The Hellfire Club

by Peter Straub

  Nora said, “I’m just grateful that he’s willing to talk to me.”

  “Willing is hardly the word.” Martindale let them pass into the house and then stepped backwards onto a riotous Persian rug. A broad staircase with shining wooden treads stood at the end of a row of white columns. “I’ll take you into the library.”

  At the end of the row of columns, he opened a door into a book-lined room twice the size of Alden Chancel’s library. In a dazzle of sunlight streaming through a window, a white-haired man in a crisp dark suit who looked unexpectedly familiar to Nora was standing beside an open file box on a gleaming table. He grinned at them over the top of his black half-glasses and held up a fat volume bound in red cloth.

  “Andrew, you said I’d find it, and I did!”

  Martindale said, “Nothing ever gets lost in this house, it just goes into hiding until you need it. And here, just in time to share your triumph, are Dan and Ms. Eliot. Would you like some coffee? Tea, maybe?”

  This was addressed to Nora, who said, “If you have coffee ready, I’d love some.”

  The white-haired man tucked the red book under his arm, twinkled the half-glasses off his nose and folded them into his top pocket, and came loping across the room with his right hand extended. He was as smooth as mercury, and though he must have been in his mid-seventies, he looked as if he had undergone no essential physical changes since the age of fifty. He shook Harwich’s hand, then turned, all alertness, interest, and curiosity, to Nora, who felt that with one probing glance Mark Foil instantly had comprehended all that was important within her, including a great deal of which she herself was unaware.

  Harwich introduced them.

  “Why don’t we sit down so that you can tell me about yourself?” Foil indicated a plump sofa and two matching chairs near the bright window. A glass table with a neat stack of magazines stood within reach of the furniture. Nora took one end of the sofa, and Mark Foil slid into the other. As if he were cutting her loose, Harwich moved around the glass table, sat down in the chair beside the far end of the sofa, and lounged back.

  “You haven’t been sleeping very well, have you?” Foil asked.

  “Not as much as I’d like,” she said, surprised by the question.

  “And you’ve been under a good deal of stress. If you don’t mind my asking, why is that?”

  She looked across at Harwich, who looked blandly back.

  “The past few days have been kind of strange,” she said.

  “In what way?”

  Looking at the kind, intelligent face beneath the white hair, Nora came close to admitting she was here under false pretenses. Mark Foil took in her hesitation and leaned forward without altering his expression.

  Nora looked up from Foil to Harwich, who was staring at her in unhappy alarm.

  “To tell you the truth,” she said, “I’ve just become meno-pausal, and my body seems to have turned against me.”

  Foil leaned back, nodding, and behind him, unseen, Harwich flopped back into his chair. “Apart from your looking much too young, it makes a lot of sense,” Foil said. “You’re seeing your gynecologist, keeping a watch on what’s going on?”

  “Yes, thanks.”

  “I’m sorry if I seemed to pry. I’m like an old firehorse. My reflexes are stronger than my common sense. You and Dan were friends at Brown?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What was our eminent neurosurgeon like in those days?”

  Nora looked across at our eminent neurosurgeon and tried to guess what he had been like at Brown. “Ferocious and shy,” she said. “Always angry. He improved once he got into medical school.”

  Foil laughed. “Wonderful thing, the memory of an old friend. Keeps us from forgetting the cocoons from which we emerged.”

  “Some old friends remember more than you imagine possible,” Harwich said.

  “When I was that age, I read Browning and Tennyson until they came out of my ears. Not very up to date, I’m afraid. I suppose part of what I liked about Creeley’s work was that although he was much better than I ever would have been, he wasn’t very up to date, either. In medicine you have to be up to the minute to be any good at all, but I don’t think that’s true in the arts, do you?”

  Andrew Martindale backed through the door holding a wide silver tray with three cups and a silver coffeepot in time to hear Foil’s last sentence. He turned around to carry the tray toward the glass table. “Not again.”

  “But this time we have a Harvard Ph.D. and professional writer to consult. Emily, what do you think? Andrew and I have an ongoing argument about tradition versus the avant-garde, and he’s completely pigheaded.”

  Martindale slid the tray onto the table, almost clipping the stack of magazines. Nora looked at them and knew she was lost, out of her depth, about to be exposed as a fraud. Avec, Lingo, and Conjunctions, which almost certainly represented Martindale’s taste in literature, might as well have been written in Urdu, for all she knew of their contents.

  “Settle our argument,” Foil said.

  Harwich said, “You shouldn’t—”

  “No, it’s all right,” Nora said. “I don’t think you can settle it, and I don’t think you want to, because you get too much fun out of it. Speaking for myself, I like both Benjamin Britten and Morton Feldman, and they probably hated each other’s music.” She looked around at the three men. Two of them were gazing at her with undisguised friendly approval, the third with undisguised astonishment.

  Martindale smiled at them all and vanished.

  As if following stage directions, the three of them picked up their cups and sipped the excellent coffee.

  “You’re right, we enjoy our ongoing argument, and part of what I like in Andrew is that he keeps trying to bring me up to date. And although Creeley’s work is not the sort of thing he generally likes, he’s been supportive of my efforts to publish a Collected Poems.” Foil smiled at her. “It would be nice if your work finally permitted me to do him justice.”

  Nora felt like crawling out of the house.

  “Merle must be your editor.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Merle Marvell. At Chancel House. Isn’t he your editor?”

  “Oh, yes, of course. I didn’t realize you knew him.”

  “We’ve met him a half dozen times, but I don’t really know him except by reputation. As far as I know, Merle is the only person at Chancel who’d have enough courage to take on a proj-ect which might turn out less than flattering to Lincoln. In fact, I have the idea that Merle is the only real editor at Chancel House.”

  Nora smiled at him, but this conversation was making her increasingly uncomfortable.

  “Do you think Chancel House would be willing to publish something which puts Driver in a different light? Creeley didn’t think much of him to begin with, and by the end of the summer, he positively detested the man.”

  “I think they’re willing to present a balanced viewpoint,” Nora said.

  “Well, then.” Foil placed his cup in its saucer. “I don’t see why I shouldn’t share this with you.” He picked up the thick red book. “This is the journal Creeley kept during the last year of his life. I read it when I went through his papers after his death. Read it? I studied it. Like every suicide’s survivor, I was looking for an explanation.”

  “Did you find one?”

  “Does anyone? He had been disappointed the day before he killed himself, but I wouldn’t have thought . . .” He shook his head, the memory of defeat clear in his eyes. “It still isn’t easy. Anyhow, if you’re interested in bringing the celebrated Hugo Driver down a peg or two, this will be useful to you. The man was a weakling. He was worse than that. It took a while for Creeley to convince anybody of the fact, but he was a thief.”

  61

  NORA’S BLOOD SEEMED to slow. “Are you saying that he stole other writers’ work?”

  “Oh, they all do that, starting with Shakespeare. I’m talking about real theft. Unless you’re saying th
at Driver actually plagiarized Night Journey. But if that was your story, I hardly suppose Chancel would be backing you.” He grinned. “Instead of giving you a contract, they’d be more likely to put one out on you, Merle Marvell or no Merle Marvell.”

  Harwich chuckled, and Nora silenced him with a murderous glance. “Are you saying that Creeley Monk saw him steal things from the other guests?”

  “Not just Creeley, thank goodness. You’re interested in all of them, aren’t you? In everything that went on that summer?”

  She nodded.

  “This is what I’m prepared to do.” He gestured with the book. “I’ll describe some of the contents of this journal. You continue your research while Andrew and I are on Cape Cod. When I get back, I’ll talk to Merle Marvell and hear what he has to say about you and your project. I’d do that now, but we have limited time this morning. You have the most—ah, colorful—neurosurgeon in the state vouching for you, so I’m willing to go farther than I normally would, but I want to be as cautious as is reasonably possible. You have no objections, I assume?”

  She thought hard for a moment while both men looked at her, Harwich shooting sparks of wrath and indignation, Foil calmly. “Why don’t I send you the chapters after they’re written? If you let me borrow the journal, I could have more time to sort through all the information, and I can get it back to you at the end of the summer.”

  He was already shaking his head. “I hold Creeley’s papers in trust.” Seeing that Nora was about to object, he raised an index finger. “However! When Merle tells me that you are indeed what you say you are, as I’m sure he will, I’ll give you a copy of all the relevant pages from this diary. Do we have an agreement?”

  Harwich gave her a grim, unhappy glance. Nora said, “I think that will be fine.”

  “Okay, then.” A suppressed vitality came into his features, and Nora saw how eager he had been all along to do justice to his dead lover. “Let me tell you something about his background, so you’ll be able to appreciate what sort of person Creeley was.” He paused to gather his thoughts. “He was a year behind me at the Garand Academy, on a scholarship. We were all alike—except Creeley. Creeley was as conspicuous as a peacock in a field of geese.

  “Creeley’s father was a bartender, and his mother was an Irish immigrant. They lived in a little apartment above the bar, and he had to take two buses to get to school. Creeley turned up wearing big black work shoes, a hideous striped suit far too big for him, and a Buster Brown collar with a velvet bow tie. Of course, the older boys beat him up, and that was that for the Buster Brown collars, but he kept the velvet bow tie. That had been his idea. He’d read that poets wore velvet bow ties, and Creeley already knew he was a poet. He also knew, at the advanced age of fourteen, that he was sexually attracted to other males, although he pretended otherwise. In order to survive, he had to. But he didn’t see any point in pretending about anything else.

  “By his second year he resembled the rest of us. Because he was absolutely fearless, because he was such a character, he already had a place in the school. Everybody cherished him. It was remarkable. Here was this utterly philistine school, and Creeley Monk single-handedly made them—us—respect a literary vocation. In his junior year, he published a few poems in national magazines.

  “I went to Harvard, and he came on a full scholarship a year later. It didn’t take us long to become close. Creeley and I lived together while I was at medical school, and he moved to Boston when I had my internship and residency there. He got a job writing catalog copy for a publishing house, and we had separate apartments in the same building, which was his choice. He didn’t want to do anything that might compromise my career. But in every other way we were an established couple, and when I moved back here, he did, too. Again, we had separate apartments, and I went into practice with two older men. During this time, Creeley and I were like people in an open marriage. He was devoted to me, and God knows I was devoted to him, but he was promiscuous by nature, and he was commuting to Boston almost every day, so that was how it was.

  “He began publishing in all kinds of journals and magazines, gave readings, won a few prizes. In 1937 The Field Unknown came out, and I’m happy to say it was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Georgina Weatherall invited him to Shorelands for the following July, and we both saw this as a great sign.

  “In the end, he was disappointed. None of the writers he most admired were present, and two people there had not even published books—Hugo Driver and Katherine Mannheim. He had seen one story by Katherine Mannheim in a literary magazine, and rather liked it, but she had published a fair amount of poetry, which he liked a lot more. In person, she turned out to be a very pleasant surprise. He had imagined her as a kind of a lost, waif-like little thing, and her sharpness and tough-mindedness came as a surprise. There was something else he liked about her, too. I’ll read you some of that from the diary. Hugo Driver was another matter. Creeley had read some of his stories in little magazines and thought they were weak tea. Even before Creeley became aware of his thieving, Driver made him uncomfortable. In his first letter back to me, he said Driver was ‘dank and desperate,’ which turned into a running joke. After a while, he was referring to Driver as ‘D&D’ in the diary, and then that became ‘DD,’ which became ‘DeDe,’ like the girl’s name.

  “The others were a mixed bag. Austryn Fain struck him as a clever nonentity, a sort of literary hustler who spent most of his time trying to charm Lincoln Chancel into giving him a lot of money for his next book. Then there was Bill Tidy. Creeley respected Tidy, and he loved his book, Our Skillets. They had a lot in common. So he went to Shorelands anticipating a kind of meeting of minds, but Tidy put up a rough-spoken, workingman front and refused to talk to him.

  “And then there was the rising star of the gathering, Merrick Favor. Creeley was instantly attracted to him, but it was hopeless. I could see what was coming when he wrote that the first time he went to dinner in Main House and saw Favor talking to Katherine Mannheim in a corner, he thought he was seeing me!”

  Suddenly Nora realized that the reason Mark Foil had seemed like a known quantity to her was that he was an older version of the handsome young writer in the famous photograph. She managed to say, “Yes.”

  “I suppose he really did look like me, but that was all we had in common. Favor was straight as a die and a compulsive womanizer to boot. He and Austryn Fain both flirted with Katherine Mannheim, but she wouldn’t have either one of them. She made fun of them. Even Lincoln Chancel made some kind of crude pass at her, and she demolished him with a joke. But you know the lure of what you can’t get. Creeley developed a hopeless crush on Favor. It drove him crazy, and he enjoyed every frustrating second of it.”

  “You didn’t mind?” Nora asked.

  “If I’d minded that sort of thing, I couldn’t have put up with Creeley for a week, much less all those years. He wasn’t designed to be celibate. Do you know how the place was set up, how they lived, what their days were like?”

  “Not in much detail,” Nora said. “They lived in different houses, didn’t they, and they had dinner together every night?”

  Foil nodded. “Georgina Weatherall lived in Main House, and the guests were assigned to cottages scattered through the woods around the gardens. These were one- and two-story affairs originally built for the staff, back when the family who owned the place had an army of servants. Creeley was in Honey House, one of the smallest cottages, all by itself on the far side of the pond. He had only two tiny rooms and a saggy single bed, which made him very grumpy. As the only woman guest, Katherine Mannheim was put by herself in the next-largest guest house, Gingerbread, stuck back in the woods past the gardens. Austryn Fain and Merrick Favor shared Pepper Pot, and Lincoln Chancel and Dank and Desperate were installed in the biggest cottage, Rapunzel, which had a stone tower on one side and was halfway between Gingerbread and Main House. Chancel had the tower for himself. I suppose he commandeered it.”

  “I still don’t really und
erstand why Lincoln Chancel wanted to go there in the first place,” Nora said, having just realized this. “He had his businesses to take care of, and he hardly had to spend a month in a kind of literary colony for the sake of Chancel House.”

  Foil started to answer and checked himself. “I always took his being there for granted, but he didn’t have to subject himself to Georgina’s selection of writers, did he? He wasn’t there for the entire month, though, he showed up only for the last two weeks.”

  “The answer’s obvious,” Harwich said. The other two waited. “Money.”

  “Money?” Nora said.

  “What else? The Weatheralls owned half of Boston. Lincoln Chancel was supposed to be richer than God, but didn’t his whole empire turn belly-up pretty soon after all this? He was looking for cash to start up his publishing company.”

  “Anyhow,” Foil said, “to get back to Shorelands, even the normal guests had no formal daily schedule. During the day they could do as they pleased as long as they stayed on the estate. If they wanted to work, the maids carried box lunches to the cottages. If they wanted to socialize, Georgina held court on the terrace. You could swim in the pond or play tennis on the courts. The gardens were famous. Guests wandered around the different areas, or sat on the benches and read. At six everyone gathered in Main House for drinks, and at seven, they went into the dining room. Let me read you something. This is what Creeley wrote when he got back to Honey House on his first night.”

  He opened the red book and flipped through pages until he found the entry he wanted.

  “The gods in charge of railways having seen to my arriving at this longed-for destination five hours late, thereby postponing the death of my illusions, I was escorted in haste by the alarming Miss W., an apparition in blazing, ill-assorted colors (purple, red, orange, and pastel blue) distributed among layers of scarves, shawls, gown, stockings, and shoes, also in a not-to-be-ignored profusion of monstrous jewels, also in ditto face paint, down a narrow path through the gardens—all splendid so far—to a narrower path leading at weary length to my abode, Honey House, a name which had implied rustic charm to susceptible me. In reality, rustic Hovel House is charmless. Miss W. pointed with a ring-encrusted finger to a tiny prison bedroom, a squalid kitchen alcove, a clunky desk where I am to Create! Create! Cawing, she ‘left me to my devices.’