The curtains closed. The funeral director opened the chapel doors. We left—and rode back to the city in silence.
When we reached my apartment, Jack offered to stay with me for another night. But that would have made five nights in a row—and though he didn’t say anything, I was certain that Dorothy was getting rather anxious about his extended absence from home. I didn’t want to do anything that upset the equilibrium which had been established between his two households, so I insisted he return to his family.
“I’ll tell you what,” he said. “I’ll take the rest of the week off work, and be with you all day tomorrow.”
“You can’t do that,” I said. “And you know it. You’ve already taken half of last week off.”
“You are more important.”
“No,” I said, taking him in my arms. “I’m not. You’ve got a job to be getting on with. Don’t risk it for me. I’ll be all right.”
He promised to call me twice a day, every day. The first call of the next morning, however, came from the Riverside Funeral Home. Eric’s ashes had arrived back from the crematorium. Would I be home this morning to receive them?
An hour later, the doorbell rang. It was a gentleman in a dark suit and a homburg. With a slight bow, he asked me my name, then handed me a small box, wrapped in brown paper. I brought it inside, placed it on my kitchen table, and stared at it for a very long time, not wanting to open it. Eventually, I got up enough nerve to tear off the paper. I hadn’t requested an urn—so the remains of my brother were returned to me in a square cardboard box. The box was painted gray, with a marbleized finish. A simple white card adorned its cover. On it was written: Eric Smythe. I admired the calligraphy. It was most impressive.
I stopped myself from raising the cover and peeking inside. Instead, I stood up, grabbed my raincoat, and placed the box in one of its pockets. Then I left my apartment and walked down Broadway to the 72nd Street subway station.
I knew where I was going. I had chosen the venue days earlier—when pondering (in the few lucid moments I’d had since Eric’s death) where he might like his ashes sprinkled. Though the Hudson River was convenient to us, I knew he’d object to the idea of ending up anywhere in the vicinity of New Jersey—as he made ceaseless jokes about the Garden State (once when I suggested an outing to Princeton and environs, he tartly said, “Sorry—I don’t do Jersey”).
The East River was also struck off my list of possibilities—as it had no associations for him whatsoever. Nor did Central Park—because, at heart, my ultraurban and urbane brother didn’t really think much of greenery or wide open spaces. He loved the jangled chaos of city streets, the snarled traffic, the edgy ambulation of crowds, the sheer manic brio of Manhattan. Part of me wanted to scatter him on 42nd Street—but that seemed just a little too bleak. Then the idea hit me. Though Eric had no affinity with verdancy or lush terrain, he did spend a considerable amount of time in that most citified and gritty of public spaces: Washington Square Park. During all those years he lived in the Village, it was his outer office: a place in which he’d loiter for hours on a park bench with a novel, or take on the chess hustlers who occupied the northeastern corner of the park. He often spoke about how much he loved the park’s egalitarian rough-and-tumble, not to mention the ragtag collection of New York characters who gathered within its confines every day.
“I sit in this park,” he once told me, “and I know why the hell I walked out of Hartford and never looked back.”
So now he would permanently commingle with the habitués of his favorite open-air bolt-hole.
Of course, I couldn’t take a cab downtown. Though Eric might have gotten very free and easy with money in his final years, he would have loved the idea of heading to his final resting place for a nickel on the subway. Nor was I going to bring anyone along to help me scatter the ashes. This was my last moment with my brother. I wanted it to be a private one.
So I slipped a token in the turnstile on 72nd Street, and caught the No. 1 train south. It was ten o’clock. Rush hour was over—but it was still crowded. There were no seats, so I stood, holding on to a strap. Someone bumped into me. Instantly, my hand went down to my pocket. A wicked thought crossed my mind: imagine if it had been a pickpocket, and he had stolen the box. The poor thief would have suffered a coronary when he saw what he’d lifted.
I stood all the way downtown. I got off at Sheridan Square, and started heading east. I made a detour down Bedford Street—the location of my first apartment in Manhattan. I strolled on to Sullivan Street, and walked past the door of the brownstone in which Eric had lived for over a decade. I thought back to those years in the Village. I wondered if Eric would still be alive if he hadn’t achieved such esteem. If he hadn’t been such a high-profile writer in such a high-profile new medium, would the Feds have ignored him? No amount of success was worth the price my brother had paid. None at all.
When I reached Washington Square Park, the sun was at full wattage. There were a couple of drunks asleep on the benches. There were two young sharpies hustling chess. There were a couple of NYU students breaking the “Don’t Sit on the Grass” rules. There was an organ grinder, with a pet monkey on his shoulder. As he cranked his machine, it churned out a honky-tonk version of “La donna è mobile” from Rigoletto. Eric would have approved—both of the Verdi and the eccentric instrumentalist churning out this final musical send-off. I looked up into the cloudless sky, and was pleased that the wind had decided to absent itself today. I took the box out of my pocket. I removed the cover. I stared down into the chalky white powder. I started to walk around the little path that circumnavigated the entire park—a ten-minute journey at the absolute maximum. Every few yards, I took a handful of ashes and scattered them on the path. I didn’t look up to see if anyone was noticing what I was doing. I paced myself, making certain that I did the complete circuit of the park. When I reached the Fifth Avenue gate again, the box was empty. Eric was gone. Then I turned north and started walking uptown.
I walked all the way home. The next day I walked down Broadway straight to Battery Park. A day or so later (my calendrical sense had vanished), I headed north, ending up at the Cloisters in Fort George Park. As promised, Jack called twice a day, deeply concerned about my emotional state. I told him I was fine. He had been called out of town to Wilmington and Baltimore—and felt guilty about not being there with me.
“You don’t have to worry about me at all,” I said. “I’m coping.”
“Are you sure?”
“There’s nothing to worry about,” I lied.
“I miss you. Desperately.”
“You’re the best, Jack. I couldn’t have gotten through this without you.”
But I wasn’t getting through this. I’d stopped sleeping. My diet consisted of saltines, tins of Campbell’s Tomato Soup, and nonstop coffee. And I was spending eight hours a day walking, killing the rest of the time at double features in the big picture palaces that lined Broadway. Like my brother in the weeks after he was fired, I too had become a professional drifter.
A week after the funeral, I received a phone call from Joel Eberts. He sounded preoccupied.
“You free this morning?” he asked.
“Since being suspended with pay, I’m a woman of leisure.”
“Then drop by the office. There are one or two things I need to go over with you.”
I was there an hour later. Joel seemed unusually edgy. He gave me a fast paternal hug, and told me I looked tired. Then he motioned for me to sit in the chair opposite his desk. He picked up a file marked “Eric Smythe” and started rifling through it.
“There are a couple of things we need to discuss. The first is—the matter of his insurance policy.”
“His what?”
“Eric, as it turns out, had his life insured by NBC. It was part of the medical cover which paid for his bills after his hospitalization last month. As we know, the network hadn’t canceled his medical policy after sacking him. What I’ve since discovered is that t
he bastards also never canceled his life cover. What’s more, last year, when everyone at NBC thought he was the best thing since sliced bread—and, more to the point, commercially valuable—they upped his life insurance to seventy-five thousand dollars.”
“Good God.”
“Yeah—it’s a hell of a chunk of change. And it all goes to you.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“Well, let’s say around half of it will end up in your bank. The other half, I’m afraid, will fall into the hands of the IRS. I know their actual demand is around forty-three thousand . . . but I’ve got a good tax guy I use—a tough SOB. I’ve talked through this case with him, and he’s pretty sure he can get their demand shaved down by around seven to ten grand. Still, that’s around thirty-five thousand to you . . . which ain’t bad.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Eric would’ve been pleased, knowing it was going to you.”
“But without a will, who’s to say it will go to me?”
“You’re his only extant family member. There are no other siblings, right? We’ll have to jump a few standard legal hurdles. But, trust me, it’ll be a cinch. The money is yours.”
I sat there, saying nothing. Because I didn’t know what to say. Joel Eberts sat opposite me, studying me with care.
“So that’s the good news,” he said.
“By which you mean . . .”
He hesitated, then said, “There is something else I want to talk with you about.”
I was worried by his tone. “Something serious?” I asked.
“I’m afraid so, yes.”
Another apprehensive pause. Joel Eberts was never apprehensive.
“Sara,” he said, leaning forward. “I need to ask you a question.”
“All right,” I said, my anxiety rising. “Ask.”
“Say I told you . . .”
He broke off. He looked supremely uncomfortable.
“What’s wrong, Joel?”
“Part of me doesn’t really want to go into this.”
“Go into what?”
“The question I have to ask you.”
“Ask it.”
He paused.
“All right. Here it is. Say I told you that I knew the name of the individual who named your brother to the FBI . . .”
“You do?” I said loudly.
He held his hand up.
“One thing at a time. Say I did know. The question is . . . and I really think you should consider this carefully: would you want to know that individual’s name?”
“Are you kidding me? Absolutely. So tell me. Who was the shit . . . ?”
“Sara . . . are you sure? Really sure?”
I suddenly felt very cold. But I still nodded. And said, “I want to know.”
He stared directly at me, fixing me in his gaze.
“It was Jack Malone.”
TWENTY-ONE
I COULDN’T MOVE. I sat rigid in the chair, staring down at my hands. I felt as if I had just been kicked in the face.
Though I wasn’t looking at him directly, I could feel Joel Eberts’s gaze on me.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“I’m so damn sorry,” he said.
“You’ve known about this since . . . ?”
“The day after the funeral.”
“You waited this long to tell me?”
“I needed to check a lot of things out first. I really didn’t want to hit you with this, until I was absolutely certain that it was true. Even then, I debated for days about whether to tell you . . .”
“You were right to tell me. I had to know this.”
He sighed a tired sigh.
“Yeah—I guess you did,” he said.
“How did you find out?”
“Lawyers talk to other lawyers who talk to other lawyers who talk to . . .”
“I don’t follow you.”
“Ever heard of Marty Morrison?”
I shook my head.
“One of the biggest corporate lawyers in the city. Ever since this blacklist crap started, Marty’s firm has handled a lot of people who’ve been called to testify by HUAC. ’Cause it’s not just the entertainment business that’s been investigated. The Feds have also been poking their noses into schools, colleges, even some of the biggest companies in America. As far as they’re concerned, there’s a Red under every bed.
“Anyway, Marty and I have known each other since Adam. He grew up two blocks from me in Flatbush. We were at Brooklyn Law together. Though he went the Wall Street way, we’ve always maintained the friendship. Of course, we’re constantly giving each other crap about our political differences. I always say he’s the only Republican I will ever break bread with. He still calls me Eugene Debs. But he’s a straight shooter. Very well connected. Someone who knows where all the bodies are buried.
“He also happens to be a big Marty Manning fan. Around a year ago, we’re having lunch one day, he gets talking about some sketch he saw the previous night on Manning’s show. That’s when I do a little bragging and tell him that Manning’s head writer—Eric Smythe—happens to be my client. Marty was actually impressed . . . though, of course, he had to make a joke about it: ‘Since when the hell has a stevedore lawyer like you been representing writers?’
“That was the only mention of your brother. A year goes by. The stuff hits the fan with NBC. Eric refuses to do the dirty on his friends. He ends getting slimed in Winchell’s column. The next day, Marty rings me here. ‘Saw the item about your client in Winchell,’ he tells me. ‘Tough call.’ Then he asks if there’s anything he can do to help, because he knows all those assholes on the HUAC committee. He also thinks they’re opportunistic trash—not that he’d ever admit that publicly.
“Anyway, I thanked Marty for the offer of help—but told him that your brother wasn’t looking for a deal . . . and certainly wouldn’t suddenly become a stoolie after all the damage that the Winchell piece had done. So, unfortunately, there was nothing he could do.
“Then, of course, four weeks later, Eric was dead. And . . .”
He stopped. He twitched his lips. He avoided my stare. “What I’m about to say to you might really anger you. Because it was none of my business. But . . .”
He stopped again.
“Go on,” I said.
“I was so goddamn upset . . . enraged . . . after Eric died that I made a call to Marty. ‘You can do me a favor,’ I said. ‘Get me the name of the bastard who squealed on my client.’ And he did.”
“Jack Malone?”
“Yeah: Jack Malone.”
“How did your friend find out?”
“It wasn’t hard. According to Federal law, anything revealed under testimony at a HUAC hearing—or during an interview with an agent of the FBI—cannot be printed or publicly disseminated. But there are three former G-men—backed by this right-wing supermarket magnate named Alfred Kohlberg and some superpatriotic priest called Father John F. Cronin—who have set up a company called American Business Consultants. Their principal job—if you can believe this—is to scrutinize employees in major corporations, making sure they’re not Reds. But they also publish two newsletters—Counterattack and Red Channels. These rags exist for one purpose only—to list the names of everyone who’s been accused of being a Communist in a closed executive session of HUAC. Those two newsletters are the Blacklister’s Bible: they’re the place corporate America and the entertainment industry look to see who’s been named. Naturally enough, Marty Morrison has a subscription to both of these shit sheets. He discovered that your brother had been listed in Red Channels—which is also how Eric’s employers at NBC learned that he’d been named during testimony in front of HUAC.
“From there it was easy for Marty to call a couple of lawyers he knows around town—guys who’ve cornered the blacklisting market, making very big bucks representing people who’ve been dragged in front of HUAC. Of course, lawyers being lawyers, they’re always excha
nging notes with each other. Marty hit pay dirt on the third call. A big white-shoe attorney named Bradford Ames—who, among other things, looks after the legal side of Steele and Sherwood. Ames owed Marty a favor. Marty cashed it in now.
“‘Between ourselves, do you have any idea who might have named Eric Smythe?’ Marty asked him. Of course, Ames had heard of your brother—because his blacklisting and his death had been all over the papers. ‘Between ourselves,’ he told Marty, ‘I know exactly the guy who squealed on Smythe. Because I represented him when he testified in executive session at HUAC. The funny thing about this guy was that he wasn’t in showbiz. He was a public relations guy with Steele and Sherwood. Jack Malone.’”
My mind was reeling. “Jack testified in front of HUAC?” I asked Joel.
“That’s what appears to have happened.”
“I don’t believe it, Jack’s about the most loyal American imaginable.”
“According to Marty, he had a skeleton in his closet. A really small one—but even tiny skeletons get used against you nowadays. It turns out that, right before the war, Mr. Malone put his name down for some Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee . . . which was one of those organizations that was helping people fleeing from Nazi Germany and Italy and the Balkans. Anyway, as it turns out, the committee that Malone was associated with had direct links with the American Communist Party. Brad Ames said that Malone swore up on a stack of Bibles that he was never a member of the Party . . . that a couple of Brooklyn friends of his had finagled him on to the committee . . . that he’d only gone to a couple of meetings, nothing more. The problem was—one of the guys who allegedly finagled him on to the committee had been subpoenaed by HUAC. And he’d named Malone during his testimony. Which is how Jack Malone also ended up in the pages of Red Channels—and how his bosses at Steele and Sherwood found out about his accidental flirtation with subversion.
The Douglas Kennedy Collection #1 Page 47
