Lillian and Dash

by Sam Toperoff

  One face in particular held her attention. A woman about her age, roughly thirty, lay on a stretcher apart from all the others, placed there, it was explained, because she had not yet been identified. She was, apparently, a visitor to someone unknown in the neighborhood. Though closed, her eyes were unusually large; lidded, they conveyed an expression of peacefulness teased by the irony of her half-smile. One cheek was dimpled. Lillian could not break off her gaze. She was asked to move aside by a man backing in a truck to take away some of the identified victims.

  The face had shaken Lilly to numbness. She sat down on the steps of the rectory. Movement around her slowed. She heard no sound. Many years before in New York at dinner Hemingway told of arriving at a battlefield near Udine, and smelling the war dead for the first time and being pleasantly surprised by its sweetness. She smelt death now, beneath the choke of wet, charred wood. There was no sweetness whatsoever. Lilly coughed and almost threw up.

  There was no electricity in room 323 so she sat with her notebook perched on the windowsill. She sat down intending to write some narration for a film she hadn’t seen but could now imagine. Instead she wrote:

  Damn you Hammett, damn you—

  I blame you for this of course. (The “this” is my profound confusion, my ravaged emotional state and utter hopelessness, and any damned thing else that’s happened to me because of this fucking war!) And why is it all your fault? Because you should be here with me to soften the blows, and you are not. I’m here alone. And you’re there alone too, perhaps. When in good conscience—something you’ve always lacked—you should be here to explain, clarify, translate, illuminate, and just plain make sense out of what I’m seeing and why it’s happening to innocent people. I’m blaming you because I certainly can’t be expected to blame myself, can I?

  You’ve seen men killed. Probably have even killed some. (Have you?) But I have never seen a corpse, so many corpses, so many people killed so wantonly, par hazard as the French say. It’s one thing to believe in the cause, surely, as we believe the Republicans must win and to hate fascism in the marrow of our bones. It’s another to see what the war does. The war. The war. The fucking war.

  It undermines everything your mind tells you you have to believe because it absolutely must be won. But it is a monster that only wants to feed itself. I’m in a bad way, my dear Dash. If you had come with me, I’d know how to begin to sort out all this crap in my head.

  Asshole Hemingway and his poof Gellhorn have no such problems. They are documenting a vision of hell and doing it like art critics hovering over Bosch or better yet a Goya nightmare. For me, it’s something I’d rather not have seen. In the newspapers the thing made some sense. Inhaling the stench of it fogs the mind.

  Everyone seems to have a horse in this race—Hitler, Mussolini, the pope, the king, Uncle Joe. It’s a war by proxy, war as a sport for spectators and gamblers. From a distance that may make some sense. But not when you see the faces of the people, living and dead. The experience is so surreal I need to invite Buñuel and Dali over for drinks. We’ll use corpses as the tables, skeletons for chairs.

  Last night I may have seen the future. They asked me to give a speech thanking “our Russian comrades” for their contributions to the cause, La Causa, in case you didn’t think I’ve learned any Spanish. I never got to speak. Each and every pipsqueak who had anything to say about their so-called contribution spoke and spoke and spoke. As the night wore on the tone began to change. Hope and gratefulness became by degrees criticism and then blame. The evening ended in a brawl, and they had to sneak me out a side door. It was the fucking Tower of Babel retold.

  Blame. In one form or another I’ve seen it everywhere here. I don’t think the bad guys have it. Pope and king were always beyond blame, never any surprises, always infallible and cruel. Didn’t you used to say, “Blame before endgame”? That’s what I’m feeling here.

  Here is what my really dumb driver said last night, “The world is fighting here. The Spaniards are dying, all the Spaniards. My countrymen.” And, really, I had nothing to say.

  I want to come home. Please be there.

  I love you again, Lilly

  The Republican press office promised to send the letter in a pouch to its New York consulate and then have it hand-delivered.

  . 11 .

  Love Again

  SAMUEL DASHIELL HAMMETT WAS A MAN for whom the word unattached was not a negative thing, for whom the un- was not a prefix but an integral part of its Teutonic root. Attached meant a harnessing—meant limitation, restriction, and unhappiness all rolled into one. Even when it came to Lillian Florence Hellman.

  More often, though, being attached to Lilly meant a greater sense of “unattachment” to everything else in his life, and that could become a source of his contentment. This was, of course, the only way a man alone, an isolato, could love, although such a man did not even think to acknowledge the term. Hammett could not write about the subject of love, could not even think clearly about love. His detective heroes—the Op, Sam Spade, the more recent Secret Agent X-9—were such men, men who could not love or even talk about it, especially not talk about it.

  Nick Charles was most assuredly not the loner. Nick Charles, a bon vivant and raconteur, a schmoozer and bullshitter par excellence, who had too many old pals and drinking buddies from his single days, an irrepressible ladies’ man and flirt; but also married and fundamentally loyal to Nora because he loved her. Of course Nickie professed his love in the only way a Hammett lover could—ironically. So when he says, “Of course I’ll miss you, dahling. If you go out shopping, my beloved, I won’t have anyone to throw darts at,” he really means, “Please stay home, sweetheart. I need someone to drink with this afternoon.”

  In Lillian’s absence, Hammett still had not taken a drink. That didn’t mean his mind was clear. Actually, drinking produced wonderful clarity until drunkenness kicked in. Sober now, Hammett was woefully confused about something as emotionally charged as his love for Lillian. So he walked the city a great deal and wrote a bit.

  The hardest part of writing about his family was thinking about his family, bringing it back in memory. During his walks he tried to see more clearly the true events of his childhood years. He particularly liked to stop at construction sites and watch men working. Their actions gave him a sense that there was a positive counterforce to human impermanence and the physical law of entropy. Even if it wasn’t actually so, the illusion gave him pleasure. He liked watching the girders go up and stay up. He particularly liked to walk to Grand Central Terminal and watch passengers going and coming, especially arrivals being greeted by friends and family, something he’d never done.

  Hammett bought a new notebook just before Lillian left for Spain in a shop down on Sheridan Square. It was slightly less than full-size and had lined pages. On the spine the word NOTES stood out in embossed gold. He bought a black Waterman fountain pen that had just the right heft to it. Its nib produced a sinewy script that gave him pleasure as he put it on the page.

  Here he was, a middle-aged man, a famous writer by any reasonable standard, someone who received tens of thousands of dollars for simply telling a story, and now he was walking around Manhattan scratching observations in a notebook like a kid serving a literary apprenticeship. That realization gave Hammett pleasure. He kept his notes and sketches in the back of his notebook, preserving the front pages for an early memory of his mother. He had accumulated quite a few typed pages of family memories already. He reserved the story about his mother, Anne Bond Dashiell, because he wanted it to inaugurate his notebook.

  The Queen Mary was due to dock by midmorning, so Hammett rose early even for him. He sat in very pale winter light in the most comfortable chair in the living room, notebook propped on a knee he folded over his leg. Before he began, he realized that the penalty for mistakes in the book would be more severe than a typescript—his page would be forever marred by corrections. He printed TALES and DASHIELL HAMMETT on the title page. Had he al
ready made a mistake? Why in the world had he committed to that title so quickly? He looked at the word TALES and narrowed his lips in a considered smile. He turned the page and imagined a first line. He wrote, Everyone hates a drunk. It wasn’t at all the sentence he intended to write that morning. He had intended to write, My mama had a capacity for love of humankind so great it was almost self-defeating and very difficult for the rest of us to live with.

  He wrote on:

  Everyone hates a drunk. Even drunks know this. And who in this world wants to be hated? Which is why most drunks often go to great lengths not to look like drunks. The very best way not to look like a drunk is to drink with friends. Usually those “friends” are drunks too. The point at which sociability gives way to drunkenness varies from person to person, of course. In my father, Richard Thomas Hammett, it was the point at which he became mean. It came by degrees, but once it was there, the meanness was a fright to my mother, all us children, and most everyone else. I think I’m the same kind of drunk.

  One night—I must have been about eleven—Mama sent me to the Bog Hill to try to get Papa home. It was early, but Mama wanted him home because we were all supposed to go visit Mama’s folks in Grant Mills next morning, a visit I always looked forward to because I could spend almost the whole day by myself in the barn.

  I used to carry whatever book I was reading along with me to the bar so everyone there could see I was nothing like my father. Could see right away I was not ever going to be a drunk like him.

  I heard shouting before I entered. Sometimes, when the men saw me come in, the place would go quiet, not for long and not on the night I remember. The real shouting was between my father at one end of the bar and Phil Burroughs at the other end. Burroughs’s nickname was Ball-bustin’ Burroughs, and everyone knew what the name signified and that Burroughs had truly earned it. Usually they started out the evening drinking together—two drunks being sociable. Then they would come to differ over something very minor. That and further drunkenness led to a fistfight with bruised hands, torn clothes, and bloody faces.

  That particular night my father and Burroughs were still reasonably sober but shouting wildly at one another over the general placement of the Mediterranean Sea. Insults reigned: “ignorant fool” and “jackass” and “dumb bastard.” As best I could make out, Burroughs had sited the Mediterranean correctly between North Africa and Southern Europe; my father had it between Persia and India. It was not my place to settle the argument. It was my task to get my father out of there and home.

  I pushed through the crowd of large men over to my father’s side of the bar and the argument. Two men appeared to have backed my father; everyone else correctly supported Burroughs.

  I touched my father’s large-knuckled hand and told him we had to go home to get ready to leave on our family trip in the early morning.

  He said, “Right, Sammy. You’re right. Almost forgot.” He smiled at me and announced to the crowd, “Big day tomorrow, boys. Visiting the rich relations … You all know my Sammy.” His body began to unbend itself off the stool. I did not relax.

  Burroughs said, “Hold up. You run out of here and never have to admit how wrong as hell you are.” The bar quieted.

  “Not wrong.”

  “Wrong as hell.”

  “Right as rain.”

  “Let the boy decide.”

  The crowd agreed that was the fairest way to end the impasse. Smart boy. Educated boy. Burroughs said, “Sammy, do you know for sure where the Mediterranean Sea is?”

  No one moved. You could hear a pin drop. I’d be a liar if I said I didn’t know what was at stake. I knew perfectly well. And I also knew my options. I could say I didn’t know where it was. I could say it touched India. Or I could say where I knew it to be. So I can’t claim innocence or ignorance as an excuse. I said nothing at all, which was yet another option, and pulled on my father’s arm.

  Burroughs approached and touched my shoulder. My father slapped his hand away. Burroughs said, “Well, boy, do you know or don’t you?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Well, where the hell is it?”

  “Between Africa and Europe.”

  “Not anywhere near India?”

  “No, sir.”

  The hand, my father’s large, powerful hand, moved suddenly, not more than six inches, from the end of the bar into my face. It was the back of his hand flush on my nose mostly. I flew backward. I saw sparkles and blackness and then dark blood. I was on the floor of the Bog Hill with men’s faces leaning into me, none of which was my father’s.

  That instinctive movement of my father’s hand was invoked and powered by shame and jealousy and guilt. I do not know what makes someone a drunk, but I do know those things are always part of it. Guilt and jealousy and shame. For drunks with money on a higher social rung, like me, add an olive, a touch of vermouth. That’s an even sadder personal cocktail.

  End

  Dash reread his pages and was surprised to discover errors, lots of them, mistakes he’d not have made had he typed. He made all his small corrections neatly in his notebook, but this new carelessness was now something to worry about. Why, he wondered after rereading, when he wrote about his father, did he never really capture the man? God, he really despised Richard Hammett, and it showed.

  DASH WAS NOW seven weeks without a drink.

  Hammett’s bags had been packed for days, for more than two weeks actually. But he knew that if he were not in New York when Lilly returned from Spain he risked losing her … really did risk losing her. Risked losing this affinity, affection, engagement, caring, stimulation, everything he had with Lillian and with no one else in his life. Why did he not think love when the only word missing was love?

  Her cable said little and implied much:

  DON’T WANT YOU TO SEE ME THIS WAY STOP TAKING QUEEN MARY STOP NY NEXT WEEK STOP SEEKING SANITY STOP BINDING OF WOUND STOP GREAT LOVE STOP LILLY

  The reunions at Pier 54 were always interesting for him to watch. He could be part of this one. The day was clear but cold. Same camel hair coat, same fur cap, Hollywood-thin pants and slipper shoes. He wore the gloves Lillian had bought him before she left. Hammett walked down Tenth Avenue. A wind coming off the river caused his eyes to tear, his nose to run, his cheeks and chin to tingle with frost. Something within him was happy. Bars were already open on just about every corner. He stopped at a coffee shop on Sixty-third Street.

  Why hadn’t he tried to find out what time the liner was due to dock and be certain to be there when Lillian debarked? Because this was how Dashiell Hammett dealt with matters emotional, distancing himself with studied nonchalance and carefully misplaced intention. Chance ruled in these matters, he told himself. He sat in the shop too long and wrote nothing in his beautiful notebook. He paid for his coffee, left a big tip, and walked to the river.

  The streets were full of taxis and fancy autos. Horns honked. All sorts of anxious people waved and dodged and shouted. Porters were already loading steamer trunks and luggage onto carts and piling them near the curb. Finding Lillian in this crush would not be easy. He had a built-in excuse.

  Hammett made his way through the long, noisy shed all the way up to the customs fence, where he was stopped by police. Beyond customs he saw a green awning designated PRESS in large yellow letters. Mixed in with cameramen and reporters, some carrying portable microphones, Hammett saw Alfred and Blanche Knopf. Then he spotted Shumlin with Dos Passos and Archie MacLeish, the Spanish Earth brain trust.

  The newspapers mentioned Lillian’s return. In fact, the Hearst papers had kept a “Hellman Watch” while she was in Spain. Diplomacy, they editorialized, was a very delicate and complicated matter best left to a trained corps of professionals. A fair enough criticism, but Hearst didn’t let the matter die. In an editorial Hearst himself declared, “Miss Hellman does the cause of neutrality and peace a great disservice by stoking up emotions that can only cause discontent and greater violence. One can only wonder what her true motives can be
in trying to embroil Americans in what is and can only be seen as a foreign and thankfully very isolated conflict. Miss Hellman should stick her nose only where it belongs, namely in the wings and dressing rooms of Broadway theatres.”

  Hammett read that and smiled, recent photos of William Randolph and Adolf Hitler warmly shaking hands in Berlin fresh in his mind.

  Hammett saw her first at the landing where the gangway turned sharply for a final descent to the pier. She stood talking to a ship’s officer. Other passengers moved around them. Clearly the press was waiting only for her. Lillian listened intently while the officer pointed and spoke. Hammett didn’t remember her being so small. He waved modestly with no possibility of her seeing him. When he saw Lilly still speaking quietly, he dropped his arm.

  As she came down to the pier, Hammett noticed that she was not searching the crowd for him, and observed that there was something vacant about her, as though she had lost something important and was thinking about where it might be. He wanted to rush forward to help her find it. She looked wounded. Lillian never looked wounded.

  He watched her come to the landing. Watched as she embraced her friends. Watched as she did not search the crowd to see if he were there. Watched as she prepared for the rush of reporters. Watched her begin to speak into a microphone as he turned and walked away.

  Whenever he sensed emotional paralysis, Dashiell Hammett got himself a drink. This Hammett walked past every bar as he made his way up Ninth Avenue. Although he had a destination, he made the journey seem like a wandering.

  She was already in the apartment beginning to make coffee when he arrived, chilled to the bone and looking frail. It was as though he were the one arriving home from the war. They stood and looked at one another. It hadn’t even been a month. It seemed like forever. Nothing had to be said for a while.