Lillian and Dash

by Sam Toperoff

  Then, more quietly to Miz Quintin, a threat: “If you do not stop maligning this child, you will put your soul in peril.” It was the only threat I ever heard from my mother’s lips, and it evoked a breathless sigh from the crowd.

  I looked mostly at Reba the whole time. Her face was pink and utterly impassive. There was then a prolonged silence. Her purpose at the marketplace done, Mama gathered us up and we set off on the road home.

  Hammett knew when he began where this memory of Reba was going. He also knew he had the option of writing two distinct Rebecca Hammett tales. He drained his gin and poured himself another.

  Being as bookish as I was made me seem even more the lonely boy. Miss Gaffer, the librarian, chose my books based on the solid nineteenth-century belief that a boy’s character could be shaped by the biographies of great men. She gave me Eli Whitney, Ben Franklin, Lord Nelson, Napoleon Bonaparte, Commodore Vanderbilt, Abraham Lincoln. When it looked like I would tear through every biography in the library, she said, “Don’t you worry, Sam, I’ll make sure you run out of time before I run out of books for you.”

  All my reading made me seem silly in Reba’s eyes. She teased me about reading such foolishness. She wanted me to read adventure stories and then tell her about faraway places in the world.

  I liked Reba well enough, I guess. I think I might have liked her more if she hadn’t teased me so much. If I had perceived her teasing as a form of affection, which I now believe it was, it might have changed things a bit between us.

  One midsummer night and very warm, I was reading The Life and Times of Young Andrew Carnegie at the kitchen table beneath the old oil lamp. My mother set a time limit on my reading at table in order to save oil money. Young Carnegie himself was sitting in semidarkness at a kitchen table studying Morse code so he could apply for a job as a telegrapher on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. My mama called out to me to finish up and go to bed.

  “Five minutes, please, Mama.”

  Reba said, “I’ll make sure of it, Mama.” Shortly thereafter she damped the wick and I was in darkness. No point in complaining, I closed my book. Reba whispered to me, “Sam, I need you for something.” She put her finger to her lips for silence. “Follow.”

  She tiptoed out of the house into the yard. I followed. There was only a sliver of moon. I couldn’t exactly find her. “Sammy,” she called. I traced her voice. She was sitting on Papa’s woodpile at the edge of the trees. Reba wanted me to sit on the chopping block opposite her.

  “I like you, Sammy.” I knew Reba wanted me to say I liked her back. I couldn’t because she wanted me to. “Do you ever wonder what will happen to us all?”

  The truth was that I didn’t because my books gave me a sense of a personal destiny that I had to shape and follow; in so doing it was clear I would have a good and eventful life. That took a lot of the guesswork out of an entire existence spent passing between home and school in Hopewell. It never occurred to me that because she was a girl, Reba did not have a destiny as fortunate as my own. I said, “I think I’ll invent something and become famous.”

  “No one here ever becomes famous.”

  Hammett put down his pen and rubbed his eyes. Did he want to finish this story now? Did he want to finish it ever?

  He decided it had to be written, perhaps not shown to anyone but certainly written.

  Reba reached out with both hands and touched my cheeks. “I’m so proud of you, Sammy. You’re different from any one else I know in the whole world. And you’re my own brother.” My sister had never touched me like that before, deliberately and with affection. Her hands were cool and stayed on my cheeks. “Promise to think about me when you are gone away from here.” I said nothing. “Sam. Promise.”

  “Promise.”

  We sat quietly. I would have gotten up but my sister began to hum and sing “After the Ball Is Over.” I forgot to mention that Reba had the sweetest voice I’ve ever heard. And so we stayed there. Quietly. I had never shared such a moment with another person. Reba sang low there in the dark. She whispered, “Sam, scratch my back, please.” And then she sang some more.

  She was wearing a dress Mama made. Mama made most of our clothing on a sewing machine her family had got her. My father disparaged her sewing as well as her machine.

  Reba’s summer dress was pale yellow. It had no arms and wide straps over her shoulders.

  “Don’t be afraid to touch me, Sam. Nothing bad will happen.” As she said this, she reached behind her back and opened the top and second buttons. It turned out as I put my fingertips to her back that there was something to be afraid of. I didn’t know what it was but the tightness in my stomach and chest, the near paralysis in my arms and fingers was as close to fearfulness as I’d experienced since I saw Mr. Freeman hanging from the tree beyond the lake. Reba’s hair was down and smelled clean and felt soft when I bent my cheek to it.

  “Scratch in circles, Sam. Slower. That’s right. Oh.”

  I did only what Reba said to do, but the combination of my fingertips on her cool skin, the smell of her, her cooing and humming voice was so dizzying I closed my eyes and allowed a strange mixture of pleasure and fear to take me away. I became dizzy and then excited in a way that worried me.

  “That feels so good. Don’t stop please.”

  Reba leaned forward and pulled the straps of her dress off her shoulders. She rocked slightly backward so that my hands edged toward her sides. When she leaned back toward me finally, I had her breasts, soft flesh I had no right ever to touch, one breast in each hand. This was thrilling beyond imagining. And sinful without my knowing sin. My chest was on her back, my cheek and lips upon her neck.

  Mama called out to Reba from the house.

  “Yes, Mama. Be right there.”

  Reba leaned back slowly and buttoned her dress. She said, “Thank you, Sam,” without looking back at me.

  It was the first great confusion of my life and it never went away completely.

  End

  . 13 .

  The Walk

  WHEN WE SPEND THIS MUCH TIME TOGETHER, we even begin to sound alike. Thank God for personal pronouns.

  He can date things better than I. In this case—I guess I’m talking about our blowup—the nearest I can come is the blitzkrieg of Rotterdam, which would make it, what, early spring 1940? The bombing, similar to Guernica but on a much, much larger scale and far better organized, happened two or three days earlier. Hundreds of bombers, three hundred, according to the papers.

  When we were in California the depressing impact of the war news did not hit me as it did back here in New York. Out there, it was as though we were in one surreal world reading about what was happening in another surreal world, like Martians trying to be concerned about what was happening out on Venus. I can’t say Rotterdam broke my heart. Spain had already done that.

  The Journal American showed Rotterdam leveled to dust and rubble, faint grids where streets and avenues had once intersected. Only one building, the great cathedral, was left standing, untouched as though the surrounding punishment was God’s will, when it was Hitler’s. No people, not a one, to be seen, even with a magnifying glass, which is what I was using when Hammett came into the kitchen. The Hearst caption read, “Rotterdam, Holland, in the aftermath of aerial military action,” as though there were neither murderers nor their victims, only “action.” The bastard.

  Hammett picked up the morning’s Times and read the latest reports. “Looks like they’ll be going after London next. They’re collecting air bases across the Channel. Can’t believe how fast they’re moving.”

  “I hope I don’t hear the hint of some bullshit, he-man admiration in your voice.”

  “You may hear it, but it is not there. I’m only saying this will be a war of wills, and until our will matches theirs, they’ll just roll on.”

  The mood of the day was set by that early exchange over coffee. I resented his acknowledging any superiority whatsoever to the scum … and for much of the day could not comp
letely shake my resentment.

  Hammett had agreed to walk to the lawyer’s office with me that day and cosign a contract to purchase a farm upstate. In Westchester. Pleasantville. The world was living in Shitsville and there we would be, tucked away safe in Pleasantville. Still, I have to say I was not guilt-ridden. Living in the country was the answer for us. You know, give old Voltaire a try, “Cultivate your garden” and all that. One hundred and forty acres on which to make things grow, nourish your soul, get food to market, grow strong, try to look away from the rest of the world for a while. Dash was always a country boy at heart and other than a few radio plays those days, he certainly wasn’t growing anything in the city.

  For us, the simplest exchanges in those days always had angry undertones. Blame it on the Nazis. Blame it on the weaklings who gave them the run of the house. Since blame always seeks the nearest target, blame Hammett and then blame me. He was edgy too, but I didn’t think it mattered very much. Everything about buying the farm had been discussed fully, all had been agreed to. I thought.

  We would become co-owners of Hardscrabble Farm, and all would become right in our small universe. He got to name the place after many long and enjoyable discussions over the dinners we prepared together. I’d say, “What about Tightwad Acres?”

  “Good but not true. There’s nothing cheap about either one of us. How ’bout Rewrite Farm?”

  “Self-aggrandizing. What about Cornucopia?”

  “You’re kidding.”

  Hardscrabble came late in the game. Hammett offered it after doing a crossword in which the clue was “Scratch or paw the earth,” eight letters. S-c-r-a-b-b-l-e. Hardscrabble was what the sharecroppers back in Hopewell called their infertile land.

  I said, “That’s as far from Cornucopia as you can get. But Hardscrabble it is.”

  I knew the property needed lots of work. The farmhouse needed everything—rewiring, a new well, a roof, a screened-in porch, new kitchen, complete paint job … The farm itself needed a tractor, maybe two. An irrigation system. The barn walls needed shoring up. Much of the stock had to be replaced … Listen to me, I’m speaking like Farmer Lill.

  Money was at no time an issue, at least where I was concerned. The Little Foxes was going to Warners even before it closed on Broadway. Watch on the Rhine was on its way to town with at least three studios already bidding significant money for film rights. I knew the play would cause a stir. No one else was writing about the raw political brutality cloaked by the elegance, good breeding, and superficiality of European aristocrats and the wealthy American upper classes. In the play, a German-born engineer and his wife and three children visit his wife’s very rich and apolitical mother in Washington. Kurt, the engineer, is prominent in the antifascist underground in Germany. Another aristocratic house-guest discovers this and is about to expose him and some of his colleagues when Kurt kills him. And there is the great moral dilemma of the play. When exactly do we take up arms against the Rats? Is killing ever justified? These are questions easily answered for me. I thought it was about time audiences had to face them too.

  As far as Hardscrabble was concerned, it didn’t matter a tittle to me that Hammett was cash poor at the time. Perhaps it should have, but it didn’t. He could pay his way when things got better for him. Or not. I didn’t care. It wasn’t important.

  As I said, mid-May, a glorious morning in New York. It was my idea to walk rather than ride to Sherman’s office to sign the Hardscrabble papers. The walk over to Broadway, across the park, and then to Madison would set the day apart, make it feel special. It was something I thought we needed to set against the backdrop of the despicable bombing in Holland, an entr’acte, contentment stolen in a crappy world.

  I knew he didn’t like the financial arrangement for Hardscrabble. But was there any doubt that if the situation were reversed, he’d do everything possible for me to share the farm with him? When I said that, it turned a tense situation into an angry tense situation. He said I’d get my money soon and with interest. Instead of saying, Fine, and being done with it, or better, saying nothing at all, I made a joke: “First of the month, small bills, brown envelope, my agent’s office.” When our eyes met, I could see he didn’t love me. If anyone knew that money was never about money, it was me. And unless Dash had another good novel in him or got some film work, radio plays were simply not going to cut it. As it was, half the money he did make went to his family—yes, he was still married, thank you very much—no telling precisely where the other half went. We walked on in the civil chill of a very fine day like a typical married couple.

  Did I mention that he had dressed for the occasion? A haircut—not a drinker’s apology, a stylish trim—and his best gray suit and tie. Just the week previous he had wandered over to Broadway and bought a Homburg. He saw Ribbentrop in the Times shaking hands with Molotov and said, “Dignity, thy name is Homburg.” I said, “Rats in fancy hats is still Rats.” But he bought the hat and looked handsome and prosperous and particularly well turned out as we crossed Columbus Avenue, where I slipped my wrist over his arm. I had to help get him through this difficult day.

  When we entered the park at Eighty-sixth, I told him about a talk I’d had with Jack Warner about the rights for Watch. I didn’t bother to tell him I’d talked with Goldwyn and Mayer as well. No deal had actually been cut with anyone yet, one certainly would be, but nothing was firm. I needed to know about scheduling and casting and, naturally, about the money. It was going to have to be substantial now that Hardscrabble was about to become a reality. Even though I owed L.B. a favor for Myra, the movie was too important to throw away with Mayer. Here was my chance to show the American public who the Rats were, why they were Rats, and how Rats invariably behaved. Watch on the Rhine did that. Hammett had been, as always, helpful with each draft. No, that’s patronizing; more than helpful, inspiring. He knew the damned story inside out and backward.

  I told Hammett I wanted to collaborate on the screenplay with him, to get it released soon enough for it to have the greatest political impact. We still weren’t in the war. No reason why he couldn’t get started on the writing himself until I got free of the my stage obligations. I intended the news to encourage. I didn’t realize …

  At any rate, he said, “And now I’m supposed to thank you for the payday. That’s not what we are, Lill.” I said nothing while we walked on.

  I always pushed to get my Broadway people in the films of my plays. This one was different. Stars would give the political message a hell of a lot more bite. When Jack Warner mentioned Bette Davis and Charles Boyer, I knew we could do something important with the film. Of course I knew you never ended up with all the teaser names. Davis would be enough for me.

  Warner was very reluctant to agree to Hammett writing the screenplay. “He’s not drinking, Jack.”

  “He’s not writing much either.” Then he said he needed assurances for what he called “my people.” Jack Warner had no “people.” What kind of assurances? The best kind, he said. Warner wanted my word that if the Hammett screenplay was unsatisfactory for any reason, I would submit a final version at no additional cost. It was an insult Hammett would never have to hear. I knew Dash could produce a marvel. He wasn’t drinking very much at all. No more than I was. I agreed, provided Davis played the lead. Warner said we had the outline of a deal.

  “You are not supposed to thank me for a payday. What you are supposed to do is get to work on the script tomorrow morning and give my dingy, one-room political talkfest some fucking life … let the outside world shine its light on—”

  “What are they paying for hackwork at Warners these days for someone who can’t get any work on his own?”

  “Dash, don’t ruin the day.”

  WE’D ALWAYS FOUGHT, always, always broken up—well, separated at least—and then come back together after a while, a cooling off, or sometimes a heating up. Not always out of need, either. Ultimately it was a seeking that brought us back. Where’d I leave that arm of mine anyway? Or as
in my case, where the hell was my heart, where’d I leave my courage? I had them just a little while ago. So it is fair to say Lillian Hellman completed me. The only problem was that sometimes a man like me doesn’t want to be completed. Women in love don’t ever really get that. Even amazing Lillian, brilliant Lillian, didn’t get it. The Hammett she admired was not a Hammett who ever was. It was the Hammett who someday might be … the maybe, maybe Hammett. That’s no way for a man to live.

  Let me take the day from breakfast on. Very nice morning as I recall. Unusually nice, except that all the war news was particularly terrible. I mentioned at table that sometimes military conditions can deteriorate to the point where things were irreversible. Lillian said, “Are we there yet?” She was at the stove making French toast.

  “Just about.”

  “What’ll we do?”

  “Us or the country?”

  “The country. We’re fine.” Said with emphasis. “We’re off to Pleasantville. Hah, Pleasantville. Bucolic life of dumb contentment.”

  We let ourselves be appropriately ashamed of our personal good fortune. I said, “Our side isn’t going to do anything smart or brave for a while. Let’s hope Herr Hitler does something monumentally stupid.”

  “And will he?”

  That’s when I saw a small note on the theater page about Watch on the Rhine coming to Broadway. No one outworks Shumlin’s flacks. The piece said the play was going through changes to keep it as fresh as the latest news from Europe. This line struck me: “Miss Hellman—a modern-day Kassandra—has warned us all repeatedly for years of a dire future unless we act to defend our democratic way of life. Alas, Kassandra’s legendary warnings went unheeded, but she was not so brilliant a playwright.”