Lillian and Dash

by Sam Toperoff

  I may have found my true calling. I clean toilets. By choice, since I had these options—laundry, kitchen, commissary, storage (hell, it’s all storage here). All those other things required being part of a team. Toilets you do alone, and you can imagine how that suited me. But wait, there’s more. I approach each toilet as an art restorer would a Vermeer: a soiled masterpiece to be brought back to its original glory. I pride myself on knowing what the glory once was.

  I clean the warden’s toilet, an honor bestowed only on a master craftsman, which I am already recognized as being. His is a deluxe model—“The Lady with Pitcher” of toilets, you might say. It is a massive thing, tall and wide and beautifully sculpted. Equipped with brush, rags, sponge, and cleanser, I scrub and cleanse it once a week. Not content merely with hygienic cleansing, I polish his throne to a high luster. You will never guess why, dear girl. To see my face. I achieve mirror brightness only in order to look at myself in its curved surface. I lie on the floor and look into the convex whiteness and see me as I was, or think I was, not as I know I am, full-cheeked, wide-browed, bright and hardy, instead of the skeletal bone-bag I’ve become. My toilet image, not the one I observe while shaving, is who I hope to resemble when my West Virginia days are done. I’m beginning to feel healthy.

  Oh, in addition to my calling I have an occupation. A job that pays me in cigarettes. Some guys here take extension courses through the university. I write their papers for three packs of Camels. (No one here ever heard of Fatimas.) I got a B-plus on a five-pager on the League of Nations and a B on Melville’s South Pacific novels. We’ve got some hard graders down here in the Alleghenies.

  I also supplement life as a plagiarist by using the tonsorial skills I mastered up in Alaska. I’ll change my name to Guido and open a small shop off Riverside when I get back.

  I’m going to close with what should have been my open, call it burying the lead.

  I miss you enormously. Enormously. But I mustn’t allow myself to miss you at all. That creates some interesting tensions I can only release late at night in the privacy of my private room. I’m without a roommate, a boon given because I think I’m seen and treated as something of a celebrity. Most of the guards and many of the crooks know my work. Some find it admirable. In that sense I’m with my people and right where I belong.

  Bisous, Lilly Marlene, or should I say Ta-ta?

  Fondly, Pops

  P.S. As I write this, I’m sure I’ll live to regret doing it. It’ll probably end up in a memoir about you—of which there are sure to be scores; or in some scholarly tome on “The Blacklist Casualties” before America moves on to its next diversion. Still, I want to say it, formally, at least once: I’d give my life, yes, my life, for what I think democracy is, but I will never let cops and judges ever, ever tell me what I think democracy is. My mind is my Upper House, my supreme Supreme Court.

  Dash

  . 19 .

  Lost and Found

  WHEN THEY LOOKED UP Dash and Lillian realized they’d lost the better part of a decade. It didn’t matter particularly if that time had been stolen or misplaced. Lost was what mattered. They had spent much more time apart than together. Each in separate ways came to the same realization: time together eventually drove them apart. Apart for long periods was precisely what it took to stoke the desire each had for the other, or if not desire, at least mutual need.

  Hammett got out of prison in early November 1953 after serving five months, one month off for good behavior. He said it was the warden’s way of thanking the man who made his ass sparkle.

  He was driven to the bus stop on the road to Morgantown by a guard getting off shift. No one was there to meet him. The guard would have driven Hammett into town but he lived in the other direction and his wife needed the car.

  Hammett waited for the bus chilled to the bone because he was wearing the summer suit he went in with. Tall old man, stooped, suit collar up against the wind, holding a small valise. It was midafternoon; cloud cover gave the green hills a chalky look. He could as easily have been standing on Route 7 back in Hopewell, but he was glad his failed life was on display here rather than back there. People around Hopewell would all know Richard Hammett’s smart-alecky kid, even as an old man.

  A car pulled up to the bus stop. The driver rolled down the window. It was the guard who had dropped him off. “Get on in. I can’t leave you out here.”

  “I thought you had to—”

  “I did. Get in.”

  Most of the way back to town, the guard—his name was Paul Chase—apologized. Don’t know what I was thinkin’ got repeated a few times. “Man like you.”

  “Man like me, what?”

  “Man serves his time and I dump him right like that. What was I thinkin’?”

  “Thinkin’ your wife needed the car.”

  “She does. I’ll have to make it up to her some way. You got enough cash to get home with?”

  The word hit Hammett unexpectedly. Home. It must mean something important; why else did it make him think he was one of those rare humans who had no need for it. The only home he had ever known was Lillian, a place that always scared the hell out of him. “Uh-huh. They gave me fare.”

  “Bus or train station?”

  “I don’t know. Which is best for New York?”

  “Six of one. Bus is cheaper.”

  “Bus it is.”

  At the Greyhound Station Hammett offered to pay Chase for the ride. “Buy the wife some flowers.” Chase refused to take money. They shook hands. Hammett dropped ten dollars on the floor of the passenger side.

  The bus was full of Bus-is-cheaper people. College kids, Negro women with children, out-of-work guys, an ex-con—an Eisenhower-era “Bus of Fools” he had an urge to write about, and then a stronger impulse came, reminding him that he wasn’t up to the task. Only Lillian was. And Lillian was in England. Unhappily ensconced in Belgravia, as it turned out.

  He thought of a young Lillian with pleasure. What a piece of work was she. He thought all the way back to that despairing girl all but crushed by the reviews of Days to Come, but who as a woman had outbraved him, outwritten him, and who would certainly outlive him; in fact, had already outlived him. The thought of what she was pleased him. He could not love, simply wasn’t capable of it. But he loved her. Only he did not love her all the time.

  America’s wasteland rolled past his window. Bus routes in Pennsylvania were rarely scenic. Decaying factories, towns half closed, car lots, junkyards, railroad sidings, loading docks, cement and dirt and ashes. During moments when the sun broke through nothing was absolutely hideous, leading Hammett to remember Billy Wilder saying to Lillian, “No such thing as ugly, darling, there is only bad lighting.”

  The bus stopped in every town that had three churches and five bars. Forty minutes was the longest time between stops. The same people got off and on. At every stopover, no matter how brief, Hammett walked across the street to a bus-stop bar and threw down a shot and a beer. In Scranton he had a second whiskey before he left. He didn’t pay much attention to his money.

  Back on the bus for the last leg of the trip, he looked at his knobby-boned fingers. In their time these hands had held a pickax and shovel, loaded freight cars, tapped telegraph keys, formed a fist that struck bone, moved across a typewriter, hoisted drinks; these were fingers he only noticed during the flush times when he got a manicure. They often prompted compliments from a manicurist and on more than one occasion led to an erotic encounter, manicured fingers unbuttoning, unhooking, petting, fondling. A man was his hands, Hammett realized just now that he saw his own as pale and skeletal. As he was now. He even managed to shave these days without seeing himself in the mirror. He felt more spirit than substance, already a ghost, not invisible quite but eerily translucent, milky white. Faint and frail. Hammett was not particularly ill or terribly old.

  During a twenty-minute stop in Newark, he called the West Side apartment, not expecting anyone. He let the phone ring many times. He was disappointed at
not being disappointed. He had hoped against hope she’d be there. She wasn’t waiting for him at the gate when he was released. So at least when he got to New York … He assumed there were practical, perhaps even legal reasons for her absence. He’d been wounded, hors de combat. Lillian remained an important political target. Hammett decided to go straight to Katonah when the bus got to midtown. He had to borrow a dollar from a stranger.

  THE ENGLISH DIDN’T HAVE their own Joan of Arc. For a year and a half, in liberal political circles at least, Lillian Hellman played the role. Her treatment as an expatriate heroine had its benefits—writing income, a few loyal friends, and one memorable evening with Charlie Chaplin, who had left the States for the London premiere of Limelight and found his reentry permit revoked. In the expanding world of what and who was un-American, Joe McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover had become powerful deciders. McCarthy’s Senate subcommittee and Hoover’s FBI also controlled the IRS and, as in Chaplin’s case, the U.S. Immigration Service—in other words, controlled money and movement—and God only knows what else they could manipulate.

  Chaplin, insulted and angry, had announced to the world that he’d never attempt to return to America again. It was in no way a defeated man who sat to Lillian’s left in Noël Coward’s dining room. Lillian immediately told him of being passed off as his sister on her trip to Madrid in 1937. Chaplin loved it but turned the subject back to the madness infecting America. Lillian said it would pass eventually and that they’d be able to continue on with their careers soon enough. He looked at her in disbelief. “Such profound optimism always astonishes me. Pleases me too.”

  “I’m just more American than you, n’est-ce pas?”

  “True, true. Our situations are quite different, my dear.” Lillian hated being called my dear; this time she allowed it. “I’m just a music hall urchin from the alleyways of East London, so in a sense I’ve been sent home. You are an important literary personage …” He let the word sound French. “… a child of the Deep South—Georgia is it?”

  “Alabama. New Orleans.”

  “—and you’ve been sent away. You’re being punished, naughty girl, whereas I’m just picking up my life where I left it off years ago.” Chaplin dropped his head, scowled, and lowered his voice: “But tell me, as one political criminal to another, what’d they get you for?”

  Lillian matched him perfectly in hugger-mugger style: “Premature antifascism.”

  Chaplin’s guffaw stopped all conversation at the table. He announced, “I’m crushed. They exile this girl on a charge of ‘premature antifascism’ and they only get me as a ‘Communist sympathizer.’ I’m desolated.” He turned to his wife Oona: “Have you ever known anyone more premature than I?”

  “Only Humphrey Bogart and Cary Grant and Jimmy Stew—” There was laughter, which Chaplin quieted.

  “Thirty-five. I started writing The Great Dictator back in ’35. What was more antifascist than that? Nineteen thirty-five, for heaven’s sake. If that’s not pre-premature, what is? I’m going to write that Charlie McCarthy a very strong letter.”

  The personal advice Chaplin tried to leave with Lillian was to renew herself with her work. “You know we are only our work, my dear. They …” He waved his hand. “They will pass. If the work is good and true, it will live on. And you will live on with it. Live in time, not in a country. I give my address as Posterity Street. Why don’t you move into my neighborhood?”

  “Because I’m not Chaplin.”

  The statement created a pause. So Lillian added, “You are surer of your work than I. Your reputation gives you an enormous margin for error. You are Charlot everywhere in the world. Charlot can appear inadvertently to trip the rich villain with his cane and have him fall ass-first into the cake batter. You can do that anywhere in the world and get a laugh with it.”

  “Yes, of course, but no longer in the United—”

  “Remember Hammett?”

  “I do, yes.”

  “Well, he once had something of the reputation you talk about. Not internationally perhaps, but certainly back there. He lived on Posterity Street, but they are taking even that address away from him. There is this constant drumbeat of criticism of all his work, a so-called reevaluation of his entire career—all part of the political indecency—and frankly it’s killing him.”

  “So why then aren’t you with him now?”

  They looked into one another’s eyes until Lillian looked away.

  The benefits of London aside, Lillian did not like the city, disliked it in fact. The weather displeased her. The strong remnants of class and its palpable anti-Semitism sickened her. She felt the constant scrutiny of the house guest. The hypocrisy of liberals who talked strong and acted weak disgusted her. Still, it was too soon to return. All reports from home indicated that things were getting worse with a befuddled Eisenhower in the White House and Nixon, plucked right off the House Un-American Activities Committee, at his right hand. And in London at least there were cashable checks for writing scripts and articles.

  She called the apartment often—Hammett had been left a key—hoping he’d pick up. She also called Katonah and Santa Monica without success.

  Very late one night or early on a dark morning she called Katonah and he did pick up. “Thank God,” she said.

  “You’re welcome, I’m sure.”

  “How long have you been there?’

  “Five weeks, six. Can’t be sure. I’m waiting for the electricity.”

  “No electricity. It’s cold. Are you eating?”

  “Apples.”

  “Apples?”

  “Apples mostly. And sourdough rolls.”

  “Do you have a pencil and some paper?”

  “Paper. No pencil.”

  “For Christ’s sake, find one.” She waited.

  “Okay.”

  “Write this down. It’s Cedric’s number. Call him and have him come over.”

  “Okay.”

  “Promise?”

  “Cross my heart.”

  “Promise.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “I miss you.” Hammett said nothing.

  When she hung up, Lillian realized that of course he couldn’t be trusted. She called Childs herself and asked him to please go over and “make things right for Hammett.” Hammett, of course, never did call Childs.

  There was a great deal to be “made right for Hammett.” Childs continued his visits so that things became reasonably right—heat, a supply of food. Thereafter whenever Lillian called and Hammett answered, the conversation was rational at the very least. Childs confirmed that Hammett had begun taking better care of himself. He was keeping himself cleaner. He did a bit of cooking now. Kept the cottage in a semblance of order. Childs paid the electric bills.

  Childs had wood delivered to Hammett for winter. He left money at the market and the gas station that Hammett could draw against but which was never used fully. The cottage was full of books, and Childs had no idea how they got there or who paid for them. He did see postal wrapping paper around the place and assumed someone else was subsidizing Hammett’s intellectual life.

  Lillian asked if Childs thought Hammett was writing.

  “Hard to tell. There’s a different piece of paper in the machine each week. I don’t stay very long. I’m sure I make him uncomfortable.”

  “It’s not you, it’s me he’s upset with. How about the drinking?”

  “It might be pretty bad sometimes. Lots of bottles to get rid of. Don’t know how he gets it either. But I have a feeling he’s been a lot worse.”

  “Is he a danger?’

  “To himself, you mean?”

  “Yes, to himself.”

  “No, I don’t think so. You talk to him too. What do you think?”

  “He doesn’t always answer when I call. When he does, he’s more and more like his old self.”

  “So you’ve answered your own question.”

  “But you see him. Is he old-looking? Is he broken down?”

&n
bsp; “Old maybe, but not broken.”

  The sun came out and Lillian decided to walk to Harrods to buy a scarf. The air was chill but the sun on her face felt marvelous.

  The store was crowded but not jam-packed. Still, it bothered her that she was jostled near the handbag counter. Crowded in London was different from crowded in New York; space normally remained much more respected here. Lillian glared after the woman who had bumped her sideways and disappeared.

  Lillian stopped to look at leather bags. The bags were wonderful, from Florence and staggeringly expensive, but wonderful. A large brown shoulder bag, soft and light, suited her perfectly. She saw herself traveling with it comfortably; it would, in fact, encourage her to travel. She switched shoulders and took a few steps with it. It felt just right and it lifted her spirits. Lillian asked the saleswoman the price. Forty-five pounds, around two hundred dollars. An extravagance she thought she could afford.

  The saleswoman wondered if she’d like to see some other Italian leather goods. Gloves, wallets, sewing boxes?

  Perhaps a wallet for Hammett. She hadn’t bought him anything for a very long while … since … forever.

  In the showcase alongside the wallets were leather-bound notebooks. This was her immediate inclination, a notebook for a writer, until she realized that Hammett would see it not as a gift but as an obligation. So a wallet it was. Not the long leather fold that slipped into a jacket pocket—Hammett wasn’t wearing many suit jackets these days—but a thin, stylishly black billfold for a pants pocket. Nineteen pounds.

  Lillian’s check was accepted by the saleswoman, who needed a manager to sign the slip and initial the check. He asked for identification; she produced her passport. Everything was fine.

  Rather than have the handbag wrapped, Lillian said she wished to carry it home on her shoulder. Might she transfer the contents of her old bag and have that one wrapped instead? Of course, madam. And the wallet, she’d like that gift wrapped as well. Why certainly. And here is your receipt. Thank you for your patronage.

  Lillian felt fine, reinvigorated in fact, as she stepped out onto the Brompton Road. The chill in the air made her decide to take a cab home. A large red-faced man in a black coat and a black bowler suddenly blocked her path. “Excuse me, madam. I must ask you to return to the shop with me. There has been a discrepancy.”