The Ghost of Greenwich Village: A Novel

by Lorna Graham

  The realization lit a fire under Eve. First, she informed Donald they’d be on a rigorous interview and dictation schedule. Then she bought a new set of pads and wrote down every anecdote Klieg had ever mentioned that involved Donald. She also visited the library almost every night, redoubling her efforts to learn about Donald’s times and his contemporaries, both the famous and the forgotten, to understand where he fit in among them and within his era in general. When she finished all the books, she looked up newspaper articles on microfilm. You never knew where you’d find something important.

  • • •

  Eve arrived at Full Circle. “Hello?” she called out as she closed the door against the bitter wind outside.

  “Hey!” Like a jack-in-the-box, Gwendolyn popped out of the alcove, her blond hair now topped by inch-long dark roots.

  Eve clapped, overjoyed. “I’m so glad you’re back!” She ran over to Gwendolyn and threw her arms around her and the two rocked back and forth for a moment, saying nothing.

  When they parted, Gwendolyn ran the back of her fingers briefly down Eve’s cheek. “I’ve been feeling really bad. I wanted to invite you to come up to spend Christmas with us. I called a few times and your number just rang and rang. You weren’t alone for the holiday, were you?”

  “Actually, Mr. Klieg invited me over for Christmas dinner,” said Eve. “It was an incredible evening.”

  They had fun pulling out red dresses and sweaters for a pre–Valentine’s Day display and catching up with one another. Eve told Gwendolyn more about Christmas at Klieg’s but not the revelations about Donald. Though she’d confided more than she ever thought she would about her family and her childhood and the feelings she harbored about both, there were some things that simply had to remain private. While Gwendolyn possessed an open heart and generous spirit, Donald presented a bridge even she would be unlikely to cross. And though Eve reasoned that she could probably invite Gwendolyn over and trust Donald not to reveal himself, she couldn’t bear to make him keep quiet. After everything he’d been through, she wasn’t about to make him feel like a pariah in his own home.

  • • •

  The bakery called her back offering a part-time counter and delivery position. It meant a lot of time out in the elements and didn’t pay very well, but what choice did she have? She’d have to keep plugging and hope that something else came along. She told herself to be grateful that at long last, she finally had something.

  • • •

  It had been a long afternoon on her feet delivering cupcakes and turnovers, and Eve sank gratefully into a chair at the coffeehouse when her shift was over. She wrapped her hands around the steaming mug of tea and made her way through the papers that hung on wooden poles along the wall.

  A Post headline trumpeted a name she recognized.

  “BLISSFUL” JONES: MORNING ANCHOR SNAGS RECORD-BREAKING CONTRACT

  Good luck keeping up with the Bliss Joneses. The morning star has just signed a four-year, $60 million deal. Industry watchers had been wondering what, if any, fallout there would be from Jones’s brief but oft-replayed embarrassment last fall, when she seemed to fall into a catatonic state while being skewered by Eve Weldon, a Smell the Coffee staffer who had just apprehended the knife-wielding mugger known as the Stiletto. (See latest on Buntwiffel, page 11.)

  Now we know. Insiders say ratings for STC actually saw an uptick after the imbroglio, and the brass have evidently decided to reward Jones, who was reportedly threatening to bolt to NBC or CBS.

  On an unrelated note, or so a spokeswoman assures us (wink, wink), the network has also announced job cuts to the morning show. Among those to be slashed: production assistants, graphic artists, secretaries, and writers.

  How do you like that? Eve thought. The writers finally got a mention.

  As soon as she got home, she left messages for Quirine and Russell, letting them know she hoped they were spared.

  • • •

  Eve set a demanding goal of ten pages a day; if they could do that every day till the end of February, when she might have to leave the apartment, she’d have a manuscript that she could take to an agent. Donald remained reluctant to share his more intimate secrets, but Eve finally hit on the idea of using her Smell interview methods to extract what she needed. She wrote down all her questions before their sessions and circled him back whenever necessary to make sure he answered each one.

  This approach produced a couple of grumbles, but slowly, Donald ventured into the personal. He talked about his childhood in southern Illinois, the parents who fought and the father who left, the discovery of writing in high school thanks to an encouraging teacher, life typing up army reports during the Korean War, the guilt he felt at creating military propaganda, his disappointment when so many of the Beat writers he’d known abandoned New York for San Francisco, and his subsequent decision to move to Europe.

  He shared his impressions of the twenty-one-year-old Klieg, who was a tormented soul when he arrived in the City of Light. His father had decided his son’s interest in fashion meant he was gay, which had made him abusive. Klieg came to Paris to escape, and his deliverance into a circle of fellow artists constituted his salvation. Donald, a bit older, had been in Paris for a few years. He was just beginning to tire of it when he met Klieg at a dinner party, and he delighted in reexperiencing the city through the fledgling designer’s wide eyes.

  As for Louisa, she’d arrived in town with nothing but a suitcase and a few francs. A cousin got her the café job, but she had never dealt with customers before and suffered a couple of difficult months at the hands of the world’s most discriminating diners. Donald and Klieg took the delicate-featured beauty on as their project, helping her make change when the café was busy and both learning something about humility in the process. Louisa returned the favor by giving Donald surprisingly sophisticated feedback on his stories and serving as Klieg’s first fit model.

  “How quickly did you sense that she would present a problem for you both?” asked Eve.

  “It took some time,” admitted Donald. “I actually believed, when it came to friendship, that three was a more solid number than two. Like three legs of a stool, we seemed more sturdy, more stable, as a trio. Each time two of us disagreed, we had a built-in mediator. One of the three of us always had money, or wine, or a better idea. Good moods became infectious; bad ones easily put down. If not for the jealousy of a heart in love, I would have been happy to go on that way forever.”

  Over the next few days, Donald spoke thoughtfully of Lars, René, and the others. How they’d escaped their own dreary towns to create a family of the like-minded in Paris at the dawn of a new era. The way he described his friends reminded Eve of how Dawn Powell portrayed her characters: He was witty, unsentimental, and though he often skewered them, it was obvious he loved them.

  Donald widened his scope: Over the course of several sessions, he presented a detailed analysis of how the euphoria of victory that buoyed postwar Paris gave way to the acknowledgment of the genocide that had occurred on its doorstep. This, he said, had prompted the artistic community to seek new tools in order to express this incomprehensible reality. For Donald, it led to the development of his unique deconstructed style, a metaphor for how the old rules—for writing, for the world—had been rendered utterly moot, right under everyone’s noses.

  Eve’s pulse began to hum within her. The combination of Donald’s intimate stories of writers and artists he had known, plus this macro view of postwar culture, was unique. Add to that his own work, which was becoming deeper—and more honest—by the day. His dictation was colorful and concise, but now he welcomed her contributions as an editor and she was able to enrich and shape his work. This, she thought, hand racing across the page, was starting to feel like a real book.

  • • •

  In the second week of February, Eve arrived home to a postcard from Klieg, postmarked Capri. It showed two empty beach chairs on a stretch of powder white sand in front of a glinting blue
ocean.

  Took your advice. Told Günter all. World did not end. Now we attempt old-fashioned family vacation but we are burned from the sun. We fly to Germany tomorrow, eager for clouds.

  I hope you are well and that despite everything I may still count you as a friend.

  —MK

  Eve sat down on the stairs and fanned herself with the postcard, considering the question. It didn’t take very long. The fact that she was so relieved to hear from him told her what she needed to know. They were still friends, she decided. Of course they were.

  Klieg’s infractions were long ago, and at some point, well, enough was enough.

  • • •

  Eve was enjoying her fifteen-minute break, sitting on a sack of flour in the back of the bakery, talking to the bakers and inhaling the scent of butter and cinnamon. As she finished her coffee, she flipped to the TV page of the Daily News and found the latest dispatch from her previous life.

  OPPORTUNITY KNOCKS ANEW

  We were the first to tell you how former network VP Orla Knock was forced out from her entertainment position in L.A. The good news: Her payout was apparently hefty enough to finance a new venture. Knock has announced the opening of OK Productions, based in Chelsea, which has just inked a deal to produce arts-related documentaries for PBS. Now’s your chance to learn the secret history of zydeco music and go inside the Royal Danish Ballet. Must be nice to not have to work for “the man” anymore. Welcome back, Orla!

  Arts programming, thought Eve. Just like she wanted. It was nice to know that being fired by the network didn’t necessarily have to be the end of the world.

  • • •

  “Another two boxes came in,” said Mrs. Chin. “Getting down to the dregs now, though. Mostly mimeographed literary neighborhood quarterlies.” She handed Eve a pile of leaflets. “I’m not even sure if we’ll shelve these, we might just store them. But you might as well have a look. And I’m told there’s one last box coming. Should be here next week.”

  “Thank you,” said Eve, pulling the stack across the counter toward her. “Do you happen to know the name of the collector?” Maybe he’d been someone Donald had known.

  Mrs. Chin shook her head. “I don’t. But I can certainly ask.”

  The literary quarterlies hardly qualified as “dregs”; in fact, they were charming. Though uneven, vulgar at times, they pulsated with the energy of the Village of the fifties and sixties. Some contained socialist rants, others racy limericks or cartoons. Many presented first-person accounts of dramatic encounters between writers at local watering holes: fistfights over women, births of minor political parties, authors getting into verbal duels of stunning technical virtuosity in front of agog onlookers.

  An hour or so into her work, she came across Mike McGuire again. His name appeared in The Free Voices Brigade, 3rd Quarter, 1965. His name, and more than a dash of Donald’s style. It was a series of spare, oblique poems about longing. She skimmed them before taking the leaflets to the copy machine, armed with a fistful of quarters.

  She fed them in, one by one, and a realization took hold: Donald had possessed a genuine disciple. And if there was one, perhaps there were more. The fact that he might have had influence after all, despite what she’d read in that book so many months ago, could prove helpful in selling his memoir. Not to mention that Donald was someone who could tell you behind which bathroom tiles Chandler Brossard hid the only novel that was a worthy follow-up to Who Walk in Darkness, and who could also explain, from the inside, the machinations of how the Beat movement fed into the sixties counterculture in a two-continent, postwar movement that had taken the world by storm.

  It was ten days until March 1, when the next rent check was due.

  As the machine clicked and hummed, an idea formed in the air around her. A plan that could save them both.

  Chapter 18

  The cake was gorgeous. Inside, yellow sponge had been layered with fresh strawberries and real whipped cream. Outside, a perfect coating of white fondant, and red letters with flecks of sparkle in them, spelling out Congratulations! Even with her employee discount, it cost Eve twenty-two dollars. She hoped it would be worth it.

  She exited the elevator on the eighth floor and followed the signs for OK Productions. Glass doors fronted the suite. Inside, there was the sound of hammers banging against walls and the smell of fresh paint. No one was at the reception desk, so Eve filed past it and down a wide hallway. At the end, she found the office she was looking for. She stood outside for a moment and took a deep breath before tapping the door with her knuckle.

  “Yes?” came a familiar voice from inside.

  “Delivery for Orla Knock,” said Eve.

  “Come in.”

  Eve stepped in, the enormous pink box shaking slightly in her hands. They locked eyes and Eve wondered if Orla would remember her. The question was answered immediately.

  “You,” said Orla.

  “Yes.”

  “Eve … something, wasn’t it?”

  “Weldon. Yes.”

  There was a pause while this sank in. “You’re delivering cakes now.” Orla said this as though reading the absolutely fitting last line of a novel.

  “Yes,” said Eve, trying to affect more dignity than she felt. “But it’s only temporary.”

  “Until when?”

  Eve searched for some spin that would mitigate her embarrassment. “Until I don’t have to anymore,” she said at last.

  Orla looked tanner for her time in Los Angeles and now sported an armful of silver bangles and large ropes of turquoise beads. But the West didn’t seem to have dampened her essential New Yorkiness: Her persona still appeared to be clad head to toe in black.

  Eve handed her a slip to sign for the cake. Orla scribbled her familiar signature and handed it back. “Who’s this from? I don’t see a card.”

  “It’s from me,” said Eve. She put the box on the corner of the desk as Orla looked at her quizzically.

  “May I sit down for a moment?” asked Eve.

  “Why?”

  “I have something I’d like to discuss with you.”

  “I suppose. But I’m doing a conference call in about three minutes.”

  Eve took a seat. She gazed briefly around the bright corner office with its large windows on two sides and the many pictures resting along the walls, waiting to be hung. Boxes were stacked in the corners and an enormous corkboard burst with rows of Post-its and memos.

  “I’ll be brief, then,” said Eve. “I’ve been reading about your new venture. And I have a proposal for you.”

  “You don’t say,” said Orla, betraying neither interest nor disinterest.

  “I noticed that while your series has the visual arts covered, everything from commercial posters to architecture—and music, too—you’re not doing anything on literature.”

  “Literature is inherently less interesting on television.”

  “Maybe. But the writers themselves are just as interesting—if not more—than any of the fine artists. For one thing, they’re more articulate.” Orla shifted in her chair but said nothing. Eve cleared her throat. “Anyway. I’ve come into possession of a rather important unpublished manuscript. By a writer present at one of the most significant cultural moments in modern memory, both in the United States and Europe.” Eve summed up Donald’s life and named some of the famous artists he’d known. She even explained about the connection between Klieg and Donald and that Klieg would most likely provide one heck of an interview about his old friend.

  “The manuscript’s got all kinds of illuminating, never-before-heard stories about lots of famous people. And it details hiding places of work that his New York writer friends weren’t ready to show anyone. Under floorboards, behind mantelpieces, false bookshelves. So much, just waiting to be discovered. I’ve included a full list of what’s likely out there.”

  “But how could one possibly verify something like th—”

  “I’ve already made contact with the tenants over
on East Seventh Street and Avenue D, and 14 St. Luke’s Place, which were home to Herbert Huncke and Marianne Moore, respectively. The manuscript was absolutely right.” Eve opened her shoulder bag and pulled out a folder containing copies of what she’d found. She handed them over to Orla. “It’s a virtual treasure map.”

  There was a noncommittal silence as Orla leafed through the pages—notebook writings by Huncke, which described how he’d come up with the term “Beat generation,” and a poem by Moore. “And just who did you say is the author of this astonishing manuscript?” Orla put down the papers.

  “His name is Donald Bellows. Here’s a short version of his bio.” Eve handed Orla a Xerox of his entry from the Village writers book. “This says his symbol-based approach was only a germ, but there’s a good deal of undiscovered writing included in the memoir and I can assure you it went far beyond a germ. And he was the first to do it. Here are some samples, if you want to know what I’m talking about. And here’s the work of one of his acolytes, a young man who sought to build on his ideas and encouraged others to do so as well.” Eve handed over copies of everything, along with a complete proposal of what the documentary could cover.

  Orla used the pages to fan her face. “And how did you come to possess this manuscript?”

  “I found it in my apartment, which is where Mr. Bellows used to live. It was behind a panel in a cabinet. He died without family and with no estate. I’ve checked with a lawyer. I’m the rightful owner of this material.”

  Orla skimmed “Rock, Paper, Scissors.”