”
“Anger that escalated, maybe. Sisterly rivalry. Over the years—bitterness documented by too many people. Something to do with the book”—I winced—“or something to do with Jason Fargo and an affair of the heart.”
“None of it conclusive.”
“True, but . . .”
We were interrupted by the sudden appearance of Johnny Marks, bursting in on our conversation, and, without invitation, pulling up a chair. He leaned in, aggressive, staring from me to Stas, and his look was cold, hostile. “So what’s this little meeting?” he sneered.
Stas viewed him with calm demeanor, said nothing at first, and then looked at me. “I think we have a guest.”
Ready to attack, I merely smiled.
“I was just over to Aunt Millicent’s and her silence alone told me something was up. No one tells me nothing, so I drove into town and seen a cruiser parked outside and, lo and behold, in the window, sipping la-di-dah coffee, is a state trooper and a non-police officer.”
“Johnny, can I help you?” Stas spoke softly.
“Well, that’s question I’ve yet to hear from your lips, Wolniak.”
“Can I help you?”
“I stopped in to see my buddy, Roger Emerson, just a moment back, and he had a tale to tell me. Somebody talks to me, at least. Obviously, Miss Ferber here has made a name for herself in Rawley’s Depot, with her intrusive, all-around nosiness.” He bit his lip. “Roger has a lot to say.”