Lillian and Dash

by Sam Toperoff

  Lilly said, as though reading from a script, “They each stood there, frozen for a long moment, gazing helplessly at one another, looking for a sign. The moment was fraught …”

  “Yes, fraught, heavily fraught, but fraught with what, he wondered quizzically.”

  “Oh, I dunno, just fraughtfully fraught I imagine.” He saw a spark of something in her eyes.

  “ ‘I’ve missed you,’ he said, wondering if that wasn’t really her line.”

  “Not so terribly that you weren’t there to meet me.”

  “I was there.”

  “Really?”

  “I just didn’t know how to … couldn’t approach you with all that going on …”

  “So maybe you could approach me now.” Lillian opened her arms slightly waiting to be embraced. Hammett stepped forward, put his arms around her, chin on top of her head, and picked her up. As he squeezed and released three times she expelled air—“nyah … nyah … nyah.” Lillian said, “Don’t. No more.”

  He heard tugboat whistles and car horns. She heard nothing. They stayed together a long while. They said nothing when they separated because they wanted to talk, to tell, but before that there was explaining. Explaining did not qualify as talk.

  “The war,” is what he said eventually. “It got to you, the war?”

  “Incredibly. Take off your coat. It’s warm in the kitchen.”

  “I’m still a bit cold.”

  “I feel like cooking. What do we have?”

  “Not much of anything, I’m afraid. I didn’t think.”

  “So what else is new. Any cheese?”

  “Some old cheddar.”

  “Eggs?”

  “Not sure.”

  “Come on, let’s cook. Warm you up.”

  Hammett stopped her by placing a hand on each shoulder, forcing her to look up at him. “I think I know how to help you.”

  “I haven’t been hit by a car, you know.”

  “Yes, you have. If I help you, I help myself. Still selfish, you see.”

  There were eggs he hadn’t remembered buying. There was cheese. There was milk and butter and flour and a jar of grape jelly. The oven quickly heated the kitchen and Hammett stood next to her in gray slacks and a knitted sweater, his hair tousled from the fur cap, looking nothing like Gary Cooper anymore but comfortably and domestically handsome. He found the pot and baking dish she requested, measured out exact amounts of flour and milk and butter. Lillian was humming. Occasionally their hands touched. When they did, they stopped and considered each other for a moment. A wonderful thing began to happen then. Lillian asked cooking questions and didn’t receive cooking answers.

  “Can you find the sifter for the flour?”

  “I called you regularly, you know. Called press offices in Barcelona and Madrid. Left tons of messages. Worried sick about you.”

  “How many eggs are there?”

  “I saw you at the ship. On the gangplank. I waved. Thought maybe you wanted to be with your friends.”

  Her expression said, You’re my friend. “Do you know how to separate egg whites?” Of course he did; they had made soufflés together before.

  “I’m in a bit of trouble myself. You know my inclination is to run and hide. I’m fighting it.”

  Lillian stopped greasing the baking dish and said, “I’m in trouble too. My inclination is to run and hide. I’m fighting it. Et cetera, et cetera.” His hands held eggshells so he pressed her with his elbows. She said, “Put on some really mournful music.”

  They ate in the kitchen by candlelight because it was the warmest room in the apartment. Alone, together, in warmth on the eighth floor, each felt safe in a dangerous world, closer than they had been in a long while. They ate and drank ginger ale, still their champagne, and shared wounds.

  Hammett went first. Given his known involvement with l’affaire Waxman by the powers that be at the studios, it was unlikely he’d be signing any lavish contracts with anyone. He recounted Myra’s report. He passed along Phil Edmunds’s deceptions and larcenies, which led naturally to Myra Ewbank’s professional tribulations. Lilly asked lots of questions for which he could supply few satisfying answers. When she wondered why he hadn’t gone to L.A. to try to help, he said he put off the trip because it was important to know when you were beat. No, that wasn’t it. “I thought I might be needed more here.” Still not it. “I wanted to be here more than there.” That was a Hammett profession of love.

  Hammett left silence.

  “Dash, we need each other. More than ever.”

  He said, “True.”

  Her explaining began with, “Nothing I wrote about the war is valid. The only thing I got right are the bad guys. It’s such a confusing mess, and I was so in over my head all I could think about was that you’d be ashamed of me. I hated you for not being there to help me through it all … Deep down, I felt used. I know that’s crazy.”

  “You probably were in an impossible situation.”

  “And I’m still in it. Herman said he doesn’t want me to walk away until we have our film.”

  “That’s crap. Hemingway can write the film in two days.”

  Then she recounted everything. In detail, at length. The trip to Madrid. The siege of the city. The incredible destruction she saw. Hemingway and Gellhorn. The tangled course of the war. Its hopelessness. “I was scared all the time, Dash, deep-down scared. I failed. I know I failed.”

  They ended up curled on the couch with Lillian describing her last glimpse of a country in utter despair and she right along with it. He very much wanted a drink. So did she.

  It was already tomorrow when they began to talk about what to do tomorrow, and the days after tomorrow. What was comforting was their understanding that they would now go their separate ways together. That was not only what each needed, it was what both wanted. The music now was Mendelssohn and they fell asleep on the couch.

  The next morning, coffee was made, the kitchen was clean, bagels and lox had been bought, and Hammett was at the table reading the Times. Lillian leaned in the doorway unseen for a while letting her happiness grow. Hammett made believe he didn’t see her. Finally he said without looking up, “Just thought of two more Jews I’d like to powwow with.”

  “Let me guess. Meyer Lansky and Emma Goldman.”

  “Nope. Neither at this particular time.”

  “Why not?”

  “Lansky would probably kill me … and Goldman would get me killed.”

  Hammett poured her coffee and they tapped cups.

  “Thanks. So who then?”

  “Baruch Spinoza and the Baron Rothschild.”

  “Rothschild is easy. You want to learn how to become very rich without working.”

  “Cor-rec-et.”

  “Why Spinoza?”

  “Because he’s come closer than anyone in history to figuring out what love is all about.”

  That word from his lips made a sudden and stunning impression. She said, “Really.”

  “Yup.”

  She made it a point to sound only slightly curious: “And what does my celebrated Lantsman have to say about love?”

  “Well, back when he was at the top of the philosophy game, he decided to take on the fearful subject, and in the end defined love thus: I love you because you exist. It was pure reductio ad amore. Nothing more nothing less. And when you think about it, you can’t reduce the matter to anything less, or more, than that. But there is some stuff I’d like to ask him.” Hammett still hadn’t looked fully up at Lillian.

  She pushed into his lap. “So why do you have to talk to him?”

  “Because it says here they found his diaries and it turns out quite a number of ladies shared their existence with the sage.”

  She stood up. “Some detective you are. You want to find out about love and you track down the wrong Jew.”

  “And the right Jew would be …?”

  “The Jew who wrote Set me as a seal upon thy heart, Love is stronger than Death. The Song of Solomon
Jew. That’s who.”

  Hammett’s laugh gave them both pleasure. He said, “True, rich old Solomon’s—what was it?—seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines, or vice versa, would make Spinoza look like a piker.”

  “Word in the temple is that he loved every single one of them to pieces.”

  The day was spent reacquainting. And the next and the one after that. They did not answer the telephone, which was hard for Lillian. They went to the movies each day, sometimes twice. They walked along the river when it wasn’t too cold. They ate in Chinese restaurants and cooked together. They made love in bed like kids with cooing sounds and tickles because each wanted only to surprise and entertain the other. Thanks to Spinoza they talked about love as a subject, an interesting and desirable one. Hammett did not declare it.

  LILLIAN BEGAN ANSWERING THE PHONE because in time that is how the world reenters. She picked up only when her instincts told her it was relatively safe. Her instincts were often good. She turned down all dinner invitations, requests for interviews, and whatever else would have distracted them from their working lives together. There was work now, not work she welcomed, not well-paying work, work to be got through.

  After avoiding Shumlin for as long as she reasonably could, Lillian received by messenger a handwritten shooting script from Joris Ivens. Well, perhaps not a true script, more like a log of sequential shots with each shot described briefly, and identified with place and date. So she would attempt to create the narrative of the film without being able to see the film itself, at least for now. A note from Ivens added the caveat that there would of course be changes in his and Hemingway’s final version. How significant, he couldn’t be sure.

  As she began writing narration to images she could only imagine, the loathing that she carried back from Spain re-emerged. Lillian imagined the first dead person she touched—that woman’s face—behind the cathedral. She again saw the nightmare vision of hell—Madrid in flames. Felt briefly the fear engendered by a bomb falling from an unseen airplane at night. Slowly, a bit at a time, every event she experienced during her weeks in Spain was transformed into story.

  Lillian looked at the first page of Ivens’s notes and wrote:

  Distant sirens, that is what they hear first. Closer ones next. Then the drone. By now for most people it has become just another way of marking time. Like the noon church bells that peal across the entire country. Like the whistles calling workers to the factories or sending them home. Imagine. Bombs falling from the sky each night, and it has become a commonplace. Collecting the bodies the next morning; that too has become routine. What is not routine, and never will be, is the suffering.

  Ivens’s note said that footage of the recent bombing of Guernica could be inserted here.

  In the beautiful Basque village of Guernica terror came in broad daylight … on Monday, market day, when the whole town was gathered in the square, exposed, vulnerable.

  Matching word and picture, Hammett reminded her, ought not be done slavishly. Film narrative could be more partial and fragmented than straight storytelling, and even more effective. Word and picture could be moved around quite easily, new material inserted where needed, invented on the spot where necessary. The important elements now for Lillian were authenticity of voice and emotional truth. She convinced herself she finally had both.

  HAMMETT BEGAN THE MEMOIR of his mother with the sentence he had intended before Lillian returned home. My mama had a capacity for love so great it was almost self-defeating and all but impossible for the rest of us to live with. He gazed at the sentence and read it aloud once for Lillian, who said it sounded beautiful but what did it mean? Hammett then read it to himself a few times and concluded it was an excellent beginning precisely because it begged for elaboration. He also admired its balanced tensions, good and bad qualities perfectly at play. He didn’t want to rush the story so he let the sentence stand and began a new paragraph.

  My mother Anne was a great beauty. There were photographs in the house of her as a girl with very long hair and eyes so kindly and soft you thought that portion of the photograph might have been out of focus. She wore a sailor’s blouse and a spangled scarf that somehow created the impression of impermanence, as though she were a casual visitor passing through. Her soft eyes were pale and inward-looking. Her hair, highlighted in the photo, was pulled off her face to show a wide brow. A lovely girl with a soft, vulnerable beauty.

  When I was of an age—about nine or ten—when I could see my mother as a woman, someone other than only my mother, I saw a very different beauty. Anne Dashiell was the most stunning woman I had ever seen. Unlike her girlish photo, she was bony and strong and sinewy; her features were regular but elongated, giving her appearance an imperfect perfection that was continually surprising. Her hair was always cut very short and she never wore lipstick or makeup. Her skin was suntanned and textured—not weathered—and one side of her face—the left—was heavily dimpled when she smiled and when she was hurt. Her pale eyes did not have expressive range. Mostly they belied innocence and curiosity even when she was not innocent or curious. My mother was strong and shy.

  Other members of her family were rooted in their proud American pasts. The Bonds, her mother’s family, were of fine English stock. The Dashiells, the father’s side, were even prouder and finer and French. So in her family old national rivals had come together and made peace in the New World.

  Anne Bond Dashiell was well educated for the time, having attended school until the age of sixteen and then trained as a practical nurse and midwife, a plan she also had for my sister Reba until family fortunes delayed and denied it, but that is indeed quite another story. Mama’s folks said I looked most like Mama. I didn’t really, they just wanted me to. In truth Reba looked most like Mama.

  Late one night—so much happens when people can’t sleep—I sat up with her in the kitchen. She always needed something to do with her hands, so we shelled peas. Dickie was asleep. Reba was reading. I didn’t know where Papa was. The difference in being alone with Mama late at night was that I was encouraged to talk. I asked her things I truly wanted to know about. With Papa there was never any asking. Only his telling. I asked Mama what she wanted most when she was a girl. She stopped shelling. A look came over her face, a combination of surprise and pleasure. She looked almost like a girl just then.

  “Two things, Sammy. I wanted two things. I wanted to fall in love with Prince Charming like in the books I read. Like Cinderella. Like Sleeping Beauty. Swept off my feet, Sammy. ’Cause you’re not a girl, you probably won’t understand.” Mama stopped being Mama just then. She became more like my sister.

  “And that was Papa?”

  The spell was broken. She picked up a pea pod. “Yes, Sam, I guess that was Papa.”

  “And the second?”

  “What second?”

  “You said you wanted two things.”

  “Oh, yes. To please the Lord Jesus.”

  Mama was a Catholic and made us be Catholics, but she was a particular kind of Catholic. Papa made fun of her, called her a Jesus Boy Catholic. For him most Catholics were Voodoo Mary Catholics. Many Catholics believed in things that couldn’t possibly be true, in visions and miracles. A Jesus Boy Catholic saw Jesus as someone who loved all his children and wanted them to be fed and housed and loved. Mama was a socialist back then without knowing the first thing about politics. She loved people, especially the lost and unwashed, as Jesus had, and as he commanded we all should.

  When we lived near town, Mama went to Mass every morning. When we lived in the country, as we did now, she prayed at table before anyone awoke. She was visited frequently by Father Boylan, a young priest who looked quite a bit like the picture of Jesus hanging in her bedroom. Papa used to tease Mama about how often Father Boylan visited her. He called him her Priest Charming. Mama said the father heard her confession. Papa said he hoped she had nothing to confess and laughed through his nose.

  One morning the sheriff’s car pulled up to the do
or and Sheriff Haynes asked if we might have seen a man who escaped from the penitentiary the night before. Mama said no and asked what the man had done. Bank robber, the sheriff said.

  I asked if he was a desperado.

  Only if you own a bank, he said.

  Later that day a man in tattered clothes came to the door and asked for something to eat. It was him, it had to be, the bank robber himself. Reba and I were scared as anything, but Mama sat him down and gave him almost everything she was saving for Papa’s supper. The man looked up from his bowl with narrowed eyes and scared Reba and me even more. I didn’t know if it was the way he looked, dirty and with his hair falling down over his face so that he looked sneaky, or if it was the way he ate, using his hands and not taking bites but stuffing the food into his cheeks. Mama didn’t treat him at all like a thief or a criminal. She treated him exactly like a guest, like Father Boylan almost.

  When the man was done and it was time for him to go, Mama wrapped some bread and cheese in a towel and gave him a bottle of her juice for him to take away. He never talked and never said thank you. He just ate, looked around with a fearful expression, took the food and left, and I was glad when he did.

  Mama said, “Little that we have, we still have more than he does, more than enough to share.” That part was true. We all watched as he went around the back of the house and off into the woods behind Papa’s shed.

  Not long after the convict left, Sheriff Haynes’s car pulled up to our house again. Mama made a sign for us to be quiet and went out on the porch to talk to the sheriff. Here is what I heard as best I remember it:

  “We’ve traced the man back down here, Miz Hammett. Keep that door of your place locked good now. No one comes in, y’hear? Suggest you lock those kids of yours up good too.”

  “You know, Sheriff, I think I saw the man you’re looking for. He passed right down the road in front of the house.”

  “Down the road? Really? Which direction, ma’am?”

  “I’m sure he went that way.” She indicated the road to Wayland, exactly opposite to the way we had all seen him go. I was about to say something out loud. Reba put her hand to my lips.