by Anne Bernays
“Charlie’s a good man,” I said. “He’s the best. In fact, I don’t know many people who can match him in rectitude.”
“Don’t go fancy on me. I know you went to Harvard.”
“Look, Ed, this is as hard for me as it is for you.” I never thought I would hear myself say something as silly as this, but here I was pleading via sentimentality.
“You’ve got me wrong, pal. This isn’t hard for me. It’s people like you with their heads in the sand who don’t want to recognize the threat around us. It’s not just pinkos in Hollywood, it’s a pervasive disregard for the Constitution. I’m not implying that you’re not a good American, but we can’t, you and I and all the others watching, let these people take over our country.”
It was hard for me to square Fleming’s paranoia with the man who had displayed, in his novels, sensitivity and compassion. This was another species, as if he had taken some awful potion that transformed him from a dog into a wolf. Had the wolf been there all along? I don’t really think so. I couldn’t begin to imagine what had sent him so far to the right that we were no longer speaking the same language. There was no point in arguing; it would get me nowhere.
I told Fleming that I was extremely sorry to be losing him to another house, we would just have to find another Fleming—I couldn’t resist this little dig. In response he said I should go ahead and try. This was getting to be a pissing contest that I didn’t wish to continue. I told him I had to hang up. He barely said goodbye.
After I hung up the phone I found that I was trembling. And this reaction wasn’t so much about the money we would surely lose when we lost our favorite author, but that I had said goodbye to a friend to whom I thought I was chained for life. It didn’t matter about his ugly opinions, what mattered was friendship. Gone.
I needed to talk to Barry. Rashly, I called home. Marie answered: “Samson residence.” I asked her if Barry was there. “No Mister Samson, he’s gone to the garage, at least that’s what he said when he left the house; he needed to look at something in the car.”
I thanked Marie, kicking myself for asking.
I went down the hall to Charlie’s office.
“It’s done,” I said. “I feel like I’ve chopped off my right hand.”
Charlie was tipped back in his chair. His hands were behind his head. Although his feet were still on the floor, he looked relaxed enough to be half asleep. He told me he hadn’t been worried. He knew I would do the right thing.
“That’s odd,” I said. “Because I didn’t know myself.”
I was determined to make myself feel better about losing Fleming and began to tick off reasons that there might just be a silver lining in my having done “the right thing.”
There was something newly disturbing about Fleming, the hardening of his right-leaning opinions, rare in a creative person; and maybe his assumption that he could make the world around him change to his liking, his preference for order over disarray—not your usual mad artist scrambling to make a deal with chaos, misery, disloyalty, distrust. Just as he kept dozens of sharpened pencils waiting for him to use them in coffee mugs on his desk, so he believed ardently in extreme self-discipline. He had been known to publicly lecture younger writers on the virtues of keeping to a daily (and I might say, killing) schedule. “You mean,” one of these novices asked him, “you sit at your typewriter for six hours a day?”
There was something else eating at me—losing my temper with Barry. It wasn’t his fault, he had simply been there when I was very upset. Of course I took it out on him; there was no one else around to take it out on. He was the last person in the world I wanted to hurt. Or so I told myself.
Charlie told me that Lucille Baroney had called him to say she was enjoying talking to the nice young man whom I’d hired to pry her story loose. He also told me her agent worked in the same office with Fleming’s agent. A rather nice symmetry, I figured—maybe she’ll come through with a book that would help fill in the huge money hole caused by Fleming’s defection.
WHEN I entered the house, Barry was in the downstairs hall. I don’t know exactly what he was doing there, but he greeted me formally so he must have thought he was being observed. I still hadn’t apologized to him for losing my temper.
I took off my coat and hat and handed them to him. He put them properly in the hall closet. He wouldn’t look me in the eye, though my own eyes pleaded with him to forgive me.
“I’ve asked Mrs. Samson to give me the weekend off,” he said. “She said it was okay.”
“Oh,” I said. He had never asked for more than one day off at a time.
“Yessir,” he said. “My cousin Tony’s getting married in Jersey. I’m his best man.”
“Cousin?” It was the first I had heard of this cousin.
“Yes sir, Mr. Samson, we grew up together. Tony’s a chef. He works at 21.”
“Well, that’s very nice for him—and for you, Barry. Short notice, isn’t it?”
“Well no, Mr. Samson, I’ve known about the wedding for a while now. I guess I forgot to mention it.”
“I guess you did. Is Mrs. Samson here?”
“She called to say she would be late for dinner. Not to wait for her.”
It was obvious that he wasn’t ready to forgive me for my outburst. I thanked him and went up to my bedroom where I stood in the middle of the room, numbed by panic. I should believe everything Barry told me. Then why was I finding this so hard? It wasn’t until I brought Barry into my house that I began to doubt. Before that I trusted. I trusted my wife, my children, my associates, my authors (well, that’s not quite true, but authors are notoriously cagey and love to fiddle with the truth). I trusted Grete and Marie. I trusted myself. My doubts were pantry moths in the larval stage, crawling in and out of the flour on the shelf, eating their way through packages of rice, sleeping and making love in containers of tapioca and barley. My mother’s kitchen seemed to be their asylum; she wept when she had to throw out everything in her pantry and start all over again. And still they came. They laid their minuscule eggs and multiplied. I once asked Grete if we had them and she shook her head. “Only poor people have them,” she said. “Cockroaches too. And little ants. Not in a house like this.” My doubts grew from tiny pale worms into winged things that circled above your head.
Mostly—but not exclusively—my doubts were about Barry. Perhaps, in spite of myself, I shared the button-down belief of those convinced that homosexuals were unreliable. That if you were homosexual you were open to blackmail; and that if there were homosexuals working in our government this circumstance could easily lead to treason or worse.
And maybe the doubt about Barry’s loyalty to me, who paid his salary and gave him board and room and not terribly much work to do, served as an added attraction. No love without some degree of doubt.
THE PUBLISHER—whose name will go unremarked by me— chewed me out for letting Fleming go. But the news didn’t hit the daily papers, thank god. It did, however, make the trade magazines, Publishers Weekly (“Edgar Fleming defects from long-time publisher”) and Editor & Publisher (“Bestselling author Fleming finds new home at Scribner’s”). I tried to explain, but hit a wall. The publisher, I should remind you, who owned fifty-one percent of Griffin, was not so much interested in books per se, but in the money they might produce. He told me that one should never let emotions interfere with business. I told him that to fire Charlie would also constitute “business.”
“You can’t really be joining this witch hunt?” I said.
The publisher looked down at his manicured fingers. If he was ashamed, he wouldn’t admit it outright, but I saw a flicker of embarrassment cross his features and he muttered something about my not taking a decision like this again without consulting him. He was the publisher after all. There was, between us, that boundary that supposedly keeps commerce and aesthetics/morality separated from each other; anyone who has ever encountered it knows how blurred the line truly is. Do you want to publish an admiring history
of the KKK even if you’re sure it will be a best-seller? Questions that had to do with money came up all the time and we both knew it. Questions about loyalty almost never came up; we were both in newish territory. Still, he was angry to have lost Fleming.
“What about this old movie star Charlie’s been nurturing? How’s that coming along?”
If he expected Lucille Baroney to make up in shekels what we would surely lose by losing Fleming to Scribner’s, he was much dumber than I thought. Should it turn out to have wings, it would still be a one-shot deal. The thing about Fleming was that he went on and on, one after the other, big fat books, with big fat stories, memorable characters and even—god help us—a semi-spiritual underpinning. What a rat he turned out to be. The only thing that would stop him was dementia or death.
I told the publisher that I thought we would have a good strong book. “The manuscript has just gone off to the Literary Guild.”
“Why not Book of the Month?”
“Are you serious?”
PHYLLIS HAD not been especially interested in the Fleming flap. She had grown quieter and less theatrical. It was odd how little feeling—either positive or negative—I could muster when it came to Phyllis. I suppose this was because I had by now so little emotion invested in her that nothing she did really irritated me, nothing really pleased me. She might have been invisible.
Lucille Baroney’s agent began to make demands. I figured this was inevitable. Lula’s I.Q. may not have been as high as Einstein’s, but her business sense was finely attuned to what would please the great audience out there. Charlie and Griffin had given her future a reprieve. Her agent, a woman of considerable stature—she was almost six feet tall and rumored to be an illegitimate child of a British Royal—abetted Lula’s interests with passion. We gave her more secondary rights than was prudent, we guaranteed a larger advertising and promotion budget than we ought to have, we hired an outside publicity person to shepherd the old lady to radio and television stations, to forums and panel discussions, and lo and behold—we had another best-seller. Charlie said he felt two ways about its success. It was “kind of crummy,” he insisted. “Who cares how long Errol Flynn’s dick is? It makes me squirm. Maybe I’m just an old-fashioned guy, but I prefer Virginia Woolf.”
“You’re getting stubborn,” I said.
He admitted as much. Then he thanked me again for not firing him. He made me sound like a Cold War hero. I wasn’t. I think I did what most men would do under the circumstances. People were seeing villains everywhere. A week or so earlier a celebrated author left his long-time publisher because it had been bought out by Time Incorporated, thought by him to be an evil tool in a polluting commercial environment. We all said this was crazy.
In spite of Baroney’s unexpected triumph as “memoirist” and a raise all around for those in management at Griffin, a melancholy had landed on my shoulders. I could feel it as a soft, substantial weight. When I looked in the mirror I saw more gray on my head than brown. I saw lines on my skin I had never noticed before.
THE FIFTIES were leaving. Henry was a freshman at M.I.T. Kate, still in high school, had discovered a group of girls to whom she attached herself with enthusiasm. One of the popular elite, she was almost never home on weekends. She was reluctant to do her homework, and although she spent many hours holed up with her mother, rarely spoke to me. Our shared secret had not brought us closer but rather the opposite; she gave me the cold shoulder.
The only place I felt warm was when I was with Barry. He listened to me; I listened to him. I loved the way his face changed whenever he saw me.
“You know how I feel,” I said one day while he was driving me to Presbyterian Hospital high up in Manhattan to meet with a celebrated heart doctor. This M.D. wanted to write a book about the possibilities of transplanting human organs from the dead to the living. This seemed more like science fiction than pure science but, from experience, I had learned not to trust my initial reactions to crazy-sounding ideas. Besides, this man had impeccable credentials and I figured he wasn’t about to risk his career by advocating something completely mad. I was willing to go all the way uptown to meet him because I figured his time was tighter than mine. Besides, it didn’t hurt to go out in the field once in a while.
Over his shoulder, Barry said, “How do you feel, boss?”
“I feel like a very old shirt you can’t bring yourself to throw out. You know how you begin to be able to see through it?”
I caught a slice of his face in the rearview mirror; he was smiling indulgently at me.
“That’s all my shirts,” he said.
I went on to explain that just a few more days or months and the see-through part would disintegrate. You would have to throw the shirt away or turn it over to the rag brigade.
“You have the feeling that something’s about to happen that will change your life and maybe mine, don’t you?” I was about to answer when the car swerved violently. “Fucking Christ!” he said. “Did you see that?”
I said I hadn’t seen anything.
“Man on a bicycle nearly got himself creamed.” Barry was shaken. He pulled over to the curb and asked me for a cigarette. “It wasn’t my fault.”
I told him I didn’t believe in omens, but maybe it was time for us both to do something else. I’d get out of publishing, he could fish. We talked briefly of this fantasy. Then I said, “You know how sorry I am about losing my temper the other day. It was inexcusable. Please forgive me.”
“Okay,” he said. “But don’t let it happen again. Don’t take your shit out on me. That’s not what I’m here for.”
What is love? I wanted to ask him this but didn’t, I suppose, because a sudden reticence came over me. We had enough love between us not to have to analyze it. Leave it at that. Life with Barry is going to be a continuous question mark. Play it by ear. That’s all you can expect.
CHAPTER 10
Once, years ago, I had promised myself never to sink into self-pity, mainly because, in seeing it in other people, I was moved not so much by pity as by their attempts to make you feel even worse than they did. My promise echoed inside my head but, as it turned out, my determination to be stoic was nothing compared to my ability to feel sorry for myself. I had a Ph.D. in self-pity. For a while after everything exploded, I wallowed in it, perspired with it, smelled it, hated it, drove Barry crazy with it. Finally, it was Barry who gave me an ultimatum: either pull yourself together or I’m leaving.
From time to time I wondered, when disaster strikes, whether you feel worse if you brought the disaster on yourself or if it hits accidentally like an earthquake. And sometimes—and this bothers me a lot—I have to remind myself that what happened to my marriage was not a disaster at all but rather a change so complete that I felt as if I had left Walter behind and was someone else; someone called, say, Robert or Thomas who wears a size eleven shoe—not nine-and-a-half as Walter did, and has a lot of hair where Walter was going bald, and liked for the first time the sharp smell of Florida Water.
After a while the climate grew more moderate, even though I never—that is, almost never—saw my daughter Kate, on whom I had poured so much of my love and who turned me away from her with one withering remark: “You weren’t man enough to tell Mom. I’m not even sure you are a man.”
“They despise us because of the way we have sex? How can that be, boss? Why do they care where we stick it?”
I couldn’t answer. I had no answer. It seemed such a minor thing, after all, how one gets one’s pleasure. Why don’t they despise drunks, who do a hell of a lot more harm than we do?
I thought I would lose my job; I didn’t. But I lost a lot of friends and some members of my extended family, who were embarrassed by me.
It all started one evening in early June when Phyllis, who had arrived home before me, was in the front hall waiting for me.
She didn’t beat around the bush. “There’s a reporter from the Trib who’s apparently been calling here all afternoon,” she said. “He
wants to talk to you.”
“What does he want?”
She told me again that he wanted to talk to me. “Yes I know, but what about?”
“I should think you would have a pretty good idea.” She handed me a piece of paper with the reporter’s phone number on it.
“Let him call back,” I said. All the while I was looking around for Barry who usually was there to take my coat and hat and stow them in the closet.
“Care for a drink?” I asked. I felt light-headed. It was like hearing that yes, that little scabrous thing on your arm is cancer.
Phyllis treated me to one of her more engaging smiles. “Don’t care if I do,” she said. “How about in your study?”
We went in and sat down on the leather couch. She asked me if I’d had a good day. As a matter of fact, I told her, quite a good day. Someone on the coast had called to inquire about the rights to Lula’s story. “Movie within a movie,” I said. They talked names: Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck. The money hanging like juicy fruit off this tree would go on for a while.
“I’ll get some ice,” Phyllis said. “There’s none in the bucket. That girl doesn’t learn.”
The phone rang while Phyllis was out of the room. I picked up; the man on the other end identified himself as a reporter with the Herald Tribune. He was exceedingly polite and called me “sir,” and while asking me a series of invasive questions, kept apologizing for only doing what his editor had told him to do. “Is it true, sir, that a Mr. Barry Rogers, who works for you as a chauffeur and cook, is, let’s say, in a special relationship with you?”
I told him it wasn’t exactly his business. And Mr. Rogers did drive our car, but we had a cook, a Mrs. Grete Solvena— he might want to speak with her about the cooking. I asked him where he had picked up this gossip. He was adamant about not revealing his sources. He assured me he had not one but two, and he had checked the story pretty thoroughly. And was it true that Mr. Barry Rogers had at one time worked for the Winchester Carpet Company?
