Blacklist

CHAPTER 44

Hey, Boy Wonder -

What meat cloth Caesar feed on? Your child bride is an attractive little colt and your infatuation is understandable, but until she grows up and learns how to read don’t fob my work off on her. If you don’t like Bleak Land, say so yourself-. getting a letter from the baby saying “it’s not right for our list at this time” is such an outsized insult I’m even willing to believe just barely, mind you, and only out of self-delusion-that you didn’t know your infant had written to me. What I also will delude myself into believing is that you can’t be as chickenshit as the rest of the industry, afraid to touch me because the lesser apes in Washington put me in the can for six months and had my books yanked from every embassy around the world. Me and Dash. No undersecretary of protocol in Canberra is going to have his morals corrupted by the Maltese Falcon, or A Tale of Two Countries. Dash, poor bastard, is drinking himself into an early grave, but I refuse to break so easily.

This was a carbon copy, and therefore unsigned, but the smudgy type sizzled.

As Amy had said, the Pelletier archive was enormous. She and I were

facing each other across a table in the University of Chicago’s rare books room, with boxes of papers and books between us. When we’d signed in, the librarian said Pelletier must suddenly be a hot item-we were the second people asking to see the papers in the last month.

With the instincts of the born detective, Amy said, yeah, her cousin Marcus always had been a jump ahead of her, and the archivist agreed that Marcus Whitby had been looking at the boxes three weeks ago. He’d only come once, the archivist said, so whatever he wanted, he found on his first trip. We were lucky, she added, that Mike Goode, their premier processing archivist, had sorted and labeled the boxes.

Even so, we had a formidable hoard to inspect. The collection was probably a lit crit’s dream come true, but made for a detective’s nightmare. Pelletier had kept everything-bills, eviction notices, menus from memorable dinners. He thought highly enough of his historical importance that he’d made carbons of most of his own letters. Most were like this one to Calvin, long fulminations against someone or something. In the thirties and forties, the correspondence was energetic if caustic-astute observations on personalities or public events.

As time passed, though, Pelletier became more embittered and more embattled. He wrote angrily to the New York Times over the review they gave Bleak Land, to the University of Chicago for not keeping him on as a lecturer in the sixties, to his landlord for raising his rent, to the laundry for losing a shirt. Amy and I looked at each other in dismay: What had Marc found in this mass on his first pass through it?

The Herald-Star had given Pelletier a two-column obituary. I read it for biographical information. He’d been born in Lawndale on Chicago’s West Side in 1899, gone to the University of Chicago for a year, volunteered to fight in France in 1917 and had come back to join the radical labor movements sweeping Chicago and the country.

Pelletier made no secret of having been a Communist during the thirties and forties. A Tale of Two Countries was based on his fifteen months in Spain during 1936 and ‘37, where he fought with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish civil war. Supposedly it was filled with thinly disguised references to historical figures, including scathing portraits of Picasso and Hemingway, and it revealed the arguments about the war that took place in a Communist Party cell, each member possibly a real person Pelletier had known in his own Chicago cell.

When called to testify in front of Representative Walker Bushnell and the House Un-American Activities Committee, the committee pressed Pelletier hard to identify the characters in the book, but he refused, claiming that it was a work of fiction, and spent six months in prison for contempt of Congress. Afterward, as a blacklisted writer, he found it difficult to get his work published and wrote romances under the pen name “Rosemary Burke.” He died Thursday of pneumonia exacerbated by malnutrition at the age of seventy-eight.

Pelletier wrote one novel before A Tale of Two Countries and two in the decade after. All four were published to critical and commercial acclaim, although the reviewers all agreed Two Countries was his masterwork. After that, there’d been a gap of over ten years before he finished Bleak Land, which he apparently had shamed Calvin into buying, since Bayard published it in 1960.

We found a 1962 carbon of another letter to Calvin, saying it wasn’t surprising Bayard had sold only eight hundred copies of Bleak Land, since they’d refused to spend a nickel on promotion.

Eight hundred people must have been stumbling around in the dark inner recesses of their local bookstores, trying to avoid hangovers or tax collectors, when they fell down and found themselves clutching a copy of Bleak Land on the way up. What did Olin do to you in that hearing room? Tell you he’d lay off if you’d forever foreswear the friends of your youth?

I rubbed my eyes. “This is more than a day’s work. I almost wish Pelletier had ratted to Bushnell and Taverner-I’d love to know who his Communist cellmates were in the thirties.”

“Does that have anything to do with Marc’s murder?” Amy asked.

“I don’t know,” I said, petulant. “But scanning the reviews, I see Two Countries has an earnest young black photographer who’s a homosexual male-maybe that was meant to be Llewellyn. There’s a crowd of intellec

tuals, and worker wannabes from the university-kind of like the kids in SDS back in the sixties. It would be nice if he’d provided a key.”

Amy grinned. “That’s someone’s doctoral dissertation, not the job of the great writer himself. I read A Tale of Two Countries for a lit class. It’s beautifully written, and more substantial than For Whom the Bell Tolls, but Bleak Land, I think it didn’t sell because it wasn’t a good book. Maybe Pelletier was too angry when he wrote it, or maybe he was out of practice. Even before the blacklist, he’d stopped writing fiction and was doing a lot of work for Hollywood.”

“Did Bleak Land deal with things as autobiographically as Two Countries? I mean, would I learn anything about Calvin and that group from reading it? Because Pelletier only got to be friends with Calvin after Bayard Publishing brought out Two Countries in such a big way.”

“You mean was it another roman a clef? If Bleak Land is, I wouldn’t have known when I read it, because I didn’t know who any of the players were. I guess I could check it out of the library and try to see now if I recognize any of them.”

The librarian looked at us warningly: other people were trying to read in the reading room. We continued in silence for a time, only stopping briefly to eat some odd-looking sandwiches out of a vending machine. While we ate, I told Amy that the police were starting their own investigation into Marc’s death.

“The bad news is, they think he was killed by Benjamin Sadawi, the kid in the Larchmont attic, so they’re not interested in following up on the ideas we’ve been generating. But at least they say they’ll do some digging on how Marc got out to Larchmont. And they’ve ordered a full autopsy from Dr. Vishnikov. Vishnikov has ruled out any external blow or wound to Marc before he went into that pond, but he’s mad at me-he thinks I blindsided him with the cops, so he says he won’t give me the tox screen results when those come in. Can you get Harriet to request them as next of kin? I’d be glad to supply my lawyer to run interference for her.”

Amy scribbled a note in her pocket diary and took Freeman Carter’s information from me. “Harriet’s moving into my place tonight. Her folks are flying back to Atlanta this afternoon-thank the goddess!”

We dusted the crumbs from our fingers and went back to the rare books

room. At two, knowing I had to leave soon, I stopped reading letters in detail and began flipping through the contents of the remaining cartons. In the middle of a set of manuscripts, I found a manila folder labeled “Total Eclipse: Unfinished, unpublished ms., 122 pp.” It was typed on yellowing paper, with Pelletier’s handwritten notes in the margins. The writing itself was shaky; this must have been written at the end of his life, when he was often drunk or ill or both.

They want us to think that when Lazarus rose from the dead, his friends and sisters were beside themselves with joy. But inside the grief when he was buried were the secret thoughts: thank God we got him safely underground, revolting drunkard, couldn’t keep his hands to himself. Thank God he won’t live to tell a soul about that night in Jericho when he caught me with my mother’s maid behind the sheepfold. No more scurrying when we hear him coming in late from tavern or tussle, demanding hot food and wanting it now.

And then he rose again, and behind the joy saw his loved ones’ thoughts writ large: we were just settling down with the new shape to our lives, minus his sharp words and demands, and here he is, raised from the dead.

I know. I was dead, and now that I’ve slunk out of the grave into a corner of the basement, trailing my winding sheets, I can smell the stink of fear rising from my dear ones. Although maybe it’s just the stink of my own rotting flesh.

Gene, who is the most terrified, predictably wept loudest at my grave. The baby, the darling, he used to tag after me when he was five, let me play, Herman, show me how, Herman, following me from sandlot ball to taverns [crossed out; “bar” written in by hand] and then to girls. I should have known from the way he watched me, but that was when he was still my eager golden brother, the one I teased and gave a little careless attention to.

I was the hero back from the war, a hero in some places anyway, with my arm in an interesting sling and my eyes dazed from too much blood, so much blood that I couldn’t drink it away. A hero to my golden brother, who’d spent my war years getting rich. I was fighting, he was taking over the family firm.

No George Bailey role for Gene, nossir. No, Gene had a truly wonderful life. Big brother risking his life on the Ebro, little brother minting the stuff in buckets, turning a sleepy family business into an international power. So that when I came back, although the girls clustered round to hear my battle stories, they slipped out the side door with Gene. He was renting the apartment on Elm Street in those days, just the place to take the girls, where Mother couldn’t see, and then come home for church on Sunday, hair slicked back, bending solicitously over her, butter not melting in his mouth.

We hung out at Goldie’s. It was just one of those west Loop bars. Guys heading home for work stopped for a quick one, listened to the racing results or a late ball game. We used to go after a meeting, Toffee Noble all excited about his basement magazine. He sometimes came with Lulu, who painted outsized canvases of African ritual dances. He also hung out with Edna Deerpath, the tiny black whirlwind who represented the hotel laundry workers in their bloody battles against the Mob.

Toffee never joined in anyone’s battles, just smirked from the sidelines, Mr. Cool, then went home and wrote us all up in stories he cranked out on his basement press. We never knew whether he held one of those pasteboard squares, the pass to the inner circle, or not. Some said he was too chicken to join, others that he was too chicken to admit he traveled all the way.

We were all brothers then, or brothers and sisters, even Gene, my blood brother, although everyone knew he only came to meet girls. We used to tease him, you think you’re the good capitalist? The one who won’t be hanged from the lamppost just because you like Red nookie?

I was the grand old man, being five or six years older than everyone but Lulu, and the only one who’d ever been shot at for being Red-although Edna and Lulu had ducked their share of stones for being black. Goldie herself didn’t care if you were black or white or red as long as your folding paper was green, and she set the tone; everyone at Goldie’s took you as you were, so of course it was a place where rich girls came, because rich girls gravitate to poor men when they want a little kick on the side.

And one of those was Rhona. I’d met plenty of Rhonas before, or thought I had, rich girls with too much money and too little to do. When they’ve tried dope and skiing and race cars, then they dabble a little in politics, a little in Communism because it’s daring and exciting. In the powder room at the Drake the next day, “Oh, darling, I went to this hovel on the West Side, can you believe people live in two rooms, there wasn’t even a closet, I had to hang my Balenciaga on a nail, and a shared bathroom halfway down the hall, and they’re all so earnest, comrade this and that, but Herman fixes me with those black eyes and I feel actually pinned to my chair, a wet puddle, I can’t get up or everyone will know, and it’s all so exciting because the government could raid us at any second. I brought him to Oakdale and Mother never guessed, she would have turned fifteen shades of red herself.” Oakdale. Larchmont Hall, Coverdale Lane. The name seemed deliber ate. I looked at my watch and tried to read faster. Rhona, with her silk teddy and painted nails, became enthusiastic about Communism, but was terrified of being discovered by her family. She would type fliers in Herman’s Kedvale Avenue apartment-wearing nothing but her rose teddy, to Herman’s intense satisfaction, then put on overalls and a blond wig to march on picket lines or to leaflet commuters. She and Herman made love in the afternoons on his unwashed sheets.

The sheets were gray from too little soap. A girl like Rhona, she might type or run a mimeograph machine, but she stood baffled in front of the washing machine in the basement, teased by thirteen-year-old girls who’d been turning a mangle since they were five. I didn’t get to the laundry more than once a month, so the sheets came to smell like Rhona, and like sex, a little joy by Patou, a little joy by Herman.

“Cute,” I muttered, showing the paragraph to Amy. “Couldn’t he operate a mangle himself?”

“Don’t get so exercised. It’s only a novel, and anyway, the guy is dead. And for heaven’s sake, don’t mark on it!”

Shamefaced, I put my pencil down and turned back to Pelletier’s words. I loved leaving my own scent on her. She was too fastidious to wash in the communal bathroom, rich little Communist girl, and when I’d licked

her nipples into red cherries against her whipped cream body, I’d ask what Ken would think when she raced home to undress and bathe. “Won’t he lean over you and wonder who or what he’s smelling over the bath salts.” At first she would laugh it away, but one day she explained the sad truth, that Ken was impotent, that he’d long since stopped leaning over her in the bath or bed or any other place.

It was Dryden who said that pity melts the mind to love, and maybe that’s when I started to love her, when I started to pity her. Maybe if she’d whined about it the first time she unbuttoned her white silk blouse, “I only fuck strange men because my husband’s impotent,” I would have despised her, but it was four months before I learned the truth, and then she never mentioned it again.

And Gene, who never missed anything, saw the pity and the love, and began coming to the apartment, where he pantomimed dismay at the rat droppings in the hall and uncurtained cracked windows in the front room. But it didn’t stop him hanging about after meetings. “I can run Rhona home and come back to finish discussing business with you, Herman. Do you need a buck for the laundry? Those sheets are going to get up and walk off that bed on their own pretty soon.”

Disgust didn’t keep him from lying in those sheets. It was the day after I’d found her there with him, the day I beat her (long red fingers on the whipped cream skin, red fingers from her red lover, red fingers turning to blue, blue blood of the master class, it would rule her in the end) the day she left and didn’t come back, the day I started to die.

The next twenty pages dealt with his dying: “Every man imagines he’s Jesus, or at least Trotsky, important enough for execution. That’s what I thought for the first five years I lay in the ground. Finally, I realized selfpity and booze were what really did me in.” He compared himself to Lulu: “… she was in the same boat as me, unloved, unwanted, but she didn’t turn her face to the wall. Instead she turned her back on all of us, went to Africa, painted her giant canvases whether anyone bought them or not.”

If Pelletier’s works were all-what had been Amy’s phrase? A something of clay-Lulu definitely stood in for Kylie Ballantine. Kylie continued her

work, she went to Gabon, she refused to be bowed down by Taverner’s spite in getting her fired.

And Gene stood for Calvin, the Boy Wonder. And Rhona… and Ken. MacKenzie Graham. He’d been impotent, so Geraldine turned elsewhere for love? Was that what she meant, when she said she and MacKenzie had so little in common?

I drew circles on my notepaper. Edwards Bayard had overheard talk as an adolescent about someone who looked just like his mother, and so didn’t seem to realize who his father was. Adolescent self-absorption, a fantasy yearning for the perfect father, made Edwards assume the neighbors were gossiping about him. And then his hurt and bitterness with Calvin kept him clinging to this adolescent version of events. Funny to see someone with so much education, and with the power of his personal wealth and his position in the Spadona Foundation, unable to let go of his adolescent view of the world.

I listed all the Bayards in one of the circles I’d drawn. In another, I put Darraugh’s family, starting with Laura Taverner Drummond, then Geraldine and MacKenzie, whose father connived with Laura to marry the two wild children. Their daughter Laura, named after the formidable grandmother. Darraugh, born in 1943. Darraugh’s son, young MacKenzie.

I slowly added a line joining the Grahams to the Bayards. Darraugh looked exactly like his mother. Everyone said Geraldine Graham had been a wild young woman. In his current illness, Calvin Bayard wandered to Larchmont in the dark. He had kept a key to the house. He had clutched me, crying, “Deenie.” Geral-deeme. She had spilled coffee all over herself when I reported it. Whatever Pelletier had thought about Calvin, the Boy Wonder, Calvin had loved Geraldine Graham.

I again imagined Darraugh as a boy-not galloping around the fields on his horse, but kneeling in bed in the middle of the night, head cupped in his hands, watching Calvin Bayard appear through the woods and let himself into Larchmont after the servants had locked the place up. He had stood up fiercely for MacKenzie Graham; he had weathered his grandmother’s fury by naming his son MacKenzie. Whether Calvin Bayard, MacKenzie Graham, or, for that matter, Armand Pelletier had been his birth father, MacKenzie was the man Darraugh loved. No wonder he hated Larchmont Hall.